Archive for the ‘FILM REVIEWS’ Category

We begin in classic saddle-sore terrain. A lone stranger with a mysterious past —Daniel Craig fills the boots here — rides into a godforsaken town in the Arizona territory. More familiar archetypes are waiting for him there: the grizzled rancher-potentate (Harrison Ford‘s Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde); his feckless, rowdy wastrel of a blood heir (Paul Dano); and his worthy and doting but unappreciated ranch foreman (Adam Beach), an adopted son enviously looking on — the dynamic from Anthony Mann‘s The Man FromLaramie. On the periphery are Sam Rockwell‘s meek barkeep and Olivia Wilde as a strangely out-of-time elfin beauty with a gun belt.

This motley bunch of people are soon at each other’s throats, but when an attack from the outside ends with loved ones kidnapped, the squabbling parties must circle the wagons and work together on a rescue mission. Forty years ago that attack certainly would have come from “alien” men called Apache, Sioux or Comanche. Today’s enemies are, however, literal aliens; the cowboys-and-Indians rivalry the film’s title plays on has fallen out of fashion. There are Apache on hand inCowboys & Aliens but, after initial tension with Ford’s gruff old soldier, they band together with townsfolk and outlawry alike to take a common stand for humanity.

Director Jon Favreau‘s experiment in genre crossbreeding — a Western/sci-fi mash-up pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit — is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre. The sci-fi element is such standard-issue space-invader stuff as to be hardly worth consideration as anything other than a gimmick. The Western tropes are more lovingly dealt with, but here the genre, which has long striven toward maturity, is made “fun” again through dislocation from historical fact.

Violence is likewise freed from any moral dimension, with very grotesque extraterrestrials providing new, definitely nonhuman targets that can be guiltlessly exterminated. (In one curious intervention of history and morality, though, there’s a brief shot of piled pocket watches and gold teeth accumulated by the gold-harvesting aliens — it seems to equate the invaders with Nazis.)

Abstracted, the Western’s ideals and rituals become meaningless clichés. When ex-Yankees and Confederates unite under the Stars & Stripes at the bitter end of Sam Peckinpah‘s Major Dundee, there’s weight to the rapprochement. When Favreau bands together unlikely allies against the Others, it’s under the gray flag of something-for-everyone popcorn entertainment.

It should be noted that Favreau is a capable storyteller among blockbuster blowhards. As with his handling of the first Iron Man, he displays here the rare ability to patiently lay down the track along which his narrative will move, and he gets some good work from his performers. Ford, enlivened by dude garb, seems to enjoy himself in front of a camera for the first time in decades, and his scenes with Beach have real reverb. They stand out amid rambunctious “summer fun” pyrotechnics, which are much the same every year, like on the Fourth.

COWBOYS & ALIENS | Directed by JON FAVREAU | Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby | Universal Pictures | Citywide

Written by:

Nick Pinkerton

Image Source

An earnest, ethereal riff on the one-night-in-a-high-school-caste-system interwoven-narrative ensemble piece, writer-director David Robert Mitchell‘s feature debut spans the last night of summer in a cloistered Michigan suburb. High schoolers Maggie (Claire Sloma, a pierced punkette) and Beth (Annette DeNoyer, perfectly just-pubescent nerdy) bike between a tame sleepover and a cool-kid kegger; new girl Claudia (Amanda Bauer) swiftly finds herself tangoing with the local mean girls; incoming freshman Rob (Marlon Morton) quasi-stalks a blonde mystery girl; and Scott (Brett Jacobsen), home from college, pursues a pair of just-graduated twins (Jade and Nikita Ramsey).

When it comes to the atmospherics of that fertile transition point between school years, this pre-cellphone period piece — hazily innocent even as it’s sketching out the odder, darker corners of adolescent desire — gets a lot right. The constant presence of music — think Dazed and Confused, with the Magnetic Fields swapped in for Foghat — nails both the teenage fantasy of living life to a personal soundtrack, and a high schooler’s heightened hunger to experience everything all at once.

An editor by trade, Mitchell shows more talent for defining situation and feeling via crosscut gazes than he does through dialogue, which here is often conspicuously precise. But of the uneven young non-actor performers, Sloma is always interesting to watch: She’s even almost credible when tasked with delivering the film’s thesis in the form of a lesson learned. —Karina Longworth

THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER | Written and directed by DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL | SundanceSelects | Nuart

Written by:

Karina Longworth

Source

The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat‘s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses. The Sleeping Beauty, like last year’sBluebeard, is based on a classic legend from Charles Perrault‘s 1697 collection Stories or Fairy Tales From Bygone Eras. But in freely incorporating elements from Hans Christian Andersen‘s 1845 tale The Snow Queen and her own provocative thoughts on the prison of childhood and adolescent desire, Breillat reimagines the slumbering heroine as a gender insurrectionist, freeing her from her most retrograde and enduring cultural representation:Disney‘s passive damsel.

“A little girl’s life is really boring,” 6-year-old Anastasia (confident, not fatally cute Carla Besnaïnou) announces in voice-over, sharing the same lust for adventure that the younger of the two sisters in Bluebeard (the director’s own childhood surrogate) possesses. Despising dresses and any other traditional feminine trappings, the tiny tomboy climbs trees and proclaims her new identity: “I’m Sir Vladimir.”

Cursed at birth by a warty old hag to die young, aristocratic Anastasia had received a reprieve from three nymphet fairies, who modify the newborn’s fate so that she goes into a centurylong deep sleep at age 6, not to wake until she turns 16. After she rebels against having to don a fuchsia kimono, a tutu and elaborate maquillage as part of an all-girls ballet recital, Anastasia’s hand, as preordained, is pierced by a sharp object — the injury that leads to her 100 years of repose.

Her body may be at rest, but her dreams are filled with derring-do. In staging Anastasia’s REM escapades, Breillat proves, as she did inBluebeard, that an extremely limited budget and modest scale are no impediment to carrying out her ideas. After the headstrong half-pint outwits a boil-covered ogre, she boards a train that takes her to a farmhouse, where she will spend a blissful few months romping around with a barely pubescent boy, Peter (Kerian Mayan), who eventually departs, succumbing to the seductions of the Snow Queen — and the promise of adventures of his own. In her quest to find her beloved “brother” (the two share a bed, resembling not so much devoted siblings as a newly-in-love couple), Anastasia meets dwarves who appear to have jumped out of Las Meninas; young albino regents who treat her to a feast of pastel meringues; and a knife-caressing Roma girl.

In the film’s final third, centered on the 16-year-old Anastasia (Julia Artamonov), Breillat revisits one of the defining themes of her work: the sexual appetite of young women, earlier explored in A Real Young Girl (1976), 36 Fillette (1988) and Fat Girl (2001). As pale as the moon, the teenage Anastasia fits uncomfortably in the modern world. “What species are you?” asks 18-year-old Johan (David Chausse), Peter’s great-grandson, when he fingers her whalebone corset. Far more predisposed to feminine accoutrements than she was as a child (“For beauty, you must suffer”), Anastasia is just as willful as her 6-year-old self. “No one dares contradict me!” she shouts at Johan, with whom she has a tempestuous relationship — after she’s bedded by the older incarnation of her Gypsy friend.

Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic Breillat has laid out: A girl’s childhood and adolescence often are culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren’t always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to “go alone into the world.”

Breillat’s clarity stands out even more when compared with the half-thought-out, postfeminist notions in Julia Leigh‘s Sleeping Beauty, which premiered at Cannes and will be released by IFC Films in October. And her vision undoubtedly will embolden the announced final installment in her fairy-tale trifecta, Beauty and the Beast — a classic 1946 film by Cocteau that’s also been Disneyfied.

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY | Written and directed by CATHERINE BREILLAT, based on the story by Charles Perrault | Strand Releasing | Sunset 5

Written:

Melissa Anderson

Source

The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June’s Trollhunter, Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it’s neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy. Set in a sprawlingLondon public-housing compound, the film follows a group of teenage hooligans as they stumble upon and eventually thwart an extraterrestrial invasion.

Led by the angry but reasonable Moses (John Boyega), the kids defend their turf alongside co-residents Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse they half-assedly mug prior to the appearance of the E.T.s, and Ron and Brewlis (Nick Frost and Luke Treadaway), two underachievers who serve as a sort of stoned Greek chorus. Things move fast enough to distract from the movie’s paltry budget — the woolly aliens, or “big gorilla-wolf motherfuckers,” as Moses calls them, are plainly guys in suits — and give the film a Lord of the Flies by way of John Carpenter feel. (Joe Cornish, the actual director, is a well-known comic actor inEngland.) Attack the Block strains somewhat to deliver a climactic moral, but the way it slyly shifts our sympathies to Moses and his crew (at the expense of another species, granted) without overplaying their deprivation puts more serious-minded indies to shame. —Mark Holcomb (Arclight Hollywood).

Written by:

Mark Holcomb

Source

In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she had an affair with a co-worker named Dave Lindhagen(Kevin Bacon), at which point Cal tells her he’s heard enough.

But Emily can’t stop talking. “I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” she confesses a couple scenes later, when the now-estranged couple meets again. “Can women even have midlife crises? In the movies, it’s always men.”

And in this movie, too. Would that an actress of Julianne Moore’s age and talent got a chance to explore an identity crisis in a real way in a venue other than Showtime, but whatever Emily may be going through, it’s swiftly pushed to the background.

Crazy, Stupid, Love follows Friends With Benefits as the second romantic comedy in as many weeks to ostentatiously point up its awareness of romantic-comedy cliché several times over the course of a narrative that ultimately validates far more of those clichés than it deflates. Directors Glenn Ficarra andJohn Requa were last seen as the auteurs of I Love You Phillip Morris, one of the smartest comedies of recent years and quite possibly the best gay relationship film ever made featuring Hollywood stars. While Crazy, Stupid, Love isn’t nearly as groundbreaking, its love-positive dramedy is notably bighearted, and enlivened by the work of a few good actors.

Moore recedes, popping up mostly as a foil to Cal’s effort to Regain His Manhood via new clothes and anonymous sex. He takes tutoring in both fields from Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a hard-bodied, harder-hearted player who is moved to Change His Ways when he falls for Hannah (Emma Stone), a stunning lady neurotic/law student whose Focus On Career has left her in lack of a satisfying romantic life. In a less successfully integrated story thread, Cal’s 13-year-old son nurses an obsessive crush on his 17-year-old baby sitter, who in turn has eyes only for 40-something Cal — a roundelay whose bawdy sentimentality feels airlifted from a John Hughes movie.

Carell and Gosling, both willing to take their characters to the point of caricature in order to find the truth in them, have a nicely barbed chemistry together, never more convincing than in the scene, indicative of Crazy‘s treatment of cinematic tropes, in which they establish their pupil-mentor relationship. Strangers negotiating in a bar, they use gangster-film lingo (“Maybe you remind me of somebody — you in or you out?”) to cement a bond whose first destination is necessarily a shopping montage.

Carell’s film choices as far back as The 40 Year-Old Virgin suggest a tendency toward middle-aged, every-nerd romantic leads — the unlikely love interest who spends an entire film proving his charms — but here he’s given a realistically complicated person to play. As Gosling’s character puts it, Carell has “kind eyes and a good head of hair,” both of which go a long way toward boosting the credibility of a character who bounces among oblivious dad, hopeless romantic and calculating lothario.

In contrast to Carell’s contrived “transformation” into romantic hero, Gosling is treated like an ingenue, with the directors building an entire scene around the awesome spectacle of his rock-hard midsection, giving his ass and hulking muscles their own key light in a sex scene in which his partner is mostly in shadow.

Dan Fogelman‘s script is snappy, if too proudly referential. It’s hard to say if a motif involving the use of Dirty Dancing as a seduction tool was outright stolen from last year’s French romcom Heartbreaker, or if the similarity is mere coincidence.

The film is more interesting at its least cute. In its second half, the dialogue seems looser, less bound to punch line. Characters who previously talked over one another, too deep in their own heads to actually have an exchange, slow down and start to listen. Shooting on grainy, high-speed film stock (often with a handheld camera), working with a suite of actors who are game to both play light and silly and dig deep, Ficarra and Requa lend a naturalism to highly contrived, patently absurd situations.

Spoiler alert: There are two plot twists, both of which fit the romcom mold and neither of which seems particularly necessary, but I have to admit that I saw neither coming. That’s the thing about movie clichés: As eager as filmmakers seem to be to show that they know the jig is up, sometimes that shit just works.

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE | Directed by GLENN FICARRA and JOHN REQUA | Written by DAN FOGELMAN | Warner Bros. Pictures | Citywide

Written by:

Karina Longworth

Photo:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Best Coast’s retro garage-band sound on the radio and pre-1980′s-style balances in our bank accounts are the latest evidence that we’re living in the era of the throwback. It’s only natural that David Robert Mitchell’s Myth of the American Sleepover — a last-day-of-summer-vacation movie that borrows heavily from Dazed and Confused — would surface as one of the season’s most buzzed about indies.

Mitchell’s characters operate in a world without iPhones, the Internet, pop music or sex. There’s plenty of talk about this last item, but the most we see is a little bit of kissing and a lot of heartfelt conversation, along with the sort of bad haircuts and wounded sincerity all too familiar to anyone who’s ever actually been a teenager. It’s a movie so genuinely sweet that the climax is a town-wide parade, complete with choreographed dance routine and float. American Pie, this is not.

“Francois Truffaut made films about very simple human experiences. I guess I wanted to make films like that,” Mitchell told the LA Weekly. As in Truffaut’s Pocket Money, Mitchell’s handful of main characters moon about town without doing much of anything. They do want to sleep with each other, but the lust is peripheral, and the compulsive hypersexuality that marks most American movies about teenagers is wholly absent. “It’s a teen movie but we wanted it to be a little bit different,” Mitchell said. “I was trying to give it a different tone. A little bit softer.”

Mitchell wrote Myth in 2002 and moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter to pitch it to financiers. After six years of fruitless meetings, the project seemed ready to die an early death. Instead, Mitchell and his producer, Adele Romanski, decided to raise the production money themselves. “We picked a start date roughly a year from when we realized we were having trouble,” Mitchell remembers, “and we just said on this date, we’re going to make the film with whatever resources we have.” The two saved paychecks from their day jobs and Mitchell cashed out his life savings.

As anyone who’s ever made an independent film can attest, financing is only one of many, many obstacles. During production, the filmmakers had to wrangle a huge cast of non-professional teenaged actors while navigating shots set in dozens of locations. After the shoot, Mitchell returned to his day job in L.A., which made editing difficult. “I was cutting the film at night. Me and my editor worked two jobs for about a year.”

Indie filmmaking is a gamble in the best of times, and with distribution companies reigning in budgets during the recession, there was no guarantee the finished movie would see a release. A Special Jury Prize for best ensemble at South by Southwest helped, as did a glut of positive critical attention after Cannes. Myth was picked up by IFC and received a limited roll out in New York and Los Angeles. Starting July 29, it will be available nationwide on demand.

“When you make something you care about, you dream other people are going to care about it, too,” Mitchell said. “If it actually happens it’s kind of shocking. When we premiered at South by Southwest, that seemed like enough, honestly. And then we heard from Critics Week at Cannes and they were like, ‘We love the movie! You’re in!’”

If the director seems startled by his success, it might be because it was a long time coming. He graduated from Florida State University’s film school almost ten years ago. This is his first completed feature. “It’s such a gentle film. I think people didn’t really understand what it could be,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell advised other filmmakers trying to get their own projects off the ground to “be willing to work beyond the point of exhaustion.” He learned the hard way — indie directors can’t expect to rely solely on outside investors anymore. “We spent a good amount of time trying to raise money to do the film the way we thought we had to. I don’t think anyone took us seriously. Finally, we said we need to do this ourselves with whatever we have. I don’t regret it but…It took me a long time to realize you could do that.”

Myth of the American Sleepover opened at the Nuart Theater last Friday.

Written by:

Sarah LaBrie

Photo:

unknown

Summary

To read the review go to www.jestherent.blogspot.com

Article

Summary

In defiance of others

Article

As usual, my annual Top 10 list is largely based on progressive political, social and cultural content, combined with artistic integrity and excellence.

1) Che (Part I)
2) Defiance
3) Milk
4) Frost/Nixon
5) Chicago 10
6) Battle in Seattle
7) Valkyrie
War, Inc.
9) Body of War
10) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Summary

Barking up a different projector

Article

Judging by the gross majority of mainstream accolades and conversations from film reviewers and consumers alike, one would believe that the best the films of 2008 had to offer were Slumdog subjective dazes and replayed dark knight narratives where Horatio Algers of the world rise from the hells of poverty and alien-nation while billionaire playboys dress up and save the world; growing young has its disadvantages, and non-German Germans speaking English could write a more genial and gentler German history in these not so happy-go-lucky times.

What was that Godarian remark about art being the reality of the reflection of reality? Egad, if unabashedly reinforcing the status quo vis-à-vis Victorian-valued fantasy is the cinematic community’s reaction to the best in the best of all possible worlds then, apparently, The Class’ François (François Bégaudeau) is not the only one reluctant to have others to read Voltaire’s Candide.

If it were not for the notable exceptions of Milk and Waltz with Bashir it would seem that in the days of President-Elect Barack Obama, Hollywood, along with its apologists and admirers, are even more behind the American political centrist-left curve than they were with the promotion of last year’s politically reactionary film, No Country for Old Men, as the best picture of 2007.

While it would be lengthy, albeit perhaps more useful, to discuss the faults with the forerunners of 2008, as we look ahead to January 20, 2009, let us praise here the extraordinary works of art of 2008 rather than tear down mediocrity moviemaking. (There is much to criticize elsewhere anyhow and, besides, criticisms can be fully explored during the month-long Oscar race between nominations on January 22, 2009, and the award ceremony on February 22, 2009.)

Like any other social text, a film needs to be judged on numerous tropes, agents and assets implementing ideas, events and characters with intensity, innovation and intelligence. No film is an island free from complacency, criticism and kudos.

There were plenty of exemplary films of 2008 achieving considerable accomplishment(s) yet it was not a particularly great year for cinema. More specifically, on at least three memorable occasions, weeks went by where, basically, I saw films I would essentially forget altogether had it not been for the occasional reminder thanks to a visit to the video store or channel surfing through cable television.

Ergo the alphabetic list of best 2008 films below may have risen to the top of the year, but it is highly unlikely any of them will make my “best of the decade” at the end of this year.

Funny Games U.S. – In light of and in contrast to promising times such as these, it is a grand thing when someone shoves a Schopenhauerian story of non-visually accepted brutality into our non-olfactory cephalic orifices. An American remake of his 1997 film, Michael Haneke’s precisely directed film examines the mean means and wayward ways of American movie violence when a staunchly upper-middle class mother (Naomi Watts), father (Tim Roth) and son (Devon Gearhart) are terrorized by the polite duo of Peter (Brad Corbet) and Paul (Michael Pitt). Superior to that other hyperbolic praised film attempting to address the same subject yet concluding with a disgusting display of suburban romanticism, A History of Violence, not since Gaper Noe’s Irreversible (which is also guilty of David Cronenberg’s adoration of suburbia and urban mistrust) has a feature film crawled under my skin, for very good reason, like this non-funny match of “Bonehead” and “Hellraiser” images and ideas.

Hunger – Stylistically brilliant with an excess of poetic license that prevents the cinematic story of IRA resister and hunger-striker Bobby Sands from being a grand masterpiece, Steve McQueen’s film is as stark, brutal, unappetizing and relentlessly pessimistic as any historical recreation of the highest orders. When you know there is no hope for the historical characters in a film — and this is not a Hollywood movie so there none here – there is little else to do than sit back and taste the misery. Cops do not stop torturing and let their victims go. Others do not watch on as the horrors of oppression merge on. This is a story about pain, resistance and lasting victory. There is a human dignity personified in this film, far beyond the machinations of a cynical Hollywood apparatus.

Milk – Wonderful in so many ways, Gus Van Sant’s story of slain civil rights leader Harvey Milk is the kind of story that offers not just one person a chance to make it in this world while millions watch on in status quo oblivion, but a community, if not a nation (world), too. What is there to legitimately say wrong about it? Sean Penn’s performance as Milk is typically brilliant yet, in addition, propelled by the excellent supporting cast. Van Sant’s skilled direction is manifest and loving. Danny Elfman’s score is the most significant of his film career. The film has direct political resonance of our times and it will be watched for years to come. Okay, Diego Luna’s character and his character’s wig are quite annoying but, otherwise, Milk may be the best film of the year.

Nothing But the Truth – In her best performance as the year’s best female character (which is not saying much), Kate Beckinsale plays Rachel Armstrong, a reporter for a major newspaper in Washington, D.C. who exposes the identity of a covert CIA agent, Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga). The government, lead by Patton Dubois (Matt Damon), demands Rachel release the name of her source. At considerable cost, Rachel refuses to cave in — thus saving face, protecting democracy and her source, plus offering “hope” for journalists, women and parents who lose family in the name of a larger unit. While writer-director Rod Lurie’s previous works have had their moderate and modest merits, he progresses professionally and politically with this picture.

Seven Pounds – In the best lead performance of his career, Will Smith, in his follow up to the stupid Hancock, plays Ben Thomas, a man so riddled with guilt the only thing left to live for is others. Ben is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the right people; he just needs to make sure the one he picks deserve it. Along the way he discovers some of the kindest, quietest people; including a heartbreaking, lonely, blind man played to near-perfection by Woody Harrelson (only that hairdo diminishes his character’s pathos). Surprisingly, for a film about an African-American making the grandest personal sacrifice he can for the greater good during the time of an upcoming African-American African president talking about sacrifice for the greater necessity, director Gabriele Muccino’s authentic “feel good” film has, unfortunately, been discarded during awards season by lighter weight works.

Special – Beyond Michael Rapaport’s outstanding performance, this is a small film with a lot of phenomena going for it. Dealing with drugs as both self-realization and self-destruction; deconstruction of the comic book narrative; the fantasies of the working class person; paying and playing to advertise brand names as an act of hero worship and identification (albeit false); working class dupe as guinea pig and wild horse; as much as you push down the working class person, he (she, they) will eventually rise; and special as in stupid; this widely disregarded film is filled with ideas and style, which is all the more important considering its obviously low budget. Special in its own way, this was the most overlooked film of the year.

Synecdoche, New York – Writer extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman’s directorial film allows the kind of rigorous thought, attention, reflection and reward akin to obvious, and not so obvious, predecessors like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (and Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Proust Recaptured) , Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (and some recent films by Jacques Rivette), and theories advanced by Umberto Eco (Travels in Hyper Reality) Terry Eagleton (“Subjects”) and Frederic Jameson (simulacrum!) – to name just a few — plus the music of Wire (ITABA and “Drill”). The difficult acting challenges required by the story’s requirements are superbly met by the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dianne Wiest, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis and others.

Tony Manero – Set against the awful reign of General Auguste Pinochet’s military grip on Chile, 1978, Raul (Alfredo Castro) is an everyday fascist obsessed with impersonating Saturday Night Fever’s disco do-nothing doll (John Travolta). Grounds for a social satire, Chile’s official Oscar entry is one of the more violent and vicious films of the year (up there with Funny Games). If it suits Tony, he will steal or kill. A jerk being jerked around, like the leader of his country Tony cannot get a rise from people but he can sure put people down – for good. He should be dancing in jail but who is going to notice in a land gone mad with might? Selflessly acted by Castro and others, and bravely directed by Pablo Larrain, Tony Manero is a brutal portrait of a country rotting from the arms to its goosesteps. Not surprisingly in this time of romance with happy endings, Larrain’s film is been widely reviled by the mainstream movie reviewers.

Tropic Thunder – Every year there is a movie– usually one of those quieter summer releases — I have a blast watching. It may not be a masterpiece, but it possesses enough wit and verve to make the top ten. Director/actor/producer/co-writer Ben Stiller’s film within a film about the making of the ultimate war movie clinched-fisted America’s fascistic fascination with the image of war – plus other less than noble endeavors — and punched it right in the funny bone. From the opening scene to the ridiculous panda-cide to the hilarious send up of the serious actor by this year’s most overlooked “Best Supporting Actor” Robert Downey, Jr., to Tom Cruise’s anal-releasing performance as a foulmouthed billionaire and so on, this was a riotous ruckus. You people know what I mean.

Waltz with Bashir – The only documentary or animated film to make the list this year (note: I have not seen Wall-E), Ari Folman’s non-“Love Song” into the Lebanon massacres of 1982 by the powers that be – Lebanese, Israeli, or otherwise – engages viewers on several levels with its important historical insights, clear anti-war message, contemporary political impact, outstanding animation and deft soundtrack. In contrast to those Disneyesque derivatives of Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and DC Comics, for the children of the Sabra and Shatila slums, there was no millionaire reward or going back, and the only thing the dark night brought was death to everyone. They lit up their deaths.

Summary

BS is for Bedtime Stories

Article

Growing up 20 miles from Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca, I thought of the world of Disney as a place for fun rides, meeting girls from other schools and clowning around as far as I could without the secret Disney police catching me. I certainly never thought of it as a source (not that I used the word “source” back then) where one could find bedtime stories of merit.

From any early age on, I was well aware that Disney acquired significant works of literature — such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and various fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm — and diluted and distilled the story’s graver delusions with life and transformed them into Micky Mouse conclusions for mass consumption.

A financially successful tradition that carries on today, in their latest effort, Bedtime Stories, Disney continues to champion its economically-effective attitudes with original works just as much as it did with the so-called classics. Only in BS, Disney’s mentality is unabashedly marketed.

Written by Matt Lopez (Race to Witch Mountain) and Tim Herlihy (The Wedding Singer), and directed by Adam Shankman (The Wedding Planner; Hairspray), Bedtime Stories stars Adam Sandler, Hollywood’s most successful man-child movie star, as Skeeter Bronson, a hotel handyman who has worked harder in the hotel than anyone else yet remains on the economic periphery since his father (Jonathan Pryce, also the movie’s occasional narrator) lost the Los Angeles spot many years ago to Barry Nottingham (Russell Brand).

Hardly a Marxist treaty on the alienation man and woman experience between the products he or she works on yet cannot own, Skeeter goes on about his busy business while the rich get richer and others attempt to surpass him in class the old-fashioned way: they marry into it.

As the Nottingham hotel empire expands, the local school system shrinks (BS does not mention that less school means kids have more time to go to Disney’s amusement parks). Skeeter’s sister, Wendy (Courtney Cox, whose “frame” is noticeably smaller than the last time she appeared onscreen with Sandler for the remake of The Longest Yard), is a school principal facing employment expulsion. Out of work Wendy heads to Phoenix for job opportunities, leaving Skeeter to watch her oh-so-adorable children, Patrick and Bobbi, who are played oh so childishly by Jonathan Morgan Heit and Laura Ann Kesling, respectively.

A task that will change Skeeter little life, like many a Hollywood story, this babysitting “crisis” also provides the love-interest “opportunity” for Skeeter to meet Jill (Keri Russell), a mate way out of his league whom he will antagonize, charm, and anger before making her love him by movie’s end

Handyman by day, at night Skeeter, his niece and nephew (along with Bugsy, a guinea pig with big eyes and super-GP wherewithal) whip up tales of magical whimsy combining the imaginations of the little children with, presumably, the bigger child’s diet of movies filled with adventure and tinged with homoeroticism (not unlike Sandler’s previous films, The Longest Yard, I Now Pronounce you Chuck & Larry and Don’t’ Mess with the Zohan). From the Western to Ancient Rome to fairylands, Skeeter is cast back into a time where he can be the hero who gets the money and the honey — all the while groomed WeHo style.

When aspects of the stories start to come true during the most inspiring moments of the screenplay, Skeeter thinks the whole story may come alive. So he tries to alter and maneuver the stories the three tell at home so they can work to his advantage at the hotel and thus please the boss, seduce the boss’ daughter (Teresa Palmer), triumph over his snooty co-worker (Lucy Lawless) and vanquish his archenemy, Kendall (Guy Pearce).

(The moving surprisingly has a significant amount of non-Americans from the UK and down under. Griffiths, Brand and Pryce are from the UK. Pearce and Palmer are from Australia. Lucy Lawless is from New Zealand. It is a small, albeit white, world indeed.)

Supplementing the various stories with humorous attempts are old Sandler-film standbys for childish guffaws: farts, vomit, borderline racist characters once again played by Rob Schneider, and Sandler’s goofiness.

As the BS storylines play out their predictable course, intelligent ethical people, rich eccentrics, superior women and cutesy kids succumb to the charms of a wisecracking handyman.

Serving hamburgers and junk food to vegetarians, stupefying youth with television, driving recklessly through Los Angeles and being clueless about the trials of others pales in tragic comparison to the travesty of telling children there are no magical happy endings, especially for children.

How dare Skeeter face reality? He will learn. He is not only going to make for a happy ending by saving the school (which the kids here all want), when they are not in class, Skeeter suggests building a magical type of hotel for the wholesome family — just like you know where.

As far as storytelling goes, this penchant for happy forever may be the case for kids in BS, as well as such current fare as Australia, Slumdog Millionaire and Dragon Hunters, but it is certainly not the situation for the youngsters in Nothing But the Truth, Gomorrah, Changeling, The Boy with Striped Pajamas and Waltz with Bashir.

For the latter films that are grounded in reality, happy endings are denied. There will be few if any more bedtime stories.