by Dean | Dec 7, 2011 | General
China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less. These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.
It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route. Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent. A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang. Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible. Their martial arts are god-like, you see. The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.
House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)
by Dean | Dec 1, 2011 | General
In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we’ve witnessed for years in the television industry. In many ways it’s the poor man’s–no, the loser’s–Idiocracy.
Cover of The TV Set
by Dean | Nov 21, 2011 | Movies, Music
Cover of 8 Mile (Widescreen Edition)
Eminem, in 8 Mile, plays a Detroit post-teenager who dreams of becoming a rap singer, who both has black friends and receives hostility from blacks who don’t like his career intentions. For all its hokiness it’s a good movie, chiefly because of its depiction of working-class life in an American city. Scott Silver’s script is fragile, but Curtis Hanson directs it with flair and know-how. Eminem’s acting is hollow but the other performers shine. E.g., Mekhi Phifer is urban tough but nonthreatening as one of Eminem’s friends, he who asserts he intends to square things with the Lord but never gets around to it. Kim Basinger gives a nicely complex performance as the white rapper’s mother, and the late Brittany Murphy effectively plays, er, an affable slut. It’s not much of a role. It is not even clear that Silver is aware she is a slut.
Another problem: the obligatory embarrassing sex scene. And another: rap music. The one Eminem rap song I have heard in its entirety struck me as trivial and unfunny, and the tripe spewed out in 8 Mile is no better. One wishes we had Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin around to teach this white kid a lesson.
by Dean | Nov 13, 2011 | General
Not long after Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) begins, the eponymous main character (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from the young people’s commune she’s been living in for two years and begins to live with her sister and her sister’s husband in Connecticut–and, boy, does erratic behavior come about! Martha left the commune because she found it to be a wicked place, but her own psyche is now crashing and burning.
Is Martha attracted to communal living because she has an unhinged mind? Or does communal living associated with evil create within her an unhinged mind? Such questions arise while viewing this artistic thriller of sorts written and directed by Sean Durkin. All in all, however, not much thought is required of us re the film. For a portrait of ugly realities, it is wholly unprofound. But it’s certainly watchable: as “carefully constructed” (J. Hoberman) as it is unusual. After Martha’s craziness almost wrecks one of her relatives’ parties, she falls back exhausted on her bed before the longest fade-to–black I’ve ever seen ends the sequence. Earlier, Durkin gives us a fine sequence in which Martha’s sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), in a long shot, jumps out of her lawn chair over the sight of Martha skinny dipping in a nearby lake.
When the acting isn’t good, it is extraordinary, as in Olsen’s case. One of the Olsen twins, Elizabeth still has the marvelous eyes she had as a child as well as a perfect understanding of the character she is playing. Even when she gets emotional, her Martha is never very far from the psychotically subdued person she has perhaps always been.
(The photo is of Elizabeth Olsen and Sean Durkin.)
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
by Dean | Nov 6, 2011 | General
I was going to see Tower Heist this weekend, but I got a chance to see an old epic on the big screen and opted for that instead. It was Spartacus (1960), one of Stanley Kubrick’s better films–good on the small screen, a gem on the big. Therein, Kirk Douglas plays the gladiator Spartacus, who is determined to fight historical dehumanization by leading a slave rebellion against ancient Rome. Douglas has star power but greatness too: he’s never without forcefulness and personality. Other great ones are Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton; every time they’re on the screen we like it. Jean Simmons, enacting Spartacus’ wife, fills the bill.
I love epic movies; good ones offer cakes-and-ale, as this one does. They don’t get monotonous. Kubrick directed carefully and wisely. Outstanding is the battle scene where the rebels use against the Roman soldiers rollers of burning straw, and the long shot of Simmons and Ustinov riding away on a stretched-out road lined with crucified slaves, Spartacus among them, before the picture ends. The last epic film I saw in a theatre hitherto (they aren’t plentiful) was Mongol, which was enjoyable but somewhat less so than this one, just as Spartacus is not as great as The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia and Lord of the Rings.
(Spartacus is showing in Tulsa, Oklahoma until Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011.)
Cover of Spartacus
