Film (449)
An aging movie star wanders around an opulent, yet alienating hotel. Trapped in a prison of fame, drugs, and hangers-on, the actor suffers from the kind of existential angst that only exists in portentous art films, but finds salvation through his relationship with a young girl. That’s the basic plot of Somewhere, but back in 2003 Sophia Coppola called the movie Lost In Translation. It was a remarkable calling card that established her career and reinforced that she was a filmmaker of unique talent and vision.Now it’s 7 years later and she’s made two more movies about the pain of wealth and privilege. The limitations of returning to that well started to show in Marie Antoinette and in Somewhere, it’s starting to look like Sophia’s running out of ideas only four movies into her career. That’s not to say that Somewhere is devoid of interest or that Coppola lacks talent.…
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After decades of languishing in development hell, The Green Hornet is finally back on the big screen. It’s hard to tell if anyone exists even in the hardcore geek community who still cares about the original franchise outside of Bruce Lee nostalgia. But, if those people are out there, chances are they won’t be thrilled by this blockbuster adaptation of their favorite hero. The film does feature the iconic masks, cars, sidekick, and several characters from the original Green Hornet mythology, but it is in no way a conventional superhero adaptation. Instead the film is more of an opportunity for Seth Rogen and longtime co-writer Evan Goldberg to play around with superhero conventions, while also giving director Michel Gondry a chance to bring his patented visual pyrotechnics to a grand scale and letting Christoph Waltz mug for camera in the afterglow of his Inglourious Basterds Oscar glory. The fact that…
Audiences searching for subtlety and a strict adherence to realism will want to stay far away from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The film is a melodrama and like most of the director’s work revels in themes, emotions, and images that are both evocative and gloriously larger than life. In many ways the movie represents a synthesis of everything the filmmaker done to date combining the bombastic style, psychological collapse, and shock tactics of Pi and Requiem For A Dream with the existential quandaries of The Fountain, as well as the backstage drama and subjective character study of The Wrestler. It also has to be considered Aronofsky’s finest work to date even if it suffers somewhat from the overwrought storytelling and occasionally cardboard characterizations that has plagued the filmmaker from the beginning of his career. Natalie Portman stars as a long-suffering ballet dancer plucked from the sidelines to play the lead…
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Down Terrace can be a tough movie to pin down. At times it’s a hilariously subtle character comedy, but it’s never more than a few minutes away from being a violent crime thriller or bittersweet drama. This schizophrenic tone makes first time director Ben Wheatley’s film quite unpredictable for a story that on paper should be a standard crime melodrama. While Wheatley doesn’t shy away from the bloody theatrics that makes that genre so thrilling, he isn’t telling a story about Mexican drug lords sleeping on mountains of cocaine. His films is about the domestic life of a family of British drug dealers and the attention to detail as well as the awkward comedy that defines their boring lives makes the project unique in the genre. The film opens with a father and son being released from a brief stay in prison (played by the director’s long time friends and…
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When The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo—the first chapter in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy—hit screens last spring it was a dirty, pleasant surprise for audiences. Here was a thriller with refreshingly few clichés (hackers really shouldn’t be heroes in movies anymore) that offered genuine excitement, intriguingly complex characters, and a hard-R rated edge that could even catch seasoned horror movie veterans off guard. The movie was masterfully directed by Dane Niels Arden Oplev, quickly secured a Hollywood remake at the hands of David Fincher (Se7en), and left viewers anxious for more. Sadly the sequels have only offered diminishing returns. With Oplev mysteriously absent from the director’s chair, Daniel Alfredson took over to give the sequels a personality-less TV movie visual style and ludicrous sub-James Bond action movie theatrics. The first sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire was bad, ditching the harsh if heightened realism from…
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What movie do you make when you can make absolutely anything you want? That’s the question director Danny Boyle faced following the insane success of Slumdog Millionaire. After years of cranking out cult hits like Trainspotting (still his finest hour) and 28 Days Later in Britain and on the fringes of Hollywood, Boyle won the Best Director Oscar and scored a $377 million worldwide hit with Slumdog. Suddenly the guy could do practically whatever he wanted and have Hollywood flip the bill. His surprising choice? Making a film about Aron Ralston, a 27-year-old hiker who was trapped in an isolated canyon in Utah for five days and had to cut off his own arm to escape. The story caused a media sensation in 2003 and Boyle instantly wanted to make a movie. Unfortunately, Ralston was set on having a documentary made about his story at that time, but 5 short…
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At the heart of Lee Demarbre’s new film Vampiro: Angel, Hero, Devil is the story of a man’s incredible journey, from small-town outcast to celebrated international figure. That figure, Ian Hodgkinson, pro-wrestler, former bodyguard, sometime-actor, and all-around hell-raiser, is profiled with wit, insight, and passionate feeling in DeMarbre’s 90-minute documentary. The Ottawa-born director, who previously helmed the cult horror-musical Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, also directed Hodgkinson in The Dead Sleep Easy, an independent feature about a Mexican wrestler who becomes entangled with the mob. Talk about blurring the lines between fiction and reality. One of Vampiro’s earliest scenes features Hodgkinson trying to raise money for his newly-formed company, and casually mentioning the necessity of mob and drug-dealer involvement to get the new venture off the ground. Angel/hero/devil indeed.For those unaware of the world of international wrestling, Hodgkinson is somewhat of a cult figure. A native of Thunder Bay, Hodgkinson made…
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Originality is such a rare commodity in horror filmmaking nowadays that you’ll take it anyway you can get it. Now I didn’t know at first, but the new film The Uninvited is actually a remake of a Korean film called A Tale of Two Sisters. In fact, when I found out, it surprised me because most Asian horror remakes usually have a telltale element as the producers try their hardest to preserve some shred of its heritage; like how The Grudge remake was set in Japan. There’s the obligatory stuff like creepy kids and uncomfortable, family relationships, but otherwise this film has more in common with an Agatha Christie mystery than something from the foreign section of the video store.The story centres around young Anna (Emily Browning) who’s a newly released mental patient going home for the first time since she tried to kill herself out of grief for her…
When I read other reviews of Inkheart, I wasn’t given much hope; which goes to show you that sometimes the only judgment you have to trust is your own. Is Inkheart perfect? No, absolutely not. It’s got a hook, it has a talented cast of actors, and it has a popular series of novels as its inspiration to draw from. Where things go wrong though is that the director lacks the scope and ambition to bring the film to a truly stirring existence. He’s unable to marry style with substance and because the former is lacking, the latter ends up suffering. Still, I think there’s enough in the finished product to recommend. Inkheart is the name of the book within a movie based on a book. Mortimer (Brendan Fraser) is a restorer or rare books, and he’s searching for one of the rarest books of all. You see, through an…
I thought that there’d be no movie more insulting to women this winter than Bride Wars. So it’s a true tribute to Hollywood that there were able to release two of these movies within a month of each other. But I do applaud the studio for smart counter-programming by putting on a female friendly alternative to the Super Bowl, even if the film in question is horridly redundant, predictable and tacky. It’s like Fargo if it were done by the same people that make every ridiculous Sandra Bullock romantic comedy ever to come off the Tinseltown assembly line. This is to say that it’s just about one of the most contrived products to come out in the still early calendar year. The formula follows simply. A trussed up executive from Miami is given the stewardship of a factory in Minnesota to modernize it for the production of a new protein…
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