January 28th, 2010
Moon = fine
My recollection of the trailer for Duncan Jones’ Moon deceptively had me believing that the film would be a long, drawn out contemplative work focusing on boredom and isolation in a mining shack on the Moon. I am a big fan of films about boredom. Instead, it turned into a tight little corporate dystopia flick. On the moon. Sam Rockwell was great. The film was enjoyable. Not enjoyable enough that I’d call it “recommended.”
Lesser films seen this week:
- Vision = not recommended. Saw this as part of the Goethe Institute’s “Film | Neu” German language festival. Hopefully there were better films in the series. This story about a group of 11th Century nuns earning a tiny degree of liberation under the leadership of a charismatic absinthe-addict certainly offers an unusual historical setting. Unfortunately, the narrative is completely conventional.
- Up = fine. Watched via Netflix because it figured prominently in respectable end-of-year lists. As a part-time curmudgeon who likes to travel, I identified with Carl. I just didn’t find this particular flying house adventure all that entertaining.
P.S. Viewing Habit is the first in a series of series I think maybe I can possibly post to this space regularly. “Habit” does not imply that each post will involve nuns. I will continue to rate films on my five point scale as either highly recommended, recommended, fine, not recommended, or highly not recommended.
Categories: the cinematical
November 30th, 2009
I’m happy to report that with The Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson seems to have turned things around. The chart above is probably a bit unfair, but his films have definitely had diminishing returns for me over time. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of his films, but I’ve been less and less patient with his stilted characters, relationships, and plots. Animation is a great match for his his visual language, and adapting Roald Dahl’s children’s book gives him a simple enough story to tell that falls in line nicely with the families and teams-on-a-mission he’s chronicled from the start.
Categories: Blog, the cinematical
September 19th, 2009
Movie posters for Food Inc, Fresh, King Corn, and Julie and Julia
I’m not going to defend Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia as Oscar-worthy when that season comes around, but I think it has an important lesson for Documentary filmmakers. Watching it made me a lot more excited about eating good food than any food-policy documentary I’ve seen. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., Ana Sofia Joanes’ Fresh, and Aaron Woolf’s King Corn. With various degrees of success, each aims to educate Americans on the ills of industrial agriculture by weaving a storyline or four around an interview with Michael Pollan.
Julie & Julia does not mention corn subsidies or perhaps even the word organic. It simply tells two true stories about people who love food. It makes you want to go home and cook something wonderful in your kitchen. This is the radical action that the food docs (and Michael Pollan) aim to accomplish. If you get excited about cooking, it won’t be long before you start seeking out fresh vegetables at your local farmers market and learning about evil corn lobbyists.
Cinema (especially activist nonfiction) succeeds when it remains focused on showing through storytelling.
Categories: Blog, the cinematical, the political
April 7th, 2009
Apparently the President will be there. Another possibility is that Barack Obama clip art can sell anything. I’m buying my ticket now.
Categories: Blog, dc, the political
April 1st, 2009
While I haven’t yet had a chance to try the stand-alone device, Josh Marshall’s take on Kindle pretty much sums up my experience of using the Kindle iPhone application. After about ten minutes of reading the first ebook I bought, I had the same feeling I had when I first experienced the simplicity of the iPod.
Pictured: Excerpt from Kindle version of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”
I’ve been reading an unending stream of tweets, emails and blog posts on screen for years. Making the leap to actual literature (no offense to your Twitter skills, dear reader) actually provides a welcome disconnect from the limitless distractions the iPhone offers.
I love paper and there will always be a place for it, but with three (e)books finished in rapid succession on iPhone I consider the experience of digesting strings of letters arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters to be more-or-less conquered.
Categories: Blog, the textual
March 21st, 2009
While everyone else was looking out for Irish green on Tuesday, my work-related radar for all things purple and yellow was tripped by two neighborly old ladies dressed head-to-toe in purple talking in front of a yellow house on New Hampshire Ave. I don’t have a picture of that, so instead I give you this crazy Julia Sonmi Heglund illustration, which has been inspiring me since I stumbled upon it a week or two ago. You can buy t-shirts with the design from Threadless and check out the rest of her portfolio on her website.
Categories: Blog, the visual
January 2nd, 2009
This year proved unusually difficult to distill down to a pure top two for my annual exercise in list minimalism. I saw a lot of good movies this year, but few fiction films that stood out as excellent. In the end, these are the two:
1. Synecdoche, New York - I’ve seen Charlie Kaufman’s epic on the ultra-examined life only once, but I desperately want to see it again. It’s the only film this year that left me feeling that way. The befuddling layers of the surreal and the mundane make Synecdoche an exhilarating experience (at least for those of us who are exhilarated dry humor, implausibility, and gradual bodily decay). Philip Seymour Hoffman is a twisted pleasure to watch, as usual.
2. Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale) - I saw quite a few French films in the last half of 2008, largely owing to AFI’s European Union festival, which occupied much of the post-election calendar at the Silver Theater here in DC. I considered awarding the collective experience of viewing several* in close proximity this slot. But no! I hate it when critics list seven films as “tied” for a single slot in their best-of lists. We’re in the business of comparing and contrasting, and some films are simply better than others. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a wonderfully complicated movie about a family gathering at Christmastime. The characters are well written. Their relationships are filled with palpable love and hate. The acting is superb. Until today I hadn’t bothered to look up Desplechin’s filmography. Upon doing so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was also behind Esther Kahn, which made a strong impression on me after plucking it from other critics’ year-end lists in 2002.
Also notable:
Sean Penn’s performance in Gus Van Sant’s remake of The Times of Harvey Milk is very good. I hesitate to give much praise to Milk as a whole – largely because I found it far less powerful than that now-classic documentary.
The other performance-driven film on many year-end lists is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Micky Rourke’s turn as a veteran on the small-town wrestling circuit is at least as deserving of an Oscar nomination as Penn’s performance. However, the film overall often seemed like it wasn’t rising to the level of Rourke’s acting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the plot. I liked the parallels with his off-screen career and on-screen love interest. The film is certainly a must-see, but simply not in my top two.
I almost placed Vicky Christina Barcelona in my top two. I was extraordinarily entertained watching Woody Allen riff on François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim using the stunning trio of Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz.
*Fine. I’ll name two more French flicks here: Bertrand Bonello’s De la guerre (On War) and Idit Cebula’s Deux vies… plus une (Two Lives… Plus One).
Categories: Blog, the cinematical
