Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon may actually appeal beyond the limited fanbase for horror who pipe up in our group. (I.e., someone other than me might conceivably enjoy this.) After Scream, or even Wes Craven’s earlier self-reflexive horror flicks, many proclaimed the end of ‘real’ horror (killed off by that slasher irony). More recently folks like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth splatter with an ostensibly earnest glee, thus recuperating that ‘real’ horror (and irony gives up the ghost). Behind the Mask doesn’t have its cake and eats it, too: it’s a very smart, sly critical send-up of the slasher pic which reinvigorates the genre through, rather than against, its ironic stance. I dug it.
Month: July 2007
A Mighty Heart
Based on Mariane Pearl’s account of her husband’s brutal murder by al-Qaeda operative Sheikh Omar Saeed, this is one of the best films I’ve seen all summer yet it is quickly disappearing into the late summer night as threequals, talking rats and John McClane gobble up audience attention. That’s too bad, because A Mighty Heart is a smart, well acted and directed police procedural that is very tricky about playing into and interrogating the spectator’s desire for justice and revenge (not to mention Western privilege). Sure, you know what’s going to happen, but the power of the film is in the details. At times disorienting, this film (shot in Winterbottom’s trademark documentary style) rarely slows down but carries the viewer into the discombobulating world that is Pakistan, cutting back and forth from Pearl’s affluent home (a makeshift headquarters for her and her associates as they wait for information) and the chaotic streets, restaurants and apartment buildings of Karachi where police search incessantly for witnesses and criminals. Continue reading A Mighty Heart
Ratatouille
I have no idea why the title is spelled this way, but…. just kidding. Bliss! A wonderful film–funny, engaging, smart, moving; the kind of kids’ movie you long to see (after so many hyperactive or tawdry maudlin blurs), where the intelligence shimmers behind every detail, where the film demands (or, better, assumes) a little bit of intelligence from its audience. But better yet: this is one of the best, most lovely pieces of cinema I’ve seen this year.
Near the opening the clan of rats scurry en masse away from a farmhouse and its shotgun-wielding, bespectacled granny. In ramshackle boats, rats spilling off the edges, each rat carefully defined to her or his own particular brand of bedraggled, they shiver, as raindrops pelt the dark-slate surface of the water all around them. There’s so much visual delight in this film–on top of the pleasures of narrative and score–that I think any of us would love it.
SiCKO
i have no idea why the title is spelled the way it is, but this is a damn fine movie. unlike bowling for columbine and fahrenheit 911, it’s nicely organized and focused, so you don’t have to spend precious mental energy figuring out how we got to Z from X and Y. the first part is devastating. the most devastating part is that you know everything about it. you have heard the stories, you know people who have gone through that, you know that, but for your nice university job if you are lucky enough to have one, you would be going through that too. you know all of this because it is your waking nightmare. you live under the constant threat that it might, that it will one day happen to you. Continue reading SiCKO
Worst (best?) Inflight Movie Combos
On a flight from Copenhagen I just experienced the following movie combo: Music and Lyrics, Maid in Manhattan, Pirates of the Caribbean II. Surely no one has had worse?