The Gang's All Here
Money-shot reviews for May-June ‘08 (excluding several dozen films reviewed at IFC.com (check the index, at left), TCM.com and The Boston Phoenix):
My Effortless Brilliance (2008) Terrific if unambitious Kelly Reichart-esque indie about two estranged friends (a wary forest ranger/ex-grad student and a lonely, porcine, self-absorbed young novelist, played with wincing authenticity by critic/musician Sean Nelson) weathering the final death thrashes of their friendship in a secluded Washington cabin.
Ira & Abby (2006) I don’t know why Jennifer Westfeldt isn’t a star, but the witty-yet-conventional rom-com scripts she writes for herself might be a factor.
Speed Racer (2008) What tutti-frutti similes haven’t been evoked to describe this nightmare? It’s not a movie, it’s not even a Fruit Roll-Ups kiddie-TV commercial, it’s the Fruit Roll-Ups box design itself. Or the Roll-Ups? The high fructose corn syrup of contemporary cinema?
Petit Pow! Pow! Noel (2005) Watch for the upcoming Film Comment article in which I try to suss out exactly what this nauseating, creepy Canadian non-doc is actually about (along with Canadian non-docs like 2004's Jimmywork, 2006's Radiant City and 2006's Missing Victor Pellerin), beyond perhaps surmising that Canadians have an odd sense of humor.
Secrets of a Soul (1926) German Expressionism meets Freud in a nine-rounder, and G.E. wins by a knockout.
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) Crashingly overrated Ealing farce, which famously has Alec Guinness taking on eight small roles while a muttering, sleepy Dennis Price slowly, humorlessly, goes about killing them off for the sake of inheritance.
Lost in Beijing (2007) Middling Chinese melodrama in which a young couple of capitalist scroungers get mixed up, pregnancy-wise, with an older massage-parlor pimp-hood and his dragon lady. The Taiwanese Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Jin dominates easily.
The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite) (2007) The best looking Turkish cast eva? Revealing and powerful and marvelously generous to Hanna Schygulla, when it doesn’t stretch for those idiotic, whatta-awful-coincidence Crash moments.
The Gang’s All Here (1943) Busby Berkeley’s nightmarishly strange wartime musical froth; was BB, as many have maintained, a Surrealist/abstractionist, or did his irrationally opened-out, impossibly-observed orchestrations represent a striving toward a kind of bathing-beauty Gesamtkunstwerk that always lingered just beyond view?
The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) I used to enjoy Hammer films. I must’ve been a patient kid.
Merci Pour le Chocolate (2000) Claude Chabrol, pianos, hot chocolate, a lurking pathology that’s never explored, Isabelle Huppert in one of six movies she made that year, and me, wondering why. Watching Anna Mouglalis, however, was akin to observing a new species of human.
Kung Fu Panda (2008) Refreshingly witty about both real Chinese martial art traditions and Hong Kong genre loopiness. If they had now the Oscar category they’ll have to invent soon for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature, because soon all acting will be at the behest of digital cartoons, then Dustin Hoffman would take it.
Get Smart (2008) Holy shit, they made it into an action film, and killed all the jokes. Only funny line: crusty character star-of-the-moment Blake Clark as a Homeland Security general, spitting something about Kim Jong-Il: "That man’s insane! Everyone knows you can’t make pudding from bones – bones are crunchy!"
My Blueberry Nights (2007) Catching up with this critical hot potato – nobody seemed capable of dismissing or faintly praising it fast enough – I was entranced. In a few years, after all the gotchas and one-ups have been forgotten, it’ll reappear as classic Wong.
on the subject of money shots, there's this latest contribution to mass-cultural (with absolutely no apologies to ken russell, whatsoever) listomania, ew (has a publication ever been quite so matchlessly acronymed?) and its induced top 100 films of the last 25 years:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207063,00.html
this probably deserves its own thread, maybe beginning with a reflection on why we're awash in so many agressively awful lists -- of course, AFI is 75% to blame for the trend recently. it's rather as though there's a fired film critic for every terrible "best (fill in the blank)" film list. one "anonymous" online commenter observes:
"hey, lookit! _pretty woman_, _when harry met sally..._, _jerry mcguire_...those, and many more besides are all better films than _unforgiven_! AND _children of men_! AND _y tu mamá también_! AND anything over the last 25 by jarmusch, egoyan, ferrara, or any of the last films by bergman, malle, tarkovsky, etc.!!! bravo, EW!"
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Ew is right. These things are just meeting products thought up by desperate editors to sell magazines, which I'm surprised to imagine they probably do. The AFI has no excuses -- who do they poll, exactly? -- but that anonymous commenter just about pegged that stinky rat carcass to the posting board. It's probably best to steer clear of it, as you would a swarm of gnats.
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I enjoyed My Blueberry Nights more than I enjoyed 2046. Although I have to say expectations played a factor for both.
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Yes; experience has shown me that attending in a serious way to Cannes hype is the short road to disappointing filmaholicism. There, and at Sundance and Berlin and et al., the context for a film is a distorted stew of hot-ness, rumor, overhype, glamour, anticipated accolades, and a cinephilic "career arc" view, which in toto is never fair to the film or the filmmaker. Any of us could cook up a list of "disappointing" festival films that, given a little air and time, prove to be landmarks. By the same token, some of the best films of the last decade have only been seen (here) at festivals, unlucky (or lucky) enough to garner little or no buzz: Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero's The Mist in the Palm Trees, Alexei German Jr.'s The Last Train, Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province, Otar Iosseliani's Farewell, Home Sweet Home, Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy, Sarunas Bartas's Freedom, Faouzi Bensaidi's A Thousand Months, Park Cheol-su's Green Chair, Stanley Kwan's Everlasting Regret, Paul Rosdy's Neue Welt, Brice Cauvin's Hotel Harabati, and so on, and that's just scratching the surface because I never go to or cover film festivals unless they're local.
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At some point in the mid-90s Wong Kar-wai's exciting and hyperbolic style lost its moorings. Whether this happened between Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express, during the two years it took to make Ashes of Time , or between the latter two films and Fallen Angels (1995), Wong's powerful organic flow, which makes Days of Being Wild his only masterpiece to date, has atrophied into a slag heap of individual set pieces. Like its characters, My Blueberry Nights is less a film with a subject than a film about not being able to find one. The film is more like a striking mannerist style in search of content, made poignant only by the homesickness and emotional confusion underlying the effort. Judging by the American reviews of My Blueberry Nights, it looks like American film critics are finally starting to realize what we have always known about this unoriginal, perpetrating fraud. The honeymoon is over for Wong, another Asian appropriator of euro film culture. When will Godard and the family of Antonioni get their residual checks?
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