Month: March 2008

Into The Wild, directed by Sean Penn and based on the book by Jon Krakauer, tells the true story (though elements are fictionalized) of Christopher McCandless. Escaping a dire home situation after graduation from college, McCandless, who goes by the name of Alexander Supertramp, embarks on more than two years of wandering across the United States, seeking more and more remote wilderness, until he ends up in Alaska where he, essentially, starves to death.

The closest analogue is probably Grizzly Man, and I have to admit that I watched this prepared to dislike it intensely. As with Grizzly Man, the lead distains human companionship (McCandless was befriended and helped by a number of apparently fine people who cared deeply for him), and believes that only in the wildest, most rugged parts of nature can he find himself. His death is, in a sense, inevitable. But the movie is actually very touching (with the occasional mis-step from Penn) and ultimately powerful. You can read it as a critique of McCandless’ if you like, in that his human companions — played almost uniformly superbly by Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook and others — demonstrate the importance of social relationships.

But the film works ultimately because it, and the country and scenery, are simply gorgeous. The Colorado river, Salton Sea and mountains of Alaska are the stars, and just occasionally you can see why McCandless gave his life to get closer to them.

There’s something about apocalyptic sci-fi that can amp up the pleasures of genre. Even pea-brained exercises like Reign of Fire (dragons ride again!), Doomsday (’80s b-movies ride again!), and Le Dernier Combat (Luc Besson’s only good movie!) have an infectious energy, and when directors syncopate the thrumming backbeat of social commentary (in Romero’s zombieworlds and the recent 28 reiterations, George Miller’s Max-world, or the delirious The Bed-Sitting Room) . . . it’s sheer delight.

But give a director with some recently-earned auteurial cred a chance to find his or her deeply-satirical vision of the world to come, and you get thudding shite like Zardoz, Quintet, and now Southland Tales.

Continue reading World’s end and the hapless auteur

Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom. Ta dum dum, Boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom chicka chicka, boom.

Ta dum dum.

I had written positively but concisely about director Ti West’s first film (at comment #4), and I kind of kept an ear to the ground about his subsequent work. And last year, his second work–more restrained, in his words an attempt to strip away all the common tactical conventions of scare movies–got a good review here and a real rave from Scott Foundas here. So I was really looking forward to it.

I liked but didn’t love it; Foundas called it “Old Joy reconceived as a horror movie,” and that’s a fine mash-up pitch. The movie begins at a slow but dread-suffused pace, and takes about thirty minutes to get us well into the woods, wandering with three misplaced urbanites looking to hunt. And it’s never much of a thrill-ride, instead opting for a very deliberate white-knuckle approach to its conventional plot (the hunters start to get hunted). I liked its sense of dread, I loved its HighDef hand-held look, and I loved its disinterest in motive, backstory, resolution. Apparently shot on just over a dime (and produced by Larry Fessenden, who’s maybe the Orson Welles of indie horror films), it’s another solid small alternative for us horror fans not so into the Saw franchise or endless watered-down remakes of East Asian horror.

And it’s not Guy Ritchie, so that’s another plus.

Revolver: utterly worthless, incomprehensible, and pretentious to boot. Someone has probably described this as ‘Tarantino-esque.” It ain’t. Is it a horrible pastiche of movies, sampling Usual Suspects, the anime scene in Kill Bill volume 1, and every other crappy movie Guy Ritchie has made. At the end, over the credits, you have video of real psychologists (plus Deepak Chopra) discussing the role of the ego and the super ego. What was Ritchie thinking?

I see to have vague memories that both John Bruns and Arnab are big Rutles fans.

They got together for a showing at the Egyptian Theater last night and a Q&A and jam session – the first time the four have been together since it was filmed. Nicole Campos did a write-up and pictures for LA Weekly.

If you’re interested, it’s here:
blogs.laweekly.com/style_council/film/rutling-is-the-sincerest-form-1

I watched Badlands last night. Wasn’t nearly as poetic and grand as Days of Heaven. I was surprised. NOt sure what I think of it yet, though it was very good.

I have not seen the documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, that Werner Herzog re-made as this fictional account of Dieter Dengler’s captivity in Laos and then escape during the Vietnam War. I am not even sure why Herzog chose to tell Dengler’s story twice, once in documentary form and once in fictional form, with Christian Bale in the role of Dengler. Perhaps someone on this blog has seen them both and can offer an opinion?

The film itself has an oddly uplifting and wildly optimistic ending that is hard to square with the rest of the film. The only real justification for this ending is that it somehow mirrors the relentless optimism that Dengler manages to display throughout his captivity, in marked contrast to the five other prisoners (including a disappointing Steve Zahn). But the great majority of the film is enjoyable (that’s probably the wrong word) and beautifully made. It captures in a matter-of-fact (documentary?) style the torture, degradation, and long period on the run in the jungle that Dengler experienced. Bale is, as usual, expressive and manages to portray strength and vulnerability throughout. Recommended.

maybe we should have one place to park links to interesting conversations and articles with/about film-makers?

here’s a great interview on the onion’s av club with alex cox.

AVC: Is it hard to rectify what punk stands for and also make movies that cost a lot of money?

AC: Yeah! I think so. I think that’s right, because the money… we spend an awful lot of money on a movie. Twenty percent goes back to the studio for overhead. Who knows how much is going to get eaten up by the principal actors? Even making Repo Man for $1.5 million seemed like a waste of money to me. We had two guys in a car, and yet we have to have a tow truck, a car trailer, another huge vehicle behind it, police cars in front, motorcycle outriders. The only thing we were missing was a Roman Centurion riding along at the front with a big banner. “Here comes the movie!” And I think it’s grandiose. A lot of the time, this last one we did, nobody even knew we were there. We’d be shooting in places, and people would just walk right past us. You film much quicker and have more fun that way.