Flicks
Chris Dashiell
THE PURCHASE PRICE (William Wyler, 1932).
The implausible tale of a nightclub singer (Barbara Stanwyck) who becomes a mail-order bride in order to evade her gangster boyfriend, and ends up falling for her hayseed North Dakota husband (George Brent). Other than its Warner pre-Code flavor, it has little to recommend it except Stanwyck's reliable energy and charisma.
SIR ARNE'S TREASURE (Mauritz Stiller, 1919).
A young woman unwittingly falls in love with the man who murdered her family, in this stark drama set in 16th century Sweden. Stiller's technique is incredibly advanced and exemplary in every way, and this is one of the haunting masterpieces of silent cinema.
PETULIA (Richard Lester, 1968).
A real oddity: San Francisco's summer of love as refracted through two confused middle class people. Julie Christie and George C. Scott couldn't be more opposite types, but this works in the film's favor. Not completely satisfying, but the unexpected tonal subtlety has its rewards.
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Chantal Akerman, 1975).
This famous, and notorious, challenge to narrative conventions concerns a single mother (Delphine Seyrig) doing her household chores over a three day period while turning the occasional trick. Over a three hour and twenty minute running time, Akerman depicts the monotonous tension of female domestic routine. A difficult and enormously influential film.
ACE IN THE HOLE (Billy Wilder, 1951).
Kirk Douglas plays a reporter who takes the story of a man trapped in a cave in New Mexico, and turns it into a national frenzy. The view of humanity is acerbic even by Wilder standards, and the film bombed. Its view of the American media and a public hungry for trivial excitement seems amazingly prescient today.
Three from Schumann
The Artist
French director Michel Hazanavicius’ surprise hit The Artist is a charming recreation of the silent film era of the late 1920s that focuses on how the advent of talking pictures spelled the end of careers for those silent film stars who could not or would not make the transition.....
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Margin Call
Coinciding with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the world, first-time director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call looks at the motives and morality of those in positions of power in a fictional 107-year-old financial institution and how they react in a career-threatening crisis....
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Margaret
If Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, his first film since You Can Count on Me, establishes anything it is that unless we can acknowledge responsibility and forgive ourselves for any real or perceived wrongdoing, we are caught in an endless cycle of denial and recrimination, potentially causing great damage to ourselves and others by internalizing our guilt.....
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(12/22)
Three by Knipp
Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) - Shame is a film about a handsome but very cold New York corporate employee who is a raging sex addict. It stars Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) and Cary Mulligan (Drive and An Education).
....
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Outrage (Takeshi Kitano, 2010)
Takeshi Kitano's Outrage (Autoreiji) is a Japanese gangster movie of extreme brutality presented in such pure and unadulterated form it attains a kind of zen austerity, and at moments a trace of self-satire. ...
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)
Barely is the 2009 original language version of Stieg Larsson's pulp procedural out of US art houses than here comes a bigger budget English language film distributed in the mainstream cineplexes. David Fincher's dragon tattoo girl isn't enough better than the not-so-good Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film (directed by the not-so-known Niels Arden Oplev) to get excited about.....
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(12/22)
VIFF 2011 (Part Two)
Howard Schumann
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
Winner of the Camera d’Or for the best first feature in Cannes, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias is a work of deceptive simplicity, a film that captures the essence of human longing mostly through facial expressions, glances, and gestures....
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This is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, 2010)
Hidden inside a birthday cake and smuggled out of the country, the 75-minute “effort”, This is Not a Film, tells us all we need to know about the cruelty of the Iranian dictatorship and the courage of film director Jafar Panahi...
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Play (Ruben Ostlund, 2011)
Based on an actual racial incident in Gothenburg, Sweden, Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Play is a compelling study of how our lives are often run by stereotypes, racial or otherwise, and how the line between victims and victimizers can be a thin one....
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(11/29)
Most critics have merely differed as to whether the three preceding Twilight pictures were watchable or just plain lousy; distinguishing differences in their irrelevant quality levels is hairsplitting out of medieval scholasticism. The girls flock to the cinemas and the money rolls in... (11/29)
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Alexander Payne, returning to the big screen for the first time since Sideways seven years ago, has made a film even more intensely rooted in place than anything he's done before. And it's a film full of geniality and wisdom; funny, unpredictable, and sui generis -- while seeming on the surface remarkably like mainstream entertainment.. ... (11/8)
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In first time director Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman in her early twenties joins a commune in a wooded area in upstate New York and endures psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes) ... (11/8)
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Footnote is not an action movie but a tragicomedy -- about scholarly integrity; or is it futility? -- with enormous conflict, both repressed and open. It too, like Beaufort, centers compellingly on figures who wander a kind of half-abandoned but still dangerous battleground. It's also a deeply fascinating character study, and would warrant unhesitating recommendation were it not for a weak ending. ... (10/17)
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VIFF 2011 (Part One)
Howard Schumann
Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont, 2011)
Controversial French director Bruno Dumont’s latest film, Hors Satan, is a puzzling, excruciatingly slow meditation on the nature of good and evil and whether Christ and Satan could be two sides of the same coin....
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Tatsumi (Erik Khoo, 2011)
Directed by Eric Khoo, Tatsumi explores the life and work of the celebrated manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi who created the gekiga style of alternative comic books for adults...
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Like Crazy (Drake Doremus, 2011)
Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy, the story of a young couple having to engage in a long-distance relationship as a result of the violation of immigration requirements, is a sincere film from the director’s own experience, but one that ultimately comes up empty...
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(10/17)
