Reviews

The sterility of the computer-generated backgrounds is as repellent as the archaic gender stereotypes forced upon all the women in Sin City. Soulless excess fueled by unreasonable violence in a fantasy of a world that never should be: pah! Nah, not really. It fucking rocked. You could get bitchy about how Rodriguez just laid the comic book out on the screen, but nobody gets snotty about faithful adaptations of Shakespeare. It’s a high-octane, note-perfect accomplishment. I dunno if I’d call it great cinema, although I think the cinematography and the use of black and white was superb… hm. Maybe I would call it great cinema. It’s easy to discount the look of the film and the skilled use of spot color cause it was filmed in digital. That’s a mistake. Filming in digital doesn’t make beauty easy. Just look at what Photoshop can do in unskilled hands for proof of that. ...

The Brattle film calendar wonders how John Boorman could make a movie as good as Point Blank and then go on to make something as lousy as Zardoz. But come on: Boorman is all about the semi-surreal fractured narrative, and you can draw a clear line from one movie to the other. Point Blank is a ruthless reinvention of the crime movie. The skeleton is pure pulp, adapted from a Donald Westlake book. Westlake has been writing unpretentious genre books for decades, so it’s a good base. But you’re not more than 10 minutes into the movie before the chronology starts shattering and lines start repeating and overlapping and you have to start wondering if it’s a sequence of events or Lee Marvin’s deathbed dream. Trippy stuff. Now I know where Soderbergh picked up the techniques he used in The Limey and Out of Sight. ...

Look, people are either likely to see The Big Sleep if they get the chance or not, right? But there are going to be some people with good intentions who never get around to it. To those people I say this: go see the damned thing if you ever get a chance. That’s what movie theaters are for, after all. The plot makes little sense. Somewhere in the transition from Chandler to Faulkner (who wrote the screenplay) by way of Leigh Brackett (who wrote an earlier version of the screenplay, and who much later wrote the first version of The Empire Strikes Back), some of the connective tissue of the novel vanished. No harm, as they say, and no foul. It’s not so much the plot that matters; if you’re seeing this movie, you ought to be seeing it for the lushness of the women and the dialogue and the violence. Virulent violence, really. There’s nothing like a thug. ...

In Good Company is not actually a comedy. Easy to be fooled, considering that it was marketed as one. Really, though, it’s a light drama about a hotshot young executive who’s risen too quickly for his own good. I wouldn’t represent it as deep, or anything, but it’s charming and — here and there — touching. There’s a kind of division of responsibility going on. Topher Grace is the guy who gets character development; he’s the wunderkind who becomes Dennis Quaid’s boss when Sports America is purchased by a big megacorp. He gets to find out what it means to be an adult. Dennis Quaid is the guy who gets to act, which perhaps was not the intention of the director, but he does have the harder job. Topher is supposed to be callow, a bit shallow, and he spends a lot of the movie putting on a game face despite being terrified. The plot falls apart if Dennis Quaid can’t be angry at Topher while coming to care about him. Fortunately, Quaid turns in one of those excellent worn performances he’s capable of doing when he puts his mind to it, and thus grounds the film. ...

It would be unkind to assume that the choice of water as a metaphor for magic in Constantine was made so as to enable multiple shots of Rachel Weisz preparing for a wet dress shirt contest. Unkind, but probably accurate. On the other hand, the cheesecake was balanced by the way the movie handled the sexual dynamic between her and Keanu. You win some and you lose some, which rather summarizes the entire experience. ...

In 1981, Steve Martin took on his second starring role in a motion picture in Pennies From Heaven. It was not exactly what was expected from the guy who’d just starred in The Jerk. People went in looking for broad slapstick, and found themselves in the middle of a deeply cynical musical. Instead of using the musical numbers as uplifting emotional high points, Pennies From Heaven recasts the musical number as an unhealthy fantasy. This goes beyond the musical work of Sondheim, who broadened the emotions depicted by the musicial number to include angst and despair, and subverts the entire concept of the musical. Pennies From Heaven uses the musical form to critique the musical form. It is unclear to me how this ever got greenlit; I suspect MGM was just caught up by the idea of reviving the musical. ...

I finished up the FireflyDVDs yesterday. Overall I liked the show quite a bit. Nice snappy Whedon dialogue, potentially interesting universe, characters with secrets and conflicts, and a decent enough plot. I say potentially interesting, because despite Whedon’s claims that “Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany,” he didn’t show any good in the Alliance during the first season. Mal may be an antihero (original), but in the short space of 11 episodes he’s never wrong. I’m willing to take Whedon at his word, and assume that the shades of grey would have shown up later. They just didn’t show up yet, and so the interesting elements of the Firefly universe remain potential. ...

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. ...

You ought, perhaps, to be watching Boston Legal. Yeah, it’s a David Kelley show. He’s flashy and he goes for the cheesy drama too often and he allows his shows to slip into the precious. What’s worse, this one co-stars William Shatner, the very avatar of kitsch. Can the acting stylings of James Spader overcome these handicaps? Surely not. But yes, because it’s fucking brilliant. Let me tell you about last Sunday’s episode. ...

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. ...