Dec 21
By Ray Pride
“I want you to help me find a killer of women.”
Rooney Mara attains the role of Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” with the slightest lift of her chin on hearing those words, the coldest fire in her eyes, as she matches the gaze of Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist.
Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy of novels reads, in its present English, like the worst rush translation on Earth, but at its heights, the late author’s moments of pulse-rushing pulp instinct are vital. And its immodest beating heart is Lisbeth. As adapted by screenwriter Steven Zaillian and director David Fincher, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is terse, telegraphic, fluent, a watercolor composed in molten pewter pen nib. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 21
RECOMMENDED
“I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” is the promise made in the opening scene of Michel Hazanavicius’ soundly entertaining “The Artist.” Keen pastiche, the terrific new trifle by the maker of the “OSS 117″ spy spoof series, offers a “Singin’ in the Rain”-variety reassurance to the modern movie industry that its origins were joyous and true and good. To appropriate Jonathan Rosenbaum’s phrase, “Goodbye, cinema: hello, cinephilia.” Masses will be entertained, and rightly so. It’s not a feel-good movie; it’s A Feel Great Movie! Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 18
Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson
RECOMMENDED
Antiseptic yet endearingly lurid, shiny as a polished stone, Bill Condon’s first of two “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” movies is a couple degrees cooler than camp but at least warmer than the grave. The Oscar-winning writer-director (for the script of “Gods and Monsters”) approaches the material with more tongue-in-cheek, largely in line readings, than earlier directors confronting the sparkly vampires and doggie werewolf boys who surround its hard-crushing teen-girl protagonist Bella. It’s efficient filmmaking shot straight to the heart of its expectant target audience. Kristen Stewart’s nasal murmur, smaller and smaller beside Robert Pattinson, makes for a toothy tiny bride in brown-eyed contacts, blushing, barefoot. Eat, prey, turn? Marry, fuck, thrill? “You have to accept what is,” a character says, meaningfully meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »
Oct 31
RECOMMENDED
#OccupyGattaca! Clever lad Andrew Niccol’s latest high-conceit parallel-universe science-fiction allegory, “In Time,” is also a bold, goofy, political parable that pits plutocrats who “come from time” (time = money) against the ninety-nine percent of the population that pay out their days in seconds against minutes. The unexplained gene-splicing that allows everyone to stay twenty-five sets an internal clock ticking on that birthday, which gives you a year: a year of currency to spend in order to live. You can stay twenty-five forever if you earn enough time and also evade the police, now known as “Timekeepers.” Read the rest of this entry »
Oct 12
RECOMMENDED
Almost shot-for-shot-faithful variations on Herbert Ross’ choreography from 1984′s “Footloose” are the first of the enjoyably engaging elements of Craig Brewer’s (“Hustle and Flow”) Southern variation on the Kevin Bacon-star-maker, largely cornball fashioned with dispatch. In bits and touches, Brewer makes “Footloose” personal. It’s set in the apocryphal backwater of “Bomont,” population 18,300, not too far from any number of danceable spaces, within hailing distance of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Village,” yet never far from Brewer’s beloved Memphis, even if the grit and grime of his earlier work never comes to full, bruised bloom. (“Get your fingers out of my pie” is typical of the tangy, slangy asides throughout; “Baby, simple elegance is something to strive for” is wry self-critique.) Brand names, from Heinz to Greyhound, sketch in the pepper-and-salt anachronism of Bomont. (Reader’s Digest Condensed Books molder in several scenes.) Spunky if slightly square, this “Footloose” works to make the compulsive protectiveness of the town’s parents as comprehensible as the teens’ impulse to cut loose.
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Aug 23
By Ray Pride
Why do people fall in love with some romantic comedies, and not with others?
Recent releases like “Friends With Benefits” have played up “meta” elements, making comedy out of expectations from both the stories we’re told and the stories we tell ourselves, with some success, both as comedy and commerce. Others, like “One Day,” a kind of “friends without benefits” which opened last Friday, Lone Scherfig’s follow-up to “An Education,” meet with abrupt choruses of critical disapproval. Man, do writers get angry! The wholehearted hater of halfway-decent romantic comedies sounds always like a spurned lover. Read the rest of this entry »
Jul 13
RECOMMENDED
There was a Sunday night back in mid-2010 when intermittent aphorist Errol Morris took to his Twitter account and sounded surprised, saying something like, Wow, I think I just finished a new movie, as if it had dropped fully formed in his lab. "Tabloid" was the result and it's a quirky quickie, as he turns a single-day interview with the bizarre, emphatic Joyce McKinney, into another meditation on storytelling and truth, with 1960s-tabloid style storytelling, alleged sex kidnappings, obsession, alleged Mormon conspiracies and Korean dog-cloning thrown into the mix. More recently, Morris' appearances with the film have been shadowed by McKinney, who doesn't love the giddy romp that her life's become on screen, and Morris marvels that these Q&As, with McKinney joining him on stage, are often longer than the film's taut eighty-eight-minute running time. Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 29
RECOMMENDED
(Le Nom des gens, or “People’s Names”) ”France is full of fascists, whites are fascist, blacks are fascist, even Arabs are fascist, the Chinese must be fascist, too, but I don’t know any” is how twentysomething Bahia Benmahmoud, daughter of a once-upon-a-time French radical and an Algerian immigrant, introduces the workings of her mind to middle-aged Jewish scientist Arthur Martin (French favorite Jacques Gamblin) in Michel Leclerc’s madly riffing comedy “The Names of Love.” Algeria and Auschwitz are the tragedies in the family past of these mismatched lovers, but Leclerc’s japery about Arab-Jewish affairs, the lives of immigrants and cultural identity keep things racing on a superficial but not entirely facile speed. (The history of the Holocaust and France’s colonialism erupt too often for the serious strain to flag.) Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 14
Photo: Ray Pride
By Ray Pride
Mike Mills’ “Beginners” wears its hearts on its sleeve.
Based on his own father’s coming out at 70 after the death of his mother, as well as the dating tribulations of latter-day thirtysomething Los Angelenos, the writer-director-illustrator (“Thumbsucker,” “Does Your Soul Have A Cold?”) has composed a love note to letting go and holding on. Memories are what “Beginners” holds onto, jumping across several years in the life of Oliver (Ewan McGregor) as he narrates the life of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), a museum administrator, and meets a French actress, Anna (Mélanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”) and falls tentatively into tipsy love. Part of the tenderness of Mills’ story is the father and son are alike in so many ways, and that fact being in the weave of the story and not its larger plot. Oliver’s tentativeness with the opposite sex, and the pleasantly goofy Anna, is indicated, not explained: simply, before they die, the two men have to understand how to simply be (and, if lucky, to be in love). 1950s conservatism restrained Hal; Oliver and Anna’s obstacles are self-made. The acting is tremendously affecting: Plummer, plucky; Laurent, lovable; McGregor, understated, hopeful, melancholy. Plus a Jack Russell that, cutely, appears to read minds, as he’s passed down from Hal to Oliver. I am in awe of the brass of a filmmaker that subtitles a dog’s thoughts as if channeling Barbara Kruger, “Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something happens soon.” Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 09
RECOMMENDED
Feeling beats logic in the third feature by J. J. Abrams, as he works at breakneck pace to be a one-man cover band of Steven Spielberg’s Greatest Memes. Brimming with unusually specific period detail in an overstuffed kids-and-monsters pastiche, “Super 8″ has soaring moments of first love carried on the frail shoulders of its thirteen-something protagonists. (The 1966-born Abrams would have been the same age as these earnest pimple patches in 1979, the year in which the movie is set.) Although set in the receding mists of the 1970s, “Super 8″ is one more post-9/11 project that tends to melancholy in fabricating scenes of tragedy. On Abrams’ side, there’s “Lost” and “Cloverfield,” and on producer Spielberg’s, there’s at least “War of the Worlds.” Abrams also helps himself to a setting like that of “E.T.”, dollops of “Duel,” not enough of the slow reveal of “Jaws,” and a little of the want-for-wonder of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (especially Spielberg’s beloved military black ops converging on a small town and the mannerism of horizontal blue “lens flares” added throughout to ape Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography). And while we’re at it, how about a little Area 51 with your sacrificial Lamb? The Walt Disney-originated device of the absent, dead mother comes immediately into play, leaving young Joel Courtney (Joe Lamb) the inevitable center of the six kids who seek “production value” for a Super 8 zombie movie they hope to send off to the promised land of Cleveland: “Older kids are entering this film festival, 15, 16 years old!” Read the rest of this entry »
By Ray Pride
