Author Archives: matterspamer

REVIEW: The Future

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The Future
Directed by: Miranda July
Written by: Miranda July (screenplay)
Starring: Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky and Isabella Acres

What happens to hipsters when they get old?  The writer/director/actress Miranda July would argue that there is not a true answer to that question, but it’s just a rather interesting one to ask.  In The Future, she ponders the existence of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), two similar looking thirty-somethings on the brink of the end.  They have decided to adopt a cat, which they can take home from the shelter in one month.  This is a big decision for them.

In the meantime, the couple realize (after a couple of logical jumps) that this is their last true month of living.  Though the cat is likely to live only six months because of its illness, it could live as long as five years.  By then, they will be forty, and of course it’s all downhill from there.

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REVIEW: The Princess of Montpensier

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The Princess of Montpensier
Directed by: Bertrand Tavernier
Written by: Bertrand Tavernier, Jean Cosmos & Francois-Olivier Rousseau (screenplay), Madame de La Fayette (short story)
Starring: Mélanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Gaspard Ulliel

In America, it’s hard to write a review of a good foreign movie without feeling obligated to include an excuse for someone to watch it.  Many of the different styles in pacing and filming, in addition to the inclination toward moral ambiguity turn off audiences who favor the opposite.  The Princess of Montpensier is a lavishly filmed French spectacle chock-full of sex and gruesome violence, but injected with those aforementioned “handicaps.”

Directed and co-written with exceptional talent by Bertrand Tavernier, Princess is a period love triangle set amid the turbulent violence of the Catholic/Protestant wars of the 16th century.  It opens with an epic sequence of men on horseback slaughtering men on the ground.  This image is indicative of the unfair advantages that infect much of the rest of the story, which finds young Marie (Mélanie Thierry) married off to the wealthy prince of Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) who is given favor over the man Marie truly loves, her cousin Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel).

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REVIEW: Hugo

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Hugo
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan (screenplay), Brian Selznick (book)
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen

Hugo would be a good place to start in a film history class.  Not only does it glide through the early history of silent movies, but it also utilizes the latest digital filmmaking technology in doing so.  Martin Scorsese has created a film worthy of the 3D technology that is infecting every big Hollywood blockbuster, and he has done it by using not as a showy gimmick, but as a storytelling tool.

Here, that third dimension immerses us in the movie’s world, drawing us into an opening sequence that transforms from turning clock gears to an overview of Paris, into a train station and finally back into the walls full of clock gears as the young boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) zooms through these tunnels with make-shift abandon.  In one of the most finely filmed sequences of the year, Scorsese keeps track of him with a clever tracking shot that simply pans as he turns corners.  If this had been converted to 3D instead of filmed that way, you’d already have whiplash.

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REVIEW: The Sleeping Beauty

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The Sleeping Beauty
Directed by: Catherine Breillat
Written by: Catherine Breillat (screenplay), Charles Perrault (story)
Starring: Carla Besnaïnou, Julia Artamonov, Kerian Mayan and David Chausse

What a weird time it is for the movie fairly tale.  Earlier this year we received Hanna, a violent story of a young female assassin set in a phantasmagoria of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Still earlier, Catherine Breillat (who directed this film) gave us Bluebeard, a decidedly more subtle but still violent look at a young girl who is married off to a man who is killing off all his other wives.

In that film, we saw a girl escaping the confines of poverty and repression by running into the arms of a monster.  It was a grimy, extremely low-budget film driven more by its ideals than its aesthetics or its actors.  Breillat is an important filmmaker of exceptional talent, so the film turned out much better than it should’ve.

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SPOTLIGHT: Leonardo DiCaprio

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One of the biggest box office cash-ins in Hollywood today is also one of the boldest talents.  The career of Leonardo DiCaprio has had many growing pains, but now that he’s grown up and knows exactly what he wants out of his career, he appears unstoppable.  His gift is to take us inside the often harrowing mind of the male psyche by manipulating and subverting the things that make people sympathize with it.  He often yearns for connection in his films, whether it be from an unrequited love (Inception, Shutter Island) or just a human to be normal around (The Departed), he takes us to these places with ferocious skill and unbreakable humanity.  Rarely does he crack a smile these days, but that makes them all the more meaningful when he does.  If there is any hope that the art house can continue to have a big budget, it’s because stars like him appreciate the art they work in, and not just the huge salary it gives them.

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REVIEW: The Muppets

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The Muppets
Directed by: James Bobin
Written by: Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller (screenplay), Jim Henson (characters),
Starring: Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobsen

The entirety of this reboot of The Muppets franchise is about why it’s necessary.  The Muppets will be duking it out with Scream 4 for the title of “Most self-reflexive movie of 2011,” and sadly it’s the same mess of mixed quality and mediocre execution.

Jason Segel and Amy Adams play Gary and Mary, two people who, along with Gary’s Muppet brother Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), attempt to get the Muppet gang back together for a farewell show.  Segel co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Stoller, and it’s unfortunate that such a worthy premise oddly can’t decide if it wants to be funny or not.

In structure and (sometimes) tone this reboot resembles the Seinfeld Reunion season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.  Kermit The Frog (voiced by Steve Whitmire) joins the oddball trio to reassemble his Muppet posse, with Curb’s Seinfeld reunion line “We’ll do it in a way that won’t be lame,” being implied instead of spoken.  The Muppets are battling to be relevant, and the visual gags and several self-reflexive references are made to do battle with forced pathos instead of being front-and-center.

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REVIEW: Margin Call

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Margin Call
Directed by: J.C. Chandor
Written by: J.C. Chandor (screenplay)
Starring: Zachary Quinto, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons and Paul Bettany

Margin Call, along with Melancholia, are two movies that are helping reshape the distribution model of otherwise-limited release films.  With the help of outlets like Amazon, iTunes and other VOD (Video On Demand, get used to it) services, they are reaching audiences that arguably would never have seen them otherwise.

Of course, it helps that both of these films are exceptionally well done.  Margin Call is about the beginning of the financial crisis, examining the movers and shakers responsible for kick-starting it.  Its keen examination of this world driven purely by gambling is shot in smooth, sophisticated darkness.  Every board room is glossed over, though every frame conveys a sense of dread and impending doom (The same can be said of Melancholia).

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REVIEW: The Descendants

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The Descendants
Directed by: Alexander Payne
Written by: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash (screenplay), Kaui Hart Hemmings (novel)
Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller and Nick Krause

Snap reactions and the surprised double-take have always been two important tools in George Clooney’s acting kit.  Alexander Payne is noted as a director for having actors explore realms outside of that familiar skill set.  Perhaps most infamously, Payne stripped Jack Nicholson of his raised eyebrows and charisma in About Schmidt and had the actor play a shy, desperate man.  It’s one of his best performances.

In The Descendants, Payne has Clooney blend in.  His washed-out mess of hair and beach bum attire look misplaced and familiar at the same time.  Emerging from that sly, smirky facade is an actor capable of true grit.

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REVIEW: A Dangerous Method

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A Dangerous Method
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: Christopher Hampton (screenplay & play), John Kerr (book)
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel

David Cronenberg is a director obsessed with the crossroads of violence and sex.  His films vary greatly in both tone and narrative structure.  For proof (since we are soon talking about science) lay down the science fiction horror show Videodrome next to his more recent pulpy small-town thriller A History of Violence.

It makes since, then, that a film about the birth of psychoanalysis, revolving around the violent sexual relationship between Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient Sabina Spielren (Keira Knightley), would be a work best fit for someone like Cronenberg.  A Dangerous Method is not a straight-forward exercise in period filmmaking like its costumes and curiously English-speaking Europeans suggest, though.  The film begins intent on dispelling that rumor, as Spielren howls with bursts of rage and laughter in the claustrophobic confines of a horse carriage.  She is dragged out by a group of men and taken into Dr. Jung’s care in Switzerland.

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REVIEW: Immortals

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Immortals
Directed by: Tarsem Singh
Written by: Charley Parlapanides & Vince Parlapanides (screenplay)
Starring: Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto and John Hurt

Unlike most bad movies, Immortals is quite beautiful to look at.  From the plethora of computer-generated vistas to the shimmering metal of every blood-tainted sword, director Tarsem Singh takes the lifeless screenplay and plows his way through it with a visual grandeur that dwarfs most other modern action movies.

The initial image is of the mighty Titans, who in Greek lore are the greatest threat to the Gods.  Here they are dwarfed down to human size as opposed to the mighty renditions in the Disney version of Hercules or the God of War video games.  There is a lightning-quick battle between them and Zeus’ crowd, though that King of the Gods is missing his thunderous super powers as well.

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