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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.

Jerry Almighty

I find the apologist in the media of Reverend Jerry Falwell to be fascinating. He said incredibly vulgar things about Jews, women, and homosexuals? “Yes… but he was a man of God…”

Seeing Greatness in Shadows

Army of Shadows was disappointing. I still thought the film was really good, but it didn’t blow me away like a majority of Jean-Pierre Melville’s other films. Maybe I went into the film with too high of expectations. I want to see the greatness that other people see. I’m going to be jealous if any of my fiends love the hell out of it.

Every movie review I’ve read claims that Army of Shadows is Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece. I think that honor still belongs to Le Samourai.

Kay Francis Has a Posse

Loved Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. It’s the most elegant pre-code talkie I’ve seen. It helps that Trouble in Paradise stars Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and the gorgeous Kay Francis.

Kay Francis has a perfect face for black and white film. Dark eyes, dark hair, pale face…

Up next in the Ernst Lubitsch marathon, Heaven Can Wait. I also anticipate getting Melville’s Army of Shadows and Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine in the mail tomorrow.

Cowboy Blues

The teacher was wrong to show an R-rated film to her class, but still…“traumatized”?

CHICAGO - A girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, alleging that a substitute teacher showed the R-rated film "Brokeback Mountain" in class.

The lawsuit claims that Jessica Turner, 12, suffered psychological distress after viewing the movie in her 8th grade class at Ashburn Community Elementary School last year.

The film, which won three Oscars, depicts two cowboys who conceal their homosexual affair.

Turner and her grandparents, Kenneth and LaVerne Richardson, are seeking around $500,000 in damages.

"It is very important to me that my children not be exposed to this," said Kenneth Richardson, Turner's guardian. "The teacher knew she was not supposed to do this."

According to the lawsuit filed Friday in Cook County Circuit Court, the video was shown without permission from the students' parents and guardians.

The lawsuit also names Ashburn Principal Jewel Diaz and a substitute teacher, referred to as "Ms. Buford."

The substitute asked a student to shut the classroom door at the West Side school, saying: "What happens in Ms. Buford's class stays in Ms. Buford's class," according to the lawsuit.

Richardson said his granddaughter was traumatized by the movie and had to undergo psychological treatment and counseling.

In 2005, Richardson complained to school administrators about reading material that he said included curse words.

"This was the last straw," he said. "I feel the lawsuit was necessary because of the warning I had already given them on the literature they were giving out to children to read. I told them it was against our faith."

Messages left over the weekend with CPS officials were not immediately returned.

Giants in the Sky

Here is video of the brillaint number 'Giants in the Sky' from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.

I also tried to find video of 'No One is Alone' but failed.

California Knows How to Party

To Live and Die in L.A. is a vastly underrated movie. I just watched it again with a friend of mine this afternoon. Too many people pass it off as an eighties artifact. While it doesn’t rise to the level of director William Friedkin’s other well known cop film, The French Connection, it does merit a viewing only if to see the outrageous car chase that arrives in the second half of the movie. It easily tops the car chase from The French Connection with sheer intensity.

Plus To Live and Die in L.A. has the added bonus of having William L. Petersen… and for most of the movie he’s drinking whiskey and fantasying about jumping off a bridge. You just know some serious shit is going to go down in the movie.

Lubitsch Touch

In the past two weeks Ernst Lubitsch has become one of my favorite directors. I must admit that up until recently the only film I had seen of his was Ninotchka, which I enjoyed immensely. Any film that features the tagline, “Garbo Laughs!” is ok with me.

The Ernst Lubitsch film that really knocked me out was To Be or Not to Be, which I would describe as a “nightmare comedy” in the vein of Dr. Strangelove and After Hours. Don’t be fooled by the light poster art. To Be or Not to Be is as dark as a cup of coffee at a poetry slam. I can’t believe such a motion picture could have been made and released in 1942.

The film is about a polish theatrical troupe who get mixed up in espionage with the occupying Nazis and must defeat them using Mission Impossible type maneuvers. To Be Or Not to Be stars Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, both in career best performances. Watching Jack Benny’s amoral character fuck with high ranking Nazi officials makes you ponder if he was perhaps a lost Marx Brother.

To Be Or Not to Be was Carole Lombard’s last movie. She died after this picture was made in a plane crash.

Also, I got a chance to take in Lubitsch’s excellent The Shop Around the Corner last night. The Shop Around the Corner was the basis for the pretty good You’ve Got Mail.

The Shop Around the Corner is a much lighter film than To Be or Not to Be… it’s a romance, but it still has darkness all around it’s edges. The film has plenty of loneliness and heartbreak to go around… but it has lots of romance too!

Trouble in Paradise is expected today in the mail from Netflix.

God, That's Good

Am I the only one who finds this incredibly amusing? It’s part of the YouTube phenomenon known as “The Blasphemy Challenge” where you make a video blog entry rejecting God and the Holy Spirit.

Also enjoy A Nonbeliever Reads the Bible while you're at it.

Chilling Effect

An hour or two ago on Fox News there was a panel discussing a recent radio bit that aired on the Opie & Anthony radio show on XM Satellite Radio. The bit consisted of the two shock jocks talking to a degenerate character over the phone about the possibility of raping Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The panel wasn’t discussing the merits of the bit, which most people would consider pretty poor, but about how they can stop the radio show. They talked a great deal about how we Americans take the idea of the 1st Amendment too far and that there should be limits to speech in the United States.

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The MPAA has recently announced that they will give a motion picture an R rating if the filmmakers “glamorize” smoking unless the “glamorization” of the smoking takes place in a historical context.

What the fuck? The continuation of the MPAA acting as the morality police…

I feel very uncomfortable.