No Country For Old Men

According to the deafening buzz, No Country For Old Men is a return to form for the Coen brothers. I’m salivating at the chance to see this supposed masterpiece from these two national treasures.

The Coen brothers last two films arrived with a thud in the film community. I think I’m in the minority for my admiration for Intolerable Cruelty and with the exception of the inspired performance by Tom Hanks. their remake of The Ladykillers was disappointing.

Here is Peter Travers’ review for No Country For Old Men.

Cría Cuervos

Cria Cuervos is the best film I’ve seen this year. It’s a 1976 Spanish film by Carlos Saura, a filmmaker I’m not all that familiar with but soon will be. I rented it from Netflix a few months back based on a recommendation from a friend. I’m glad I took it.

The film stars Ana Torrent, who you may remember as the young girl from The Spirit of the Beehive. Her character in Cria Cuervos is the kind of child that’s all internal, always lost in thought, and has a wondering imagination. She becomes obsessed with the idea of death when she witnesses her father pass away as he is having a tryst with his mistress. I know this sound like a strange departure point for a movie, but you just have to go with it.

Ana, along with her two siblings move in with her aunt and grandmother after the funeral. From this point on, the picture becomes a mediation on various themes. The one theme that really fascinated me was memory.

Because the film unfolds in memory as the grown up Ana played by an awkwardly dubbed Geraldine Chaplin recounts her childhood, the film makes no effort in distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Cria Cuervos correctly demonstrates that memory is deceiving. Memory is the ability to retrieve past information, but there is no guarantee that your retrieving reliable information. Our brains are like editing machines. We cut out the boring parts, re-dub dialogue, and tighten-up the pace.

As an adult searching through bins of nostalgia and moments from the past, I, myself can’t exactly recall what was real life and what was simple childhood fantasy. Did I fall off the monkey bars during recess at school? Did I really throw water balloons at cars as I hid in a ditch? I seem to remember doing these things… but then again I can’t be sure.

Memories are the only personal thing we really have left when we get older… real or imagined…

… and that’s why I loved Cria Cuervos?

Everything about the film is top tier, especially the use of music. See the film.

No Place Like London

So far the early reviews for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street have been ecstatic. I had a friend who saw it a few weeks ago at an advanced screening and she absolutely loved it.

"I’m sure you’ve already heard from others, but – key points in a nutshell:

-1 hr 50 mins, not including end credits (they only showed the front credits).

-No ghosts, only music from the ballad.

-Full-throttle musical – believe it or not, you don’t really miss the things that are missing. It’s almost more of a musical than the stage musical! When they sing they REALLY sing, and I’m probably exaggerating, but it seemed like over 80% sung. The music is very powerful throughout. Depp is excellent. Carter has a strong accent. Anthony and Tobias almost steal the show.

-It is almost exactly like the screenplay, minus the ghosts and minus the beginning/end pool of blood thing.

-About 60 people in the audience, with very positive reactions (a few negative)... but the audience isn’t a “random sample”.

-Very disturbingly violent and gory – it’s actually a “musical-horror” movie. We knew it would be a unique film, but it is radically unique because it’s also hilarious. Sure to get widely varying reviews."

Internet Sweeney Todd Trailer

Ann Coulter on The Daily Show (6-17-02)

Happy Halloween!

Extreme Ways

The Jason Bourne trilogy is the best film trilogy since The Lord of the Rings… not that there were many contenders. Even the weakest entry in the series, The Bourne Supremacy was a really good movie.

I just finished watching The Bourne Ultimatum a few minutes ago. It’s easy to understand why this film had a huge summer box office. It’s just as good as the first entry. Brilliant chase scenes throughout the whole picture. I also loved the way Ultimatum connects with Supremacy. Talk about talking it's time to tell the story!

I’m glad I watched it at home and not at the theatre. All the hand-held camera work and fast paced editing would have given me a serious headache. The intimacy of a large sized television set corrects this.

The Bourne Identity (2002, Doug Liman) A
The Bourne Supremacy (2004, Paul Greengrass) B+
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007, Paul Greengrass) A

Homemade Wicked Movie

A very disturbing video I found on YouTube.

Best Picture Predictions

Here are my current predictions for Best Picture:

Atonement
No Country For Old Men
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Juno
American Gangster

I would like to include There Will Be Blood, but I have a feeling it will receive mixed reviews. The four journalist who saw it last week have been suspiciously quiet.

Sweeney Todd is wishful thinking.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again a few nights ago and saw a completely different film than the one I had seen so many times in my youth. As a kid, I saw a film about the beauty of space travel. As an adult, I see a film about the evolution of man and our place in the universe. I also fully understand now Stanley Kubrick’s use of HAL9000, the computer who attempts to destroy the ship’s crew.

HAL is the most human character in the film. The computer acts all too human in his quest to destroy the Discovery crew out of embarrassment, pride, and self preservation. HAL does not want to be shut down (to die) by the space man. HAL is fully conscious and wants to remain so. The shut-down scene is unbelievably sad.

"These are my friends..."

I Want Sweeney

Tim Burton’s upcoming adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet is driving me crazy with anticipation. I don’t think I’ve been more excited to see a motion picture in my entire life. For months now I’ve been searching the internet for any bits of information regarding the film. All I have so far to quench my geeky thirst is a promo one-sheet poster from Comic-Con. Needless to say it’s not doing the trick. Oh, what I wouldn’t do for a teaser trailer.

I can’t believe I’m this excited to see a Tim Burton directed movie. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed a great many of Burton’s offerings like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, and The Corpse Bride. Tim Burton is also the man responsible for shattering the test tube with Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The dread of knowing such an uneven auteur handling one of my favorite pieces of art give s me nightmares.

The God Spider Has Come...

One of the greatest directors of all-time past away today. The great Ingmar Bergman is no longer on this Earth. The world has just gotten a little less cooler again.

Check out The Seventh Seal, Fanny & Alexander, Smiles of a Summer Night, Through a Glass Darkly, and Wild Strawberries to see cinema pushed to it’s limit.

Like a lot of people, I first encountered Ingmar Bergman with The Seventh Seal, which remains my favorite from his body of work. The Seventh Seal is a brilliant meditation on the existence of God and death. For many people when they think of The Seventh Seal, they automatically think of Max von Sydow’s Antonius Block facing off against Death in a game of chess. Me, I think of the scene where the Knight and his Squire come across the Witch being burned at the stake.

Squire: “Who will take care of that child. God, the devil, the nothingness? The nothingness, perhaps?”

Antonius Block: “It can't be so!”

Business Needs a Lift

Fucking brilliant teaser poster for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!

Sunless Experience

Watching Chris Marker’s Sans Soliel can be extremely tedious. Sans Soliel is a 100 minute meditation on time and memory done in a quasi-documentary style. A female narrator helps guide you through hundreds of video images from Japan, Africa, and Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo.

I don’t think the film is bad or un-watchable. It’s just after the first ten minutes, you’ve seen pretty much what the film has to offer. Sans Soliel is one of the rare times I’ve check a clock to see how much time was left in a movie.

The film’s highlight is a giraffe being shot by a hunter. Presumably something to do with time and memory…

Sans Soliel is really a film for the class room or for the most adventurous filmgoer. I guess I wasn’t feeling like Indiana Jones today.

Sicko & Me

I admit that I’m a huge Michael Moore fan. I discovered his debut film Roger & Me at an old mom and pop video store in the early 1990’s and fell madly in love with it. At the time, Moore was just a local cult hero. I obsessively watched Roger & Me over and over again. I showed it to everyone I knew. I still consider it one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

I got a chance to watch Moore’s new film Sicko yesterday. I am disappointed to report that Sicko is very flawed.

The first hour is filmmaking as good as you’ll see it in a full length documentary. Heartbreaking tales of the American health care system failing the people.

The problems start to show up in the second half of the film when Moore travels abroad. There are too many sequences detailing virtually the same thing… that France and Great Britain have free universal health care. This whole section of the film could have been reduced to maybe three minutes., instead it’s close to thirty minutes.

The most problematic thing in Sicko is the already infamous ending. Moore travels to Cuba with ailing 9/11 rescue workers to seek medical treatment. Ok, exaggerated satire… wonderful stuff. The point has been made right? Not exactly. What we get in the very tail end of the picture is a lot of shots of Moore in a hallucinatory bewilderment state as the 9/11 rescue workers receive… breathing tests from hunky Cuban doctors?

It’s of course absurd to believe that a bunch of Yankees could travel down to Cuba and receive medical attention, no questions asked. What’s more believable is that Fidel Castro is a public relations whore who knows when to wine and dine. Plus, cameras slung by an Academy Award winning American filmmaker helps too.

The exclamation point is an embarrassingly staged ceremony by Cuban firefighters in honor of the 9/11 rescue workers. Lots of tears are shed, lots of hugs given… more shots of Michael Moore in a hallucinatory bewilderment state. The whole ceremony is inter-cut with Che Guevara’s daughter mumbling something about caring for the people. Yes, Che Guevara, the Stalinist guerilla warrior who never passed up an opportunity to execute someone. The man who imprisoned hundreds of artists, political opponents, and homosexuals.

I do not object to the film’s politics. I agree with them. What I object to is the silliness of the last half of the film. Moore hammers the point to the logical conclusion and then hammers it to the center of the Earth. There is also no excuse for the complete sloppiness of film craftsmanship. Moore is better than that.

The ending of Sicko is something Michael Moore would have goofed on in a previous motion picture.