Author Archives: matterspamer

REVIEW: True Grit

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True Grit
Directed by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (screenplay), Charles Portis (novel)
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin

True Grit is not about the large names behind the camera and on the marquee, nor is it haunted by the ghost of John Wayne.  Above all, it is a fatalistic Western with more dry wit than dead bodies behind its lessons.  It is a tall tale about a small girl and her quest for blood.

Don’t be fooled by Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, or Josh Brolin.  The Coen Brothers know that many who aren’t drawn in by their own names will be drawn in by the names of those stars or fans of the original film that won John Wayne his Oscar.   All the hype surrounding the mystical one-eyed Marshall and his eye-patch has made many lose sight over the fact that this is indeed a film about that 14-year-old and the loss of her innocence by her own accord.

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REVIEW: The Fighter

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The Fighter
Directed by: David O. Russell
Written by: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, & Eric Johnson
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo

Micky Ward is trapped.  Trapped by his overbearing mother, his drug-addicted has-been of a brother, and the endless cliches of boxing movies.  Fortunately, with the help of an extraordinarily assembled cast of actors and a director (David O. Russell, a name to remember) with a fairly unique vision, The Fighter kind of comes out on top.

Horribly titled to be sure, this film tells the semi-true story of an underdog boxer (Mark Wahlberg).  Blah, blah, blah, you’ve heard it all before. The biggest success of this movie is that Russell is almost in as much of a rush to get past the fight scenes and into the juicy human drama as the rest of us are.  There’s a big story to be told here outside the ring, and when it stays outside the movie is a potent, fully alive drama.

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REVIEW: Black Swan

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Black Swan
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heintz, & John J. McLaughlin
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, and Barbara Hershey

Perfection: chased to the elegant stage by way of the not-so-elegant back rooms.  That is the goal viewers watch Nina (Natalie Portman) hurt, bleed, and dance, dance, dance toward  in Darren Aronofsky’s hallucinatory Black Swan.

Aronofsky, fast becoming cinema’s brightest renegade and fiercest visionary, has never been shy about making you feel his characters’ pain.  By removing all distance between you and them by rapid cutting and frantic pacing, you feel a kinetic connection to their turmoil.

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REVIEW: Rabbit Hole

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Rabbit Hole
Directed by: John Cameron Mitchell
Written by: David Lindsay-Abaire (screenplay & play)
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, and Sandra Oh

To know what you’re going through when you begin Rabbit Hole, know that the comedy is often found at grief counseling.  Yes, this is black comedy, or it pretends to be for a little while.

Adapted for the screen by David Lindsay-Abaire, the same man who wrote the play, Rabbit Hole offers little new in the now commonplace “dead kid” genre.  It weaves in and out through its 85 minutes on a journey to nowhere.  This is the point.  Grief puts life on hold for Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart.)  It doesn’t stop them from aging or any other miraculous time warp commonly associated with the term “rabbit hole.”  It simply keeps them miserable.

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REVIEW: Exit Through the Gift Shop

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Exit Through the Gift Shop
Directed by: Banksy
Written by: N/A
Starring: Banksy, Thierry Guetta, Shepard Fairey, and Rhys Ifans

The battle between art and commerce is as old as art and commerce.  Can you truly put a price on something that you create?  Is it possible to attach concrete meaning to something that appears so illusive and immune to analysis?  These are big questions, ones that Exit Through the Gift Shop tackles almost effortlessly and on accident.

Initially, this is a film about the evolution of the underground street art movement and its many players.  Thierry Guetta is an amateur videographer whose interest is peaked by the illegal art that these renegades create after the sun sets.  He follows them around, collecting thousands of hours of footage without any real purpose behind his concept other than it interests and inspires him.  In a way he becomes a public relations rep and assistant to these artists’ visions, that is until he meets Banksy.

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REVIEW: The Tourist

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The Tourist
Directed by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Written by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie, & Julian Fellowes (screenplay)
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, and Timothy Dalton

Slicing through the frame with vintage glamor and movie star sensibility, Angelina Jolie always captures the gaze of her audience.  Whether she be in a feature film like this one or in Africa with her family, we follow her.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, we follow a man who’s been mistaken for someone else on a cross-country journey of suspense with swerving trains, diving planes, and classic automobiles.  Cary Grant, as big a movie star as there ever was, plays that man.  Here it’s Johnny Depp, but you can’t help but keep your eyes on Ms. Jolie.

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SPOTLIGHT: Viggo Mortensen

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It’s kind of ironic that Viggo Mortensen has become somewhat of a symbol of rugged masculinity on the screen, because his best characters often undo that image.  Like Michael Douglas before him, Mortensen frequently does movies that put the modern American male through some kind of brutal morality test.  He finds the bruised souls of these characters, and shines even when he’s part of a large ensemble (Lord of the Rings.) However, he is at his best when he is front in center, paired with a director like David Cronenberg who has some mischief cooked up to counter his archetypal characters.

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REVIEW: Date Night

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Date Night
Directed by: Shawn Levy
Written by: Josh Klausner
Starring: Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Mark Wahlberg, and Tariji P. Henson

Modern comedy is often found in the silence, not the punchline.  It’s usually the uttering of a few colorful adjectives followed by an awkward stammer or glare.  When done right, on TV shows like The Office and 30 Rock, it is hilarious.  Date Night plucks its two stars from those two modern TV milestones to try and inject a little bit of comedic energy into a script much in need of it.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey play Phil and Claire Foster, a self-proclaimed boring suburban couple.  They are comatose, floating around like a slapstick version of the Burnham family from American Beauty.  Then, thanks to some blatant plot doctoring, they are forced on a life-or-death journey into a New York that is oozing with corruption and filled with vermin played by famous actors.

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ARCHIVE REVIEW: A Christmas Tale

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A Christmas Tale
Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin
Written by: Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, and Jean-Paul Roussillon

The French movie character, with its wildly shifting eyes, deep self consciousness, and ever-looming misery, never ceases to be endlessly thought-provoking.  Throw a bunch of these creatures together in the days preceding Christmas, and you’ve got the emotional bloodbath equivalent of Kill Bill.

A Christmas Tale is the typical American holiday drama done elegantly and boldly in the French fashion.  It is a dysfunctional family coming together during the holiday, and yes, mother is dying of cancer.  The movie succeeds because disease is a theme and not a plot point.  Cancer of one form or another has eaten away at this family’s soul for years; Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is suffering from the same form of cancer that killed her four-year-old son decades ago.

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ARCHIVE REVIEW: The Five Obstructions

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The Five Obstructions
Directed by: Jorgen Leth & Lars von Trier
Written by: Jorgen Leth & Lars von Trier
Starring: Jorgen Leth, Lars von Trier, Patrick Bauchau, and Anders Hove

Fans of Danish auteur Lars von Trier likely know his penchant for sadism, both on and off the screen.  Until The Five Obstructions, we’ve had to take Bjork’s word on the off screen part.

Though there are no grueling executions, rapes or scenes of graphic mutilation, von Trier does have his way with one of his idols, director Jorgen Leth.  He challenges him to recreate one of his earlier films, The Perfect Human, five different times with different rules, or “obstructions,” each time.

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