Reviews

I liked Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events more than I thought I would, for several reasons. First, Jim Carrey played a role which a) allowed him to stretch out and use his immense gift for physical comedy in a way which served the movie, rather than detracting from it. By my count he hasn’t been able to do that since 1997, in Liar Liar, which is a borderline success; really the only time before this that we’ve seen a perfect match of gift and role is The Mask. But in Unfortunate Events, Carrey’s playing an actor and it’s a surrealist world anyhow, which means that his mugging is in perfect tune with what you’d want him to be doing. ...

Ocean’s 12 isn’t really a heist movie, unlike Ocean’s 11. Rather, like the original Rat Pack film, it’s an excuse for a bunch of highly charismatic stars to pal around and crack wise. But hey, they do it really well, so I’ve got no problem with that. Bonus points for the beautiful scenery, Vincent Cassel’s virtuoso martial arts dance, Robbie Coltrane’s gangster, and Catherine Zeta Jones. Then while that’s going on, Soderbergh is making one of his indie films. Ocean’s 12 has all his trademarks: the over-exposed cinematography, jerky time sequences, offbeat camera angles, and so on. He caps it all off with an extended homage to Full Frontal that almost justifies Julia Roberts’ presence in the movie. I got the distinct impression that Soderbergh decided to sneak in his subversive frame-breaking cinematic ideology under the cover of a frothy star vehicle. (See also Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) Kinda cool.

Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn: great, unrelentingly great, ought to be an easy choice for Best Supporting Actress. Great directing, unsurprisingly. The rest of The Aviator: merely pretty good. The thing is, Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t up to the role. I still think he’s a decent actor, but he doesn’t have the gravitas necessary to play this part and — like Tom Cruise and his smile — he’s allowed one physical tic to overtake and overshadow his acting. By the end of The Aviator, I badly wanted Scorsese to sneak into DiCaprio’s trailer and inject him with Botox. Anything to get rid of that little crease between his eyes; anything to keep him from substituting a furrowed brow for action. Whether he was portraying concentration, unhappiness, madness, anger, concern, confusion.. it’s all the squint and frown. This was particularly painful when contrasted with Cate Blanchett’s ability to convey a novel by blinking just so. ...

While it’s still fresh in my mind, and because I want to be an early adopter as far as observations on the Buckaroo Banzai homage go: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Wes Anderson comes from Houston. That makes Bottle Rocket a small jump, just a skip into the air and thump back down onto the pavement. Rushmore is more ambitious; it’s set in a world far away from Texas. But Wes Anderson did go to a Texan prep school (original). Not a huge leap. The Royal Tenenbaums? Now we’re talking; sure, it’s still in New York, but it’s further up, further separated from the world in which we live. ...

There’s a montage in Blade: Trinity during which Jessica Biel and Wesley Snipes go out hunting for information. It’s really skillfully handled, with nimble wipes and split-screens and it conveys a lot of action in a very short amount of time. Truly, it’s one of the better montages I’ve seen in a while. It is not the coolest thing Jessica Biel does in the movie. In her other fight scenes, she emotes in a way we don’t see often enough in action movies. She frowns in concentration, she grins to herself when she does something cool, she gets worried when her opponents are bigger than she is. It grounds her fights in reality, because she’s acting like they’re real efforts. I liked that a lot. ...

You know, for about the first half an hour or so I didn’t think I was going to like Garden State. Natalie Portman was doing such a great job of playing Sam, who was being a terribly annoying character. No, thought I, please no, please do not try to make me cheer for a relationship between this person and the affable Zach Braff, whom I am becoming fond of both for his portrayal of this Andrew Largeman and for his deft touch with suburban absurdism. I was saddened, because she was grating on me something fierce. I have little room in my heart for anyone who believes being cute excuses being obnoxious. ...

Kinji Fukasaku is infamous in the United States for Battle Royale, a painfully cynical Lord of the Flies turned up to eleven. Among the actors in that movie, we find Chiaki Kuriyama, who later appeared in Kill Bill: Volume 1. Tarantino’s grindhouse epic draws strongly on Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Papers, a series of five movies which begins with Battles Without Honor and Humanity — which, of course, is the title to the Tomoyasu Hotei song on the Kill Bill soundtrack. No mistake, that. Despite this circular dance of interconnections, the IMDB page listing movie links for Kill Bill does not list Battles Without Honor and Humanity as of this moment. Such is the fallibility of voluntarily edited databases. ...

Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is much like a Laurell Hamilton book, except that it’s suitable for people with good taste. The territory is familiar: more or less modern day, except there are creepy-crawlies (including vampires) running around and everybody knows it. Sunshine is set right after the war that occurred when that particular fact became public knowledge, I think — the timing is never made clear. There’s a young spunky heroine, there’s a vampire, there’s romance (not necessarily with the vampire), and so on. ...

A while ago I posted a review of K. J. Parker’s Colours in the Steel. I finally got around to reading the other two books in the trilogy. At the time, I said “I’m happy to have two more chunks of comfortable reading ahead of me.” Two, yes. Chunks, yes. Reading, yes. Well-written, yes. Comfortable? Not to any notable degree. In the end, the Fencer trilogy is a tragedy about the Loredan family and their inability to love one another. I would still recommend them, but they are not in any way nice.

Embarrassingly, up until very recently I had not seen a lot of Wong Kar Wai. By which I basically mean none. But I am determined to correct my cinematic errors and last night, desperately needing something to clear my brain from the mediocrity that was Alexander, I dug around and came up with Days of Being Wild. It was the right choice; it’s haunting me. It reminds me of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wong flattens out the passage of time, deliberately eschewing conventional sequential techniques. There’s no build-up, no climax to the scenes. Things happen, flat against the backdrop of the world. The four protagonists shuffle around, touch each others lives, talk in pairs, and shuffle again. Time passes like a metronome, without emphasis. ...