Black Swan

EDITED TO ADD: I just realized that there may be some spoilery things in here...so be careful. But really, you shouldn't be reading this if you haven't seen the movie yet. "Maybe it was all that White Swan/Black Swan split-personality stuff, but as Black Swan ended I found myself confronted by two outwardly identical but attitudinally opposed thoughts: "That was something... (?)" and "That was something... (!)." In other words, I can't yet tell you exactly what Black Swan is, exactly what it means...

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True Grit (2010)

Much has been made of The Coen's tinkering with the ending to their newest film True Grit – an adaptation of a novel by Charles Portis which was turned to a hugely popular film adaption by Henry Hathaway (which in turn gave screen icon John Wayne is only Oscar…but you know all of this already) – and how that tinkering makes their western – a wholly un-ironic (or, rather, un-existential) affair that is, surprisingly for the brothers, their most straight-forward narrative…ever – not so much an honest...

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Catching up with 2010: Capsule Review - Best Worst Movie

Best Worst Movie is great if you’re a fan of Troll 2, but otherwise it’s a bit of a boring documentary that seems to be discovering the same thing over and over: the film has a cult following, and the actors are varying degrees of embarrassed about the film. The film is really about George Hardy; he’s a dentist who does good work for his Alabama community, but when he catches wind that Troll 2 is a popular roadshow film he decides to jump on the circuit and be a part of the mania. The most interesting...

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Ken Russell: The Musicals and Biopics, Part 2 (Tommy, Lisztomania, and Valentino)

After Mahler, Ken Russell signed on to turn the massively popular rock opera “Tommy” by The Who into a feature film. The film would go on to bring Russell his greatest success (both critically and financially) and would lead him to re-team with The Who frontman Roger Daltry for the hilariously absurd Lisztomania. That film was a bomb (although it did enjoy some minor success at the British box office) –in actuality it’s worse than that; although, it does play as some kind of perverse curiosity...

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Ken Russell: Musicals and Biopics, Part 1 (The Music Lovers, The Boy Friend, Savage Messiah, and Mahler)

After the release of The Devils, Ken Russell embarked on making a string of experimental, personal films -- some, on both accounts, more than others -- about artists, the theater, and composers. This olio of avant-garde work showcases the best and worst of Russell the auteur exploring his favorite subject: the creation of art by geniuses (and what makes those geniuses tick). The best example of this favorite theme of Russell’s is the stream-of-consciousness biopic Mahler and the rock opera Tommy...

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Catching up with 2010: Capsule Review – Salt

Salt is a breath of fresh air; it’s a great, old-fashioned style Cold War thriller with a no-frills, goofy attitude towards the action genre. This is exactly what these types of spy thrillers should be, and even though I really liked some of the Bourne films, Salt, in all of its simplicity, is light-years ahead of Paul Greengrass’ film. The film is not just light-years ahead in craft (I like that the film employs a mix of old-school and new-school editors – Stuart Baird and John Gillroy respectively...

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Ken Russell: The Devils

All pictures are courtesy of my brother. He reviewed the film a couple of months ago at his blog. Check it out to see even more great screen captures. Ken Russell's The Devils is one of the most memorable films to come out of that oh-so-exciting era of filmmaking: the early 70's. With the likes of Rosemary's Baby and Dirty Harry (not to mention William Friedkin's The Exorcist – one of the more audacious American films released during that era), American films were as adventurous as they were...

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Ken Russell: Women in Love

Sorry for the delay in getting this post up. It's been in the hopper for awhile; I was just never really that pleased with it….so I'm just getting it out here so I can kickstart this retrospective (which will run all month). Expect regular blogging from now until January. Yay. I hope you enjoy. See ya in the comments. Ken Russell is a filmmaker who marches to the beat of his own drum; this is a trait that all auteurs have, and Russell is no different. Here is a man who makes the films he wants...

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Catching up with 2010: Capsule Review - Easy A

Much like Orange County and The House Bunny, Easy A is a film that is nothing new to the genre of high school/college films about people who look good and attend nice looking schools in affluent communities. Whew, that's a mouthful for merely trying to explain a specific type of film, but we all probably know what type of film Easy A is before we even watch it. And yet, that is what makes the film so damn enjoyable: it is so much better than it has any right to be. The sole purpose is the charming-as-hell...

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Thanks

Allow me for a moment to be serious... I know it's cliche, and perhaps even a little cheesy, to type a list of things one is thankful for, but I felt compelled to compile this short post in light of some recent reading on this eve of the day we give thanks. To Jim Emerson: Your Scanners blog never fails to remind me that time spent reading the internet is not time wasted. Thanks, too, for always getting me to think at a higher level about what is on the screen. Your blog reminds me daily of the fond memories I have sitting in my English Literature...

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Some Quick Thoughts on "Boardwalk Empire"

Thanks to my hometown's propensity for closing everything down when an inch of snow and a little bit of ice accumulates on the street, I don't have to work today. My school is closed for the day which gives me the opportunity to catch up on some episodes of my new favorite show "Boardwalk Empire." Once again, for great, insightful (and more detailed than what you'll find here) weekly recaps visit Ed and David (and of course Alan) at their sites. Spoilers abound if you aren't caught up with the...

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The Social Network

Not since last year's Inglourious Basterds have I left a movie theater so exhilarated; I couldn't wait to get home and type out my thoughts about David Fincher's latest The Social Network. But then a funny thing happened: I realized I was about a month late to the party, and, perhaps most pressing, what could I possibly add to the already invigorating and intellectually stimulating conversation that was taking place in the blogosphere. As you may recall this is exactly the same quandary I faced...

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Spend the holidays with Ken Russell!

Yes, folks, that is correct, I will be spending my holidays with a man obsessed with religion...how apt! Apt, I say! (to quote Lisa Simpson) Beginning December 7th or so I will begin my second attempt to cover a director's oeuvre. Ken Russell is the man the majority of you voted for last month, and I have to say that you all must hate me. I don't want to tip my hand to how favorable or unfavorable my retrospective will be, but let me just say this: I have now moved through all of Russell's mainstream...

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Hour of the Wolf

This post originally appeared as part of the Wonders in the Dark horror countdown. You can view all entries here. "The Hour of the Wolf" is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. Imagine if I told you that the tagline above is for a movie called The Cannibals – sounds like an ordinary horror film, doesn’t it? Now, imagine I tell you that the above tagline...

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Catching up with 2010: Capsule Review – The Killer Inside Me

Not since John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has a film attempted so closely to follow and track the depravity of a killer, but Michael Winterbottom's latest experiment (based on a popular piece of pulp fiction) tries its hardest to do just that, but is sadly derailed by superfluous story threads and unnecessary supporting characters that seem to just drift in and out of the story with no rhyme or reason. The major difference between the two films, and one of the reasons the former...

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Catching up with 2010: Capsule Review – Date Night

Here's the type of comedy that just doesn't work in 2010. The actors, bless their hearts, try their hardest to make this pseudo-screwball comedy work, but the writing and the directing (specifically the asinine idea to add 20 minutes to the film for home release) completely derail the film. In other words: it's hard to make a screwball comedy in 2010 because directors and studios think screwball today equates to guns, car chases, and poorly directed action scenes involving normal, everyday people....

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I hope that's shepherds pie in my knickers...

Forty years ago, a film appeared that was so shocking, so terrifying, it was sealed in a concrete vault deep beneath the earth. But even the new management of Sony Tri-Star could not contain the pure evil of The Bloodening. A registered nurse, trained in the treatment of terror, will be on duty during the showing of The Bloodening. For a truly terrifying film this Halloween make sure to watch The Bloodening. It has a high likelihood of causing fear-induced heart attacks, and you get to find out how creepy little kids know about how the doctor...

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In the spirit of "friending"...

There's no doubt what the movie of the moment is right now: the Fincher/Sorkin (accredited in the trailer the same way Welles and Toland were in Citizen Kane, suggesting, perhaps that the film wouldn't be what people are calling it if Fincher didn't have Sorkin) collaboration, The Social Network. It will be a looooong while before I see this (okay, not really, but at least a few months), so in the spirit of online friends and community and such, (and living vicariously through other people's ability to get out there and see the film...not to mention...

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Images from a night of movie watching without my wife...

So my wife is gone this weekend at school (she's in a program that meets two weekends every month at Portland St.), and so I decided to be mature and instead of throwing a big party I decided to work on my work samples for my masters degree. I need background noise when I work...so I went to the one genre that always gets me through schoolwork (surprisingly not horror): the action film*. Here are some images of what motivated me while I typed up lesson plans, assessment data analysis, and other...

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Blogging Hiatus (kind of)...

It looks like Ken Russell won the blog poll for my next director retrospective. I have loaded up the Netflix queue with Russell films, and I will begin viewing those shortly. However, when I actually post stuff will be sporadic at best. In fact, I have decided use this retrospective -- and the breadth of Russell's oeuvre -- as a way to get out of doing a second Italian horror-themed blogathon. For those of you that don't know, I am an educator; actually, I think of myself as more of a social worker considering the the type of students I felt a...

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Only one day left to vote!

On the right side of my blog you will see a poll. This poll was created to give you, my dear readers, the power to tell me what you want to read about for my next director retrospective. So...if you haven't voted yet all I can is this: What are you waiting for! The race is tight (I'm a little shocked there's no love for Hal Ashby), and it appears that right now Ken Russell is going to win this thing, but Peter Weir has caught up a bit, and Nicolas Roeg is starting to creep up there, too. Only 26 people have voted so get on it, people! Once the...

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"Boardwalk Empire"...the best film of the year?

[I'm hoping to do these quick and dirty posts on what I liked most about each episode every Monday. For detailed episode recaps, which these posts of mine will not be, you should read Edward Copeland's wonderful blog. His summation of the pilot episode can be found here. Keeping in the spirit of what Jim Emerson has been proposing over at his blog (essentially that television is doing cinema better than cinema these days), "Boardwalk Empire" may just be the best "film" I see this year. I'm extremely...

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Oliver Stone: Nixon

[This is the final installment of my look at the films of Oliver Stone from 1986-1995. I've placed a convenient little pole on the right side of the blog for you all to partake in. That's right, I'm giving you the power to decide what I watch and write about for the next director retrospective! Hehe. Exciting, I know. So, be democratic and vote!] And so we come to the end of this "retrospective". Yes, retrospective is in quotes because I was only ever interested in covering the years when Stone's...

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Oliver Stone: Natural Born Killers

After the box office failure of Heaven and Earth Oliver Stone was crushed. His final entry into his Vietnam trilogy – his most impassioned labor of love – was met with resounding apathy from the critical and commercial masses, and all he wanted to do was make a straight-forward action film with an easy shooting schedule after the grueling experience of filming on location in Saigon for Heaven and Earth. What Stone found was a script by then-plucky up-and-comer Quentin Tarantino (who at the time...

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David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon: Videodrome

[This post is part of the David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon going on right now at Tony Dayoub's site Cinema Viewfinder. Check out the comments for this piece here] What is probably one of the most unconventional horror films ever made, David Cronenberg's Videodrome is, perhaps, only matched by David Lynch's Blue Velvet as one of the oddest, most surreal horror experiences I've ever seen. Cronenberg's film is akin to Lynch's in the sense that both films sit on the fringes of horror (using the prototype...

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Oliver Stone: Heaven and Earth

Sandwiched between Stone's two craziest and most manic films lay one of the auteur's more visually poetic and interesting films; Heaven and Earth isn't something so different that it stands out – although it's nice to see Stone stretch himself a bit here by having the film being told through the eyes of a female protagonist – and it falls too often into ridiculous melodrama to be emotionally memorable. But if you can get past some of the film's major flaws (the film, based on two books by the...

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Winter’s Bone

Unlike Precious and Frozen River (the latter I enjoyed for its performances), Winter's Bone feels lived-in; it doesn't feel like the filmmakers are above the material judging it, smugly proud of the way their exploiting their marginalized, poverty stricken characters for the sake of impressing the Sundance crowds in the name of "understanding these characters" or "showing us a world we've never seen before because we're too concerned with our own lives to look worry about it." Meth is a driving...

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Oliver Stone: JFK

After the lukewarm reaction to The Doors, Oliver Stone needed to rejuvenate the quiescent angst that had been on display in his earlier films like Salvador and Born on the Fourth of July. Stone wanted to fashion a film – what he would call a "counter-myth" – about what he perceived as the conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. Molding his screenplay in the style of Z and Rashomon, Stone created JFK; a procedural unlike any I've ever seen. Thanks to Stone's amazing ensemble cast (as Craig...

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Oliver Stone: The Doors

I remember seeing tons of shows as a teenager where I would gladly be packed shoulder to shoulder with other sweaty music fans – packed like sardines – waiting for a band or musician to come on stage and give us a show. I was always adamant about seeing bands that did something different live than what they would do on their albums; after all, if I wanted to hear the same thing I would save my money and just listen to the album. Standing there for hours with complete strangers, swaying back and...

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Oliver Stone: Talk Radio and Born on the Fourth of July

Talk Radio is perhaps Oliver Stone's angriest film; an apt designation considering he teamed up with an even angrier man in playwright Eric Bogosian (who also stars as the lead). What they're angry at is more arbitrary than what Ron Kovic, the subject of Stone's 1989 hit film Born on the Fourth of July, is angry at. For Kovic the focus of that anger is clear: disillusionment and betrayal from those he trusted most (his government, his parents, American ideals); however, the anger directed by Barry,...

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New Blog Design

I'll be back on Monday with some more posts (continuing my look at Oliver Stone's films), but first I wanted to point out the obvious: I've redesigned the blog (yet again).  So I guess I've re-redesigned the blog. Anywho, if you look up top there are now neat little tabs that will take you to a specified page with links. I will place the current year's reviews in a tab at the top (and when I was doing this I was shocked to see that I've reviewed exactly three films this year!) and any previous years will be placed on the right under their...

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Oliver Stone: Wall Street

Taking a break from traditional war zones, Oliver Stone decided to move from the jungles of El Salvador and Vietnam to the jungle of Wall Street. The major difference is that Stone isn't as serious here as he was with his previous movies Salvador and Platoon. There's something charmingly campy about Stone's tale of 80's excess and greed in Wall Street. Most of what makes it work is the performance of Michael Douglas – a star at the time not known for these kinds of roles – and Charlie Sheen, who...

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Oliver Stone: Salvador and Platoon

Oliver Stone is as interesting a filmmaker we have working today in American cinema. The problem is that he basically made the same film over and over until people grew tired of his shtick. To see an Oliver Stone film is to see something controversial; the filmmaker has always been interested in not creating controversy, but seeking it out and explicating the chaos and greed and corruption of America's infrastructures (Wall Street/greed; Vietnam/war; Washington, D.C./corruption in politics; television/violence...

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Director Retrospectives: Oliver Stone

On September 24th Oliver Stone will release his sequel to the campy 80's drama, Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (what a horrible subtitle) seems hardly an event to trumpeted, but I have to be honest: for maybe only the third or fourth time this year I'm actually kind of excited to go out and see a movie on the day of its release. So, prior to the release of Stone's latest film I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at his most revered period of filmmaking. From...

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Two from John Huston: Prizzi’s Honor and Under the Volcano

[This post is my contribution to Adam Zanzie's John Huston blogathon; head on over to Icebox Movies to check out the rest of the great entries.] When thinking about Adam's question and main theme for the blogathon – whether or not we can call John Huston an auteur – I knew that I wanted to consider this question while placing it within the context of Huston's late era; in this case two of the final three films he ever made. Prizzi's Honor – a dark comedy about the mobster genre – was unlike...

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Why The Expendables will be the best movie I see this summer

No, there's no logical reason for the title to this post; this is going to be strictly emotion-based. Next Friday The Expendables – a B-level action movie that seems to be so retro that it has no place being released in theaters in 2010; rather, it would be more appropriate to have it be shown between the hours of 12:45 am and 4 am on Showtime – will be released nationwide. Sylvester Stallone's recent labor of love is an attempt to bring people back to the action movie; people who have become...

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Summer of Slash: Wrap-up

Well, as you can can see apparently the summer only lasts a few months in my world. I know that technically I have an entrie month to watch more slasher/horror movies and write about them, but the truth is that I've pretty much covered all of the titles I wanted to cover. This isn't really the end of my horror movie writing, though (of course not!) as a month from now I will be joining three others in coutning down the best horror films of all time over at the place for movie polling, Wonders in...

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In Defense of Miami Vice

Head on over to Wonders in the Dark where they've been kind of enough to let me ramble on about why I think Miami Vice is one of the best film's of the decade (in their recent poll on the subject I placed it number two). Here's a sample: There’s nothing more cliché than an action film about two cops who go undercover and infiltrate a drug cartel; and that, while undercover, one of the cops will no doubt get in too deep while the other cop can only question his partner’s commitment to the case....

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