Setting up easy targets, The Men Who Stare at Goats seems less clever than behind the times.
"We always recognize our own kind," asserts Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). That kind would be Jedi knights, or, more-and-less precisely, men with superpowers. At the moment (2003) he's in Kuwait City, where he's identified a reporter from Ann Arbor, Bob (Ewan McGregor), as "one of us." Visibly nonplussed, Bob also sees an opportunity: feeling abused by a wife who's left him for his editor, he's been looking for a way over the border to Iraq,…]]>Endgame crafts a crackling thriller out of the tangle of crafty maneuvering and happenstance that put a stop to South Africa's apartheid.
The great events of history have a tendency to collapse into a few melodramatic snapshots that hardly do justice to the real thing. Just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was precipitated by a more complex chain of events than Ronald Reagan snapping his fingers at Mikhail Gorbachev, so too apartheid’s end was brought down by more than the stubborn persistence of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Endgame crafts a crackling thriller out of the…]]>Where is Fox Mulder when you need him?
I have to get this out of my head. I feel like it's dug in there and I can't think straight. -- Scott (Enzo Cilenti) "I am actress Milla Jovovich," announces Milla Jovovich at the start of The Fourth Kind. It is the film's first and last even vaguely credible assertion. Underline the "vaguely." For even as she strides into a close-up, Jovovich is surrounded by slippy-slidey digital trees, a disconcerting unnatural nature that suggests…]]>Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is concerned with lasting effects -- on individuals and especially, on communities.
At 16 years old, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is looking at an unbearably grim future. Illiterate, obese, and pregnant for the second time by her father, she's sure to be kicked out of school and condemned to an existence much like her mother's, that is, angry and tragic, barely distracted by frequent helpings of greasy food and network TV. Precious lives in Harlem in 1987, but her trauma is hardly past. Precious: Based on the Novel…]]>The combination of animation (where the laws of physics are conveniently suspended) and 3D technology is a powerful temptation, and here we see many of the ways in which those toys can be misued.
If watching goony-faced animatronic creatures cowering in terror or delivering Christmas cheer as if with a cudgel is your idea of a good time, then Disney’s A Christmas Carol should be right up your alley. (Those who enjoy virtual roller-coaster rides and long falls from high places are also encouraged to attend.) Once upon a pre-millennial time, Robert Zemeckis made movies with real people in them. They might not have been the stuff of undying…]]>Even as Gentlemen Broncos makes sport of artistic hacks, it also delights in their creative process.
The opening credits of Gentlemen Broncos is cute and promising, presenting cast and crew names on the covers of retro pulp fiction book covers. This sets up the premise of Jared Hess' new film, which is, like Napoleon Dynamite, filled with nerds, this time of the sci-fi variety. Unfortunately, what follows doesn't quite live up to his clever opening. Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is an aspiring science fiction writer homeschooled by his seriously offbeat mother Judith…]]>The Next Iron Chef is not a show about cooking. It is a show about people freaking out; cooking just happens to be what they’re doing while they’re freaking out.
By the time you’re reading this, Holly Smith has been eliminated from contention in the second season of Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef. That's a shame, but also a bit on the predictable side. I say this not as a reflection on Smith’s skill as a cook: The winner of numerous accolades including the 2008 James Beard Foundations’s Best Chef Northwest, Smith doesn’t need me to talk about what a fine cook she is…]]>These five films from the golden-era of the legendary Nikkatsu studio shows off the never-ending ways Japanese filmmakers were able to combine the best elements of pulp and epic Japanese storytelling.
Oh, the Criterion Collection. In a world where every conceivable artifact of every type of media is readily available thanks to cheaper production methods and the 'long-tail' effect of Internet-based retail and distribution, and where any arm-chair critic can find a ready audience thanks to the explosion of online venues (*ahem* Thank you Popmatters.com!), the good folks at Criterion play a valuable role, carefully curating a collection of films of quality and cultural value that…]]>The Fourth Kind is NOT the truth. It is a piece of fiction using other pieces of fiction to verify its already fake plotline.
No one likes to be taken advantage of. It plays with already questionable self-esteem issues, especially for those who fancy themselves as smug, smart-ass know-it-alls. Especially in today's cynical, post-modern age, it's hard to pull the wool over the audience's eyes - cinematically, artistically, or factually. Cracks in the defining demeanor always appear, letting you know full well that everything you've just experienced is a lie. We critics fancy ourselves as ace detectives in the…]]>The many makers of New York, I Love Youare collectively too self-conscious about the New Yorkiness of their task.
First, there was Paris, je t'aime (2006), an anthology of short films focused on love and Paris. Then the producers announced intentions to do it again, in other cities. So now we have New York, I Love You, and the project that began so promisingly has already sputtered. New York viewers may emerge irritated; most others will probably wind up bored. Where the films in Paris used neighborhoods as inspiring and allusive settings, the new…]]>It's all but impossible to represent randomness. And yet this is the task taken up by Act of God, Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on lightning.
No lightning, no life. -- Alex Hermant It's all but impossible to represent randomness. And yet this is the task taken up by Act of God, Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on lightning, or perhaps more accurately, the effects of lightning strikes on survivors. As interviewees try to understand abrupt loss and arbitrary life, the film tries to illustrate their efforts. This mix of aspirations makes for a complicated viewing experience, with images ranging from talking heads…]]>Work is at the center of Frederick Wiseman's absorbing documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet.
We have to follow a certain logic. -- Brigitte Lefèvre "You have to go on working," instructs Brigitte Lefèvre. "Not for the sake of working. You have to turn everything to your advantage. You can learn a lot by observing others." She's speaking with a lovely, slightly flustered-seeming member of the corps de ballet at the Paris Opera Ballet, where Lefèvre has been artistic director since 1995. The girl smiles and nods, grateful and reverent.…]]>Now that the U.S. government looks mired in acrimony and frustration, it's good to remember when change seemed inevitable.
"What began as a whisper in Springfield soon carried across the cornfields of Iowa, where farmers and factory workers, students and seniors stood up in numbers we have never seen before. They stood up to say that maybe this year we don't have to settle for politics where scoring points is more important than solving problems." Ah, 2008. As endless as the presidential campaign seemed back then, it has since become a source of bracing…]]>More surprising than the still-impressive special effects and the jokes that hold up to modern scrutiny is the fact that there are moments throughout Ghostbusters that are legitimately scary.
“Let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area…” -- Egon, Ghostbusters Since the '80s, the closest I’ve come to caring about the Ghostbusters franchise was when I giggled at Spike the vampire during a 2003 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when he innocently asked Buffy, “Who ya gonna call?” and then mumbled, “God, that phrase is never gonna be usable again, is it?” But some friends…]]>Full of tension, the first scene in The Maid (La Nana) sets up Raquel's grim and limited world.
Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) dreads her birthday. This much is clear as she bends over her work in the kitchen, not quite cringing at the sound of voices from the dining room. A cut to the table shows family members pulling out brightly papered gifts and a cake, shuffling to arrange themselves as if to surprise her. Inside the kitchen, Raquel sits down to her own plate, pushing potatoes and hunching her shoulders. Teenaged Lucas (Agustín…]]>The People v. Leo Frank indicts not only the shoddy police work and lawyering, but also the public hysteria advanced by local newspapers.
It was pandemonium. -- Steve Oney In April 1913, Atlanta was "giddy with excitement," reports William Smith (Jayson Warner Smith). The New York Metropolitan Opera had arrived, a sign at last that the city was coming out from under its destruction and degradation during the Civil War, and emerging as a cultural center, as well as the "industrial gateway of what we called the New South." But, as Smith recalls early moment in The People…]]>A treasure hunter who has travelled far and wide looking for long-lost fortunes, Lance Larson's questing serves as point of departure for the beguiling documentary, Loot.
Some things I saw I just wished I hadn't seen. -- Andrew Seventy Lance Larson is a believer. He believes in a better tomorrow, he believes in himself and in his occasional invention (for instance, a lawn ornament he calls the Solar Santa). "If you can sell a car, you can do anything," he declares, proud enough of his day job. Lance also believes that someday, his avocation will pay off. A treasure hunter who…]]>While Sam's retaliation offers its own pleasures, her fundamental good-girlness, like Laurie Strode's or Rosemary Woodhouse's, also makes her abuse seem broadly meaningful.
"I go a lot on my gut feelings," smiles the landlady, standing in the kitchen doorway. "And I have a good one about you." Sam (Jocelin Donahue) smiles back, her face hopeful if slightly anxious. It's a big step, renting an apartment. She checks the newspaper ad, clutched in her fist, then follows the landlady outside, ready to commit. If only Sam knew, as you know, that this landlady is played by Dee Wallace, who…]]>Labor Day celebrates the work of SEIU toward getting Barack Obama elected.
“This election is really important. We are at a moment in time where, if nobody takes anything for granted and people work really, really hard right up to the last minute in November, we really could change things.” Steve Earle's pronouncement makes clear the essential and frequently repeated point of Labor Day. The presidential campaigns of 2008 gave hope to labor unions, that workers' needs might be met and their efforts rewarded, that they might…]]>Despite the efforts of some to dismiss it as a prank, Antichrist is a serious film and its disturbing extremes speak of broad and deeply felt moral, social, and ultimately, political anxieties.
Even for a Lars Von Trier film, the critical reaction to Antichrist has been unusually hostile. Met with derisive laughter, booing, and walkouts at Cannes, the film was dismissed by some as little more than arthouse 'torture porn'. Others questioned the film's sincerity, branding it a kind of hoax, the work of an attention-seeking provocateur having a joke at his audience's expense. The Guardian called it "a smirking contraption of a film", while for the…]]>