tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-99928295733106445 2013-05-17T10:29:20-05:00 TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901c475bb7970b 2013-05-17T10:29:20-05:00 2013-05-17T10:35:03-05:00

**½/**** starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw directed by Michel Gondry by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn't be out of place in Michel Gondry's distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC's "Bust A Move," until it's crushed by what's ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry's boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That's an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry's obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the "real" bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners. Both intimations turn out to be true, in a...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019102249b89970c 2013-05-15T16:11:26-05:00 2013-05-15T16:19:54-05:00

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs directed by David Cronenberg "A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony." --William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch by Walter Chaw "Sexual ambulance, did you say?" asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg's impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement--an introduction, really--to a creature called a "Mugwump," named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine's financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg's, are reptiles or insects (or should I say "also reptiles or insects"?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901c238d26970b 2013-05-13T21:48:08-05:00 2013-05-14T10:42:22-05:00

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B- starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse screenplay by Neil Cross and Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti directed by Andy Muschietti click any image to enlarge by Bill Chambers Mama is about a woman who doesn't want kids being forced into motherhood by her pigheaded boyfriend. Yes, it's a horror movie, but that's ostensibly the not-scary part--that would be the titular ghost who challenges our heroine to a mom-off for the souls of two little girls. Mama has watched over them since their crazed father Jeffrey (the suddenly omnipresent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), still smarting from a bad day on Wall Street that saw him going postal, tried to execute them in a remote cabin in the woods. Five years later, Jeffrey's brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) finally hits pay dirt in his obsessive search for his nieces when a routine check turns up the cabin with the girls inside, now feral and living on cherries.1 Not that I'm asking for a prequel, but I'd love to--and would perhaps rather--see those lost years, the gradual breakdown of these kids' language, hygiene, decorum. Alas, the Western cinema is preoccupied with domestication, which is where this...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeb0e661d970d 2013-05-12T15:12:15-05:00 2013-05-13T09:52:09-05:00

***½/**** Image B+Sound B+ Extras B- starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles directed by Charles Chaplin click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an "idea" credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director's own reputation as a womanizer. RUNNING TIME 124 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 1.0 LPCM SUBTITLES English REGION A DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Criterion In retrospect, it's hard to believe that Chaplin thought Verdoux would be a net positive in terms of PR. He may have overestimated the will of...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeaee00aa970d 2013-05-08T14:59:23-05:00 2013-05-08T15:18:11-05:00

*/**** starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald directed by Baz Luhrmann by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann's unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it's not so much an interpretation of its titular hero's self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It's all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann's shooting of Gatsby's legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann's one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald's book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann's style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov--it's Timur Bekmambetov's A Farewell to Arms. It's showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus--an asshole at play with Welles's "best train set a boy could ever want," with the casualty only what's possibly the best American novel ever written. It's an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeadac62b970d 2013-05-06T11:58:43-05:00 2013-05-06T12:01:07-05:00

***/**** directed by Jason DaSilva by Angelo Muredda Midway through When I Walk, Jason DaSilva's seven-year record of his experience since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It's to DaSilva's great credit that that curiosity about what will become of him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal checkpoints of a committed relationship--babies and all--when one also has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn't to say we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a depressive's video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva's hook is honestly come by and cannily placed. What's more, it pays off to the extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties. Likable as he is as a star, there are elements of DaSilva's approach as a filmmaker that give one pause. Too often he indulges in canned positivity and Sundance quirk as means of...

Angelo Muredda tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019101d338d4970c 2013-05-06T11:55:52-05:00 2013-05-06T12:01:44-05:00

***½/**** directed by Michael Marczak by Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon. What starts off as an amiably hazy jaunt, anchored in some delirious set-pieces like an orgy-jamboree hybrid, is given narrative urgency by the group's journey to South America, where we witness...

Angelo Muredda tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeacc18cf970d 2013-05-03T20:52:52-05:00 2013-05-03T20:52:53-05:00

***½/**** directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of travel away--23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care. Activist documentaries can be difficult to steer away from the saccharine, but here the filmmakers strike a delicate balance between conscientiously witnessing the heartbreaking plights of their subjects and depicting with...

Angelo Muredda