Until “Avatar,” “Titanic” was the highest-grossing movie of all time. Whether or not its re-release in 3D adds substantially to its $605,000,000 worldwide gross is an open question. I talked to James Cameron before the initial release in 1997, when the general public hadn’t yet seen it, seen it, and seen it again. What did “Titanic” look like all those many years ago?
Click here to read the interview
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In an early scene, the narrator of Mario Van Peebles’ energetic multicultural musical coming-of-age high school tale, “We The Party,” identifies one of his classroom fears, a fellow African-American teenager, shoulders hunched, cloaked in a dark hoodie, plugged into his music. “A wannabe rapper, ‘cept no one ever hears him rap, straight-up scary,” he says on the soundtrack. While that may be the film’s most timely image, the director of “New Jack City,” “Panther” and “Posse,” doesn’t show himself as a filmmaker in his fifties. Working in a busy style of multiple screens, changing frame rates, freeze frames and other play with the image, he matches the iPads, iPods and laptops of his Los Angeles protagonists with a sense of life lived at the speed of the moment, and an awareness of the clashes of race and class that shape our society every moment of the day. Read the rest of this entry »
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Antony Cordier’s “Four Lovers” (Happy Few, 2010) is good-looking tosh that says the French, they are different than you and I, they have lots of carefree sex and then want to talk about it. “Subject A,” Preston Sturges called it, and the ménage-a-quatre of “Four Lovers” goes from A to A and back again. Two couples (former Olympic gymnast Élodie Bouchez and feng shui self-help author Roschdy Zem; jewelry-maker Marina Foïs and tattooed web designer Nicolas Duvauchelle) go through their paces of mutual admiration, mate-swapping and pretentious voiceover. The film’s clearest statement? This is how we photograph how we want people to think we live today, but with a little full-frontal nudity. These are modern lifestyles? Yes, but with a little full-frontal nudity. Read the rest of this entry »
Where do quirky talents with a strong eye go, like the director of “Desperately Seeking Susan,” (1985) Susan Seidelman, when the film industry shuts its doors to all but the largest-budgeted and micro-budgeted of productions? The low-simmer “Musical Chairs” is the answer, a likable yet earnest semi-musical about a Puerto Rican dancer-in-training in the Bronx who works as a handyman in a Manhattan dance studio. From across the divide, he winds up teaching the studio’s star pupil after an accident breaks her spine and confines her to a wheelchair. Dreams of ballroom dancing turn toward New York’s first wheelchair dancing tournament. Read the rest of this entry »
Ralph Fiennes
Perseus, a demigod in denial, undertakes a perilous journey to get something he needs to kill something else and save the world. That’s the plot for both “Clash of the Titans” (2010) and the new “Wrath of the Titans,” set ten years later when Perseus is a single dad. Titans, the mythological offspring of Uranus and Gaia only appeared in the first film as a mention in opening narration. But the second concocts one Titan, the 1500-foot-tall Cronus, for a climactic mega-clash. Read the rest of this entry »
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RECOMMENDED
Andrew Davis began his career as a cameraman in Chicago in the 1960s, and before his largest success, “The Fugitive” (1993), Davis was a poet of the Chicago streets in action films like “Code of Silence” (1985) and “The Package” (1989). (A variation on the Oswald-was-a-patsy conspiracy theory, “The Package” used dozens of Chicago locations to economically suggest other cities and countries.) One of Davis’ most notable obsessions in his Chicago-set films was to make them as topographically accurate as possible—that is, his skillful, adroit camera placement and cutting could, in fact, take place in the real world, rather than being pieced together from disparate locations miles apart, which filmmakers most often do. Beyond its serviceable plot, his first feature “Stony Island” is most valuable, more to be treasured, as a lovely mash note to a passed version of the South Side and a music scene that has not stood still in the past thirty-five years. Read the rest of this entry »
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The great British filmmaker Terence Davies returns with a Terence Rattigan adaptation that suggests the past is a pained place of desire, of regret and of tracking shots that are as spontaneous and unexpected as a dance number in a musical. It’s a few years after the War, and at the age of forty, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz, fiery, tremulous) leaves her life of privilege with her lawyer husband, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale, warm, concerned, genteelly solicitous) for passion with Freddie, a younger man, a tempestuously alcoholic ex-RAF pilot (callow, bumptious Tom Hiddleston). Bleak wallpaper and crushing emotions follow. Read the rest of this entry »
Brute propaganda gussied up in gauzy Lifetime-level production values, “October Baby” is an anti-abortion diatribe produced by a religious concern as family entertainment. Aggressively stacked melodrama, it’s gauzy, glib and exasperatingly holier-than-y’all. It’s the latest example of an emerging and readily financed production and distribution model that provides reassuring fairytales to religious audiences, or, “faith-based,” the euphemism of choice. Read the rest of this entry »
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There’s nothing overtly religious about most of the films by Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, but there is a spiritual character that often works in mysterious, elusive ways. “The Kid With A Bike” (Le gamin au vélo) is about a troubled twelve-year-old hard case (Thomas Doret), nicknamed “Pitbull” for good reason, who learns about life through a series of unexpected encounters, especially with a local hairdresser, played by the luminous Cécile de France. Read the rest of this entry »
