November 23, 2005

Shorts, 11/23.

Heavens. "New York scoops up David Edelstein from Slate," reads the mediabistro headline. The piece notes that New York is looking to spiff up its site by getting bloggier. No word on when this'll happen, so, will there or won't there be a "Movie Club" at Slate this year? Via Movie City News.

Also: David Poland resorts Jeffrey Wells's preview of Sundance 06, January 19 through 29.

Torino Film Festival Dave Kehr: "The Torino Film Festival makes it very easy to live in the past with the exhaustive retrospectives they put on, and this year was no exception, with a complete career retrospective devoted to the work of Walter Hill, the first half of an exhaustive Claude Chabrol retro that will be completed next year, and smaller tributes devoted to the American indie Lodge Kerrigan, the pre-Code films of Alfred E Green (whose 1932 Baby Face remains an astonishment) and the late Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka."

NP Thompson eviscerates The Producers: "[I]t's a stinkeroo to end all stinkeroos, a Thanksgiving turkey, and a lump of coal in this year’s horror-day stocking all meretriciously rolled into one."

So what else is playing...

Rent

Rent:

  • Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene: "Watching the movie version of Rent in 2005, I know how ex-hippies felt watching Hair in 1978. God knows HIV and poverty aren't going away anytime soon, but the late Jonathan Larson's East Village reworking of La Bohème attacks them with the kind of earnest Broadway bombast that dates on arrival - especially when it purports to rock." Also: The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

  • In the New York Observer, where Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner have an important piece on how we've allowed the media to sleep through the war in Iraq, Choire Sicha establishes the historical context of the play before turning to the film: "It makes the East Village look a little less authentic than Sesame Street, a little more than It's a Wonderful Life. It's illusory, despicable and the worst sort of rewriting of history, because that history has actually never really been written in the first place."

  • Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "Rent is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads."

  • AO Scott in the New York Times: "Rent is often dramatically jumbled and musically muddled - but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat."

  • Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "I wasn't sure a movie musical could be worse than last year's styrofoam-and-gilt swan-boat travesty Phantom of the Opera, but I'm afraid Rent proves me wrong."

  • Jorge Morales (Voice): "Rent is about as timely now as Gigi."

  • Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "It doesn't do what Chicago did, reimagining and stylizing the source material for the big screen."

  • Karina Longworth at Cinematical: "By erring, at every turn, on the side of fan-wary caution, [Chris] Columbus has made a film that will probably go over splendidly with devoted 'Rentheads.' The problem will lie in not just pleasing, but in fooling, everyone else."

  • Nathan Rabin at the AV Club finds it "plays like Last Exit To Brooklyn as reinterpreted by Up With People."

  • Dylan Hicks in the City Pages on trying to review the thing: "[I]t feels like shooting fish in a barrel, only the fish are puppies." (Also: Matthew Wilder on William Eggleston in the Real World.)

Syriana

Syriana:

  • AO Scott (NYT): "[I]ts sheer entertainment value... is worth emphasizing... Someone is sure to complain that the world doesn't really work the way it does in Syriana: that oil companies, law firms and Middle Eastern regimes are not really engaged in semiclandestine collusion, to control the global oil supply and thus influence the destinies of millions of people. OK, maybe. Call me naïve - or paranoid, or liberal, or whatever the favored epithet is this week - but I'm inclined to give [Stephen] Gaghan the benefit of the doubt."

  • Stephanie Zacharek (Salon): "Syriana often feels more complicated than it needs to be, and there are too many places where its willful complexity undercuts what the actors are doing.... It's as if Gaghan knows we're up to the challenge he's handing us and yet secretly hopes we're not - maybe because the more confused we get, the smarter he looks."

  • Kenneth Turan (LAT): "Syriana is a fearless and ambitious piece of work, made with equal parts passion and calculation, an unapologetically entertaining major studio release with compelling real-world relevance, a film that takes numerous risks and thrives on them all."

  • J Hoberman in the Village Voice: "[B]y far the Bushiest of Bush II thrillers... The ensemble is stellar... The movie may be too knowing for its own good, but it's not glib and it never goes cheesy."

The Ice Harvest

The Ice Harvest:

  • Manohla Dargis (NYT): "There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points."

    J Hoberman (Voice): "Funny, tense, and exceedingly well made... This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as Double Indemnity or No Exit."

  • Keith Phipps: "[Harold] Ramis is at his best when dealing with men facing a soul-defining crisis, and he finds plenty to work with in [Richard] Russo and [Robert] Benton's script, which offers Russo's trademark blend of colorful characters and slow-building dilemmas. The Ice Harvest finds them all operating in top form in as dark a territory as they've ever explored."

  • For Kevin Thomas (LAT), it's "a classic guilty pleasure."

  • James Rocchi at Cinematical: "[T]he big names in the credits... somehow wind up making for a very little movie."

  • Mike Russell: "Following Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, it's maybe the year's second-greatest Christmas noir."

Also in the NYT:

Olivier
  • "In the early 1960s, Laurence Olivier defined the goal of acting to Michael Gambon, his young protégé at the National Theater. Every member of the audience, he said, both male and female, should want to have sex with you." William Grimes reviews Terry Coleman's Olivier. Related: MaryAnn Johanson at Cinemarati: "We go to the movies to watch beautiful people do exciting things while we imagine ourselves having sex with them."

  • Jeannette Catsoulis: "Part road trip, part love story... 39 Pounds of Love presents a bracingly honest yet poetic portrait of a man refusing to be defined by the limitations of his body." More from R Emmet Sweeney in the Voice.

Also in the Voice:

Match Point Also in the New York Observer: Scott Eyman on Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, Andrew Sarris on Match Point and Rex Reed on Mrs Henderson Presents.

Also in the SFBG: Dennis Harvey on Dorian Blues: "There's something to be said for a first film whose faults aren't those of indulgence or excess." More from Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

Also at the AV Club: Scott Tobias on I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth and Gilles' Wife.

"Time (and an overwhelming need to see it a second time) doesn't permit for a full length review, but Filmbrain is seriously toying with the idea that Love Streams might be [Cassavetes's] greatest film."

Glenn Abel in the Hollywood Reporter: "Old weird Americana takes a bow in the sprawling and richly rewarding DVD set Unseen Cinema."

Tokyo Decadence (1992) has finally made it to Korea and, in the Korean Times, Kim Tae-jong asks director Ryu Murakami why he thinks it took so long.

Ray Pride: "Indiapost.com gets the Hare Krishna perspective on Bee Season, which includes Aaron, a young man played by Max Minghella, finding a devotee (played with Hare Barbie gleam by Kate Bosworth) almost as irresistable as her religious beliefs."

Kevin Smith responds to AICN's Talkbackers.

At Flickhead, Ray Young reviews Ringers: Lord of the Fans, "the latest addition to a subgenre of recent documentaries about aficionados in the throes of their showbiz-related passions."

"This is not a 'death of cinema' essay, and I firmly believe that cinema and post-cinema can and should coexist," writes Matthew Clayfield at BRAINTRUSTdv. That said, "We are forever in need of new formal models - new ways of seeing images, hearing sounds, and of being in the world - and the post-cinematic landscape is rife with possibilities."

Nick Rombes: "Movies are losing their bodies, and so are screens."

Online browsing tip. At Worth100.com, "Director's Cut 6: Movie scenes you didn't get to see." Via MCN.

Online viewing tip. Park Hopping 3D Video Podcast, Disney rides to take wearing red and green glasses, via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, where Xeni Jardin is covering the MPAA-BitTorrent deal. Slashdotters discuss.



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Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2005 8:51 AM