Winter Short Takes

North Country: The climatic scene is shite (something tells me the class action suit didn’t go down quite so dramatically) and the melodrama is ramped up to eleven (indeed, the litany of horrors on display is overwhelming), but director Nikki Caro gets good performances from her cast and her film evokes a sense of place very well. Her commitment to the material made me want to see it through to the end, but Norma Rae is far, far superior. The film also deserves the Million Dollar Baby Award for best performance by an inanimate object (and to think said object has been nominated for an Academy Award!).

The Weather Man: I was surprised by this film. It’s the story of a completely unlikeable, passive aggressive anti-hero whose identity crisis results in a few but not a lot of changes. The film’s caustic yet humanistic tone and scaled down theatrics is refreshing. Director Gore Verbinski seemed to get away with something unusual here–at least by Hollywood standards. Perhaps it was a gift after the huge success of the pirate movie.

Rent: I spent 525, 600 minutes watching this horrific movie the other night. Actually that’s not true, I fast-forwarded through 85 % of it. It still felt like a year of my life I’d like to have back.

Nine Lives: Would have been much better if the film were entitled Two Lives. This kitty don’t hunt.

The World: Ok, I know I’m supposed to be the go to kid for Asian high modernism, but I found Zhang Ke Jia’s film about globalization and work in a newly emergent, consumer happy China to be little more than the emperor’s new clothes. The film does carry some interesting frisson in its first half-hour (and there are a handful of visual delights) but by the end I was simply bored. Why all the left-coast critics over at Film Comment embraced this dour little tragedy/melodrama/documentary so enthusiastically is beyond me.

3 thoughts on “Winter Short Takes”

  1. One more: Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared. Initially, I think this movie wanted to create a gritty, urban Grimm’s fairy tale in which a psychologically and physically abused boy (the uncannily talented Cameron Bright from Jonathan Grazer’s Birth) shoots his evil stepfather and escapes into the New Jersey night only to encounter a virulent breed of human repugnance far worse than he had ever imagined. Now that’s a film that interests me. But somewhere along the line, the film morphed into a sub-standard, hyperactive, cinematically flashy Guy Ritchie action flick with Paul Walker playing the low-ranking mob stooge in charge of disposing a gun which his superiors used to kill some dirty cops. So Walker, running scared, attempts to track down the neighbor boy who stole this weapon while also carting his own ten-year-old son on the chase. It’s an unapologetically violent, bloody, amoral little Tarantino knock-off that is never quite sure what story it wants to tell. Still, it was fun to watch. Now Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D+, but their review, written by Scott Brown, encapsulates everything I enjoyed about this film:

    Running Scared is pugnaciously ugly, unvarnished hackwork, and it commits to its nightmarish puerility with a vengeance. The picture pulsates with a genuine, un-focus-grouped bloodlust. A child with a gun is its central image–and it’s assumed that this will not horrify, but empower. Pederasts appear suddenly and improbably, caper demonically, and are banished ballistically. It’s as if someone smelted his personal “issues” into bullets, spun them into a cylinder, and fired them directly into your brain.”

    That’s got to be worth at least a B- don’t you think?

  2. just saw North Country on dvd. half-way through it degenerates into “lifetime television for women” (does it still exist? i don’t have tv) mode, but the first half is solid, thanks mostly to charlize theron’s great performance, but also, as jeff said, to its effective sense of place.

    i’ve had in me for a while to talk about women’s movies. i won’t do it now, but i’ll say that i’m astonished by how much backtracking hollywood has done on this score in the last 20 years. there’s little dignity for women in hollywood. even in this supposedly empowering film by a woman director, women break out crying every 7 mins (i counted). com’on, man, people (women and men) are tougher than that. charlize can stand an abusive husband and a contemptuous father, then breaks down like a soap bubble at the least sexual provocation.

    also, why constantly reproduce the myth that women are flirtatious? all the bar scenes are about getting laid or hanging to a man. if frances mcdormand had not been there i would have puked.

  3. we just finished the weather man (referred to by jeff above). i thought the first half was quite good–at least it went by quite fast–and then it slowed down quite a bit. i do like that it avoided the cliches of the “middle-aged man in crisis” genre but on the whole i think it could have been a lot tighter, and could have done without the soundtrack.

    are these roles reserved for nicolas cage? when it started i got a strong sense of deja vu and then remembered that movie he was in with tea leoni. also matchstick men.

    another short’ish take from me: hidalgo, courtesy encore ondemand. i sort of enjoyed its throwback hollywood charms but then felt guilty immediately. very messy race/identity issues–half-sioux, half-white army dispatcher/endurance horse-racer who has denied his sioux identity most of his life witnesses the wounded knee massacre, ends up a drunk in buffalo bill’s wild west show, and then gets challenged to participate in a desert race in the middle-east. the race pits his mixed-breed mustang against arabian thoroughbreds, and there’s lessons a-plenty about being true to yourself. not entirely sure, however, if filtering the native american genocide through the metaphor of a horse race is a good idea. at the end of the movie we are told that the descendants of the mustang (hidalgo) run free on some ranch somewhere. the sioux don’t get a mention.

    oh, and it turns out that most of this “based on a true story” stuff never even happened–all made up by the guy. there was a better film in that story, but alas this was a disney production. nonetheless, viggo does a fine job and there’s a couple of good swordfights.

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