A Donald Wolfit segue from Becket. A doomed three-legged romance falls apart on the class divides of black-and-white post-war England. The accents are awesome, and Ambrosine Phillpotts is a standout as the snooty wife/mother.
Over several nights. More Hunter S. Thompson completism from Johnny Depp, who somehow dragooned Aaron Eckhart into this feeble effort. Rife with cliche and lacking any depth in the characters, this bears no obvious relationship to the book (the little I remember of it). Dross.
A Steve McQueen inessential, despite the masterly long takes. Too much Michael Fassbender proves to be too much. There is a vacuum at the heart of this movie where his character should be, and it is therefore tempting to compare it to Bateman in American Psycho, or the ranginess of Dimitriades in Head On, where a slog through the night stands in for a journey through inner space. This is somewhat painful as Fassbender makes it clear that Brandon has something to say, though perhaps it is beyond him to actually do so; compulsiveness is monotonous. I guess one could think of this as a New York reflection of his earlier effort in Essex.
Carey Mulligan reminded me of Gemma Arterton in The Disappearance of Alice Creed, game but more symbol than woman. (The list of "if you didn't like this you might also not like..." movies is too long.)
Dana Stevens is on the money, as are Stephanie Zacharek and Anthony Lane.
Even so, I am wondering what is next for Steve McQueen; Twelve Years a Slave is scheduled to be made in 2013.
A Jack Lemmon segue from Short Cuts, a black and white rom com from 1960 that swept the Oscars. I didn't know Shirley MacLaine was Warren Beatty's sister, and that helps to make sense of this. It's OK, I guess; Fred MacMurray is a bit painful and it's not at all subtle, most of the time. Rated #94 in the IMDB top-250, somewhat implausibly.
I got suckered by Anthony Lane's review in the New Yorker. It starts as a heist flick, shifts gear to a man-hunt sort of thing, and twists and turns its way into some kind of romance. The toilet scene is the most arresting since Trainspotting (though the romance does not occur there, unlike Henry Fool). Those crazy Norwegians, they left out the fjords.
Again. Cristoph Waltz is fantastic, and Fassbender makes the most of his time on the screen. #104 in IMDB's top-250, still.
An Audrey Hepburn / Cary Grant early-60s rom com triller set in a Paris that must be thoroughly sick of Americans. She gets all the good lines. Apropos filtered cigarettes: "It's like drinking coffee through a veil, isn't it?"
I liked it.
I saw this maybe five years ago. I find it so frustrating as I like many of the actors but can't credit their characters nor the conceit of their lives intersecting in this way. Taking things to the edge time after time is ludicrous; if this was L.A. everyone would have left by then (2004), and it is so cheap of Haggis to ride ragged the red-button issue of race. This is Altman light without the levity. Maybe it gives some context to The Interrupters, which I still have to see.
This is one of those old arthouse flicks that shared the shelf with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the Three Colours trilogy back in the days of VHS. (I must have watched it back in the 90s.) Here Jarmusch has a black-and-white Tom Waits play a non-crook semi-bum who goes down for having a dead man in someone else's trunk. I really enjoyed the early scenes in New Orleans but the arrival of a stilted cliche-ridden Roberto Benigni made the rest grate.
A one-actor Robert Altman. It's about a decade since Watergate etc. and "Nixon" feels the need to set the record straight, with a bottle of Chivas Regal and a revolver. The monologue is a bit much at times and demanding in its traversal of U.S. history.
I wonder what Altman and cohort would have had "George W. Bush" say.
More David Lynch. It seems a lot less appealing than it did in the mid-1990s; Balthazar Getty is a limited actor and Patricia Arquette was better elsewhere. Bill Pullman is given little room to move. Trent Reznor does an awesome job producing the soundtrack, and yet the haunting Song to the Siren performed by This Mortal Coil (that's Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins / Teardrop out front) is missing from the CD. The cinematography is sometimes good. I'm not going to pretend to be interested in decyphering this trip into inner space.
Another early Wong Kar-Wai, somewhat similar to Chungking Express with more gangsta and less romance. Maybe funnier too.
Rod Steiger tries to channel the Ugly Tuco with mixed success, and James Coburn just gets on with it. A minor Leone.
I still like it, but the acting here is not as good as in other Hartleys.
A Nic Cage segue from Kick-Ass, and a David Lynch, Sherilyn Fenn (etc) arc from Twin Peaks. Laura Dern has the biggest task here. One of these years I'll get around to Inland Empire.
Remains decent on a second viewing, though I note it has fallen to 7.9 on IMDB and now a long way from the top-250. I still think it is one of Cage's better efforts.
Once again: the full version, with the there's-not-gonna-be-a-T3 ending. Still at #38 in the IMDB top-250.
A total cock-up of an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. This is mediocre Saturday matinee fare, and you can tell why they waited for the big man to die before pulling the trigger. Errol Flynn isn't given much but does his best with the dancing girls; presumably the really saucy bits are on the cutting-room floor. I wonder if he ever attempted a non-ham role.
Antonioni is famous for something that I can't see. This is a somewhat beautiful amble through moddish 1960s London with little plot and no characters worth speaking of. All I learnt was that the bra either hadn't been invented by then, or had been burnt quietly, off-stage, with no liberation of the females.
The movie, not the restuarant chain, and before this, the TV series. I felt so sorry for Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) as her character went from sassy wantonness to cringe-inducing banality over the two seasons. The movie is a case of too much information, and it makes Laura Palmer much less interesting. David Lynch is sometimes at the top of his game here.
