There was a time when I considered Wes Anderson along with PT Anderson to be my favorite director(s). After discovering Rushmore on video, I built a feverish anticipation for The Royal Tenenbaums. In December of 2001 I drove 8 hours to New York to see the film. When I arrived every showing that day had already sold out so I had to buy a ticket to Waking Life (you’re welcome Richard Linklater) and sneak in. It was worth it because it’s still one of my favorite films. In 2004 I saw an advance screening of The Life Aquatic a few weeks before it was released and though it has great bits I knew I was making excuses for the films shortcomings. I saw The Darjeeling Limited premiere at the New York Film Festival in 2007 and liked the film, but it didn’t mean the same thing to me that his previous films did.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox is by far my least favorite of his films. I wanted to enjoy it but have a hard time finding anything good to say about it. I didn’t think it was funny, the music choices were obvious (I Get Around and Street Fighting Man, really?), and thought it was visually disappointing. Unlike Henry Selick’s incredible stop-motion work, the scope of this film was extremely limited. The designs looked flat and they seemed more like miniatures instead of a real environment. I also found the scale of them to be strange, they looked tall and thin but appeared to only be inches high.
It’s not a terrible film, I just thought were it not for Anderson’s name or the voice cast it wouldn’t be a very notable one. Logically, the film didn’t make more sense than your standard Dreamworks animated film. They wear clothes and speak like humans but still eat like animals? I realize it’s been done in hundreds of animated films but Pixar will at least put some thought behind what their characters limitations are. I can appreciate Anderson for at the very least trying something different but found myself bored throughout and further appreciated Darjeeling and Life Aquatic even with their flaws.
Falling somewhere inbetween the promising Donnie Darko and the disasterous Southland Tales, The Box is essentially a very stylish bad movie. After the epic failure of Southland Tales, writer/director Kelly needed to make a film that would appeal to a wide enough audience to rescue his career and it appeared that The Box would be it. After seeing it I can say it’s just as idiosyncratic as his previous work with many familiar science fiction elements popping up. Based on the short story “Button Button”, the film plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone (for which the story was previously adapted) as directed by Dario Argento. There was a lot to admire in this film, Frank Langella is great, as is his makeup, there are some genuine scares and paranoid creepiness but the film also captured a sort of 70’s cheese so accurately it was hard to take seriously (and the film wanted to be taken seriously.)
I’ve decided after a few days of mulling it over that I didn’t really like this movie but not because it wasn’t a good movie. I liked that the film seemed to have room to breathe absent from the generic romantic coming-of-age film suggested by the trailer. Carey Mulligan was great in the lead (though her character seems too wise for being 16), Peter Saarsgard’s casting instead of someone British was puzzling but he did well in the role. I actually really enjoyed the film until I realized that I had been swindled by a twist that I wont spoil. The film succeeded perfectly and it frustrated me.
This past weekend my dad came up to visit so we could watch as many horror films as we could in 72 hours. This year we saw 14: 6 in the theatre, 4 of which were double-features, and 8 on DVD, 3 of which were new releases each arriving with a wave of hype.
‘Zombieland’ is a zombie comedy starring Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg as the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse. It’s pretty hard to ignore the comparisons to ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which is unfortunate because that film was so brilliant that it becomes more apparent this film doesn’t have much to add. The opening credits are some of the most inventive and visually stunning I’ve ever seen but this is unfortunately the highlight of the film. The script has a some clever ideas, the “rules for survival”, for example are cute, but surprisingly for a film called ‘Zombieland’ the film manages to shortchange the zombies! The zombie deaths aren’t very interesting, no characters are ever put in danger and long stretches of film have no zombies present at all. When the characters arrive at the mansion 2/3 of the way through, the film begins to sag and never recovers. The film is fun but slight, especially after wading through the zombie films of the past decade and comparing this to the brilliant ‘Shaun of the Dead’.
‘Paranormal Activity’ is ‘The Blair Witch Project’ for kids who probably didn’t see that film a decade ago. Anyone who has seen that film, as I did once (only) during limited release, will know that this film is nothing new. The premise is that a couple sets up a camera in their bedroom to capture supernatural goings-on, which is supposed to build suspense as their situation worsens. The daytime scenes are repetitive and don’t seem to build in intensity, the nighttime scenes take too long for anything to happen and by the time it does it’s over! The audience I saw the film with was audibly disappointed when the film ended and I can’t blame them. The bottom line is that people wanted to be scared and they weren’t. The hype for this film was extremely out of control and we were all extremely disappointed.
‘Trick ‘R Treat’, a Halloween anthology originally scheduled for release 2 years ago, finally saw a direct-to-DVD release earlier this month. Direct-to-DVD generally means that the film is terrible but that’s not actually the case. The problem with most anthologies is that they are always so uneven, certain stories are great and some aren’t. ‘Trick ‘R Treat’ manages to avoid this by weaving all the stories together with a ‘Pulp Fiction’-style chronology that jumps backwards and forwards in time during the course of one Halloween night. The film is actually great fun, a smart fun horror film actually set at Halloween (which is rarer than you would think). I can see why a film like this didn’t get a theatrical release, nobody knew how to market it. At times it feels more like a great TV special than what most audiences have come to expect out of a horror film, but it’s worth seeking out and one of my favorite discoveries this year.
After a great trailer, some Sundance buzz, and missing the BAM screening I had tickets to earlier this year, I was pretty excited to see this “Brilliant…Electrifying…Amazing” film. Unfortunately, with the exception of Tom Hardy’s magnetic performance the film is pretty much a dud. The film is hardly the fastpaced, stylized, hilarious true story it promises, instead a monotonous series of fights with no development or progression whatsoever.
The backstory shown in the trailer is pretty much all the insight you get as the film dives right into Bronson’s first prison sentence. We don’t know why this man would be possessed to do these things and we don’t ever see the perspective of the film change. Scenes are cut to pop or classical music without regard for their importance. Other than it looking cool why are we hearing this song while the prison guard walks down the hallway? When it’s all over we don’t know any more about this characters inexplicable violence than when we started. So what was it all for?
As a longtime Coen Bros. fan, who has been deeply disappointed in their recent work (‘Intolerable Cruelty’, ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Burn After Reading’, their “Ugh Trilogy”), I was surprised at how much I was surprised by this film. Because I was out of town I wasn’t able to see the film until last weekend which makes ‘A Serious Man’ the first Coen film since ‘The Big Lebowski’ that I didn’t see on opening weekend. All of this worked to the films advantage.
‘A Serious Man’ is a black comedy set in 1967 about Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern professor who watches his life unravel. His wife wants a divorce, his kids only want his money or to adjust the television antenna, and a student attemps to bribe him as his tenure acceptance is called into question. The setup seems classic Coen, (or even John Hughes who also relished putting his characters in situations that get impossibly worse), but the film has a tone all it’s own.
The cast is unknowns who are familiar faces at best, (a fantastic change of pace from the star studded mugging of ‘Burn After Reading’), and only helps the believability of this world. Michael Stuhlbarg is great in the lead and you really feel for him every step of the way. The time and place is so specific (and so Jewish!) I wish I had known some of the more inside jokes, but I like that the film doesn’t stop to explain them. If you get it, great and if you don’t the film doesn’t care.
The film shows how absurd and futile religious institutions are and acts as a morality play. The ending is shocking and unexpected and the fact that it ends where it does makes me admire the film even more. Stacking this and ‘No Country For Old Men’ together gives me hope we still haven’t seen everything the Coens are capable of.
