Deep Focus

Public Enemies

2009-07-03T01:45:13Z

Simultaneously a tough guy and a sap, a realist and a romantic, director Michael Mann has for decades now been making movies about what it means to be a man. He chooses to tell these stories in familiar settings, setting his fairly measured character studies in the kind of testosterone-soaked milieu that has been favored by a century of manly filmmakers. Mann has made movies about cops and robbers. There's one about a cab driver and an assassin, one about a whistleblower and another about a great athlete. He's even made a supernatural horror movie set among Nazis. But he keeps returning to the subject of heroes and villains, about the role-playing that takes place when good guys go head-to-head with bad guys, and about what happens when the line between antagonist and protagonist gets blurred.

Tony Manero

2009-07-03T01:39:55Z

Surely one of the more repellent creations to inhabit arthouse screens this year, Raúl Peralta is a glowering brute of a man. Unemployed and undistracted in Pinochet's Chile, he's one of those desperate characters the movies are drawn to, nursing big, illusory dreams about turning his life around through a stonefaced, stiff impersonation of Tony Manero, the working-class Brooklyn dancer played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He sits through mostly empty matinee screenings at the local cinema, then rehearses his moves on the old, rotting stage at a squalid little nightclub while putting the make on the three women in his life: the club's owner, Wilma (Elsa Poblete), his girlfriend, Cony (Amparo Noguera), and — why the hell not? — Cony's nubile daughter Pauli (Paola Lattus). And he's a rank opportunist who, as often as not, sees his countrymen each as minor obstacles between him and his next little stab at happiness.

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-01T01:12:27Z

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, depicting a trio of soldiers working on the streets of Iraq. The movie doesn't stop to explain what they're up to or put their actions in context. The audience is left to infer the circumstance, but it's not hard to imagine the scenario. Judging from the cutting and the jumpy handheld camera style, we're looking at a tense situation. That robot rolling around by remote control, poking at a pile of refuse, is probably looking for a bomb. And when the robot breaks down and one of the men starts suiting up like Sigourney Weaver in the last scene of Alien, it's a sure bet he's about to play a game of red-wire/black-wire with a scary chunk of explosives. The tension is heightened, actually, by the fact that the movie has just begun. These characters are interchangeable and, because the movie has yet to present us with a formal protagonist, potentially expendable. That's how director Kathryn Bigelow gets way ahead of her audience in this film's very first sequence. Barely five minutes into her movie and already I was cowering in my theater seat, terrified that something was about to blow.

Surveillance

2009-07-01T00:36:58Z

Either it runs in the family or Jennifer is one hell of a mimic, because there's an unmistakably Lynchian undercurrent to much of the goings-on in Surveillance, which lends some juice to a somewhat pulpy yet dry and familiar scenario. During the opening scenes, as Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond show up at a tiny police precinct wearing the kind of blue suits that denote FBI badgeholders, the younger Lynch adds an otherwordly soundtrack drone to the activity that flashed me right back to the first reel or so of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Passengers

2009-06-30T22:00:49Z

My review of Passengers is online at filmfreakcentral.net:

Even if you haven't read the jacket promo copy, you'll suspect Passengers is up to some kind of supernatural wish-fulfillment from its first few minutes, as a slumbering Anne Hathaway is awakened on a rainy night by a phone call from a colleague who tells her something terrible has happened requiring her presence at a nearby hospital. It's not just that Hathaway plays Dr. Claire Summers, a therapist charged with helping a group of plane-crash survivors cope with their near-death experiences and the accompanying trauma—it's that the chilly, insistently otherworldly production design strongly implies something strange (but comforting, very comforting) is going on, too.

True Blood: The Complete First Season

2009-06-09T02:36:42Z

My review of True Blood: The Complete First Season is online at FilmFreakCentral.net.

There's something refreshing about True Blood, a show that approaches the idea of loving the undead with healthy helpings of humour, viscera, eroticism, and subtext. The tongue-in-cheek storytelling and routinely bloody tableaux aren't especially remarkable, but True Blood is pretty packed with sex, even by HBO's standards. Over the course of True Blood's first 12 episodes, we learn that Bon Temps, Louisiana, and environs are home to not just a handsome Civil War vampire but also a plucky telepathic waitress and a shapechanging bartender, as well as assorted "fangbangers" (humans with a thing for screwing vampires) and addicts in thrall to V juice, the street term underscoring the intoxicating, potency-enhancing effects vampires' blood has on humans.

Riptide

2009-06-08T13:21:07Z

It's less than 10 minutes into Riptide, and already Norma Shearer is decked out in insect-woman garb, adjusting the fit of the skimpy costume and complaining that part of it must surely be missing. Mary, the easygoing city girl Shearer plays, never makes it to the masquerade ball scheduled out on Long Island. Instead, she falls easily in lust with a lonely New York swell named Lord Philip Rexford (Herbert Marshall), equally ridiculous in an unrecognizable bug costume that fits him like a suit of chain mail might, if chain mail came with bug eyes a pair of antennae. As meet cutes go, it's a terrific pre-Code absurdity — the movie hasn't even begun yet, and already the leading lady is half undressed.

Drag Me to Hell

2009-05-31T16:13:22Z

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that has more sheer cinematic energy than Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. It's in the cutting and the camera moves, but also in the cacophonous, claustrophobic staging — he manages to put you in that little cabin out in the woods with the zombie girl locked in the cellar and all hell about to break loose. (The flamboyantly comic Evil Dead II, with such flourishes as its flying-eyeball tracking shot, is generally more prized by movie buffs but, Bruce Campbell signature schtick aside, I much prefer the grim original.) The first two Spider-Man movies are fine, but Raimi's traveled a long way in general from the kind of craziness that made his reputation and on which he built his career.

Up

2009-05-29T04:00:01Z

Because Pixar is known for so reliably hitting balls out of the park, every time, it's hard to think of what possible angle to take in a review as its latest slugger, Up, trots merrily around the bases of the multiplex, dances its way toward the hefty box-office returns that await at home plate, and basks in the warm glow of the adoration of millions of fans. For three years now, there have been stories in the financial press alleging that Pixar's latest is due to underperform because a) nobody wants to see a silent movie about a lonely robot; b) children don't want to play with plush rats; or c) nobody loves old people and fat kids. That's one reason why it's such good sport to watch the movies rake in the dough year after year.

The Girlfriend Experience

2009-05-27T01:41:37Z

Ostensibly a jazzy, nonlinear short story about the emotional life of a high-end Manhattan hooker, this latest entry in The Steven Soderbergh Eclecticism Project is less a sexy confection than a sly satire on capitalism. Or, more specifically, a satire on capitalists during a recession. The film takes place in the last days of the 2008 Presidential campaign, as the first shockwaves from the current economic downturn are still resonating. Just about everyone on screen is concerned about holding down a job, from the expensive call girl "Chelsea" (contemporary porn star Sasha Grey) who frets about the new batch of hookers who might be that little bit younger, more alluring, and more obliging, to her less affluent boyfriend, a bottom-rung personal trainer who keeps looking for an entr ée to gym management (though he considers himself too special and unique a snowflake to don the company T-shirt). Even the journalist who interviews her is involved, it is clear, in a kind of commerce. And what kind of job is journalist, really, in today's economy?

Summer Hours

2009-05-15T02:21:05Z

Summer Hours is what's generally referred to as a "small" film, but for Olivier Assayas, it represents a comfortable return to form after several self-conscious attempts at rethinking and reinventing the boundaries of his work. Demonlover was a sort-of thriller about the international sex trade; Clean was a combination Anglo/Francophone recovery drama; and Boarding Gate was aggressively marketed as a globetrotting thriller about a girl (Asia Argento) with a gun and a paucity of clothing. I haven't seen Boarding Gate (yet), but Demonlover and Clean both felt like somewhat contrived exercises in arthouse empire-building.