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Category: Culture

Not just recommended

February 18, 2005
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Hey! If you’re in Boston, I’m providing you with plenty of warning and I will brook no objections that do not involve the need to babysit. The Saturday after next, February 26th, Days of Being Wild is playing at the MFA. It’s at 4 PM. I cannot even begin to explain how great this movie is, although I took a crack at it once. When I listed the top twenty movies of all time? Most of them were hard to choose and maybe Last Life in the Universe could creep on there and so on. But the top three, those were easy, and Days of Being Wild was among them.

So it’s pretty strongly recommended. There are shows all week long if you can’t make Saturday at 4. It’s one of the best movies ever.

Touched with wings of fire

February 12, 2005
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I say “Well, I think I’m going to see Constantine after all.” And you say, “What? That’s stupid. Keanu, and Los Angeles instead of London, and dude.” And I say, “Well.”

Then the New York Times says, “How difficult is it to play a mythic figure like Gabriel as opposed to, say, a soccer mom?” And Tilda Swinton says “They’re exactly the same, because no one you play is ‘real.’ Every character is a construct, even if you’re playing a suburban mother. You’re looking for a construct in the way you look and talk, and you have either the mythic information about Gabriel, or what we know about suburban mothers, and then you just try to make it real. It’s exactly the same. So, you start with what we know about Gabriel as God’s messenger.”

The picture looks something like this:

Tilda Swinton as Gabriel

It goes a long way to unconvince me from taking a pass.

(You could also read Kip on the matter, who says basically the same thing, which is not surprising since I stole it all from him anyhow.)

Of all time

February 11, 2005
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After much internal debate, I’ve finished my top twenty movie list. In order of preference, even. The up-to-date list is here (cool site, by the by) but if you’re too lazy to click through:

  1. Magnolia
  2. Days of Being Wild
  3. Brazil
  4. Casablanca
  5. City of God
  6. Bullet in the Head
  7. Miller’s Crossing
  8. Crash
  9. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  10. Ronin
  11. Blue Velvet
  12. Goodfellas
  13. The General
  14. Dead Man
  15. Full Metal Jacket
  16. The Incredibles
  17. Taxi Driver
  18. Peking Opera Blues
  19. Glengarry Glen Ross
  20. The Grifters

Yeah, I like genre movies. Possibly I like guy movies too; be your own judge. Yes, Miller’s Crossing is the best Coen Brothers movie. I don’t know if Days of Being Wild is the best Wong Kar Wai movie, but it’s the best one I’ve seen — I understand that In the Mood for Love may supercede it when I finally see that, though. Crash is the best Cronenberg movie because it’s the best cast he’s ever had, although Videodrome is a very close #2.

There are indeed a lot of movies I haven’t seen.

Pretty silver discs: 2/8/2005

February 7, 2005
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Hey, so it turns out they do this new DVD thing every week. Whatta bonanza. Before I get started on talking about this week’s harvest, I wanted to mention that I picked up Delicious Library over the weekend. It is awesome, although I would recommend carefully backing up your database regularly, since I lost a couple of titles in some sort of hiccup at some point. But man, is it awesome. I cataloged 360 DVDs (yeah, yeah, I know) in about two hours of lazy work. Cool stuff.

If you have a region-free player or live in the UK, check out Ping Pong. I missed this at Fantasia, but the buzz is very good. Who doesn’ t like ping pong stories?

Over here, Deadwood is the biggie. It’s the hot HBO series of the year. Timothy Olyphant is one of my favorite actors and I’m looking forward to digging into the series as a DVD set — which is how I watch most of my TV these days.

There’s also a special edition of Raging Bull which I would get if I were still obsessive about commentary tracks. There are three of them here, including one with Scorsese and one with all the writers. There’s also a lot of behind the scenes footage, including a cool-sounding shot by shot comparison of De Niro and the real Jake LaMotta in the ring. Hm, maybe I still am obsessive. You can also get this as part of the Martin Scorsese Film Collection, which meshes nicely with last summer’s Martin Scorsese Collection release. But I digress.

Stephen Fry’s directorial debut, Bright Young Things, ships this week. I missed it in theaters but heard good things; I imagine it’s worth a rental.

If you’re catching up on Oscar viewing, Before Sunset is shipping. Great movie. Me, I have to believe there’ll be a special edition at some point which will improve on this bare-bones disc. I badly want a commentary on this one.

I reviewed Robot Stories back when I saw it at Fantasia. All that stuff is still true. It’s a good movie, although not one I feel the need to own.

Finally, Warner Home Video is releasing an 18 movie set entitled, accurately, Best Picture Oscar Collection. That title kinda says it all.

Can't stop the night

February 5, 2005
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Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus has, in something more or less akin to order: samurai, samurai zombies, convicts, gangsters, mysterious women, zombie gangsters, zombie convicts, cops, and mutants. Most of them wind up fighting each other. I won’t try to list the arsenals; rest assured that if you like guns, blades, fists, or feet you’ll be happy.

There’s also rambunctiously zestful overacting. It’s pretty great.

It’s sort of hard to figure out what else one can say about this movie. It’s not that it’s plot-light — there’s a ton of plot, to the point where some of the plot kind of spills out the sides and runs down the edge until Kitamura remembers to go clean it up. It’s not coherent plot, but it’s plot. There’s also a ton of style; Kitamura loves his electronica and he really loves rotating the camera around a fight scene. The fight scenes are good. All the characters have enough cool to freeze a smallish ocean.

So it’s not that there’s nothing to talk about; it’s more that the volume of the movie is cranked so far up that it’s difficult to talk about it rationally. (“And there were ZOMBIES!”) I liked the movie from the first scene, and I knew I was in for a great ride about ten minutes in after one of the yakuza calmly conducts a science experiment. It’s a long way from perfect; the last half an hour drags a little, and the camera rotates somewhat too much. But it’s a blast of an action movie. It’s easy to see why this made Kitamura a star director (his latest movie is Godzilla: Final Wars, the last Gozilla movie for at least a decade).

Make popcorn first.

Pretty silver discs: 2/1/2005

February 1, 2005
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So, the legions ask, what should I be looking out for on DVD this week?

Well, the Babe Family Double Feature DVD is out. I’d be a little leery of this, although I liked both the Babe movies — it appears to be one DVD, so picture quality may suffer. Still, a cheap way to get two good movies.

DVD of the week is the Chariots of Fire Special Edition. It’s about time; this was previously only available in a full-screen version. It comes with commentary, screen tests, making of documentaries, deleted scenes, and so on.

I’m not going to buy the Karate Kid Collection, but I’ll sleep better at night knowing it’s out there. This appears to be new pressings — at least, the Karate Kid DVD has a bunch of extras, including a commentary by the director and the stars, which didn’t exist on the old standalone DVD. The other DVDs don’t have any such extras, though. I’d talk about how this set will ride on the coattails of Hillary Swank’s Million Dollar Baby, but I’m laughing too hard. “Sweep the leg!”

Hm, Ray is out. There are a bunch of editions, so choose wisely.

Bill Murray’s serious acting career probably started with Where the Buffalo Roam. Which was his third significant movie, so it’s not like his recent stuff is really a change of pace. He’s such a mensch. Anyhow, this DVD may or may not suffer from the same screwed up soundtrack as the Anchor Bay DVD release. (They didn’t get the rights to the original music and substituted pablum.) We’ll hope not.

Finally, there’s the complete run of some TV series called Wonderfalls that they tell me was good. All I know is that you could go over to the Borders in the Cambridgeside Galleria and buy a copy right now, cause it’s on display a day early.

Art in science

January 31, 2005
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If you’re into the Boston art scene, you might want to check out the Berwick Research Institute’s BRI:AIR, A Retrospective. I have somewhat of an ulterior motive in saying this, as my brother co-designed the exhibition, but I’ve been down to tbe BRI a few times and it’s always been interesting. It opens this Saturday and runs for about two months.

Francophile

January 30, 2005
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It’s my belief that the next wave of action movie innovation — or at least excitement — is going to come from France. Luc Besson made the initial pass at this back in the 90s with La Femme Nikita and Leon before a couple of regrettable US failures — but now he’s back in France producing movies like Wasabi and the Taxi series and Haute Tension and so on. The guy has his own little action movie empire over there.

You also have people like Florent Emilio Siri, who directed the brilliant Nid de Guepes; he’s got the director’s chair on the next Bruce Willis flick, Hostage. You’ve got Unleashed, a French production starring Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, and Morgan Freeman — which looks like it’s going to be the best Western Jet Li movie to date. (Written, as it happens, by Luc Besson. He pops up all over the place.)

And then you’ve got the just-released Assault on Precinct 13, a remake of the John Carpenter classic. It was directed by Jean-Francois Richet, who has not done much of anything of note, and it is absolutely smoking hot.

Not perfect or anything. I’m still wondering where the forest in the middle of Detroit came from. But these young punk French directors really seem to like what they’re doing, and Richet has a great feel for the uses of violence as punctuation to a tense scene. His sensibilities are different enough from mainstream Hollywood that when the movie turns a corner and something dire happens, it’s a shock rather than being just another cat leaping out of a closet.

Also he’s very crisp. Come to think of it, I don’t recall any cats jumping out of closets in Assult on Precinct 13. When something loud happens, it’s someone shooting at someone rather than a false alarm. It’s direct and snappy and immediate.

Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne aid and abet this effort. Hawke’s got a nice tense depth to him as the tortured cop, and Fishburne plays the deadly gang lord with that cool Fishburne poise that is so very convincing. The tension between them is the core of the movie — well, besides the action — and it helps immensely that Fishburne makes us believe he doesn’t understand Hawke’s motives; it helps immensely that Hawke makes us believe that he’d see saving Fishburne as a means of redemption.

It’s just a loud action movie, and it did kind of get dropped in the middle of January where bad movies go to die, but if you want to see a good action movie then you ought to catch this one. Five years from now, you’ll be able to talk about how you were into French action directors before they were cool.