Review List I
Sunday, March 12, 2006 | Permalink | Comments [0]
I’ve been watching a lot of films lately.
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is a can’t miss. Well, if you’re a fan of Dave Chappelle and can at least tolerate hip hop music. The heart of this film is in how it was cut. Yes, Chappelle is hilarious and music is great, but Michel Gondry makes some brilliant decisions in post-production, skipping back and forth through time and from situation to situation. In other hands, this could have been far less entertaining.
The Constant Gardener is fantastic as well. Great thriller; the film takes a lot of liberties with your assumptions, leading you down false trails and tricking you into making connections between characters that turn out to not exist. Very well shot. The bulk of the film takes place in Africa, which lend it a feeling of being foreign and exotic. Interestingly enough, while there was a lot of implied violence in the film, there is very little of it on screen — the bulk of the film’s R rating being reserved for language and beautifully filmed scenes featuring Rachel Weisz’s very nude and very pregnant body.
Junebug is also very well done. Unusual pacing. It seems to stagger into a sort of steady rhythm before abruptly pausing very now and then to, quite literally, take in the scenery. Excellent performances. It seems to fall in that post-Wes Anderson Lost In Translation/Broken Flowers milieu, with its Futura Bold title cards and central characters dropped into enviroments full of quirky unusual people. But it works much better than Broken Flowers did and, I think, finds new ground not previously explored.
Battlestar Galactica Season 1 turned out to be far better than I expected. If you haven’t given it a try because of what you remember of it’s previous incarnation, this is something new and different and entirely it’s own. Oh, it’s nothing all that highbrow, although many of the themes that run through the series allude heavily to current world events, it’s mostly escapist mind candy along the lines of Lost and is really quite a lot of fun.
The Weather Man is so-so. Go re-rent American Beauty, it’s a much better version of the same story. You know, guy hates career, guy’s family is falling a part, guy embarks on a introspective journey of self-discovery. I did like how this one ended though. Not that having the main character shot in the head by a homophobic ex-military officer is necessarily a bad way to wrap things up, but The Weather Man takes a different path and still manages to avoid a tidy, vanilla ending.
Must Love Dogs and In Her Shoes are awful trainwrecks, the latter being so bad as to be completely unwatchable.
And 2046 left me wondering why foreign films are always so… foreign. Well shot, well acted but I had no idea what was going on. Watching some of the extras on the DVD helped, but I still find this film hard to recommend.
Oh, and I finally saw — and hated — Batman Begins. A lot of potential there, but ultimately unsatisfying. I mean, in a comic book film you never make the bad guy in the mask a secondary villian — especially to Liam Neeson of all people. But what really bugged me? That stupid Batmobile with the stupid torpedo hatch he kept diving into to use the car’s weapons. And I thought it was supposed to be this amazing James Bond-ian military car — yet it couldn’t outrun the cops? It occurs to me that if Batman really wanted to stealthily slink about unnoticed under the cover of night, he might consider driving something less exotic. Like a Honda Civic. But I suppose if one insists upon running around in the pre-dawn hours of the morning wearing form fitting spandex and a cape, it’s rather difficult to argue that one isn’t really seeking attention in the first place.
Finally popped in Michel Gondry’s The Director’s Label DVD. What a great surprise to find a short on there featuring David Cross!
I’m currently working my way through Scorsese’s Bob Dylan biopic, No Direction Home. It’s really good so far. Some spectacular footage of Dylan performing on-stage in 1966 is interwoven throughout the film.
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