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We’re two months in, and yet the Summer season continues on. For 30 May, here are the films in focus:
Son of Rambow [rating: 7]
Wistful and a little wonky, playfully recreating a fanciful early ‘80s UK summer, Son of Rambow definitely feels like someone’s personal experiences reinterpreted for public consumption.
It’s clear that, if music provides the soundtrack to our lives, movies make up the mental scrapbook. While we are a far more aural than visual race, we do tend to take certain films at face value. We’ll shiver at the thought of a shower after Psycho, or become the wariest of beach goers after Spielberg bares his Jaws. Yet we don’t typically take the actual image with us. Instead, a motion picture is filed away as a feeling in our cultural cabinet, lovingly recalled whenever a similar scene or sequence pops up. For the young boys of a small English town, Sylvester Stallone’s unhinged Vietnam vet with a personal vendetta and a wondrous way with weaponry becomes a symbol of their social coming of age. The reverence and need for a remake forms the basis for Son of Rambow, an effervescent look back at one director’s post-punk past.read full review…
The Strangers [rating: 4]
The Strangers is a deadly dull experience in boredom, strangled by two cinematic stumbling blocks - one external and one of its own unfortunate making.
The art of suspense is dead, or at the very least, dying. Few in post-modern filmmaking know how to establish dread without drowning it in gore or just boring us to death. Part of the reason lies in how cinematically complex the basic bloodless thriller must be. It has to work on the psychological, as well as the physiological and pragmatic levels. As Hitchcock accurately stated, the viewer must be invariably linked to the fate of characters they just met, and may know more than. It’s all a matter of timing and talent. Tossing grue at the screen is as easy as opening up a can of red paint. Getting audiences to grip the edge of their seats stands as a rare motion picture accomplishment. read full review…
Other Releases—In Brief
Sex and the City: The Movie [rating: 4]
For fans of the long running HBO rom-comedy, a Sex and the City movie seemed like a no brainer. Leave it to salary disputes to make the inevitable suddenly span four long years. In that time, it’s clear that nothing new has been invested toward this Cinderella on stilettos nightmare, a collection of irredeemable behaviors masked as post-modern feministic fizz. For this unnecessary revisit, Carrie gets engaged to her BFF as ATM, Mr. Big, Miranda systematically alienates and then disowns her unfaithful spouse, Samantha screws and shops, and Charlotte blandly plays the perfect mommy. It’s all so contemporary…so couture…so calculated. Like a greatest hits package without a single hummable tune, this drawn out, dystopic fairytale hits on every facet of the series the fanbase demands without offering the uninitiated a single reason to care. The fashion porn the demographic digs feels equally unexceptional, the same old labels being flaunted as fabulous when they’re really yesterday’s Elsa Klench feature. This is a comedy with permanent PMS - it’s bloated, moody, and purely a ‘gal thang’. Men - and true film fans - are not welcome, and frankly, both groups should take that as a blessing.
