by ·Comments Off on The Prophet (2011, Gary Tarn)

The soothing voice of Thandie Newton reads us soothing philosophy from The Prophet.

From the description, Tarn “traveled around the world with his 16mm and HD camera and filmed people, situations and places that resonate with, rather than illustrate, the text’s themes.”

Watched to get in touch my my Lebanese roots. Actually I planned to double-feature with the animated version but didn’t get to it. I didn’t usually love the photography, but the cumulative effect of it with the voiceover worked for me.

by ·Comments Off on Silence (1971, Masahiro Shinoda)

Set during whatever era of Japan when Christianity was outlawed, the story follows dour missionary Rodrigues and Garrpe, his balding friend who is less good at dialogue acting, as they arrive in a small town to clandestinely spread their religion. This turns out to be harder than they suspected, and they’re eventually captured and brought to their predecessor and teacher Ferreira, who has abandoned Christianity and tries to convince them to do the same.

Rodrigues:

Obviously watched in preparation for Scorsese’s upcoming remake. I didn’t find it all that engaging or convincing, which I suppose means there’s more hope for remake improvement than there was for Infernal Affairs / The Departed. I tend to make a really big deal out of less-than-convincingly delivered dialogue, so I generally favored the Japanese cast in this movie, who I couldn’t understand, over the English speakers, who I’m afraid the director couldn’t understand. And unrelated to the film’s quality, I couldn’t make it play in proper full-screen on my TV, so it’s the last Filmstruck movie I’m watching until they get Roku support.

Iwashita:

Looking around online, I’m not the only viewer who was reminded of Apocalypse Now (which this movie predates by eight years). Played at Cannes with fellow crisis-of-confidence films Solaris and Images. The white guys haven’t been in much else, but Ferreira was the prolific Tetsuro Tanba (grandpa in Happiness of the Katakuris). The supposedly Christian guy who sells out Rodrigues to the cops was Mako, Bob Hope’s companion in The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell. And Shima Iwashita, convinced to apostatize when her husband (Woman of the Dunes star Eiji Okada) is buried to the neck and nearly trampled by a horse, was a regular Shinoda star, also in The Demon and Sword of the Beast.

Tanba:

by ·Comments Off on Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve)

Saw this right after rewatching Kubo and the Two Strings over Thanksgiving, noticed how they both refer to a person’s life “story,” then realized this was based on a book called Story of Your Life. So the two movies go together nicely is what I’m saying.

Amy Adams is a linguist and Jeremy Renner a physicist who are recruited by Forest Whitaker to communicate with the aliens whose giant ships have appeared across the planet. We see Adams do lots of linguistics but don’t see Renner doing any physics, and I think Adams’ final language-comprehension-enabled time-reading abilities break some movie paradox laws (she can learn from her future self), but the whole thing is so beautifully done I could care less. Also interesting that the emotional resonance of world peace is much less than the story of Adams’ own doomed marriage and child.

D. Cairns:

Dennis Villeneuve makes beautiful images, perhaps tending to exploit shallow focus a little TOO much, but in doing so he uses it in unexpected ways, sometimes throwing the whole subject of the shot into an artful blur.

Damn this movie being great, because now I have to care about Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel. An Advanced Movie, it relies on our knowledge of flashback rules in order to trick us by breaking them. Waited in my seat until the music credit came up. I liked the Jóhann Jóhannsson score but I guess I really noticed the bookending Max Richter piece. This was the academy’s exact justification for excluding Jóhannsson from award consideration, somewhat unfairly.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Short (2015, Adam McKay)

“Seeds are gonna be the new currency.”

Another Brad Pitt movie explaining the math and business behind the scenes of things, so soon after Moneyball. This one follows separate groups of financial people who realize the banking system is ultimately built on bad loans, so they bet money on its collapse. Along the way, financial concepts are explained to the audience via Anthony Bourdain metaphors and Margot Robbie monologues (and the Polyphonic Spree appears for some reason). And we watch some of the world’s most charismatic male actors not trying to keep the global market from collapsing – that’s not their job – but hoping to profit from its destruction.

Pitt plays a light Ron Swanson type guiding young John Magaro and Finn Wittrock. Steve Carell plays some asshole, Ryan Gosling plays a smooth-talking dude, and Christian Bale gets to be the hard drummin’ socially awkward numbers guy who figures the whole thing out.

by ·Comments Off on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014, Zellners)

“I am like a Spanish Conquistador. Recently, I’ve learned of untold riches hidden deep in the Americas.”

A strange idea, obsessing over the “this is a true story” opening titles of Fargo, putting a degraded VHS tape of that movie into the hands of an already disconnected-from-reality Japanese woman whose hobby is treasure hunting, and setting her loose in Minnesota. However this movie, which opens with those same Fargo titles, is at least loosely based on a true story of a Japanese woman found dead outside Fargo.

Judging from the blu-ray alternate scenes, it seems the Zellners are inclined towards absurd comedy but dialed it down for the feature, so we’re left with a character study of a nearly mute, mostly unsympathetic (she rips off everyone she comes across) woman with a singleminded need to find something that we know doesn’t exist: the briefcase of money a wounded Steve Buscemi buried in the snow on a roadside twenty years earlier. Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Norwegian Wood) is engrossing to watch, and it’s fun to see the Minnesotans vainly try to culturally connect with Kumiko (asking at a Chinese restaurant if anyone can translate Japanese, giving her a copy of Shogun, offering her a ride to the Mall of America). I appreciated the concept and performances but wasn’t feeling it overall.

Bedtime for Bunzo:

This pet store had an owl, a parrot and a monkey, and the combination of their sounds stunned my two birds into silence:

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Black Something (2016, Zellner Bros.)

Found on Filmstruck: the directors’ new homage to Malle’s Black Moon. A short burst of weirdness, and the first thing I tried to watch on that site, so I can’t tell if the barking dogs sound was out-of-sync on purpose or if this is gonna be a problem. A girl picks flower petals, centipedes wriggle, plants drip with goo, and frilly collar-wearing dogs attack a bear.

by ·Comments Off on Joy (2015, David O. Russell)

Joy (J. Lawrence) dreams of being an inventor, but then her life gets sidetracked with a husband (E. Ramirez), two kids, a divorce, a lazy mom (V. Madsen), an erratic dad (De Niro) and a spiteful sister. One day she hits on a new idea for a miracle mop, and sets to producing and marketing it, bringing the whole family along with dad’s rich girlfriend (I. Rossellini) and Joy’s supportive grandma (D. Ladd) and best friend. Then there are pricing and patent disputes. Then after everything has been pretty lousy and hopeless for Joy for an hour and fifty-eight minutes, she wins a major victory against a crooked business partner then becomes wildly successful in postscript.

It feels like Russell builds overcomplicated situations in American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, shoots the scenes with his trusted cast, and figures out how it’ll all work in the editing room, relying on energy and instinct to carry him through – and this time, he didn’t have it. The scenes and sporadic voiceover and transitions and characters often felt half-assed, and if I hadn’t known a distinguished filmmaker was behind the whole thing, I rarely would’ve guessed.

The cast gathers ’round to watch NAILED on cable:

T. Robinson:

Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes … The excruciatingly literal dialogue also feels like first draft material. “I feel like I’m in a prison,” Joy sighs about her house. Later, she and her supportive best friend Jackie reminisce about “all the things we used to dream about,” and Jackie introduces a flashback with “Remember the party where it all started?” Exposition inevitably comes either via Mimi’s gushing voiceover, or “As everyone here already knows…” speeches. Joy’s own emotional development consists of a recurring nightmare in which her childhood self scolds her for abandoning her ambitions.

M. Singer:

Lawrence is too good of an actress not to be watchable in the part, but she’s totally miscast as a divorced mother of two who’s been repeatedly beaten down by life’s disappointments. This part was meant for the Jennifer Lawrence of 2025, not the one of 2015.

by ·Comments Off on Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

Catching up on recent true-falsey docs in prep for True/False. To be fair, nothing here can be proven false, but with all the identity-hiding, illegal activity, perspective-switching and popular suspicion that the whole thing might be a put-on, it totally counts.

First half follows obsessive videographer Thierry who becomes fascinated with street artists (including Shepard Fairey, who I just saw in The Color of Noise) and starts following them around, recording their work, claiming to be assembling a documentary about the scene. Thierry finally meets his legendary hero Banksy, gains his confidence and documents some of his projects. Then after Thierry’s idea of a street art documentary is revealed to be very different from everyone else’s, Banksy takes over the footage and turns the camera back on Thierry, who rebrands himself Mr. Brainwash, launching his own art career with an overly ambitious solo exhibit.

Too bad Inside Job won the oscar, because I would’ve liked to see Banksy’s acceptance speech.

by ·Comments Off on Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniels)

Insane movie full of Michel Gondryish handcrafted whimsy plus whatever great combination of acting and makeup went into Daniel Radcliffe’s multi-purpose corpse.

Much of the wonderous fire-farting, boner-compass, kung-fu-chop, grappling-hook-vomiting details had already been given away by the trailer (but if they hadn’t been, I would’ve written off the movie as a Sundancey quirk-fest and skipped it). So my happiest surprises came from the plot twists as Paul Dano becomes best friends with the dead body and as Radcliffe becomes more alive we start to take Dano’s view of reality, which crashes when he finds his way back to normal civilization (the yard of his crush, Mary Elizabeth Winstead of Scott Pilgrim).

Fart recordist Steve Nelson:

One I remember was Paul Dano, who cut one loose right before a take. He just grabbed the boom mic right out of the air and delivered it … We needed farts that were not cartoonish, that were realistic but at the same time expressive. I know — my career. Mom’s really happy I went to art school.

by ·Comments Off on The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)

Watched this after the great Killing Them Softly. It passed the time – kind of a mismatched buddy cop movie along the lines of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but with half the chemistry and humor of that one – or else I wasn’t in the most receptive mood. Can still appreciate the effort though, a fun, throwback action comedy with more careful work put into the characters and jokes than the twisty conspiracy plot.

During a 1977 smog epidemic, Russell Crowe is hired to break private eye Ryan Gosling’s arm when Gosling has been snooping around on behalf of a client searching for her dead niece. Gosling’s surprisingly capable teenage daughter (Angourie Rice of the next Sofia Coppola movie) tags along, and I think Matt Bomer (Magic Mike) plays a hit man threatening Crowe’s client Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers) who is hiding out from her mom Kim Basinger, a sold-out politician whose dirty secrets are hidden in a porn film.

My favorite shot: Gosling fighting with a guy on the roof, one falls into the pool, the other just misses

R. Collin in The Telegraph:

Both leads aren’t playing to type, exactly, so much as types gone halfway to seed. Crowe is 52 years old now, and has warmly embraced the dramatic possibilities of middle-aged spread … Gosling, meanwhile, plays the kind of moustachioed bro who — for want of a better way of putting it — thinks he’s Ryan Gosling, giving Holland a loose-swaggering confidence that amusingly exceeds his practical abilities.