Author: arnab

napoleon dynamite

anyone else seen this? watched it a couple of nights ago. don’t really know what to make of it, but i did enjoy it. like something todd solondz might make if he wasn’t a miserable git–skirts the lines between caricature, affectionate identification and satire, seems to cross them from time to time but never quite falls completely into any of those modes. i wish i had more interesting things to say about it.

i have now seen two movies made by people from idaho: this and “twin falls idaho”. that was a non-sequitur.

festen

we dogme 95’ers never use the english translation of a non-english film’s title to refer to it, no sir.

i don’t know that i understand what all the dogme criteria are but this cheery little danish film about incest, child-molestation and cake baking (can you guess which one of those it’s not really about?) is pretty damn good. i don’t want to say too much about it yet. what would be cool would be if everyone watched it and then we could discuss it–as opposed to my completely dominating your experience of the film with my superior analysis (a state of affairs that would probably violate the dogme manifesto). so watch the film first and then i’ll dominate you with my superior analysis.

oscar predictions?

we’ve barely watched any of the nominees in the major categories, but if “ray” is nominated for best picture it must mean it is a bad year. i’m currently going with “million dollar baby” as best picture and scorcese finally getting his best director. i think foxx will get best actor, thereby really pissing off both tom cruise and will smith. for best actress i think there will be an upset and the woman from the new mike leigh will win (and thereby assure herself a lifetime of roles in very un-mike leigh’ish quaint english movies made for the american arthouse circuit). the category that confuses me is best documentary feature as it appears, going entirely off of titles of nominees, that no holocaust or civil rights themed docs have been nominated (though i suppose “the story of the weeping camel” may yet turn out to be one or the other)–are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the academy’s approach to documentary award-giving?

but these are my current picks–as oscar night approaches i will doubtless fine-tune them before once again crushing all opponents in various online and offline pools.

watched but as yet unblogged

in reverse order of viewing:

1. “the business of fancydancing”–promoted this one after mike’s endorsement. we liked it a lot (maybe sunhee will post her thoughts as well). some of the acting was a little amateurish (a lot of first-time actors apparently) but the lead was great, as was the writing generally. structurally very interesting as well–it felt like what it was: a film based on poems rather than stories or a novel. i also liked how it avoided resolutions, not only of seymour and aristotle’s relationship, but also of the question of seymour’s relationship to the rez (in his life and his art).

Continue reading watched but as yet unblogged

ray

we watched this last night. i found it to be curiously uninvolving. the parts that worked best were the musical performances (with ray charles singing). the rest was mostly trite psychologizing, shuffling around questions of history, and the occasional quincy jones sighting (which i think was supposed to stand in for charles’ relationship with 50s/60s jazz). and apparently there is nothing to say about ray charles after the 60s. there’s been a lot of talk about foxx’s performance; it is mostly a series of very good ray charles impressions mixed in with some scenes of very good acting–but i thought the impressions distracted (though the big-time critics disagree). too bad belushi died before getting to do a joe cocker biopic.

since this has been nominated for a best picture oscar i am forced to rate it “overrated”.

sky captain and the world of tomorrow

watched this last night. the first 20 minutes are just dazzling. it captures the feel of a comic book much better than any movie in its genre, even if on a small’ish tv it probably doesn’t look as good as it did in the theaters. however, the story and so forth aren’t very much better than another recent installment in this genre, “the league of extraordinary gentlemen”, though this is wittier. giovanni ribisi, who i like a lot, does a serviceable supporting turn but the appeal of angelina jolie and gwyneth paltrow continues to baffle me. and is there nobody other than jolie who can play englishwomen in action films?

technical stuff: on the one hand we have something like “terminator 3” in which computer generated monsters and machines interact with the world of humans; in this we have humans being digitized and inserted into a world of computer generated machines, animals and sets. both kinds cost many, many millions to make (i believe this was $70 million)–but neither is as much fun as “raiders of the lost ark”. i thought i had a point when i started that last sentence but i see it might resemble one of roger ebert’s so i’m just going to back away from it.

fucking netflix

nikki noted in a comment on “shaun of the dead” that the fact that they got it off netflix while it remains on “very long wait” status for me must mean they’re better than me. possibly, but what it definitely means is that you don’t rent very many dvd’s from netflix in a month. if you rent too many movies from netflix you will run into service issues. i’ve noticed of late that more movies i want remain longer on “very long wait” or “long wait” status. and very often movies get shipped the day after they receive the previous movie from me, even though my top choices are “available now”. i wrote to netflix customer service about this and this is their response (the more annoying bits are in bold):

Continue reading fucking netflix

strayed

we actually watched this a few nights ago. an andre techine film–the only other things i’ve seen by him are “wild reeds” and “my favorite season”, both of which i liked a lot, and possibly more than this. but this is quite good too. france, ww-2 right before the armistice with germany. a young mother and her children are escaping from paris when their refugee convoy is bombed (a truly horrific scene but not quite as traumatic as the black and white footage of real carnage that opens the film). they fall in with a strange young man and proceed to sit out the war for a little while. not a whole lot happens but you stay tense throughout. people connect, don’t connect and there’s no real resolution.

emanuelle beart plays the mother and the makeup people fail gallantly at trying to make her seem plain.

equilibrium

why the hell did i watch this?

apparently in the future high and low emotions will be outlawed and chemically prevented so as to prevent war and crime. that’s all well and good but why must the new cops who enforce this have to be named grammaton clerics? and why is everybody in resistance movements in these movies always so morose? whatever happened to the jolly french resistance with their jaunty berets and their devil-may-care attitude?

whatever happened to john sayles?

we watched silver city some nights ago. it was interesting enough but pitched almost entirely like a lecture meets low-key agit-prop. sayles still writes interesting dialog but his films are growing increasingly tedious. it is almost like he doesn’t trust his audience to connect the dots anymore. and the principal casting is seriously off in this film. whatever happened to the man who wrote and directed passion fish, matewan, lone star and men with guns? even the flawed limbo was much better than this–actually i quite liked that movie.

does anyone know how he finances his films? i think it might have been the much maligned roger ebert who once noted that sayles’ career, quietly, regularly making interesting movies for 20 years now, makes you look askance at scorcese and lee’s complaints about hollywood not allowing room for interesting films.