Category: 2012
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The Last Road refers to limbo. Literal limbo. Except it’s also a real place where the newly dead protagonist, played by Aaron Long, spent time while he was alive. Writer-director-photographer-editor-many other hats Wheeler never explains the rules of limbo very well. At times it’s a wonderfully imaginative spin on post-apocalyptic stuff. At other times, it…
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Until about eighty minutes into Rust and Bone, the film resists predictability. Director Audiard has a couple moments of Marion Cotillard bouncing back after a tragedy to pop music, but they’re punctuated with fantastic postscripts. The postscripts make up for any melodramatic shorthand. Well, until the eighty minute mark. And then Rust and Bone becomes…
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The last scene of Old Stock doesn't exactly overshadow the rest of the film, but it certainly sets it apart. It's one of the more subtle finishes to a film. Without giving the viewer any guidance, director Genn and writer Dane Clark close the picture with a silent reference to a line in the dialogue.…
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Besides a truly excellent real time (or very close to it) sequence where Maggie Grace avoids being kidnapped in order to help already kidnapped parents Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen, there's not much to Taken 2. Even the action-packed finale is a disappointment. I had been hoping it'd match that long sequence–which goes from a…
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There are so many easy targets in Flight. Not really the acting, even though a lot of the supporting cast is phoning it in. They’re good actors–Don Cheadle, John Goodman (doing a riff on Big Lebowski)–and they’re capable at phoning it in. It’d be impossible for them to do anything else, however, given director Zemeckis.…
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Deadpool is an effects test by Miller to prove a feature is possible. It’s unclear, in terms of a narrative, if the ninety second short answers that question in the positive but it doesn’t much matter. These ninety seconds of a strange masked comic book character directly addressing the viewer are phenomenal. There’s a certain…
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Watch In Heaven There Is No Beer with a notebook handy, because you’re going to want to write down some of the band names. A lot of them. And waiting for the end credits doesn’t help unless you’re quick with the pause button. Beer is the story of the Kiss or Kill “club,” which was…
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In a couple minutes–less, actually–kogonada takes the films of Stanley Kubrick and one of their shared elements, the titular One Point Perspective, and runs a bunch of them together. The short is of particular interest for what’s missing and, assuming kogonada is thorough (after watching Perspective there should be no doubt), one can see the…
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Moody lightning, false endings, a Pino Donaggio score–Passion is De Palma’s return to his overcooked Hitchcock homages and a gleeful one. More, De Palma’s aware of its place in his filmography–the film opens with a playful piece of music from Donaggio, preparing the audience for a pitch black comedy. And, for a long while–even through…
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The Comic King of Guatemala is about the first comic book shop in Guatemala. It opened in approximately 2012, there’s no exactly date, but let’s say 2012. It’s not just the first comic shop, it’s the first place to buy comic books in Guatemala. Why can you not get comic books in Guatemala? Sadly, filmmakers…
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A more appropriate title for Concrete Blondes might be Bad Lesbian Hip Crime Thriller Written by Three Men. The sexuality of the protagonists sadly has a lot to do with it because writers Kalikow, Rob Warren Thomas and Chris Wyatt create a love triangle between Carly Pope and Samaire Armstrong and their Valley Girl roommate…
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Obviously Jim Gaffigan’s titular character in HowardCantour.com is supposed to be annoying, but is the film itself supposed to be annoying. The music is grating, trying to get the viewer agitated; LaBeouf’s direction is desperate as well. This short isn’t supposed to be pedestrian, so instead it’s tiresome. There are a lot of problems. First,…
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Dredd is a good time. Sure, it features exceptional ultraviolence, but director Travis finds a gimmick–the drug “Slo-Mo” slows time for its user–to make the violence appear almost academic. One wonders how they did the special effects for the sequence. Travis also never glorifies the bad guys, which is interesting for what’s sort of a…
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I was tempted to start with a joke-something about how The Decelerators is an incredibly profound short film about the human condition, going on about it facetiously for a paragraph, then revealing the film is not actually incredibly profound and I was making a joke. The film is sort of “a potential film,” like director…
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Ben Affleck is a calm, assured director; Argo is something of a distant film. He never lets himself take the spotlight, but he also doesn’t let any of the supporting cast take it either. He casts the film beautifully–whether it’s Clea DuVall and Scoot McNairy as some of the people Affleck’s trying to rescue or…
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Record/Play is an awesome little short. Director Atlas–along with his co-writer, Aaron Wolfe–does something rather amazing. He starts with fetishizing old cassettes. The unnamed protagonist, played by Mustafa Shakir, sits and replays old cassette tapes. They each have labels, they each are from different places (which soon becomes important). But then his Sony Walkman breaks…
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Who would have thought a movie just called Drug War would be so amazing? The original Chinese title appears to be just as simple, director To and his amazing batch of writers–War is the probably the best four person scripted film ever–must have known they didn’t really need a flashy title. To’s direction is astoundingly…
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Until the last few minutes of Sandcastle, I had no idea how to describe the film or its director. For the first half, I had a lot of expectations for the film and writer and director Das totally headed those off–she directly confronts the viewer’s expectations, actually. She manages to do it twice in the…
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I really hope Epiphany is supposed to be a pitch black comedy. If so, director McLeod gets kudos. If not, he deserves hisses. The short opens with a clock. Ophelia Lovibond is in a therapy session, she’s talking–it’s unclear but she’s at the end of her session. McLeod goes through a lot of familiar tropes…
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Hitting women is funny as long as they’re think they’re tough and they’re fat. What else did I learn from Wild Girl Waltz… Oh, racist jokes are okay as long as they’re about American Indians, gay jokes are cool if you don’t say gay. I don’t know why I was expecting more from the picture,…
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Director Matt Spicer amps up the black comedy in It’s Not You, It’s Me to an outrageous degree, lets his lead actor Gillian Jacobs take a few seconds to breath, then amps it up some more. Jacobs plays a young woman who finds herself unable to stand the constant noises of her boyfriend, wonderfully played…
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Besides an utterly absurd title–and one nowhere near as clever as the film itself–A Werewolf Boy is something of a success. Jo proves one can successfully marry science fiction, werewolf romance, class bigotry and… I don’t know, ageless romantic melodrama. He doesn’t cop out at the end either, but turns the picture into some kind…
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Lincoln is a political thriller. The vast majority of the film concerns the 13th Amendment and Lincoln’s attempts to get it through the House of Representatives. When Lincoln isn’t pursuing this story (or when director Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s tangential subplots are too thin), the artifice starts showing. Not even Daniel Day-Lewis, in a…
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See, there you go, I had no idea the protagonist–her name’s Doll–worked at a nightclub. I thought she was working for the fashion guy, but no. Big fail from Johnston on that one. This issue is a lot better than the last one, with most of the issue having Moore dialogue. There’s a nice expository…
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A lot of Looper is a film noir set in the near future. Criminal–but basically good guy–Joseph Gordon-Levitt ends up on a farm, as de facto protector to a young woman (Emily Blunt) and her kid. Except this part comes after Looper is an action movie where Gordon-Levitt teams up with his future self (Bruce…
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With The Tower, director Kim redefines the possibilities of the fictional disaster genre. He maintains many genre standards, like the occasional laugh to relieve stress, a fair amount of melodrama, along with the greedy capitalists and the politicking city officials, while throwing in some gore and a breakneck action movie pace. But he mixes in…
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Tai Chi Hero basks in its extravagance. Whether it’s the kung fu fighting, the battle scenes (these are different types of scenes) or just the imaginative steampunk gadgets, Hero always invites the viewer to enjoy what it’s creating. And when Fung has to come up with something different? He does. And he does a great…
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Fury MAX gives Garth Ennis the opportunity to do one of his favorite things–historical war stories–with one of the things he does really well, world-weary protagonists. Well, I suppose he takes the opportunity to use the series to do those things, not so much it gives him the chance. This first issue is set in…
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Outpost should be better. Unfortunately, director Blaakilde doesn’t have many zombie ideas except ripping off The Evil Dead camerawork. The short takes place at a remote Soviet outpost; its single soldier (Asbjørn Krogh Nissen, who has nothing to do except look sad) prepares to tear it down as the Soviet Union falls and gets infected…
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Perker’s finishes over Gross lead to a somewhat different look for the book. Besides Tom looking more like an action movie star than a twenty-something, there are some weird panel transitions. It’s not bad art, it just doesn’t feel like Unwritten at times. It’s a combination of an action issue and a revelation one. The…
The Stop Button 