Uh, movies.

Moving day

2009-06-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

I've changed the location of this blog to be hosted on my own website. It is now located at http://www.mattnoller.com/blog.

Nothing else will be posted here. Move along, sir.

Coming this Friday...

2009-02-04T00:22:00.003-05:00

Nose tape and cuckoo clocks

2008-12-18T03:32:00.009-05:00

"Of all the iconic images in Carol Reed's The Third Man, none is as recognizable as the sight of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) standing in a Vienna doorway, bathed in shadow. Accompanied by Anton Karas's unforgettable zither score, it's one of the most iconic entrances in film history, which is befitting one of film's most iconic characters. Although he's only on screen for a fraction of the film's running time, Lime stands out as one of the screen's most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for The Third Man's vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe."

Read more of my review of the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray DVD of The Third Man at Slant Magazine.

"It only took two years for Wes Anderson to go from a promising young up-and-comer with 1996's Bottle Rocket to, with 1998's Rushmore, one of the most unique and important voices in independent American cinema. What's even more remarkable, perhaps, than the length of time is the sizable leap in quality between the two films. Rushmore is a true American original, a masterpiece of humanist comedy that introduced Anderson's visual sense as one unlike any to have come before (or to have been satisfyingly aped since, no matter how hard assholes like Jared Hess may try). Bottle Rocket is, well, not. But no matter how tempting it may be to dismiss Anderson's debut, to do so is to ignore the film's pleasures (minor, yes, but pleasures all the same) and to overlook how the film marks the foundations of the auteurial voice that would arrive fully formed just two years later."

Read more of my review of the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray DVD of Bottle Rocket at Slant Magazine.

California Dreamin'

2008-12-02T22:36:00.009-05:00

"During the troubled production of Ashes of Time, which was supposed to be Wong Kar-Wai's third film, the director took some time off, sat down and did what anyone in his position would do: made another movie. And he did it with a fast-paced, highly improvisatory shooting schedule, writing pages of the script during the day and shooting them at night. The result, Chungking Express, is among Wong's most exciting films and is an early precursor to he expressive odes to romantic longing that have come to define his work."

Read more of my review of the Criterion Collection DVD of Wong Kar-wai's gorgeous Chung-King Express at Slant Magazine.

More Slant stuff

2008-10-28T18:32:00.015-05:00

I've been deficient with updating (shocker, right?). Here're the reviews I've written for Slant Magazine during that time:

Maria Bethania: Music is Perfume (8/28)
Youssou N'Dour: Return to Goree (8/28)

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (S3) (9/9)
"It's hard to describe It's Always Sunny without making it sound like something even Kevin Smith would reject as being too self-consciously outrageous, and though the show occasionally crosses this line, its humor comes more from its characters than its scenarios, which are little more than the means by which the show can expose its protagonists' idiotic self-involvement. Racism, sexism and especially homophobia are frequent subjects, exposing the idiocy of such beliefs... . Adolescent frat boys may laugh at the characters' gay behavior, never realizing that the real target is the oblivious stupidity that leads to thinking that homosexuality is in itself a joke."

The Tree of Life (9/11)
Forgiveness (9/12)
Taking Father Home (9/23)

The Godfather Trilogy (Coppola Restoration) (9/26)
"The Statue of Liberty towers over The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, its image and silhouette framed in numerous outdoor shots or handled, in the form of a bronze statuette, by poor Italian families dreaming of an escape. More than blood or violence, more even than Marlon Brando's titanic jowls, it is the ghost of the American Dream that haunts the first two-thirds of Francis Ford Coppola's epic gangster saga, the broken promise of a new life for those who crossed the ocean to free themselves from the poverty and violence of their homes just to find more of the same."

L.A. Confidential (10/24)
"Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential is a throwback in nearly every way: in setting, in style, in performance, in storytelling. Based on James Ellroy's absurdly sprawling novel, the film—easily Hanson's best (hell, it's his only good one, really)—condenses the novel's unfilmable narrative into a comparatively straightforward tale of drugs, murder and the ethical morass in which the film's cops and criminals find themselves."

Two DVD reviews

2008-08-19T13:23:00.009-05:00

"Overviews of Oliver Stone's career tend to focus on his status as a political provocateur, and not without good reason. His films and public appearances reveal a fierce political intelligence, sometimes outrageous but always outspoken, and even his more ideologically measured films seem extreme due to his experimental visual techniques. Often forgotten among the discussion of Stone the activist and stylist is the director's humanism, his interest in the individuals lost within the maelstrom of history and politics."

Read more of my Nixon review at Slant Magazine.

"If Eli Roth were to direct a Lifetime movie, it might look something like An American Crime, a miserable true-crime slog that may be less graphic than Hostel but is also significantly less honest about its intentions."

Read more of my An American Crime review at Slant Magazine.

The Animation Show 4 (2008)

2008-07-26T22:13:00.002-05:00

Review at Slant.

disFIGURED (2008)

2008-07-21T16:06:00.002-05:00

"Like Crash for the heavyset crowd, Glenn Gers's disFIGURED is a preachy message movie that collapses under the weight of its own self-important speechifying. In the film's defense, it lacks the cynical calculations that made Paul Haggis's film such a noxious piece of shit, but Gers's humanism is ultimately no less manipulative."

More at Slant Magazine.

2008-07-02T13:59:00.002-05:00

Since I am mostly incapable of writing anything without the pressure of a deadline, I have been looking for ways to force myself to work in a more official capacity (also, I guess I need experience or whatever for when I enter the real world, but fuck that in my opinion). One of the ways I've done that is to trick the nice fellows over at Slant Magazine to give me a slot as a contributor. Mostly I'll probably just be covering DVD releases, but my first review is of a new release, Paul Taylor's thoroughly bland Africa doc We Are Together. It's very short, but read it here anyway.

Wall-E (2008): A-

2008-06-27T23:27:00.020-05:00

In a recent interview, Wall-E director Andrew Stanton was asked to name some of his favorite films. Topping the list was Lawrence of Arabia, followed by The Lion in Winter, Cool Hand Luke, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and several others. "Hey," Stanton said, "there's no animation in my top ten." For most people, this wouldn't be a surprise. Stanton, on the other hand, was one of the first two animators to join the Pixar team; you would think he'd at least give a shout-out to Snow White, or Fantasia, or Pinocchio.

Yet, paradoxically, Stanton's list provides a look into what makes Wall-E - and the wide majority of Pixar's output to this point - so extraordinary. They make films that, like those Disney classics, transcend categorization as animated movies. The movies are animated, of course, and stunningly so; there's no question that Pixar remains on the cutting edge of technology. But these are films, plain and simple, and they never forget to pay homage and respect to the past even while paving the way to the future.

The forebears here are the films of comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and Stanton and his animators have created a character to match up with those men's screen personas. The last remaining robot on an Earth that, as the film opens, has been abandoned by humans for over 700 years, WALL-E (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class) spends his days gathering and compacting the piles of waste that have rendered the planet uninhabitable. Wall-E introduces us to its hero and his surroundings through a 40-minute, nearly dialogue-free opening that is, in its way, every bit as stunning as the silent first act of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Designed with the assistance of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men), this sequence has the pure visual expressiveness of silent cinema and, in its wittily choreographed physical humor, evokes the graceful slapstick of Chaplin and Keaton.

Can a robot have a soul? WALL-E, with his deeply expressive eyes and human concerns, suggests the affirmative. He collects interesting trinkets, watches a worn copy of Hello, Dolly! religiously and longs for companionship beyond the single cockroach he keeps as a friend. Enter EVE, a sleek white robot sent to Earth to search for biological life, with whom WALL-E falls head-over-heels for. When EVE returns to her home base, a massive interstellar luxury cruiser known as the Axiom, WALL-E stows aboard to stay close to his new love.

The relationship between WALL-E and EVE provides a romantic core to the second half of the film, which takes place on the Axiom. The ship that provided the human race a way to escape from their inhospitable home, the Axiom's design draws influence from Chaplin's Modern Times and the sterile metropolises of Tati. The simple beauty of the film's first forty minutes gives way to the inspired chaos that marked earlier Pixar efforts like Toy Story. Stanton imagines a world where mankind has been rendered so passive by their reliance on commercialized technology (represented here by Buy 'n' Large, a Wal-Mart stand-in that seems to have taken over every aspect of life on Earth) that even walking has become unthinkable. The Axiom's citizens are grotesque, nearly-boneless slabs of flesh that float around on moving chairs and drink liquidized meals through straws.

It's a clever look at the future of our current culture, and combined with the images of the earth as an uninhabitable waste-land, it forms the basis of the film's political message. As an engagement with our current political situation, it's unusual stuff for a kid's movie (there's even video footage of Fred Willard as Earth's CEO/president, a bumbling fool who urges citizens to "stay the course," which is admittedly kind of a cheap shot), and although it can't help but feel like some sort of letdown after the almost otherworldly beauty of the film's first act, it represents a level of intellectual and satirical ambition unmatched by Pixar's previous works.

It is also, with the possible exception of Toy Story 2, the most emotionally involving film Pixar has made to date. It's no mean feat to evoke sympathy for machines, but Stanton goes even farther than that; WALL-E and EVE are among the most empathetic characters to have appeared in an animated feature. Once the Axiom returns to earth, so do the film's aesthetic strategies; dialogue disappears, and WALL-E and EVE's relationship takes center stage once more. And as the film closes, silently and in moving homage to Chaplin's City Lights, Stanton reminds us that sometimes we say the most when we aren't saying anything at all.

Cannes!

2008-05-08T22:44:00.003-05:00

I'm leaving for France tomorrow for a UGA study abroad trip to the motherfucking Cannes Film Festival. Coverage will be posted at my new blog and also at The House Next Door, which for some reason has decided that it would be a good idea to let me cover the fest for them.

The festival starts on the 14th. Coverage should start right around that time.

2008-02-05T19:52:00.000-05:00

There would be no eulogies for Bob. No photographs of his body would be sold in sundry stores. No people would crowd the streets in the rain to see his funeral cortege. No biographies would be written about him, no children named after him. No one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in. The shotgun would ignite, and Ella-May would scream, but Robert Ford would only lay on the floor and look at the ceiling, the light going out of his eyes before he could find the right words.

2007 Top Ten

2008-01-16T23:55:00.002-05:00

[Comments to come soon, hopefully.]

RUNNERS-UP: Syndromes and a Century; 28 Weeks Later; The Host; Day Night Day Night; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Away From Her; Superbad; Regular Lovers; Into the Wild; The Boss of It All

MOVIES STILL TO BE SEEN: 12:08 East of Bucharest; Brand Upon the Brain!; Broken English; Colossal Youth; Control; Fay Grim; Golden Door; Helvetica; I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone; In Between Days; Summer ’04; Time

MOVIES THAT I SAW THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ON THE LIST, BUT WERE DEEMED INELIGIBLE: Killer of Sheep (a masterpiece, but from 1977); 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (for my purposes, a 2008 film; will be eligible next year).

Windows to the Soul: 28 Weeks Later

2007-10-17T21:41:00.001-05:00

(Note: This is my submission for the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door.)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later is one of finest horror movies of recent years, but not for most of the reasons you've heard. Its political commentary may be bracing, its action scenes at once exciting, scary and poetic, but what distinguishes 28 Weeks Later is what distinguishes all great horror movies - how it uses the primal urgency of its subject matter to get at what makes us human. How do I know? It's all in the eyes.

From the very beginning, 28 Weeks Later is concerned with the eyes of its characters. The frenetic assault of the opening sequence, like many modern horror films, relies on rapid camera movements and editing to scare the audience by making it unclear what the hell is really going on. But the most horrifying moment of this sequence comes not during the action of the initial zombie attack but what comes after, when the film calms down to show Donald's (Robert Carlyle) fear and guilt at abandoning his wife for dead.

When Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), Donald's children, are tested by military doctors, it's the examination of their eyes that we see in close detail. A point is even made about Andy's different colored eyes - a genetic trait passed down by his mother.

In 28 Weeks Later, our eyes - or, more accurately, what our eyes represent - is what makes us unique. When humans in 28 Weeks Later are transformed into the undead, the first thing that changes is...

the...

eyes.

The loss of the eyes represent the loss of humanity - of what makes us really, truly alive.

And although the film is obviously very aware of the ugliness and evil of which mankind is capable - selfishness, ignorance, violence - it also feels very deeply about the opposite, about the good that we can do, even when there's nothing in it for us, even when it seems - or even is - hopeless. Fresnadillo's camera stares deep through our eyes into our souls and comes away ambivalent but loving. And his film pulses with the knowledge that it is our wide capacity for emotion, be it guilt...

or empathy...

or sadness...

or fear...

that makes us wonderful, complex, scary, human - and beautiful.

See?

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) - ***1/2

2007-10-03T22:52:00.000-05:00

Warning: some possible spoilers

A great example of a master director taking a shaky script and making it his own, every frame of Eastern Promises pulses with feeling. The focus of the film is the Vory V Zakone, a Russian mafia organization buried beneath proper British society that Naomi Watts's midwife stumbles upon when one of her patients, a 14-year-old Russian immigrant, dies during childbirth. Cronenberg presents the Vory as a community of vampires, living in the dark rooms and alley-ways of proper British society, and led by Armin Mueller-Stahl's leader, whose charming, fatherly exterior hides a ferocious killer instinct. Watts's - and the audience's - point of entrance into the Vory, if he can be called that, is Viggo Mortensen's mafia driver, an ex-con immigrant trying to find a new start in England.

Steven Knight's script is unremarkable thriller fare, occasionally clunky and often underwrought. But like all great auteurs, Cronenberg finds in the material a pathway to deal with his favorite concerns. Bodies are the central motif, both in a physical sense and as groups of people in cultures and organizations. In Eastern Promises, our bodies both absorb and tell our histories, from the tattoos adorning Mortensen's body to a police report delivered through a corpse. They are also, as always, open to invasion and attack, as in the twin, bloody deaths that open the movie to the already (and rightfully) classic bath-house fight scene. But here, as in A History of Violence, Cronenberg is equally interested in the ways groups of people interact and function as individual units, as if they have bodies of their own. The Russian mafia and English culture are both presented as single entities to which entrance is desired but elusive; Mortensen works his way into the mafia (in one haunting scene, he must renounce not only his history but his life to assimilate into the collective whole) but is only accepted to later be used as a pawn - he must force himself, trickily and violently, into the group before he truly belongs. It's social acceptance as conquest.

One group, however, remains tragically out of reach for even Mortensen. The film's final shot, which juxtaposes an image of Mortensen, now in charge of the Vory, with voice-over narration from the Russian girl's diary, posits a connection between the two: Both came to England to escape their Russian lives but, excluded from mainstream British society, found merely more of the same. For all its focus on the transience and vulnerability of the human form, Eastern Promises' ultimate, haunting acknowledgement is that some bodies can never be invaded, no matter how hard you try.

I'm back (probably briefly)

2007-08-24T23:24:00.001-05:00

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) - ***1/2

Not quite as good as Knocked Up, but still: what a year Judd Apatow is having. Though just a producer on Superbad, his fingerprints are all over this raunchy coming-of-age comedy, which deals in the same mix of the profane and the sweet for which Apatow has become known. The autobiographical script, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is remarkably perceptive about the turbulant emotional world of high school; fitting, since Rogen and Goldberg reportedly began work on it when they were 13. But who cares about that if it isn't funny, right? So thank God Superbad is, after Knocked Up, the funniest film of the summer. I honestly can't recall a single joke that falls totally flat, largely thanks to the miraculous performances of its two leads, Arrested Development's Michael Cera and Knocked Up's Jonah Hill. (Cera is especially brilliant, using his soft-spoken awkwardness to sweet and ultimately deeply moving effect). Hill's brash, eloquent profanity blends perfectly with Cera's tentative vocal rhythms, resulting in the most inspired comic pairing in years. And if Superbad is ultimately too broadly cartoonish to reach the emotional heights of Knocked Up, it is nonetheless hugely admirable for its unusual (for the genre) embracing of male relationships and the great respect with which it treats its female characters. "Yeah... they said that would happen in health class."

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912-2007

2007-08-01T16:39:00.000-05:00

Ingmar Bergman, 1917-2007

2007-08-01T16:28:00.001-05:00

“When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”
-Ingmar Bergman

2006 Top Ten

2007-03-02T15:48:00.000-05:00

There was no other choice, frankly. Inland Empire may be David Lynch's masterpiece, an epic, visionary summation of his entire output so far. Yes, Virginia, it does make narrative sense (I think), but narrative becomes irrelevent in the face of the emotional and thematic purity of Lynch's vision. A grimy tone-poem (yes, Lynch's low-grade digital video is "ugly," but it's also beautiful, and overwhelmingly so) to the creative urge and how it relates to mankind's search for meaning and transcendence. A polish prostitute finds it by imagining her life as a movie; an actress (Laura Dern, in a mind-blowing tour de force of a performance) finds it in the transformative acting process; and her character finds it in a torrid affair. These characters swirl together, their identities and lives intermingling and separating before finally coming together as one in "Pomona," the film's idea of heaven, for a raucus dance number. Easy comparisons can be drawn to Lynch's own filmography and Kubrick's transcendent 2001, but an equally fitting influence may be T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where hope ultimately overcomes the decay of the modern world. Shantih shantih shantih. Sweet.

I suspect that many of the critics who dismissed Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige on first pass are going to feel mighty silly when they revisit it; no movie this year benefited more from repeat viewings. What on first impression seems like little more than a classy and well-made entertainment is revealed on closer inspection to be a chilling and devastating work of great thematic depth. As in his Memento, still one of the best films of the decade, Nolan uses The Prestige’s genre tale—dueling magicians in turn-of-the-century England—to explore profound philosophical and psychological questions. Adapted from Christopher Priest’s novel, Nolan and brother Christopher’s script explores the great sacrifice necessary to convince mankind that some mystery and magic remains in our increasingly logical and scientific world (the intersection of magic and science, represented here by a terrific David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, is key to the film’s thesis). No one cares about the man in the box or the bird in the cage, The Prestige suggests; they just want to be fooled. The Descent be damned, this was the most unsettling movie of the year.

One of the most critically acclaimed films of the year was The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a Romanian movie that treated its viewers to three hours of an old man dying, an experience that for many likely approximated the experience of living in the first 10 months of Bush’s 2006. Thanks, cineastes, but no thanks. For me, no film this year was as moving, as uplifting or just as out and out entertaining as Michel Gondry’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Ostensibly a concert documentary, Block Party is less concerned with the actual concert—which is admittedly spectacular—than with the circumstances surrounding it. Frequently cutting back and forth between the concert and its preparation, Gondry turns his film into the story of a man who used his newfound money and fame to bring people from all backgrounds together. The result is one of the most movingly optimistic films I’ve ever seen, one that posits that no matter how bad things look, all it takes for Americans of all stripes—from Harlem youths to Ohio grandmas—to come together in joy and celebration is a kickass rap concert. In other words, it was the perfect film for 2006; suddenly, two more years of Bush don’t seem that bad.

“Scorsese’s back!” the critics cried, ignoring the fact that he never left, not really. Nevertheless, The Departed did mark his most immediate, electrifying and powerful film since, yes, Goodfellas. More than the empty exercise in style that some critics saw, The Departed is Scorsese’s hate-letter to the cesspool of modern America, where the only people who find success are the ones willing to sacrifice their own morals to do so. Scorsese accomplishes this feat through sheer filmmaking skill, the pressure of his characters’ moral confusion made shatteringly literal through his moving camera and Thelma Schoonmaker’s virtuoso editing (much credit, too, to Leonardo DiCaprio, whose titanic performance is a layered tour de force of boiling emotion). But what ultimately marks this as a real, honest-to-goodness Martin Scorsese Picture, despite the skeptics’ complaints, are the presence of his usual concerns; catholic guilt, damaged masculinity and surrogate fathers are all resonantly and gracefully weaved into his film’s genre trappings. And that’s without even mentioning William Monahan’s brutal and hilarious script or the brilliant supporting cast. Not enough? You want more, right? What are you, some sort of high-brow contrarian, huh? Go fuck yourself.

It’s noir set in a high school! Listen to that hard-boiled dialogue! Most reviews of Rian Johnson’s Brick came down to variations on these themes, and not for bad reason. Yes, Brick is a film noir—complete with rapid, slang-heavy dialogue, murder, femmes fatale and plot twists—transplanted to the world of high school. And yes, that’s awesome. But it’s not the end of the story. Some reviews caught on to the significance of the high school setting, where each emotion is outsized and every bit of drama feels like a life-or-death situation. But even these reviews tended to miss the bruised, beating heart beneath the film-school cleverness of the set-up. In Johnson’s story and wide, empty compositions—as well as in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s astonishing performance—lies a deep sadness specifically attuned to the worlds of both high school and film noir. Gordon-Levitt’s Brendan is two types: the cold, distant hero of noir and the ultra-smart loner of high school (he “eats alone” in more ways than one). Throughout the course of the film, Brendan’s solitude helps him solve the case, but he loses everything in the process. In this sense, Brick functions as a sly and intensely moving deconstruction of noir tropes. This is no celebration of Humphrey Bogart’s “cool” stoicism; it’s an elegy for lost souls.

What to say of a film that pretty much everyone loves and has written about at length? Should I comment on the astonishing camera work and how it functions in the film, placing the audience directly in Alfonso Cuaron’s apocalyptic world? Should I bring up the film’s Christian iconography, from Clive Owen’s sandals to Claire Hope-Ashitey’s (fake) virgin birth, and how they lead to one of the most movingly hopeful conclusions of any film this year? What about the subtly radical move of making the savior’s mother a black immigrant? Should I talk about that? Or the performances, from Owen’s skillfull internalization to a hilarious Michael Caine in his second terrific supporting role in 2006? Yeah, I should probably bring all that up. Just because everyone loves Children of Men doesn’t mean it isn't great.

RUNNERS-UP: Marie Antoinette, A Prairie Home Companion, Half Nelson, The Black Dahlia, Miami Vice, A Scanner Darkly, Iraq in Fragments, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Fountain, Down in the Valley

MOVIES STILL TO BE SEEN:
4, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, Fast Food Nation, Man Push Cart, Requiem, What Is It?, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, White Palms

Better late than never. Right?

2007-02-26T00:44:00.000-05:00

As I was driving home from the Oscar party, giddy with Scorsese and The Departed's victories (plus the $40 I won in the pool), the following thought crossed my mind: "You know, this almost makes up for Crash."

But then I realized something. You know why Scorsese winning was such a big deal, why I was grinning from ear to ear when his name was announced? Why I teared up a little bit as he started speaking? Because he lost for Raging Bull. He lost for Last Tempation of Christ. He lost for Goodfellas. He lost for fucking Goodfellas. To Kevin Fucking Costner. So you know what? No, this doesn't make up for Crash. I can't think of anything that could.

So. Congrats, Marty. It's been a long time coming, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. But Oscars? Go fuck yourselves. It took you thirty years to award the greatest director of his generation. You deserve no credit for this.

But at least Babel didn't win.

Miami Vice (Michael Mann) - ***1/2

2006-09-04T20:56:00.000-05:00

Michael Mann's Miami Vice opens with a shot of a woman dancing at a club, her body writhing in time with the music. It's a shot that throws us right into the action of the film without providing any narrative information; what we notice in the shot is not the woman herself but the hypnotic rhythm of her body, the play of light off her dress. The woman is not important; what's important is that we feel the club.

This is fitting, because Miami Vice is a movie about living in the immediate present. There's no future, no past; what we see on the screen is it. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx aren't playing characters with backstories or plans. They're hardly even playing recognizable human beings, which has understandably thrown some critics, but it fits Mann's purpose. "Who are we?" Tubbs (Foxx) asks Crockett (Farrell), referring to their undercover roles, but the line hits on multiple levels. In Mann's film, Crockett and Tubbs are men defined by their jobs to the extent that nothing else exists for them beyond the false identities, criminals and death. It's an ugly world, but for Crockett and Tubbs, it's all there is.

Mann bolsters this impression with his use of high-definition digital video, for the first time working for him as something more than a stylistic device. Of course, it's that too, and (as in Collateral) it's a mighty effective one; Miami Vice is often gorgeous. But video's inherent dream-like texture has an important and very deliberate effect on the film. As Keith Uhlich notes, it feels like a Malickean tone poem, although it's much more grim than (and inferior to) Malick's works. Crockett and Tubbs are stuck in a bad dream with no escape; they enter when the projector starts, finish when the credits roll and have to start all over again at the next screening.

The exception to this is a brief detour to the streets of Havana, Cuba, where Crockett has taken a drug king's wife, played by Gong Li, for mojitos. The two strike off a romantic relationship, climaxed by an incredible sex scene. The sequence is lovely, the film's one true escape from the ugliness of Crockett's world, but it's just a distraction. "This can't last," Crockett says, and of course it can't. The entire relationship is based on a lie, and, besides, there's only 45 minutes left in the movie. Eventually, the constrictions of "reality" will always intrude on Mann's characters; there's no lasting hope for anything more.

For what is ostensibly a Hollywood crime blockbuster, this stuff is pretty fucking depressing. You'll notice that I haven't even mentioned the film's action, which is mostly contained to one spectacular third-act shootout miles away from most summer action films. It's abstract and impressionistic, and difficult to describe in the same way that many avant-garde films are (for me, at least). There's nothing even close to summer-movie escapism here, and it's no surprise that Miami Vice hasn't exactly set the box office on fire. It's my favorite movie of the summer.

5-7-5 x 3

2006-06-17T15:50:00.000-05:00

Haiku reviews written for Hollywood blockbusters that didn't deserve full capsule treatment:

Mission: Impossible: III: The Sequel (J.J. Abrams) - **
P.S.H. is great
But the rest is just boring
Also, Tom Cruise blows

The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard) - **
The book is awful
But it's over pretty fast
Why not this movie?

X-Men: The Last Stand but Not Really (Brett Ratner) - **
All you need to know:
"I am the Juggernaut, bitch!"*
Fuck you, Brett Ratner

*Yes, I know that's not an exact quote. Shut up.

Pressing on against the current

2006-05-24T17:23:00.000-05:00

To all of my faithful reader, I would like to apologize for my lengthy absence. There's been a lot of shit going on and etc. You've heard it all before. Now capsules.

Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman) - ***
Reitman wants to have it both ways, attacking the Tobacco industry while at the same time proposing (I think) a philosophy of libertarian personal choice, and as a result his film's satire ends up being muddled and unclear. Still, Thank You for Smoking is frequently funny and occasionally hilarious, from the Merchants of Death to the brilliant argument Aaron Eckhart's tobacco smokeman has with his son about ice cream; and if it loses some steam once it broadens to take on Hollywood commercialism and sleaze, Eckhart's sharp performance keeps things moving forward.

United 93 (Paul Greengrass) - ***
This is totally not what I was afraid it would be; Greengrass works hard to avoid any semblance of sensationalism and mostly succeeds (the aftermath of the attacks being seen only on CNN is awesome, for lack of a better word). But still: Does anyone really need to see this movie? I don't think so. It's powerful, yes, but only because it represents a horrible reality everyone remembers. All Greengrass did was not fuck it up. That's admirable, but it's not enough.

Brick (Rian Johnson) - ***1/2
Not much to say about this that hasn't been said elsewhere, but I guess that's what I get for waiting so long. One of the most audacious and dazzling debuts in recent memory, transplanting noir tropes into a high school setting. It's a terrific gimmick, supported mainly by Johnson's dialogue and the ever-brilliant Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it's also more than that. Film noir is a genre in which no one can be trusted and every femme can be fatale; what better place, then, for a noir than high school, where every emotional twist and bit of girl trouble feels like a life-and-death situation? That Johnson was the first to think of this is astonishing; that he pulled it off so beautifully on his first try is even more so.

Nasty, brutish and not nearly short enough

2006-01-18T22:13:00.000-05:00

Hostel (Eli Roth)
*1/2

Intriguing, then boring, then downright offensive. With the introduction of the idiot college frat-boys, Roth had me hoping that maybe this was an exploration of Europe turning against the quintessential ugly American, but no such luck; while I can't entirely ignore this as at least part of Roth's intentions, whatever subtext the film may have had is ditched as soon as our hero hits the torture factory. At this point, Hostel becomes the advertised product, a slide-show of sub-Miike torture and depravity, which may appeal to gore-hounds but is really just numbing and dull.

Then hero Jay Hernandez predictably escapes and exacts revenge on his tormentors; and it was here that I went from bored to infuriated. In one scene, Hernandez runs his car into a female villain while trying to escape, there's a pause, and then Hernandez slams the car back over the girl's prostrate body. It's an absolutely brutal act of violence, far more disturbing than anything that's come before it, and Roth plays it as a punchline at which we're supposed to cheer. The audience gladly complied, laughing and clapping happily. I was literally shaking with disgust.

Mr. Cronenberg, we all knew you were right. Hostel is the proof.

90 minutes just doesn't cut it

2005-12-20T17:42:00.000-05:00

The White Diamond (Werner Herzog)
***

Three of 2005's most compelling screen personalities have come from Herzog - first Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell and now The White Diamond's Graham Dorrington and Mark Anthony Yhap. It seems jejune to say that these men are fascinating because they're real, but that's exactly what it is; beyond their surfaces lie identifiable and relatable human emotions. The White Diamond, like Grizzly Man, finds in these emotions some truly affecting cinema, like Dorrington breaking down while telling the story of his cinematographer friend's death or Yhap finding a replacement for his estranged family in a pet rooster that he cares for and talks about as if it were his child. Unfortunately, the film stretches even further than these men and loses its way in the process.

Dorrington is an airship engineer traveling to Guyana for scientific studies; Yhap is a local who volunteers to help with the expedition. The White Diamond details their experience and, in doing so, examines Dorrington and Yhap's spiritual and emotional isolation. But it also reaches for a paean to the majesty of nature; Herzog packs the film with beautiful nature footage, and he even crafts a central metaphor out of a cave blocked by a waterfall. It's all very nice--if nothing else, it's much more ambitious than Grizzly Man--and it could've made for a terrific film. But for whatever reason, Herzog limits himself to 90 minutes, which is not nearly enough time for everything he is trying to do.

It's a shame, because what's he's trying to do has promise, and the movie has stuck with me. But I can't help but think how much more The White Diamond could've been. Herzog has posed some evocative questions, but he didn't give himself enough time to do much more than that.

Two capsules of the catch-up variety

2005-12-04T21:56:00.000-05:00

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney) - ***1/2
I guess there's not much going on underneath the surface, but the surface is so damn compelling that it hardly seems to matter. Clooney ditches the excess of his debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and marks himself as a legitimately great director; his style, backed by Robert Elswit's gorgeous cinematography, is sharp and unfussy and very much Welles-like, drawing maximum impact with minimal (clear) effort. The same goes for David Strathairn, who transcends mimickry to give a performance of sheer, unforced dignity. His Edward R. Murrow is at once a heroic icon and a real human being and, like everything else in the film, captures the past in service of a thoroughly modern message. Out of all of 2005's hooray-for-liberals films, Good Night is by far the best.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Steve Box & Nick Park) - **1/2
I'm at a loss to figure out how such a slight trifle has so many critics so excited. Consistently amusing - especially Gromit's expressive features and that adorable Wallace-rabbit thing - but rarely laugh-out-loud funny (unless you happen to find ceaseless puns hilarious, which I don't), it hardly even feels like a movie most of the time. And while it is indeed technically astounding, several of the supporting characters are just hideous; I had a genuinely hard time looking at Wallace's love interest for protacted periods of time without feeling somewhat ill. An acceptable diversion, I guess, and good for the kids, but completely and totally forgettable.

Humanism is overrated, but Todd Solondz fucking sucks

2005-10-29T23:28:00.000-05:00

"Ode to Palindromes, recently seen on DVD"
A poem written by Matt Noller with much help from his rhyming dictionary

There is a man I will berate
A man who loves to taunt and bait
A man whom I can't help but hate
A man named Todd Solondz

His latest film is vile scum
Miserable, hateful as they come
Its message false and really dumb
I hate you, Todd Solondz

He's mad at the entire world
His 'tude, it makes me want to hurl
It puts me in a fetal curl
I hate you, Todd Solondz

His humor's not dark, it's just plain mean
The handicapped kids, the group that sings?
Most repugnant thing I've ever seen
I hate you, Todd Solondz

His characters are awful jokes
Painted in the broadest strokes
At them vile fun he pokes
I hate you, Todd Solondz

His satire? On arrival, dead
Hateful, stupid, underfed
Just watch Cit'zen Ruth instead
I hate you, Todd Solondz

If he stops directing, I'll be glad
If he keeps it up, I will be mad
'Cause I thought Happiness was bad
But this was so much worse - egad!*
To my hatred it did add
Fucking hell, I loathe Solondz

*I profusely apologize for that.

Ground Control to Major Tom

2005-10-25T18:05:00.000-05:00

I hope this works.

It does!

So. Okay. You don't know me, because no one important does. But I have this crappy website. And now this blog, which I'm hoping someone will stumble upon and be impressed by. Or apalled by. Anything for attention, really.

So what this is is, oficially, a place for me to place thoughts on film and music that won't fit on my site. However, I can and will shove anything I feel like into this criteria, so God knows what'll actually show up here.

Now observe, and enjoy. Or don't. Just observe. Please, please, observe.