Quickie: PACIFIC RIM (2013)
Pacific Rim – ***1/2 Quickie Review Giant monsters known as kaiju begin to invade our world through a portal deep in the Pacific Ocean and giant, human-piloted robot jaegers are dispatched to fight them. But when the jaeger program is dissolved, a rogue military leader and the few remaining pilots attempt one last assault on the portal to stop the kaiju invasion forever. Director Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is blockbuster storytelling at its finest. This giant monsters versus giant robots movie is the kind of summer popcorn flick we wished Transformers was and then some. With action scenes that aren’t just sensory assaults but spectacularly choreographed effects sequences, del Toro and company deliver a visual wonder that earns every second of our attention. Combine that with the director’s imaginative eye and his dark, quirky humor, and you get...
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The Old Hollywood Soul of Joss Whedon Shines Through in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Much Ado About Nothing (2012) — **** You gotta hand it to Joss Whedon. He knows how to be productive when he’s on vacation. Whedon’s adaptation of the Bard’s Much Ado About Nothing was shot over 12 days at his home in Santa Monica. Like a DIY filmmaker, Whedon got a bunch of his friends together, actors he has worked with in the past and his brother and sister-in-law (who were there to perform the songs he composed), and made a movie on the fly. But that’s not the astonishing part. No, what’s really amazing is that Whedon here has created the most original and enjoyable Shakespeare adaptation since Baz Luhrmann directed Romeo + Juliet. It’s a romantic comedy that’s so wonderfully classical, filled with the effervescent banter of old Hollywood, that you almost expect Cary Grant and Katherine...
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MAN OF STEEL: A Wobbly Start to a Potentially High-Flying Franchise
Man of Steel (2013) — *** There’s a scene early in Man of Steel where Superman is learning how to fly. At first, he makes wobbly jumps through the Arctic, even crashing into a mountain. But then… It’s that “but then” that tells the story of Zack Snyder’s take on the legendary superhero. Man of Steel could be the wobbly start of something spectacular. It’s not so much a movie as it is a very obvious franchise launch. Unlike Iron Man, Spider-Man or Batman Begins wholly entertaining stories that were good enough to warrant something greater, Snyder’s Man of Steel is a film that has to succeed in building something, which is why it’s so hard to enjoy. Like most reboots, Man of Steel rehashes Superman’s origin story, starting with the explosion of Krypton. With the end of the...
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Quickie: I KILLED MY MOTHER (2009)
I Killed My Mother (2009) – **** Quickie Review A teenage gay aesthete butts heads with his conventional bourgeois mother as the two navigate their drifting relationship. This first film by Xavier Dolan has a burgeoning visual bravado that sets the stage for even greater things to come. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s close. And Dolan’s subsequent films Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways prove that he capable of making them. Dolan’s touch here can be both blunt and delicate. When its delicate, he shows a dramatic storytelling ability that is lost on even some of the best working directors today. With outstanding performances by both Dolan and Anne Dorval as the mother. Also starring François Arnaud and Suzanne Clément. I Killed My Mother was screened at the Cleveland Cinematheque, the only movie house in the US to present a...
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CIFF 2013 Review: INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR. starring James Franco
Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) – No Stars Interior. Leather Bar., director Travis Mathews’s mock-doc (co-directed by James Franco) covering the filming of his re-imagining of 40-minutes cut from Billy Friedkin’s Cruising, boils down to this: A faux-intellectual exercise in queer theory that works more in concept than in practice. As it stands, the film feels like a second year film school student’s attempt to make a statement about the biases and prejudices of our hetero-sexist society in the most superficial way. The film follows actor Val, the story’s literal straight man, as he takes on Al Pacino’s character in Cruising for his buddy James Franco. He is constantly confronting his own discomfort with the gay sex that we see on screen and he sees in production. And this is the film’s fatal flaw. It’s too aware of it’s own mission to...
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2,000 Completely Unnecessary Words on Why I Hate THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
The Dark Knight Rises *1/2 out of **** I haven’t written a review on this site in year. Why am I writing this one? Because I can’t contain my contempt for The Dark Knight Rises and all of its careless storytelling, unwieldy filmmaking and lazy character development. Because it doesn’t succeed on any level, outside of Nolan’s ego-driven, James Cameron-like screwing around. Because the only thing epic about the finale to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is its failure. It just doesn’t work. I won’t go heavy into plot here. I assume anyone reading this will have seen it. But for anyone who hasn’t, here’s the gist: Big bad Bane tries to destroy Gotham with a nuclear bomb fulfilling the legacy of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows introduced in Batman Begins. (Selina Kyle is in this movie,...
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