I agree with Jeff: Arnab sucks.

Comments don’t show up any more, and most movies are really bad.

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I’m not sure Teeth deserves its own thread (I tried posting a comment elsewhere but Word Press wouldn’t let me) but there’s something slyly (and comically) subversive about this story of a teenager, a good Christian girl who preaches abstinence and chastity, who discovers her vagina is blessed with a bite (a nuclear power plant forever looms in the background). It is crude and crass (there are a copious number of severed penises), but the film could also be read as a post-feminist, coming-of-age, “superhero-esque” origin story of a serial killer with a code (a la Showtime’s underrated “Dexter”) who targets brutal, oppressive, sexually abusive misogynists (teenage boys, wacky gynecologists, dirty-old-men). Though a favorite at Sundance in 2006, it didn’t do too well at the box office . . . will audiences be willing to line up for Teeth II???

I got out to see Mamet’s latest, Redbelt, which he refers to as an update of the classic fight flick, and it’s a strong homage, for better and worse. We follow a scraping-by, virtuous jujitsu master/instructor Mike Terry (the reliably great Chiwetel Ejiofor) who’s trapped–by some scheming and unreliable Hollywood types, an ambitious wife, mounting debts, and his own bullheaded determination to follow a fighter’s code–into a choice between competition or the loss of everything he holds dear. Besides Ejiofor, there’s a great cast (particularly regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna, clearly delighted to be foul-mouthed lowlifes throwing their weight around), and for about 2/3 of the picture the dialogue and plotting are knotty and delightful, allowing us plenty of time to chew on what’s happening, and to read Terry against the grain: he’s calm, determined, likable, “perfect”–and perhaps misguided, foolish, selfish, and so on. For a good long while, the idea of living by a code seems both virtue and vice, and the film buzzes on that tension.

Then, in its last third, people do a lot less talking and start throwing fists and feet instead of four-letter words and opaque aphorisms, and I don’t think that’s necessarily what I want from a Mamet film. It becomes a fight flick, not entirely predictable but tonally, thematically, and (alas) ideologically in line with the kinds of sentimental affirmations of the “loser” whose code (backed up by his real talent) is worth sticking to.

Meh. But great fun for a good portion of its running time, and so I’d suggest a rental, for sure. But a far, far, far more interesting (although admittedly very different) take on the foolish virtue of sticking to one’s idealism can be found in the ink-black Danish comedy Adam’s Apples, which follows the religious Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a man impervious to any disruptions in his belief in the goodness of humanity, in the inevitable success of turning the other cheek, in the power of meek acceptance and affirmation of everyone around him. Ivan bedevils one of his ex-con wards Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a neo-Nazi who puts up a photo of Hitler in his small room, who stares dumbfounded as Ivan blithely misreads or just plain misses the malice in the actions all around him, who develops a seething passion aimed at breaking Ivan’s belief. It’d be entirely worth seeing for its casual, almost joyful misanthropy, and it is often laugh-out-loud funny. But I was even more taken by its unwillingness to affirm or flatly refute Ivan’s beliefs; rather, the film draws even more pointed laughs from the possibility that a buffoonish faith might actually have force in one’s life, even if it’s never anything but buffoonish. What starts as a vicious parody in the end seems a far more complicated, still very funny and biting investigation of faith.

After the despair that Chelsea fans (myself included) feel after last night’s Champions League final, at least an excuse to connect the loss to movies. Someone on a Chelsea fan blog linked each Chelsea player to a classic of Soviet cinema:

Cech - The Diamond Arm – Gaidai 1968
That double save in the 1st half and he saved a penalty (more…)

Does anyone know of good sources on the material production of US movies, both studio and independent? I’m particularly interested in the treatment of actors as workers. This became salient recently when a friend who is a union rep. with SAG told me about a multi-union wildcat strike on the set of a David O. Russell movie (which sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen). There are apparently complicated rules about pension funds and how much of a film’s financing has to be put in escrow to pay actors before filming can begin, and so on. This is an area I know next to nothing about, so if anyone can suggest a source for this kind of information, I’d be grateful.