Dogs Bark

Mud Wrestling with Gollum - - The Descent - - 28 Nov 2007

Recommended. The Descent, written and directed by Brit Neil Marshall, was listed as one of the ten best movies of 2005 by no less than Sight and Sound. Horror fans were more ambivalent. Most complaints hit on the less than original shock scenes. But please . . . six Spice Girls lost in a cave of carnivorous orcs? Works for me. The athletic, young actresses were each a (trog) delight, particularly Natalie Mendoza (Juno) and Nora-Jane Noone (Holly). The set design did good on the atmosphere of a real cave, despite the lighting being a bit over ambitious. Other implausibilities were covered up by the action. The editing (Jon Harris) was effective at sorting out the fight scenes and the surface landscapes began the story with a gray, fetid dread. However, the ending was shite, particularly the backstory between Juno and Sarah. A let down, after ninety minutes of fun. 

 

 

From One Friend to Another - - Donnie Brasco - - 27 Nov 2007

Strongly recommended. With deep apologies to Marty and Francis, I gotta say, Donnie Brasco is my favorite mob flick. Exacting detail gives the picture (scripted by Paul Attanasio) a gritty authenticity. Sonny Black’s (Michael Madsen) crew shuffling around outside of their Mulberry St. hangout looks like an F.B.I. surveillance tape. The hit on a rival boss evokes those Mike Wallace interviews with mob killers. Al Pacino (one of his best performances) steps into the realistic tone, yet bends it with feelings for to his protégé, Donnie (Johnny Depp). This is a tough-love pairing to rival Steiger and Brando - - electrically brilliant. This is also Bruno Kirby’s best work, backed by rock-steady Madsen, Robert Miano (personified evil!), and a wonderful pairing of Tim Blake Nelson and Paul Giamatti as F.B.I. technicians.  Patrick Doyle’s score is also memorable. The only false note is Anne Heche, miscast as the neglected Mrs. Brasco.

 

Fair Dinkum Yarn - - The Sundowners - - 25 Nov 2007

Recommended. Even though Australia is capable of telling its own story, Hollywood provided this delightful, albeit, romanticized, tale about a drover family in 1920’s New South Wales. Robert Mitchum, sporting a passable accent and his salt-of–the-earth skills, plays the itchy-foot patriarch, scrapping with son and wife (Deborah Kerr) over settling down. Kerr’s portrait of the tough-but-loving Ida won a deserved Oscar nom, as did the pic and director Fred Zinnemann. The wonderful Glynis Johns, as a jolly barkeep, was also nominated and Peter Ustinov does his amusing schtick as another no-hoper. Look for Johns’s father Mervyn, playing her (ick!) ex-suitor. Photography, by Jack Hildyard, is appropriately grand and Dimitri Tiomkin wrote one of his best scores. The ending seemed a bit bare-boned for such a long movie but I winge. Daresay, The Sundowners is the essence of heartwarming . . . and there’s nothing the matter with that.

For a Little Bit of Money - - No Country for Old Men - - 23 Nov 2007

Recommended. “This place, always been hard . . . just the way it is” drawls the Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) in No Country for Old Men. But Fargo, which this picture riffs on, is also a tough burg. Anton Chigurh is a worse nightmare than Gaear Grimsrud and Jones is no Marge Gunderson, yah sure; however, the people they try to keep alive are similar.  Again we have the good, the very, very bad, and the stupid - - the triangulation of Coen noir. You sell the shirt off your back for bloody money, and then wait for a receipt.  Back also, but diminished, are Roger Deakins (camera) and Carter Burwell (score). Tommy Lee feared typecasting with this role but really, who else could guard our borders? Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) does a wonderful turn as Jones’s wife - - her resolute humanity, the only response to the opening quote.

The Man Who Knows Indians - - The Searchers - - 22 Nov 2007

An Essential. The Searchers is such an iconic movie that you sometimes forget what a great story it is . . . and such rich acting. Watch for the scene near the beginning with Ward Bond and Dorothy Jordon as John Wayne’s (Ethan Edwards) sister-in-law. As she holds Edwards’s Confederate cape, her motions reveal the romantic feelings she once had for him and Bond’s reaction shows this is common knowledge. An entire back story told in a slurp of hot coffee. Note the symbolism of doorways (quoted by Kill Bill) in this movie and how they all lead to the finale - - silent, yet dense with John Ford’s vision of the West, cascading down to John Wayne’s masterful closing statement and departure, again done completely with body language. A bit of trivia: Olivia and Harry Carey, Jr., real-life mother and son, duplicate this in the pic, possibly a first?

Requiem Without a Dream - - L’Enfant (The Child) - - 20 Nov 207

Recommended. What's done to children in this world is shameful. Not just child prostitutes or boy soldiers, but also the feral kids of the urban ‘developed’ world. At the nexus of crime, ignorance and poverty, everything is a bartered object and in a brutal, Belgian industrial town, The Child does the calculus. To our approval, directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne don’t moralize, they show - - in a scoreless, quasi-documentary style, effectively dispassionate. New parents Bruno and Sonia are primitive to the point of animalism and their reaction to the title character (played by 21 different babies) is purely instinctual. Pretty Sonia, well played by Deborah Francoise, is a bit too simplistically good. However, it is Jeremy Renier’s Bruno who carries the plot, and possibility of redemption, for the pic. This is a cold-eyed movie, but it retains a stubborn ideal that not everything has a price.

Perché? - - L’Avventura (The Adventure) - - 15 Nov 2007

Recommended. For students of cinema, L’Avventura is an essential, both historically and in its own right. For most else, this is a difficult film. Michelangelo Antonioni searched for the nature of relationships, their dysfunction and for the liberation of the individual; such introspection seems no longer in style. So the language he uses might seem deliberately obscure. A patient read, however, rewards with a rich and beautiful movie. The DVD commentary may be helpful in this effort. Antonioni’s characters are often escaping or searching for escape from emptiness. Their inner tumult is revealed in their placement in the environment or expression. The movie begins with a mystery and the 'what' of it never is revealed; the rest of the story becomes one answer to 'why.' Nothing is gratuitous and the clues are everywhere. Some people have written entire novels attempting to express the truth in the final scene of this movie.

Whom the Gods Would Destroy - - Into the Wild - - 12 Nov 2007

Strongly recommended. Possessed of such a good story, it’s hard to judge Into the Wild on its own merits. Particularly since this story resonates so well with the history of my generation. Maybe now we watch our own 20-something children walk that knife edge between commitment and madness. Could they fall like Chris McCandless? And Director Sean Penn and lead Emile Hirsch expertly straddle another bound, honesty and hardness, as he makes his way to Alaska. Cutting into warm scenes with Chris’s Dharma-bum buddies, the camera returns to the grinding agony of his abandoned parents and sister, never letting us forget that cruelty. Truth and nature both are cruel. We re-learn this as the camera follows Chris’s last gaze up into the bright, blue, perfect sky, cut by planes full of people he’ll never know . . .  going places he’ll never see. This is a sad, wonderful film.

The Mumbling Mr. Ripley - - The Good Shephard - - 10 Nov 2007

Not recommended. There’s a point in The Good Shephard where a woman says to Matt Damon, “You owe me a day at the beach!” Damon just shrugs . . . we never got one either. The pic is about secrets and lies, apparently. However, the muddled dialogue, frequently whispered, kept most of its secrets from me. I guess the idea that the privileged run foreign policy is radical to director Robert DeNiro. Not me - - and no need to mention Skull and Bones, featured prominently throughout. That’s just their summer camp. Solid performances by John Turturro, Joe Pesci, and Alec Baldwin please greatly but Angelina Jolie, who starts as the sort of sexy, challenging woman she plays so well, gets reduced by marriage to a neglected shrew. Jeez Bobby, a guy who’d rather water board a Russian than play house with Angelina is really not my cup of tea.

Seoul Food - - The Host - - 8 Nov 2007

Recommended. I wasn't as delighted with this movie as Cannes. However, it's the biggst grossing Korean pic of all time. The creature modeling (Weta, giving it a LOTR flavor) and CGI (The Orphanage) are done well and the opening attack on the city is impressive. I liked the dysfunctional Park family and dark comedy, recalling Tremors. The acting was excellent. I enjoyed seeing Scott Wilson again (In Cold Blood, Monster). The middle dragged a bit. The main complaint was over a common abuse in modern thrillers. There's a compact with audiences saying: don't get me to invest in a character, then off them without honor. Compare Pitch Black, which ended lethally, yet nobly. I need to feel the sacrifice was worth it. But despite all this, it's a fun movie. Oh, sorry. It's about a monster that crawls out of the Han River and eats Seoul.