Dogs Bark

Rocking The Cradle, Ruing the World - - Winter’s Bone (2010) - - 28 July 2010

Strongly recommended. There’s a scene in this wonderful film where heroine Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) attempts to describe her life to a clueless military recruiter. I immediately went right to Afghanistan, thinking, if we understood our own rural poor, maybe the Pashtun would become less opaque. Let’s start the lesson with Winter’s Bone, the work of Ms. Lawrence and new director Debra Granik. Ree is a 17-year-old-before-her-time, woman-child, ubiquitous to hard-luck folk immemorial. She evades both tribal feuds and the law with finesse, while fiercely defending her home and family. Kentucky-native Lawrence brings a smokey authenticity to her work but is well matched against Deadwood alumni John Hawkes (The Perfect Storm) as Uncle ‘Teardrop’ and county sheriff Garret Dillahunt (The Road). Granik’s style blends the moonshine of Jim White (Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus) with the deep water of John Sayles (Matewan). Can’t wait to see more from her and Ms. Lawrence.

Living The Dream - - Inception (2010) - - 16 July 2010

Strongly recommended. What are the best action pictures you’ve ever seen? Why, they’re the ones you run in your head every night while you sleep. Your dreams. Hollywood tries to recreate them on the screen but they frequently screw it up. The stories are stupid and lazy. The characters are incomplete and pedestrian. The special effects are pointless. And in the middle you suddenly realize, it’s just a movie. But what if Leo DiCaprio and Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Caine were all totally into their work? Suppose Christopher Nolan combined all the narrative imagination he showed in Memento and all the cordite he wasted in The Dark Knight? Inception is the movie we’ve all wanted to make. Smart, funny, insanely tense, brilliant in the details and playfully profound. And the special effects? Spot on. This is the most entertaining movie I’ve seen this year.

Chiiilll... dren! - - The Curse Of The Cat People (1944) - - 14 July 2010

Strongly recommended. If you rent Cat People from Netflix, you will also get The Curse Of The Cat People. Be forewarned: this is not your typical studio exploit. Based on the success of Cat People, RKO insisted that Val Lewton shoot a sequel. Lewton fooled everyone by taking the same characters and actors, advancing them slightly in time, and making an entirely new, deeply personal, masterwork. The Curse Of The Cat People is indeed a horror film - - the horror of childhood isolation. It’s a ghost story, but more The Devil’s Backbone than The Ring. Amazing child actress Ann Carter plays Amy, a dreamy, lonely girl searching for affection. Carter, Lewton, and rookie director Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still) develop a fascinating psychological allegory. The movie was championed by James Agee, who later wrote another gothic fairy tale, The Night Of The Hunter. The influence is obvious.

Kitten On The Quease - - Cat People (1942) - - 12 July 2010

Strongly recommended. I’ve been panning a lot of horror movies recently and you might think I’m not a fan. Au contraire, mon amie. My misspent youth was full of great Universal, Corman and Hammer camp. I’m just picky. Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is one of my favorites. Tourneur has the ability to make bright sunlight scary as hell. And so too with his brilliant Cat People, equally the work of RKO mad genius Val Lewton. This movie and camera work (Nick Musuraca) are also a wonderful lesson in horror film noir, bridging to the original German masterworks like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari. Jane Randolph’s walk through the park, shadowed by feline Simone Simon is the stuff of nightmare. Simone’s eerie sadness, nicely complimented by Roy Webb’s (Notorious, Murder, My Sweet) Debussy-like score, makes her a most appealing femme feline.

L'Avvoltoio - - Nine (2009) - - 4 July 2010

Not recommended. This is a thoroughly despicable movie. I haven’t seen the stage musical, so the fault may originate there, however choreographer Rob Marshall (Chicago) clearly has added his ugliness. First off, Marshall couldn’t seduce the stage cast and relied on amateurs of little song and dance talent (Daniel Day Lewis, Kate Hudson, and Judi Dench). Hudson’s number is a long drink from the Grand Canal. Fergie gets the only memorable song ‘Be Italian,’ but her time is miniscule. The movie is so frantically photographed that Marshall’s choreography, such as it is, gets reduced to a Las Vegas revue. But the really hateful thing about this movie is that it scoops the entrails out of Fellini, 8½ and the Italian New Wave and kicks its heart and brain to the curb. Marshall is too young to remember the 60’s. That’s no excuse; the Cinecittà runs somewhere forever. Nine will not.

Hang It Up - - Suspira (1977) - - 24 June 2010

Not recommended. This cult classic need some sort of explanation before I will understand its huge popularity and I have read many already. But here’s the deal. It’s not scary. Sure, it’s gory and it’s weird. But from the cheesy opening to the silly ending, it didn’t move me an inch. We can talk about the deadening of shock shlock since 1977 and I’ll grant that; however, I’m comparing this to Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist. Or even the very-schlocky Amityville Horror which was scary enough to get me laid in 1978. On top of all this is director Dario Argento’s decision to film it silent and dub the dialogue in multiple languages. The sound of the Netflix DVD was awful. It was fun seeing uber-freak Udo Kier (The Story of O, Breaking the Waves) as a dorky psychiatrist, “Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.”