Category: 2013
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For most of Enough Said, I marveled at how director Holofcener–apparently in an act entirely lacking irony–created the perfect film to fail the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test, which is all the rage, requires two female characters talk about something besides men. Well, besides talking about men, the characters in Said do not do much.…
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For the most part, Fast & Furious 6 is a delightfully absurd action concoction from director Lin. The film drops the Fast and the Furious “family” into a James Bond movie; thank goodness, because it’s hard to imagine Roger Moore able to outdrive the bad guys here. And it’s even set in London (and later…
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The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden has way too long of a title. The subtitle is a reference to something the viewer will probably be unfamiliar with until the epilogue (it’s the title of a book by one of the documentary’s players), but at least it shows a certain engagement from the filmmakers. Their…
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This Is Water is incredibly slick. Director Freidell is literally visualizing a commencement speech David Foster Wallace once gave. Wallace will mention cars on a freeway, Freidell has the cars on the freeway. Often, Freidell visually represents parts of the speech–in stylized graphics–in his shots. It’s slick. And that slickness, whether it’s how well Freidell…
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BLT runs twelve minutes. It’s probably about four minutes too long to be effective, since most of the run time is spent with Stephen Molloy (as a successful businessman) lecturing a homeless man, played by Ross Owen Williams. Director Cunningham’s script makes too many value judgments in the dialogue–Molloy’s just too obviously a prat–for the…
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The Last Days of Peter Bergmann is something of a procedural documentary short. A man, using the alias Peter Bergmann, checks into a hotel in an Irish town. A few days later, he is found dead on a nearby beach. Unable to ascertain his identity, the police use CCTV footage from around town, from the…
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Time Trap is a good combination of humor and visual effects mastery. Director Shanks–who also did the special effects–does some amazing work on the short. It’s about some space guy who crash lands on Earth after the world’s ended and he has to create time bubbles to look for parts to his spaceship. So there’s…
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A lot of Lay Over is obnoxious. Loud and obnoxious. It's a Before Sunrise knock-off with Jordan Hayes's Canadian traveller in L.A. for just one night and she meets nice accordion player Noah Reid, who shows her the town. So there are all these montage shots of L.A. set to loud and obnoxious music. The…
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Enemy opens with an incredibly cruel and unpleasant scene. It's almost like a dare to the viewer to keep going. The film only runs ninety minutes and the first thirty or so minutes is summary. Sort of. Director Villeneuve and screenwriter Javier Gullón spend this first third encouraging the viewer to guess where Enemy is…
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Anna is an exceptionally stupid movie. Apparently, no one involved with the film has seen films like Inception or The Sixth Sense because Anna apes big reveals from both of them rather obviously. It’s not a matter of guessing the twist ending, it’s a matter of trying to figure out what you’re supposed to be…
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There are a handful of easily fixable problems with I’ll Follow You Down. Director Mehta shoots it in Panavision aspect ratio and doesn’t know what to do with all the width. Combined with Tico Poulakakis’s lens flare happy cinematography, Follow looks like a glossy television commercial. There’s never a sense of time or place, which…
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There are plenty of things one simply cannot do in two hours; if Devil's Knot is any indication, one cannot try to tell the story of the trial of the West Memphis Three in two hours. Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson's script seems to do quite a bit well–for the first third of the…
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Dirty Old New York is a multi-part series–presumably always intended by editor Jonathan Hertzberg to be a multi-part series. The project has Hertzberg cutting together clips of seventies and early eighties New York City. Hertzberg creates a narrative, sometimes just between two or three clips and those times usually for humor (he succeeds with those).…
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The Suspect isn’t just another action thriller where the director never lets up the pace; it’s also one where the filmmakers constantly force the viewer into one emotional response–a negative one–before relieving the tension a little and creating a hopefulness, then repeating an even more negative situation. It’s expertly manipulative and director Won seems to…
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Tim’s Vermeer is simultaneously an intensely personal look at a guy–the titular Tim, Tim Jenison–and also not an intensely personal look at him. Jenison sums up his hypothesis in the first few minutes of the film–what if Vermeer (and some of his contemporaries) were less hippy dippy artists (my term) and more inventors? They were…
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If a viewer is unfamiliar with co-director Paul Pope–and his comic work–he or she might not be as disappointed with 7x6x2. The short would probably still be disappointing, just because it takes itself way too seriously and has no self-awareness about being a sci-fi short apparently shot where the old "Star Trek" filmed a bunch.…
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Oh, good grief. I really wanted to start out with the positives about The Earth, the Way I Left It put director Pinilla goes out on such an unbelievably saccharine note–after being way too obvious a minute or two before–I just can't. Pinilla's got some very good composition chops. But Earth just keeps on biting…
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Snowpiercer is relentless. There are three quiet moments; I’m not estimating, I’m counting. The final quiet moment comes with some commentary on the earlier quiet moments. The relentlessness is appropriate, as the film concerns a train traveling through a frozen wasteland housing the last survivors of the human race. It’s a post-apocalyptic rumination on remorse…
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Home is never inspiring or sentimental. Writer-director Oliver lets sentimentality graze the film graze once–and it’s a film about sympathetic mental patients reintegrating so it’s amazing he was able to get away with a sidewalk picnic without sentimentality–but the realities of the characters quickly reign in any loose tender particles. The film concerns Gbenga Akinnagbe…
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I’m trying to think of something nice to say about Snake and Mongoose because pretty soon it’s going to seem like I’m picking on it. Fred Dryer. As in “Hunter” Fred Dryer. He’s in it for a bit. He’s having fun and still has some personality. Sadly, the main actors have none. Richard Blake is…
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Now, when a fan of something writes a sequel to that something… it tends to be called “fan-fic.” Death Comes to Pemberley is based on fan-fic from an extremely well-regarded author. P.D. James is even a baroness. But she hasn’t got anything to say about Pride and Prejudice. Worse, unless screenwriter Juliette Towhidi really screwed…
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When talking about films, I sometimes say “sincerity helps.” I got it from the Leonard Maltin review of Superman IV. I never say it ironically, I never say it as a joke. After From Above, I’m not sure sincerity helps at all. From Above is sincere. It’s sincerely about prejudice and marriage and all sorts…
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G.B.F. has a lot of problems. First and foremost, it should probably be called My G.B.F. just because making it a possessive statement would add some depth before starting it. Second, worst makeup in a movie ever. It’s unclear if it’s makeup artist Gage Hubbard’s fault, cinematographer Jonathan Hall’s fault or some combination (it seems…
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Fraction and Chaykin go for a rather distinct–and mature audiences–sight gag to repeat through the comic. There’s really some great art from Chaykin, who takes three people through hearing or seeing uncomfortable or unwelcome news and events. The whole thing is in their expressions and he nails every one of them. It makes up for…
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Directors Gallagher and Adey want to make sure their audience knows to be disgusted with Sicko. Sadly, they wait until the end credits to reveal the sicko in question, played by Tom Grimley, is called Sicko. I think the audience is supposed to be disgusted at the human condition and pornography and urban isolationism. Maybe.…
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If something is only twenty minutes long, how bad can it really be? Well, thanks to sitcoms and Croft, it’s obvious things can be very bad. But Croft is more than bad–it’s painful. Watching nerdy villain Liam Carter threaten his hostage, a terrible Devyn Dalton, listening to the actors spout out the awful dialogue from…
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Maybe all Lazarus needed was some context. Rucka finally shows life for regular people–presumably these new cast members will be returning after their little adventure this issue. He doesn’t spend so much time on exposition for them either. He just shows their lives in this future. For Forever and her story, there’s always a lot…
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The extended version of The Wolverine adds some twelve minutes to the theatrical version. I can’t quite remember the differences, but mostly it just makes the film seem longer. Mangold hasn’t got a good pace for it; the fault for that problem, however, lies with the screenwriters. The film opens with a flashback, moves on…
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It’s a mix of an action issue and a (fake) science issue. Lewis and Clark try to figure out the creature they’ve discovered–with some great notes about its physiology–before the buildup to the action sequence begins. And I’ve got to get it out of the way–the cliffhanger, which hinges entirely on the zombie zeitgeist and…
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I like this issue a lot more; I couldn’t figure out for a while, then I realized… it’s basically a lengthy Steve Epting action sequence. Velvet escapes, runs, escapes again. Brubaker juxtaposes her story against some guys at her agency talking about her. It’s great, fast but filling. The only parts giving me pause are…
The Stop Button 