Been awhile hasn’t it? It annoys me when people I follow on the internet disappear only to waste their reappearance elaborating on said disappearance. In that spirit, let’s get back to it. A few weeks ago I caught up with Martin Campbell’s American remake of his own British miniseries, Edge of Darkness, which is probably most notable for being Mel Gibson’s first starring vehicle since Signs, which was, of course, before that drunken escapade that led people to read more into the themes that tend to dominate the actor/director’s work than before. I was curious about Edge of Darkness (though evidently not curious enough to pay for it) for primarily two reasons: the return of Gibson, and the return of Campbell, who last gave us Casino Royale, one of the better Bond pictures. I haven’t seen the original Edge of Darkness, which is several hours long, so I’m afraid that I will ... continued
I’ve long suspected that audiences aren’t as sensation-‘splosion happy as both movie producers and they themselves presume them to be. Pauline Kael once wrote that the movies were so bad they didn’t attract audiences so much as inherit them, and I can’t for the life of me find someone who, to use recent examples, actually liked Transformers 2 or G.I. Joe or any number of other similarly-minded movies. Audiences go to these pictures to be in on Monday’s watercooler, and because the media saturation is so overwhelming that many of them - those who don’t read fifteen different critics, and who don’t maintain their own blog - presume those pictures to be the only ones playing, to be the only ones “worth seeing on the big screen”. It’s a pointlessly unpleasant chicken/egg circle jerk: audiences pay to see mindless, derivative, deadly dull formula movies because the producers essentially pay them ... continued
The Human Centipede has, at its center, a potentially sick, outrageous joke, and writer-director Tom Six, wisely, executes it as if were the most banal, casual thing in the world – he understands that strange is never truly strange if it’s underlined and highlighted and italicized. The picture – part mad scientist movie (it oddly recalls Eyes Without a Face in places), part Cronenberg/Miike homage/exercise – completely puts you in the mindset of its villain, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), and his complications fusing three people together ass-to-mouth with digestive track linking them, so that they can serve as one creature that will be his dog. This dog, like any other, will be disciplined when it bites, as well as when it fails to obey orders such as bringing the Doctor the paper. Six works in a consciously elegant style: The Human Centipede has a number of seductive long pans and tracking ... continued
I saw Kick-Ass last week and am just now writing about it because a. my work ethic is, best case, spotty, and b. the picture was bad in ways so irritatingly typical I got angry every time I sat down to think about it. The picture, co-adapted (with Jane Goldman) and directed by Matthew Vaughn, is another superhero movie where a wimp discovers something beyond himself and gets the ludicrously sexy girl-next-door (I’m always in the wrong neighborhoods, it seems) and stops the ludicrously obvious bad guy in the bargain. Kick-Ass’s theoretical catch is that it’s a satire of the wish-fulfillment clichés of superhero movies, particularly (randomly) of Spiderman (which strikes me as odd, as those pictures are as accomplished and reputable as any in this current glut), and that it will treat the superhero fantasy as it would play out in a “real world” of actual consequences. The dweeb-hero (Aaron ... continued
Pierce Brosnan is a switch-hitting movie-star/actor – Hugh Grant is another – who uses his handsomeness as implicit satirical barb. The joke of a number of Brosnan performances is that he’s every bit as self-absorbed and mercenary as his getting-better-with-age looks imply. This attitude syncs with the world view of many of Roman Polanski’s movies, particularly his mysteries (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Ninth Gate); as the punchline of many of his pictures is the obviousness of their solution: the clearest explanation is usually correct, but everyone still misses it, they’re distracted by their own self-absorption and wishful-thinking and need to over-complicate. Brosnan, with his what-you-see-is-exactly-what-I-am self-critique, is an ideal embodiment of Polanski’s cynicism, which isn’t tedious because we see how amused Polanski is; the director has a gift for making futility funny. As former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, under investigation for suspicious involvement with the torture of suspected terrorists by ... continued
...but the March thing turned out to be a bust in terms of keeping my one-picture-a-day promise. The challenge, in terms of time management, isn't so much the writing (though that has challenges) as the actual watching of a movie a day. Tomorrow, we shall switch back to 2010, as I've recently seen a few interesting pictures worthy of discussion. Down the road, with perhaps more time to prepare, we shall try this again.
"Thematic trilogy" can be a too-convenient justification for a director to essentially make the same movie several times (such as the Iñárritu/Arriaga collaborations), but Park Chan-Wook's three revenge films—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance—do, however, play as a trilogy with a unified arc, though it may not have been the arc the filmmaker intended. Throughout the films there is a crystallization of Park's formalist intentions, the sluggish unevenness of Mr. Vengeance eventually paving the way for the slick polish of Lady Vengeance. Mr. Vengeance is, technically, the "worst" movie of the trilogy in that Park doesn't seem to have as much an idea of what he's after, though it is still the most interesting. The film plays that contemporary neo-Kubrick game of trying to transcend clichés with a pace that's so tediously deliberate you wish the director would just get on with it. Mr. Vengeance is ... continued
I'm revisiting Wolf by accident, as I haven't ever really been that fond of director Mike Nichols' movies, which mostly strike me as superficially clever, flip and too full of themselves. I remembered Wolf as a dull, overly apologetic attempt to make the horror film "adult" - a sentiment that, of course, immediately irritates me in its snobbery. I happened upon the picture a few nights ago as I was trying to rally myself to watch whatever I thought would actually be next on this list though, and found myself pleasantly pulled in. For an hour or so, Wolf is exactly what Nichols and screenwriters Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick (the latter of the Cape Fear remake) must have had in mind: a yuppie-in-crisis picture that's jarred by something more disturbing and primal.
The picture has an admittedly great joke: that ...
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Kael famously wrote that a great movie is rarely a perfect movie, but Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise is a perfect movie. That’s not showy hyperbole or misplaced ego on my part, if you’ve seen the picture you know exactly what I mean – and it isn’t really even a subjective issue. There isn’t a misplaced scene, there isn’t an “off” line or performance, and there isn’t one moment that is too long or too short. Trouble in Paradise, is, as is widely accepted, a masterpiece. More young filmmakers need to familiarize themselves with masterpieces such as Trouble in Paradise, as one gets the impression that the contemporary idea of masterpiece has become one of a blunt, unpleasant, clobbering, thematically obvious movie. And romantic comedy directors could certainly stand to brush up on their Lubitsch, as he routinely achieved in seconds what many directors are more than happy to spend minutes ... continued
I saw L.A. Confidential in my home town theatre when I was maybe seventeen. I wasn’t that versed in noir at that point, I had seen a few of the obvious – Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil – but hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty yet, and I’m really still doing that now. I remember seeing it with my older younger brother, and both of us loving it, particularly the juicy/literate tough guy patter, the performances of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell (everyone really, even future TV-pretty boy Simon Baker makes an impression in a brief bit), and the well-staged, occasionally startling bursts of gunplay. I’ve revisited L.A. Confidential several times throughout the years but it had been awhile, and I wanted to see if my few years of writing and more serially watching movies had changed my view of it. The answer ... continued
Bowen's Cinematic is biased and opinionated film review and commentary by Charles Bowen, a freelance film critic living in Richmond, Virginia.
Sequestro @ Slant
Make-Out with Violence @ Slant
Last Letters from Monte Rosa @ Slant
The Nature of Existence @ Slant
Burzynski @ Slant
