The Human Ear

Stranger Than Kindness

2009-12-01T21:12:00.000-08:00

The restful, sultry, and placid music of Nathan Larson and Nina Persson materializes during the start of two key, defining character relationships. A causal but anxious interaction between student and teacher sparks in a bar. An awkward yet darkly funny salutation between filmmaker and idler takes place in a high school bathroom. Such begins the trailer for Todd Solondz’s Storytelling (2001), a montage of sequences that utilizes the film’s mise-en-scene, sound, and interspersed promotional techniques to convey themes of suburban disillusionment, the prevalence of public opinion, and objectification.

Storytelling’s mise-en-scene, as presented in the trailer, permeates the audience with a sense of the characters’ class distinctions, environs, and relationship dynamics. Vi (Selma Blair), a downtrodden college student, gradually inches closer to her creative writing professor, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), in a crowded bar. Garnished with a trendy leather jacket, a chain necklace, and a gaudy pink haircut, Vi is visually distinguished as a fashionable young lady. But the nervousness in her voice only adds trouble to the equation, as her often subjugated persona is clearly obligated to permanently respect any authority. The trepidation she feels in awaiting her professor’s response to her greeting comes full circle as she does not hesitate to transition from a smile to a look of worry once she has spoken. Mr. Scott’s appearance and behavior establishes him as an influence who carries clout, a judgmental professional with the duty to ignite dwindling, evaporating eminence within the minds of his students. Seated in the corner of a booth near the back of the bar, overshadowed by a crimson red wall, Mr. Scott is clad in an intimidating black turtleneck sweater and a dark brown tweed jacket. At first appearing ignorant of his student’s apprehensive approach, Mr. Scott lays his cigarette down next to his liquor, and articulates “Hello, Vi” in a completely monotone voice, devoid of any emotional subtext. Mr. Scott’s pressurizing nature has yet to be subdued by a more authoritative personality.

As Vi and Mr. Scott walk through a suburban neighborhood, eventually reaching the latter’s house, the lighting of the environment, paired with the actors’ poignant expressiveness, demonstrates the hierarchy of power within the context of their questionably precarious connection. A streetlight behind Mr. Scott begins as a dim bulb, but accentuates enough to become a blinding distraction for the audience once the duo steps closer and the camera dollies backward. The growing intensity of the light behind the professor adds more tension to the structure of his relationship with Vi, as it acts as a metaphor for his impending sexual perversity. At the same time, however, Vi walks with a cold, pokerfaced glance that illustrates her distracted mind, meandering through the possibilities and outcomes of the situation.

The trailer next catches a glimpse of their proceeding evening when Vi begins to remove her clothing in front of a reclined, tranquil Mr. Scott. The professor’s somewhat unapproachable home (evident through his closed curtains, solitary lit lamp, and plain bedspread) reflects an environment of a man whose shy lifestyle results in repressed anger toward his students’ ineptitude and maladroit storytelling abilities. After the cut to the close-up of his face, the audience sees that Mr. Scott’s bedside tables are flooded with dozens of scripts, stories, and other creative writing texts. This is a man whose life revolves around writing, which includes his own and that of others. His deepest fantasies are not evident in a classroom environment, as he lives in a world of fiction. Instead, this man of few words retreats to narratives of imagination to saturate his desires, establishing an eerie nightmare of disenchantment with his suburban society. “I don’t know about what happened, Vi. Because once you start writing, it all becomes fiction,” he announces in the classroom, presumably the day after their sexual encounter.

The cathartic moment of the Storytelling trailer reveals the happenings in Mr. Scott’s bedroom that night. As the daunting teacher lustfully gapes offscreen, Vi walks toward the wall, reluctantly presses her hands against the surface, and bends over slightly. Vi’s lack of a wardrobe and the dim, natural lighting against the wall fashion the racy sexual connotations of this moment, demonstrating the somatic, carnal pleasures constantly spiraling through Mr. Scott’s mind. Themes of “consent, guilt, humiliation, black sexual stereotypes and exploitation, for starters” run rampant through the minds of audiences during this brief segment of the trailer (McCarthy).

The final sequence of the trailer spots Vi back in her creative writing class, sitting among her peers. They are revealing their harsh opinions of her story. For one who has seen the film in whole, it is noted that her story is a play-by-play reflection of her dalliance with Mr. Scott. “It’s unbelievable!” “It’s cliché!” “It’s disgusting!” her classmates shriek. Each of the three respective students is dressed in an unadventurous, conservative fashion. Sweaters and button-down shirts reveal their innermost passions for confined and highly structured writing, which in turn demonstrates their own set boundaries of what is and is not decent. “But it happened!” Vi screams, defending her story. Once again shown with her flashy pink haircut and a V-neck t-shirt, Vi is evidently the only person in the class who is not confining to the norms of her suburban environment’s dress code. Her independence and rebelliousness is reflected through her outward appearance.

An audience’s first impression of Scooby (Mark Webber) is arguably not a favorable one. First seen sitting atop a sink in a high school mens’ bathroom, with reddened eyes (suggesting marijuana use), wet, shaggy hair, and a sloppy wardrobe, Scooby is unquestionably an unmotivated slacker. He meets Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), a clumsy, socially ungraceful documentary filmmaker standing at the urinal. Toby’s wrinkled shirt, receding hairline, colossal glasses, and cheap-looking plaid sports jacket do not benefit his already ham-fisted personality. For an audience, the implications of a looming relationship between Toby and Scooby could potentially include an unrequited objectification of the latter. The teenager’s clueless nature (“Are you a pervert?”) is met with a polite correction that could actually be perceived as superficial and arrogant. Toby’s attempt at dressing nicely, juxtaposed with Scooby’s slipshod appearance, demonstrates a hierarchy over the trailer’s Generation Y character population.

The trailer’s next voyeuristic moment of Scooby’s routine parades his daily life in an upper- to middle-class family that, through the set and prop decoration, evokes a reclusive teenager’s personality. As Scooby’s father (John Goodman) shouts upstairs for him to come join the rest of the family for dinner, the audience can spot the façade of a nuclear family covering the reality of the situation—a grim, shallow atmosphere in which the parents think they care for their children’s well-being, but instead are focused on maintaining their own social status. The glossy dinner table is adorned with delectable vegetables, fancy silverware, and elaborate dishes. Scooby’s mother (Julie Hagerty) and father were more intent on building a visual representation of their social class than they were about nurturing their children.

The melodic, reposeful track (titled “Fiction”) by Nathan Larson and Nina Persson playing throughout the trailer enraptures the audience with its innocent charm, even though it is ironically placed over a montage of suburban discomforts and social disasters. The minimalist, synthesized swells of electronic bells and chimes may call to mind the image of a utopian environment. However, the bells should do no less to the audience than to act as an alarm of approaching anxiety. A two-minute track of a ringing church bell would perhaps be more forward in explaining the precaution audiences should take before stepping into the theater to see Storytelling, as the inevitable corruptness of modern public opinion infuses the frames of Solondz’s film. But the decision to utilize the pleasant-sounding bells of Larson and Persson creates a distilled illusion that only a mild fraction of suburbia is skewered in the film’s context. After all, that’s exactly what the characters in Storytelling want to believe.

The sprinkled bits of text within the trailer are unlike those found in trailers for most of Hollywood’s blockbusters. The text in Storytelling’s trailer does not aggrandize any highly-paid stars, set up a watered-down narration of the plot, or emphasize it as a genre picture. Instead, the text markets the film to the arthouse crowd, a selection of audiences dedicated to more sophisticated, intellectual film studies. “Cannes Film Festival – Official Selection – Un Certain Regard” embellishes the first frame of text. For most, if not all, cineastes, this announcement should stand out as a assertion of respectability. After her wonderful experience at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Entertainment Weekly writer Lisa Schwarzbaum felt “refreshed by so many strong, artful, auteurist voices,” including Todd Solondz, whose “meditation on the futility of family, creativity, intellectual pursuit, racial understanding, and the entire state of New Jersey” generated an inventive suburban satire that respectably followed his “nowhere-to-hide misery of Happiness” (Schwarzbaum). The trailer’s second bit of text proudly displays the film as an “Official Selection [of the] New York Film Festival.” Though a non-competitive festival, the event is universally considered to be one of the most important film festivals in the world. The trailer’s text soon jumps from announcements of its film festival history to snippets of critical praise. “Genuinely pleasing and awfully funny!” wrote A.O. Scott of the New York Times. The transition between film festival announcement and words from film critics from respected publications demonstrates the fact that Storytelling could easily be marketed to an educated audience.

The trailer announces the film as the next work “from the director of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse.” The former film of the listed two was highly respected among the arthouse crowd, as well as by critics. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert selected Happiness as number five of his top ten films of 1998. Audiences who carefully read and acknowledged this bit of text, and familiarized themselves with the name Todd Solondz, probably remembered that Happiness garnered heavy controversy due to its sexual themes, initially resulting in an NC-17 rating. Solondz’s films, while truthful social satires, were somewhat notorious for hosting taboo material that did neither excited nor enticed mainstream audiences. Viewers of the Storytelling trailer knew that Solondz had not yet become a household name due to his confrontational and provocative subject matter. As Lisa Kernan notes in her book Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers, “theatrical trailers…make assumptions about their audiences” (Kernan 34). The editors behind the Storytelling trailer made the assumption that its potential audience was not necessarily looking for big names, but more for an auteur to helm the social satire at play. Luckily for Solondz, the audiences at the theaters that showcased the trailer for Storytelling were able to connect with his past works, both through his engaging narratives and intriguing thematic material.

The trailer for Storytelling “indicts sycophantic critique in creative writing classes on American college campuses” and simultaneously assumes the position as a bully toward a moderately wealthy family’s superficial relationship around the dinner table and with the rest of society (Metz 120). Director Todd Solondz’s well-versed history and experience with social satire returns in full form with the darkly comedic, yet ultimately honest trailer for his fourth feature film. Through quick glimpses of characters stubborn, yielding, frightening, and relaxing, Storytelling’s trailer catches a quick look at the distorted horror of the failure of the American dream.

Works Cited
Kernan, Lisa. “Trailers: A Cinema of [Coming] Attractions.” Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2004.

McCarthy, Todd. Rev. of Storytelling, by Todd Solondz. Variety (2001).

Metz, Walter. “Allen's Melindas and Todd's Stories: Complex Film Narratives in the Light of Literary Modernism." Film Criticism 31 No. 1/2 Fall/Winter (2006): 107-31

Schwarzbaum, Lisa. “Cannes Hardly Wait.” Entertainment Weekly. 1 June, 2001.

Unnatural Selection

2009-11-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

The fusion of George Tomasini's powerful continuity editing and mise-en-scene (particularly an isolated setting and character-specific costume design) aid Hitchcock's The Birds to convey a cynical message about the weakening value of the human race in the larger, organic universe.

The first edit in The Birds, a fade-in to a busy San Francisco street, immediately evokes the concept of the gradual rise of technology in the modern world. The seemingly natural transition into the film’s narrative storyline is in fact a grandiose statement on humanity. A milieu depicting the rise of industrialization, capitalism, and technology in 1963, and the resulting abandonment of all things natural, slowly envelops the screen through a fade-in from an empty black. After Melanie (Tippi Hedren) crosses the street, a large flock of birds is seen hovering above the city. The edit to this insert shot suggests that the natural world has been physically displaced by the technical advancements made by humanity in the twentieth century. No longer can nature’s creations coexist with man-made materials, so instead, they must subjugate the artificial.

When Melanie drives from San Francisco to Bodega Bay, swift jump cuts from the interior of her car to the landscape view of the northern California coastline emphasize the insignificance of humanity from an environmental perspective. While her mission, to deliver the lovebirds to Mitch at his weekend home, may seem like a pivotal priority for the film’s story and her character, the multiple establishing shots of the landscape mislead the audience, creating the idea that the edits simply suggest the passing of both time and distance. However, the narrative is interspersed with moments that insinuate the minuscule significance humans have in the world. Juxtaposed with a medium shot of Melanie driving, a quick edit to a bird’s-eye view of the coastline leaves the narrative for a brief moment, and observes the larger universe, to see that Melanie is one of many insignificant human beings soon to be ravaged upon by nature.

The scene in which the birds attack the children at the birthday party has a pace of continuity editing akin to that of a seagull taking flight and flapping its wings. What begins with a brief four shots quickly escalates into a nightmare of approximately thirty individual shots edited together to generate feelings of shock and terror. As the number of shots and edits increases, the number of birds in the scene grows to an almost incomprehensibly large amount. The average shot length in this sequence is perhaps somewhere between one and two seconds. Within its time span, this entire sequence spawns the requisite scares to create a sense of dread that manipulates the audience’s feelings toward the protagonists’ futures. The birds (and all other elements of nature, presumably) are infinitely in control over the humans.

When Lydia (Jessica Tandy) finds the dead body in the corner of the bedroom, the heavily pronounced edits astonish the audience with the discovery while simultaneously acting as a medium to explain the cause of death. In rebellion of the editing with the conventional thirty degree rule, the image of the corpse jumps from a long shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up, with no insert shots in between zooms. The tactic of gradually zooming in to the hollowed face of the victim rationalizes Lydia’s aghast response. In addition, it helps revitalize the scenario of the death, as the quick zooming is very similar to a bird pecking with its beak. While Lydia is shaken up by the sight of a dead body, the audience concurrently suffers from the subconsciously affecting editing and truly frightening scene of a murder.

As Melanie waits for an opportunity to speak to Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), the consistent editing between her obliviousness and the birds’ landing on the jungle gym succeeds at cornering the audience into a state of helplessness. The overwhelmingly increasing number of birds becomes too much for any one person to fathom. The exposure that an audience may feel from this scene is in fact a direct parallel to the film’s message. Nature is in such a prime position to annihilate the flaws and wrongdoings of humanity, yet those who are soon to be victimized are not in the opportune position to know about their fates. While the shot of the almost motionless birds scattered amongst the playground remains stagnant and ominous, the edits back to Melanie smoking and fidgeting create a feeling of tension. The editing strategy used in this scene also assaults the narrative with dramatic irony, a very traditional element of the horror genre.

Bodega Bay, the primary setting of The Birds, is located sixty miles north of San Francisco, and is more or less cut off from any major city. Its remote location allows an unfortunate impending vulnerability, something that would not happen in a busy metropolitan area, like New York or Los Angeles. The first attack by the birds, in the middle of the open water as Melanie returns to the dock, is perhaps one of the most opportune locations to attack a prey. The birds’ attack upon the birthday party exhibits the exact kind of fascination with an isolated setting that is epitomized through their other assaults. The house, certainly not surrounded by many neighbors, overlooks the tranquil bay with no disturbances or urban landscapes. The birds chose a target that was just as exposed as Melanie’s boat. The scene at the remote schoolhouse also demonstrates the helplessness within the small town setting of the film. Twenty some-odd children led by one adult inside one building is another apt spot for the birds to attack, as they would more than likely be able to escape any sort of defensive strike.

The individual costumes worn by the characters throughout the film reflect upon the stereotypes and components of diversity within the human race’s diverse personalities. While in Bodega Bay, Melanie wears a potentially expensive outfit: a nice green dress, an expensive fur coat, a pearl necklace, and brown suede gloves. Melanie’s garb during the film display her luxurious lifestyle as a wealthy San Francisco socialite. Her extravagance shows that she has no apparent regard for those with a lesser social status than she. As the film’s narrative progresses, Melanie’s clothing remains intact. It is not until she enters the bird-swarmed room at the Brenner household that her physical being is corrupted by the natural world. The birds tear and peck at her clothing and hair, making it a mess of unbelievable proportions. From this scene until the final shot of the film, Melanie is in a trance, a state of shock. Melanie’s narcissistic personality and obsession with self-image finally comes back to haunt her as she suffers from nature’s vengeance.

Mitch (Rod Taylor) changes his wardrobe during the course of the film. In his first scene, at the bird shop, he is dressed very sharply in a suit, complimented with a fedora. His clean and sensible demeanor is accompanied accordingly by his appearance. While in Boedga Bay, Mitch is seen wearing a pair of casual slacks and a cardigan sweater. Once again, his charming personality is on display through his impressive sense of style. As the bird attacks become increasingly vicious, Mitch’s clothing becomes disheveled and dirty. His attire in this context stands out as a prime representation of the torment from which humanity suffers when nature finds it at its weakest.

The various editing techniques and aspects of physical production associated with The Birds helped to build a terrifying, suspenseful wake-up call to the world. Humanity has been taking dangerous risks and leaps in technology, politics, and society for thousands of years. But it would not be until nature turns the tables and pinpoints humanity’s weaknesses that a change of pace can be acknowledged.

Human After All

2009-10-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

Harris Savides’ cinematography in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) varies, in terms of the physical nature, within the context of each character’s actions throughout the film. All examples come full circle in developing an argumentative thesis about how each character struggles to deal with peers and their respective influences, whether they be negative or positive. Emotional dysfunction and instability, power and confidence, trepidation and isolation, voyeurism and curiosity—different roles and responsibilities are presented through the character-specific camerawork within each of the film’s segments. The audience is able to acknowledge both the implicit and explicit feelings of every onscreen individual.

Building on themes drafted in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Van Sant’s social commentary presents a troubled high school environment that is a packed sardine can of students. Frustrated with their limitations and unable to explore the world, the teens eventually explode into their own when the opportunity knocks, either through violence, in the case of Alex and Eric, or compassion for one another, as with John and his father. The multiple close-up shots generate an uncomfortable closeness, while the long shots forcibly corner the audience into an emotionally distant and helpless position. Through the use of diverse shot lengths, Sarris and Van Sant convey the dramatic tribulations of each personality, including the resulting behavior and their consequences.

John, the arguably somber teenager with a sheen of blond hair, is immediately presented with a problematic paternal relationship. First seen clumsily driving drunk down a suburban road through a bird’s-eye-view long shot, John’s father is not the ideal role model. His introduction establishes the awkward and irresponsible connection between father and son. After John coaxes his dad to switch to the passenger seat, the camera is placed on the hood of the car, peering through the windshield. The car starts, and the kinetic energy forces the camera to shake violently. This subtle addition to the visual display of these two seemingly normal characters is in fact a rather big step; it concludes that their rapport is terribly unstable.

The long tracking shot following John into the school similarly explores his dissatisfaction with his struggle to find a connection with his father. Primarily relying on the consistent use of a medium shot, we eventually arrive on John making a call on a payphone. On the glass, the reflection of the car parked next to the curb is prominent. John’s sincere sympathy is forcibly obstructed by his father’s adamancy of independence. The image of John’s father pacing back and forth acts as a reminder (for both him and the audience) that the threat of a distressed relationship is wafting through the milieu.

After John sees Alex and Eric enter the school in their military garb, a tracking shot follows him as he jogs around the school warning people not to enter. The medium length of the shot accentuates the urgency of his concern for others. The scene continues minutes later as John is seen watching people exit the building. It is at this moment when he reconnects with his father. The school, now with smoke rising from the building, is framed in between father and son. The relationship between the two is no longer an internal disdain over domestic stresses, but is now a mutual alarm over the safety of the school.

Elias, the photo student, captures authentic personalities as they hide behind facades and masks of distortion that obscure their real intent and behavior. In his first scene, a minute-long take establishes his genuine qualities as he asks a couple to pose in some photos. Elias is in the shot for its entire run, while his subjects enter and exit the frame, parting to continue with their impure lives. The long shot that sets Elias at a distance amongst the autumn scenery escorts the audience to an atmosphere of helplessness, where all that is possible is to see real life. For the direct objects of the scene, however, the audience frowns upon their confidence in feigning roles for a photo. Elias’s significance in Elephant, through the cinematography, is to explore the lack of unadulterated teenage life at the high school.

As Elias traverses through the hallway, the camera rests on a close-up shot that distinctly pronounces his gait as compared to that of his peers. As Elias’s life is in a forward motion, everyone else seems distracted and hindered by a burden of a social life. Elias is not caught up in gossiping about relationships. Instead, he focuses on his art – exposing the truth about how people want to be different. The long, two-shot of Elias snapping John’s photograph in the hallway highlights the landscape of the high school locale, in which most of the students are yearning for a change. John poses in a suggestively sexual manner, completely outside the boundaries of his previously shown traits, explored in the scenes with his father. Elephant’s camerawork helps to utilize Elias’s camera as an opportunistic window. It is a medium through which the audience catches a glimpse of the source of negative and positive responses to frustration. Elias even snaps a quick picture of Alex and Eric in the library, just before their killing spree begins.

The visual relationship between Alex and Eric emphasizes the anxiety and eventual aggression that permeates the walls of the high school. As Alex plays piano in his room, the camera is placed above his shoulders, giving the audience a view of a stranger whose appreciation for classical music generates an uncomfortable, threatening demeanor, as he violently lashes at the sheets of notes once he has finished. The medium shots of the two boys at the breakfast table, leveled at a seated position, takes advantage of the inability to display the parents’ faces. À la a Charlie Brown cartoon, the lack of a substantial identity within the adult community in the film provides more importance and significance for the teenagers. The audience can also recognize the visual irony of the scene. While Alex’s mother trusts her son and Eric with the responsibilities of young adults, she is not seen in a view that is responsible enough to establish any sort of authority.

The low-angle shot from the perspective of the school’s map generates a sense of overbearing power in the hands of Alex and Eric. The unfortunate victim’s last image was that of its predators. This sequence eventually leads up to their voyage to the school by car. The camera is placed inside the vehicle, by the back windshield, staring out toward the front. Juxtaposed with the shot of John’s father entering the passenger seat, the image of Alex and Eric hopping in the car establishes their then-controlled relationship, as well as the fluidity of their plan. The camera remains stagnant for the rest of the car ride, approximately one minute. What an audience can infer from this sequence of unbroken silence and no camera movement is that the numerous incidences which created pent-up anger for Alex and Eric have finally generated an unstoppable force of determination.

Elephant’s cinematography is a haunting factor of its production, and perhaps its most important one. It utilizes both a heightened feeling of dramatic suspense and a heavy dose of sympathetic emotionality. Though they meticulously investigated each character’s inner dimensions, Savides and Van Sant were careful not to exploit their creations. Staying true to what is real in life, and not lurking around corners of suspension of disbelief, the two were able to construct a near-perfect design of psychology and pathos in the blood-stained, enflamed, irreversibly dangerous hallways of a high school.

Five musicals that should be films - by Paige Lurie

2009-08-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

5. In the Heights

The story of friends stuck in the Washington Heights with ambitions to go further than any one has before, go back to where the family once came, or just escape what they’ve been in all their life. I can imagine the trailer now…the opening rap plays over the whole thing showing the grittiness of the Heights and the brilliant dancing this musical requires. It is great for the pre-teen to mid twenties crowed because it is a ‘young’ musical, but adults would enjoy it too. Filming in the actually heights and using unknowns would be a wise choice because it would add to the authenticity of the story.

4. Into the Woods

No the Broadway recording does not count as a musical. Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stock, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunezal share the stage with a Baker and his Wife trying to find a slipper as pure as gold (Cinderella), a cow as white as milk (Jack and the Bean Stock), a cape as read as blood (Little Red Riding Hood) and hair as yellow as corn (Rapunezal) to reverse the curse of infertility from their neighbor, the witch. As a movie this can be made into a dark film, a family friendly tale filled with even more fairy tale characters, or some where in between. The setting could be the woods setting, or a large city. Any way it could be a great film.

3. Spring Awakening

Though it has become one of those musicals filled with fan girls who just “LOVE musicals!!!!!111!!”although they’ve only seen this one, Spring Awakening is still a wonderfully love story. The relationships between the young characters are honesty, the songs are hip, and it would be the best “R-rated” musical since Burton’s Sweeny Todd (there is no way around that rating). As long as they don’t cast Efron as Melchoir it could be great.

2. Parade

This would have two big plusses for me; it is by my favorite composer, Jason Robert Brown, and it is based on a true story. After the murder and assumed rape of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta, Georgia, Leo Frank is wrongly and unfairly accused. The case rode on two facts, that he was the only of the factory where she worked and her body was found, and Frank is Jewish. But the story is also a love story, about Frank and his wife finding their love for each other through these troubles. The themes of moral and the dangerous of assumption are still relevant today and the songs are a joy.

1. Ragtime

Based on the novel of the same title, this musical weaves fiction and reality to tell three interconnecting stories about the turn of the 20th century; the upper middle class family realizing what is important in America; the black man being mistreated while trying to protect his son and the baby’s mother, and a Jewish immigrant striving for a new life for his daughter. These characters, and historical figures interact with period appropriate music. The show is grand enough to be presented accurately on film and has many wonderfully cameo appearance and many leads to give it a great modern cast. The only problem is that it’s on the long side – a deterrent to much of the movie-going public. Though stuff does blow up, which is often a plus.

Review: "World's Greatest Dad" (2009)

2009-08-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Good can come from bad. Two wrongs make a right. We learn from our mistakes. You’ve heard it all before from those proverbs on your popsicle sticks. But once in a while, the greatest life experiences can come about due to the most humiliating and simultaneously tragic of situations. With World’s Greatest Dad, writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait approaches every ounce of incendiary humor with a healthy dose of pathos for each character, puts them in a wrestling ring to combat their flaws, and ends with an explosion of ironic liveliness.

Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) has been struggling to manage a career as a novelist while teaching an embarrassingly unpopular high school poetry course. His son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) is a perverted jackass whose only passion in life is too racy for others to discover. Lance is convinced that he is the ringmaster for the circus and believes he’s treating Kyle to a good life. Kyle feels like his territorial bubble is being penetrated by a Boeing 747. Poor guys. They don’t know one another well enough to comprehend the gravity of the shamefully awkward tragedy that will befall in the Clayton household.

After an accident, the social calamity within the school’s community spirals into an undiscovered territory that Lance utilizes to get noticed. What he learns from this experience is the lifestyle of non-stop celebrity madness. People begin to notice everything about him. The seats in his poetry class fill up and students stand against the walls. But what is the cost of the hype? By taking advantage of the household catastrophe, Lance unfortunately bit off more than he could chew, and is in desperate need of a Heimlich maneuver.

The film’s radical humor is truly an experience for all tastes. Moments range from hilariously jagged one-liners that teeter on the edge of stirring up riotous behavior, to shockingly funny, while also terrifying, consequences from the characters’ inane decisions. Never is suspension of disbelief a requisite for the audience. The film works because it is real.

It takes a lot of guts for a modern dark comedy to really work. World’s Greatest Dad has more nerve to eviscerate the life lessons given to us than would a Rabbi on PCP. Take a deep breath and see this movie. But if you’re like Kyle Clayton, and you think that “movies are for losers and art fags,” then you might need to get a real slap in the face to confront reality before you learn about the existence of popularity contests and legacies.

For the Young Sophisticate

2009-07-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

The man draped in a trenchcoat shown in the above image, taken on the set of The Last Laugh, changed the public’s idea of art. “He was a delicate artist, forever negotiating with industry and society, and tolerating pulp fiction in the service of getting the movie camera to fulfill its destiny,” wrote The Guardian film critic Michael Atkinson. German Expressionist director F.W. Murnau’s body of work was a powerhouse of zeal, emotional resonance, and aesthetical beauty.

Murnau’s life before his filmmaking career is not usual for a designer of gothic splendor. “Born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany, on Dec. 28, 1888, Murnau studied art and the history of literature at the University of Heidelberg. He took the name Murnau from a town in Germany” (King). A combat pilot during World War I, his college studies did not hold any real significance in his life until he began working with actors instead of the institution of war (King). Afterward, he started making films in 1919.

In 1921, Murnau filmed Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. An adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with names and places changed to avoid lawsuits, Nosferatu starred Max Schreck as Graf Orlack (representative of Count Dracula). The film’s subtitle was not nominal. The cast and crew worked together as a symphony, but instead of a mellifluous voice of music, they assembled a visual masterpiece of unrelenting terror and emotion. “[Murnau] and Schreck presented the vampire not as dangerous seducer, but as vile rapist, your worst nightmare made real,” wrote critic Brian Pendreigh of The Guardian.

Rather than focusing on the vampire’s romantic lust, as seen in Stoker’s novel, Murnau spotlighted the horrifying apprehension and dread wafting through the film’s central European setting. The use of shadows, especially the Noferatu’s, aided to the film’s shock value (Nosferatu_674_05). Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times acknowledged, in his 1997 Great Movies article on the film, that “much of [the film] is shot in shadow. The corners of the screen are used more than is ordinary; characters lurk or cower there…it's a rule of composition that tension is created when the subject of a shot is removed from the center of the frame” (Ebert).

Murnau further exemplified his artistry through his staging and blocking of the sets. Charlie Keil, in his article on silent cinema in Schrimer’s Encyclopedia of Film, wrote that “Murnau poses [Schreck] in front of archways…or uses shadows to further extend the already grotesque features of the character’s body.” This was new for a German Expressionist film, since most had relied on the set’s design, as opposed to the actor’s placement in the environment. Ebert noted that Murnau’s revolutionary editing style helped “to introduce the montage.” Sequences were edited to parallel each other’s themes. While the vampire approaches the mainland by ship, the hero attempts to find his wife. Nosferatu set standards for today’s horror films, and even ones for other genres.

Just five years after filming Nosferatu, Murnau tackled perhaps his career’s most ambitious project. He adapted Faust, the tragic play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His last German film, Faust was a passion project for Murnau, and ended up resonating in the minds of future filmmakers. Similar to his style as seen in Nosferatu, Murnau continued to work with framing sequences in the screen’s corners. “Long before deep focus, he was creating double-exposures…where a crowd of villagers in the foreground is echoed by faraway crowds in the upper corners” (Ebert). Murnau was completely fascinated by the ideas of surreal and dreamlike worlds while making Faust. “The world of Faust is never intended to define a physical universe, but is a landscape of nightmares” (Ebert).

Critics and filmmakers still hold reverence for the works of F.W. Murnau. Oscar-winning director Federico Fellini had, at one point, “yet to see a film of Murnau,” and “for this reason, many do not consider me an intellectual…I agree with them” (Chandler 268). Sadly, Murnau’s promising career was cut short after a plethora of twenty-one films in a twelve year span. He was killed in a car accident in 1931 at the age of 42. “The wreckage was so awful that they had to pry Murnau out of the car, off of the body of his fourteen-year-old chauffeur” (Behlendorf).

Murnau’s cinematic legacy reigns transcendent. “The greatest master of horror in the silent era was a cheerful man, much loved by his collaborators, even though they might lose consciousness from time to time while enveloped in clouds of steam or surrounded by tongues of flame” (Ebert). Though Murnau was certainly fascinated by the horror genre, he had a deepened understanding of the human spirit and nature, and he knew how to display life’s passions through his own – film. “[He] revealed that moving the camera in conjunction with action and locale was an act of almost magical force, an unspoken, majestic poetry that still seems to be one of the form's most sublime achievements” (Atkinson).

Works Cited

Atkinson, Michael. “A Bloody Disgrace.” The Guardian. 26 January 2001. 18 May 2009 .

Brownlow, Kevin. David Lean. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Chandler, Charlotte. I, Fellini. New York: Random, 1995.

Ebert, Roger. "Faust." Great Movies: Faust. 18 May 2009 < aid="/20050508/REVIEWS08/505080301/1023">.

Ebert, Roger. “Nosferatu.” Great Movies: Nosferatu. 18 May 2009

Keil, Charlie. "Silent Cinema." Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. 1947.

King, Susan. "Out of the Shadow of ‘Nosferatu’." Los Angeles Times. Calendar: 4 January 2001. 18 May 2009 <>

entertainment/ca-8053>.

McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang - The Nature of the Beast - A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Nosferatu_674_05. 1922. Friederich Wilhelm Murnau Siftung. 18 May 2009 .

Pendreigh, Brian. “Back from the Dead.” The Guardian. 4 July 2000. 18 May 2009 .

Michael Bay's Juxtaposed, Lofty Ambitions:

2009-06-03T00:33:00.000-07:00

Transformers (2007) - Michael Bay describes the film as "Shichinin no samurai [Seven Samurai] (1954) fused with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and charged with 85 mph fight scenes."

Tranformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Michael Bay described the tone of the film as "Ben-Hur (1959) fused with Apocalypse Now (1979)."

It's Like That.

2009-05-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

People I know will willingly go see purposeless junk like Twilight and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. This has to stop. Rococo art—“art” that has no intellectual purpose, but is instead available to the human eye to display frivolity and wealth—has resurrected. This summer, instead of rushing out to the local cineplex and pouring your money into overproduced garbage, stay at home and watch a film that will actually do something meaningful to your life.

Why are so many people, in this day and age, reluctant to watch films that have aged over ten years? To this same sample size, the concept of black and white cinema is out of the question. Foreign and arthouse films get little to no attention either, as the teenagers would rather flock to a mall and sing along with Hannah Montana: The Movie. To what avail will these ninety minutes of entertainment sustain your requirement for the weekend, month, or even the year? Controversial film theorist Ray Carney writes, "Shallow works of art, like shallow people, yield their meanings in a minute, but you must spend time with deep ones." Most likely, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which you probably planned on seeing this summer, wasn’t pitched as an emotionally or intellectually demanding experience, but rather, was an exercise in providing twenty audiences a day with ninety minutes of entertainment, only to be forgotten by those same audiences a month later.

Dan Jones, an interdisciplinary scholar who obtained a master’s degree in film studies at Boston University and now specializes in film and literature, recently wrote that “Most of the unique, independent voices of American film rarely have a chance to be heard.” In a review for the recent film Goodbye Solo, Roger Ebert proclaimed Ramin Bahrani as “the new great American director.” How many Piper readers have heard of either Goodbye Solo or Bahrani? Probably somewhere between few and none.

Where have all the auteurs gone? Some still manage to seep into the industry today; we should praise that. But there used to be a heavy cluster of filmmakers who reflect their own creative vision through their work. All of their films go hand-in-hand with a name, not by genre, but by their style. Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford…where did you go? Only a few films released in the past five years or so are bound to create influence. Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Haneke, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, Kelly Reichardt; if you’re up for some modern thinking films, I recommend these directors. These artists and their works are not transposable. They have a mis-en-scene, a personal stamp on their film. But with films like I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence) and Wild Hogs (Walt Becker), the directors are just some guy that was hired.

Don’t be afraid of the old. Rent or buy films that have some dust on them. Do yourself a favor; learn from history. Do we complain in our English classes when we read books that were written in the 1950s? Not to my knowledge. The Criterion Collection is usually my pit stop every weekend. This astounding accumulation of films is “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films on home video.” It truly is a secondary history textbook.

I depart from Campbell Hall with the communal lessons I’ve learned from my teachers during my four great years. “To be human is to care,” said Dr. Hvolbek. “You are what you know,” said Mr. Fritz. This year I saw a French film called The Class. It taught me that we learn more about life through social experiences than educational ones. If I’ve taught you anything this year with my writings, it’s that you have to think to be socially aware. And to do that, you’ll have to watch something substantial.

Miserable Lives Wasted in the Glamour

2009-04-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, “The whole work of man seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.” The characters in The Informers seem unable to acknowledge the fact that they are out-of-tune piano keys.

Bret Easton Ellis, while transforming his own novel into a screenplay, left behind both the satirical, observant perspective toward narcissistic businessmen and the drug-crazy milieu of New York City, as seen in his 1991 novel American Psycho. For The Informers, his characters spend weeks at a time partying and hopping from bed to bed in 1983 Los Angeles. You would expect this description to fit someone who is having the time of their life. Reaganomics, music videos, Wayfarer Ray-Bans, that Pat Benatar look—they were all hip. But the individuals in this story are strangely, unsympathetically plaintive.

The film is another one of those ensemble pieces with interconnected storylines. But to what avail? All that happens is we see one miserable, pathetic loser after another. What does that do for us? There is the trendy Graham (Jon Foster), whose father (Billy Bob Thornton) is a Hollywood studio executive, recently out of an affair with a successful news anchor (Winona Ryder). Graham’s mother (Kim Basinger) has been sleeping with his friend, Martin (Austin Nichols). Graham and Martin are both friends with Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci), whose alcoholic father (Chris Isaak) has taken him on a relaxed Hawaii vacation. Oh, and there’s a very popular rock star named Bryan Metro (Mel Radio) in the mix. I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is that these characters are so uninteresting and down in the dumps without any hope of redemption that I myself felt like I lived in their world (and no, that’s not a good thing).

At one point, a twitchy hotel lobby doorman named Jack (Brad Renfro, in his final and posthumous role) tells Graham, “You can’t really make it in this town unless you’re willing to do some awful things.” Unfortunately for Graham, and therefore every other pitiful character in the story, the “awful things” Jack speaks of are totally unreachable. It’s not because they’re impossible goals, as these personalities have everything they could ask for and are questionably unhappy, but it’s because they simply do not know good from bad. Graham even tells Martin that he needs someone in his life to help him distinguish the good from the bad.

Australian director Gregor Jordan (Ned Kelly, Buffalo Soldiers) is simply not ready for Hollywood, neither in the industry, nor in telling a story set there. His flat direction, slowly paced dialogue scenes, and boring choice of cinematography all make him a man without a mis-en-scene. I’ve seen a few films set in the 80s that were made within the past fifteen years that have a distinguished look and feel, all the work of the director. Donnie Darko sure did it. The Informers did not.

“Youth is forever” concludes the poster’s tagline. That’s funny. I got the feeling that Graham and his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) wanted nothing but to escape their youth. Bisexual adventures aplenty, drug usage profuse, a kidnapping by Mickey Rourke (sketchily playing himself, more or less), and a whole lot of moping about is not what I had in mind when I walked into The Informers. Don’t make the same mistake I did. I’m telling you this because the characters in the movie didn’t inform me of anything except for their meaningless lives.

Review: "Observe and Report" (2009)

2009-04-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

Your local mall is the home of infinite personalities and possibilities, ranging from admirable to repugnant. If history has taught us anything, it’s that anybody can be shaped into a different person, based on their environment. If someone steps inside the automatic doors of Forest Ridge Mall one too many times a day, they just might become a frantic mess of a human being, someone whose perception of voluntary justice gets muddled with a subconscious feeling of societal servitude.

Meet Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), head of mall security. He’s a bipolar, racist, arrogant snob who simply doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He keeps eye over the scum that enter his palace every day. You know the ones. Those fat slobs, those prissy rich folk, the catty tweens. Day by day, they flock to his territory like sheep, just waiting to be exposed to the harsh reality of the world. One of these days happens to be lucky for Ronnie. A perverted flasher sprints through the mall’s parking lot and flaunts his genitalia in women’s eyes. Now, Ronnie’s got a legitimate case to solve. Unfortunately, his boss (Dan Bakkedahl) thinks otherwise. Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) is assigned to Ronnie’ case after Brandi (Anna Faris) from the makeup counter is exposed to the pervert’s parking lot antics. Despite the aid from the city’s finest police force, Ronnie feels betrayed. After all, this was his case.

Ronnie starts to feel great about his life, and refrains from taking his antidepressant medication. Big mistake. Through a series of rather dour situations, he begins to show his now-unrepressed mean streak toward the grim underside of sloppy, American culture.

But the real problem Ronnie has to deal with, other than the obvious hatred with which his coworkers look at him, is the fact that he is just too ignorant to understand the true meaning of authority. Ronnie’s struggle is that of an everyday human’s: we often lose ourselves in an attempt to command, by physical or emotional means, the lives of others. Although his ordeal is much more morose and appalling.

Though consistently, and certainly not meagerly, laced with hilarious gags, one-liners, and full-frontal male nudity, the film is not a straightforward comedy. Rather, Observe and Report is a dark, shadowy commentary on the public’s inability to make up their mind on subjects of justice and prerogatives.

Seth Rogen’s performance as the immature, flashlight-wielding airhead is at some moments a delight, and others, a shock to the system (in a boisterous, unique way). His self-obsessed, bigoted, and overprotective Ronnie is the most memorable character of 2009 thus far. We surely won’t see any characters this deep, psychologically, anytime soon. Writer/director Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way) has brought us a complex antihero who is not afraid to step outside his boundaries and pragmatically enforce the law. Unfortunately for the Forest Ridge Mall’s attendants, Ronnie’s law is rather skewed in a sad sort of way.

The next time I step inside my local mall, I will be sure to take a quick gander at the facades the pop-culture obsessed teens and vacationing slobs have bought into. But alas, perhaps a 'quick gander' is only a fraction of the real truth.

Weekend Box Office Predictions: April 2 - April 4

2009-04-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

Fast & Furious - 3,400 Screens - $46 Million
Adventureland - 1,800 Screens - $13 Million

Weekend Box Office Prediction: March 27-29

2009-03-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

Monsters vs. Aliens - $57 million
The Haunting in Connecticut - $13 million
12 Rounds - $6 million

Weekend Box Office Predictions: March 20 - 22

2009-03-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

I Love You, Man - $20.5 million
Knowing - $17.3 million
Duplicity - $16.5 million

Weekend Box Office Predictions - March 13, 2009

2009-03-11T17:03:00.001-07:00

Race to Witch Mountain - $24.5 million
The Last House on the Left - $10.4 million
Miss March - $2.3 million

1974: A Revelation of the Human Spirit

2009-03-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

American troops had finally been pulled out of Vietnam the preceding year. Five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel only two years prior. Idi Amin was established as the President of Uguanda three years earlier. It was 1974. The world was about to experience their latest piece of history. In my opinion, this was the greatest year of cinema.

Today, you can often see a copious handful of drama, comedy, horror, science fiction, and crime films all released in the same weekend. But thirty-five years ago, a major Hollywood studio would never think this as an option. “No! We can only have one romantic drama per month!” they’d probably say to their producers. One of the aspects of 1974’s significance in film history that I admire so much is the diverse span of creativity within the seemingly limited boundaries of each genre. Oh, how each director was seditious with his style!

In a hilarious lampoon of Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Carpenter, fresh out of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, released his debut feature, Dark Star, sometime in 1974 (it is noted to have gone through many film festivals in 1973, eventually finding an unspecified limited release). As a tongue-in-cheek science fiction spoof, it’s an infallible zany parody with quick wit and surreal dialogue. Dark Star is an adventure into the metaphysical, a certified work of intellectual comedic studies, and a seminal entry into the spoof genre. I can spot the influence it undoubtedly had upon the works of collaborating directors Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams. Considering that their mega-hit, Airplane!, came out six years after Carpenter’s satirical voyage into outer space, it can only be inferred what these three guys paid attention to for their research. With Dark Star, John Carpenter, one of my favorite directors, created an underrated, loony film that is as enjoyable as any overrated classic.

Recently retired, yet always revered, actor Gene Hackman starred in director Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoiac conspiracy thriller, The Conversation, released in New York City on April 7, 1974. Adding to the delusions and psychosis experienced by David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 pop culture mystery, Blow-Up, Coppola reinvigorated a sense of mystery pursued by a hopeless, semi-sociopath that had no life outside of his work. As professional wiretapper Harry Caul, Hackman’s portrayal of an unhappy and pathetic loner is extraordinary. Caul is an irresponsible character, one who does not live up to expectations. Yet, he goes outside his comfort zone to investigate something that he should not have looked into more than ten percent of what he already knows. The Conversation is a voyeuristic masterpiece; it subcontiously lets us become Caul without us realizing that we, too, are unrequitedly snooping into people’s personal lives, resulting in terrifying conclusions. Originally conceived as a horror film starring the late, great Marlon Brando, The Conversation did not stray far from its roots. Though not a straightforward horror picture, it is a terrifying foray into the psychology of the mind, uprooting the everyday fears of the everyday man.

A private detective has been hired to spy on the husband of a client who is supposedly having an affair. When he finds out the wife who had hired him is an impostor, Detective Jake “J.J.” Gittes unravels a rather enigmatic murder case that forwards him to the corruptness in Los Angeles’ water pipelines. Does this sound to you like a 1940s film noir? Well, that’s about half right. It was almost unheard of to release a nuanced film noir a full two decades after the genre seemingly ended. But Polish-French director Roman Polanski (currently under close scrutiny of the U.S. government, though I’m hoping for their dismissal of his case) meticulously crafted a breathtaking escapade into a genre long-treasured by Hollywood.

Chinatown came to theaters on June 20, 1974. It hauled in a grand total of $29 million, which translates to about $120 million today. Clearly a hit at the box office, the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including writer Robert Towne’s win for his original screenplay, which happens to be a favorite of mine. The film launched star Jack Nicholson to success, and today, his films have cumulatively made a grand total of $1.7 billion. Yeah, he’s a star. Director Polanski’s work on Chinatown is unquestionably influential. In the film, he masterfully blended psychological characteristics of characters that audiences can sympathize with, all while they are unraveling a web of intrigue with no traditionally utilized dramatic irony.

German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a true auteur with a unique mis-en-scene, was a non-stop machine behind the camera, to say the very least. Wikipedia notes that Fassbinder, “in a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years…completed 35 feature length films; two television series shot on film; three short films; four video productions; twenty four stage plays and four radio plays; and 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. He also worked as an actor (film and theater), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.” There is no catch here. He currently holds an average rating of 7.9/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is very difficult for most directors to come by these days.

In my review of the film written last August, I said that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is “a film that not only makes you hate yourself for subjecting your eyes to modern romantic comedies, but also teaches you why movies about realistic human romance are so moving in the first place.” It’s a simple, yet powerful story of love and passion. It’s a remarkable exercise in telling a tale of true love, and the obstacles people will go through to make it last. I dare you, I triple-dog-dare you, to see this movie, and then catch Music & Lyrics on cable. I don't plan on doing this, but I can only imagine how angry at Hollywood someone must be after an experience like that. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, though its title may be dubious for those not familiar with the plot and themes prior to viewing it, is a telescope into the hearts and souls of the average human being. It makes us aware of what we want out of life, and the limits of the human condition. One of the most poignant romance movies ever made, Fassbinder's heavy-handed drama with underlying themes of xenophobia and reluctance to try new things evokes the harshest and strongest human emotions.

Famed musical theater choreographer and film director Bob Fosse was “subversive, inspirational, provocative, groundbreaking, and ridiculously amazing,” says Katie Evans (09). I wouldn’t at all hesitate to agree with her. His technical accomplishments, including four Oscar nominations (garnering a win for directing 1972’s Cabaret) are astonishing. His 1974 biopic of the comedian Lenny Bruce is no exception in his repertoire of work.

Lenny, released on November 10, 1974, is simply fascinating, and nothing short of a miracle. Chronicling the tragically short career of the controversial 1950s and 60s comedian, Dustin Hoffman stars in Fosse’s deep character study. His dedicated and eloquent performance, Bruce Surtees' gorgeous black and white cinematography, and Fosse's deft direction all mark this film as an impressive entry into the celebrity biopics category, if not one of the best. It’s a film that attests to the liberties guaranteed by our First Amendment, which are controversially challenged by the U.S. government. After watching this film, I cannot think of a better example of myself sympathizing so much with a nonfiction protagonist.

You knew it was coming. The Godfather Part II, one of the rare sequels that surpasses its predecessor in quality, winner of six Oscars (including a well-deserved Best Picture award), and perhaps one of the most groundbreaking exercises in non-linear storytelling was the pinnacle of the great films in 1974. Coppola returned to direct the middle section of his acclaimed trilogy after he put his efforts into filming The Conversation in 1973. What really separates the first and second Godfather films, for me, is the quality in acting. As Roger Ebert wrote in his January 1974 review of Part II, “[Al] Pacino is very good at suggesting the furies and passions that lie just beneath his character's controlled exterior.” Similarly, Robert DeNiro, as young Vito Corleone, is a sensational enigma that only the smartest of film scholars can decipher. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest masterpieces to grace our eyes. What I have written is not even a fraction of what the world’s top critics could write about Coppola’s magnum opus.

It was an era of freedom of expression, amongst all the social, cultural, economic, and political hardships the world encountered. The films released in 1974 woke people up with the shaking of a shoulder, stepping us over to a gigantic window, bestowing upon us a view of astounding aesthetics of the mind, body, and soul.

“Goodbye, my sweetheart. Hello, Vietnam!”

2009-03-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

In his film Full Metal Jacket, American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick thematically endorsed a theory that soldiers who were once humans are brainwashed into becoming vicious monsters during wartime and diminish the politics of war, unleashing their repressed sexual deviances upon the enemy. Kubrick’s experiences growing up in an age of the scientific study of human sexuality and the rise of German fascism, as well as his masterful understanding of the game of chess, introduced him to the ideas of humans being used as tools for countries engaged in a power struggle. Today, Kubrick would argue atrocities committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison are not controlled by the politics of war, but instead by the struggle for masculine power, and by the buttons human pawns push to satisfy their oppressive leaders.

The first thing that happens to the marine recruits in the film is their traditional military haircut (Full Metal Jacket). Since they are all converting to the universally accepted bald head, the marines are losing their individuality and their true identities.

When we meet Sergeant Hartman, the marines’ drill instructor at Parris Island, he refers to them as “maggots,” not humans. He also immediately challenges their masculinity by ordering them to “sound off like you’ve got a pair,” and by teasing Private Cowboy and Private Pyle with offensive remarks insinuating homosexuality (Full Metal Jacket). In the multiple scenes of the marines jogging and singing, Hartman’s words convey the idea that marines will never return to humanity, but will instead stay bloodthirsty soldiers with a zealous lust for women for the rest of their lives, enjoying war more than sex. “I don’t want no teenage queen!” he chants. “I just want my M14” (Full Metal Jacket).

Similarly, Hartman stresses the femininity of the marines’ rifles. Their love for their weapon will eventually give them a sensual pleasure when they are fighting on the battlefield. “You will give your rifle a girl’s name because this is the only pussy you men are going to get…You’re married to this weapon…and you will be faithful” (Full Metal Jacket). Adding to the idea of treating rifles as extensions of their bodies, Hartman’s marines “are trained to think of their weapons as synonymous with their penises. One of the platoon’s marching mantras, as they parade holding their rifles in one hand and their genitals in the other, is ‘this is my rifle this is my gun / this is for fighting, this if for fun’” (Grant 77).

Chess, an intellectual game symbolizing war, was a primary influence on Kubrick’s psyche. Learning the game at age twelve, Kubrick instantly fell in love with it (Nelson 2). For the director, in both war and chess, “what is at stake in the conflict is the supremacy of the world…The conflict can be transposed onto the existential plane where the player’s skill coincides with universal intelligence” (Adair 88). In the barracks, the marines align in the formation of opposing chess pieces. Sergeant Hartman’s callous treatment of the marine recruits is similar to a professional’s strategies on a chessboard. “Part of the art of the professional chess player is to unsettle one’s opponent as much as possible by small but legitimate annoying incidental activities” (Bernstein 32-33). Hartman’s drills are often tedious and redundant, but repetition (verbal or kinesthetic) can often result in sufficient knowledge. While the game of chess undoubtedly communicates war and power, it mildly covers the idea of sexual conquest. Every piece in the game, save the Queen, is a male. The Queen, however, is the most valuable piece. The fact that the male pieces attack the female to dominate the other side’s power symbolizes belligerent sexuality.

Alfred Kinsey, the controversial biologist and sex researcher from Indiana University, developed multiple theories discerning the nature of human sexuality in the 1940s and 50s. At the time, Stanley Kubrick was on his way to his artistic success. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, concluded children are sexual from birth (Snyder). Many of Kubrick’s films, especially Full Metal Jacket, share a theme of birth and/or rebirth, even if it is only metaphorical. Kubrick presented the marines in his 1987 film in a manner suggesting their naivety toward the real world, almost as if they are newborn babies struggling to learn the basic concepts of life. However, the one thing these marines learn first is the power of sexual impulses. It can be inferred that Kubrick’s ideas were influenced by Dr. Kinsey’s divisive research.

Kubrick grew up during the rise of German fascism. In the 1930s, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s plan for the spread of fascist ideals were “to destroy the workers' movement, while politically atomizing the rest of the population and suppressing all bourgeois–democratic rights” and to “to replace parliamentary democracy with a ruthless terrorist dictatorship, committed to maintaining the rule of big capital.” (Gruppe Spartakus). Similarly, in Full Metal Jacket, the soldiers become vengeful villains once they are dropped off in Vietnam. They were brought in to end a spread of Communism and to hopefully insert a solid democracy. Kubrick’s upraising during the rise of fascism during World War II undoubtedly affected his perception of the human struggle for political power in the Vietnam War.

Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, living to see the first Gulf War but not the second. Had he witnessed the cruelty and bizarre atrocities committed during the modern war in Iraq, he most likely would have included more anti-war theories within his films. It can only be assumed Kubrick’s passion against the grimness in war would be transferred into his artistic license.

The abuse of Abu Ghraib’s prisoners in Iraq began in 2004. The captors physically humiliated the “imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency” (Hersh). It is particularly interesting to note the idea of a supreme hierarchy exhibited within the habits of those in power at Abu Ghraib. “There's the deindividuation, the sense of anonymity. The CIA agents…never wore uniforms or showed identification. In all of the pictures the soldiers were typically not wearing uniforms. They often had their tops off. That's a violation of military protocol, because even in a prison you're supposed to be wearing your uniform” (Zimbardo). The fact that soldiers become a group rather than individuals only strengthens Kubrick’s idea that soldiers’ individuality gets lost in war. Some wrongdoings at Abu Gharib, as reported by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, include “threatening male detainees with rape…[and] sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick” (Hersh). The multiple accounts of sadistic sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib prison certainly reflect the very inhumane aspects presented in Full Metal Jacket. If Kubrick were to be a witness to the crimes in the Iraq prison, he would question the “Mickey Mouse shit” as Hartman did at the first segment’s climax (Full Metal Jacket).

Works Cited

Adair, Gilbert. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. Robert Bononno. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2001.

Ager, Rob. “The Hidden Hand.” Full Metal Jacket - “The Hidden Hand” – Analysis by Rob Ager. 21 February 2009 contents.html>.

Bernstein, Jeremy. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Ed. Gene D. Phillips. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Cahill, Tim. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Ed. Gene D. Phillips. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. With Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey. Warner Brothers 1987.

Grant, Barry Keith. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ed. Robert Kolker. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2006.

Gruppe Spartakus. “German Fascism on the Rise.” German Fascism on the Rise. 3 March 2009 .

Hersh, Seymour M. “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” The New Yorker. 10 May 2004. 2 March 2009 .

Hughes, David. The Complete Kubrick. London: Virgin Publishing Ltd., 2000.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Quinlan, David. The Illustrated Guide to Film Directors. Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983.

Raphael, Frederic. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999.

Snyder, Kristie. “The Evil Legacy of Alfred Kinsey.” Discerning the Times. Volume 2, Issue 4, Digest and Newsbytes. April 2000. 2 March 2009 < http://www.discerningtoday.org/members/Digest/2000Digest/April/The%20Evil%20Legacy.htm>.

Zimbardo, Philip. “You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel – a Talk with Philip Zimbardo.” Edge: The Third Culture. 3 March 2009 .

FINAL Academy Awards Predictions

2009-02-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

I've given you what I want. Now I give you what will be.

Best Picture: : Slumdog Millionaire
Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, Doubt
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis, Doubt

Best Original Screenplay: Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon, Wall-E

Best Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Foreign Film: Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir (Israel)
Best Animated Feature: Andrew Stanton, WALL-E
Best Art Direction: Nathan Crowley and Peter Lando, The Dark Knight
Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Costume Design: Michael O'Connor, The Duchess
Best Documentary: James Marsh and Simon Chinn, Man on Wire
Best Editing: Chris Dickens, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Makeup: Greg Cannom, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Best Musical Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Best Song: "Down to Earth," Wall-E
Best Sound Editing: Richard King, The Dark Knight
Best Sound Mixing: Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick, The Dark Knight
Best Visual Effects: Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Films by Alphabetical Adjective

2009-02-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

Below, I've listed 26 different adjectives, all beginning with the 26 letters of the alphabet. I wrote the first film that came to mind with said adjective.

Angry - Fight Club (1999)

Benevolent - Toy Story (1995)

Conventional - Hitch (2005)

Disrespectful - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Embarrassing - Zyzzyx Rd. (2006)

Flimsy - What's Love Got to Do With It (1993)

Glamorous - Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Heavenly - Some Like It Hot (1959)

Insidious - Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Jittery - Crank (2006)

Kinky - Blue Velvet (1986)

Lewd - Caligola (1980)

Monumental - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Nimble - C'etait un Rendezvous (1976)

Ornate - The Shining (1980)

Prissy - Howards End (1992)

Queasy - Se7en (1995)

Raw - Raging Bull (1980)

Somber - La Strada (1954)

Tiresome - Gettysburg (1993)

Ugly - The French Connection (1971)

Vain - Top Gun (1986)

Witty - Annie Hall (1977)

Xenophobic - The Fast and the Furious (2000)

Yeasty - Con Air (1997)

Zany - Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

A Hopeful Guide to the 2009 Academy Awards

2009-02-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will decide which actors, directors, writers, and others did their best work in the entire phase of 2008 in film. It would be wrong to say that the nominations for such awards, which were released exactly a month earlier than the ceremony, were met with universal praise and welcome. I was one of many unhappy fans. There were many performances, writing credits and outstanding directorial efforts that I felt were ignored upon consideration. They certainly won’t change any of the nominations, but hopefully my picks and acknowledgements of snubs provide new audiences for the films that were more under the radar than others.

A college professor dealing with illegal immigrants (Richard Jenkins), a crooked president (Frank Langella), a gay city supervisor (Sean Penn), a southern man aging in reverse (Brad Pitt), and a washed-up athlete looking for a comeback (Mickey Rourke) all squabble over a golden statue that will decide their fame and glory for years to come. This is the Best Actor category, and the competition is hot.

My pick for the win is Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler, my favorite film of 2008. He delivers a heartfelt performance, surely the highlight of his thirty-year career, that conveys more emotion than any other actor in the category. It is safe to say that Rourke’s performance is a sensational, once-in-a-lifetime event. The soul captured and retained in every essence of his character, from the tears that flow down his face as he reconnects with his estranged daughter, to his remarkably moving speech to his dedicated fans surrounding the ring of his long-awaited rematch, emulates the pain and internal experiences that affected Rourke once his promising career fell apart in the late 1980s. Randy “The Ram” speaks to audiences as a troubled hero, and his persona is more realistic than anything I have seen this season, perhaps even this decade.

In the supporting actor category, our eyes are honored with an array of characters. There is the man who argued a “Twinkie defense” (Josh Brolin). There is a dude playing a dude who’s disguised as another dude (Robert Downey, Jr.). There is a parish-hopping priest with a mysterious past (Philip Seymour Hoffman). We witness a malicious and snide villain set to turn humanity upside-down (Heath Ledger). We cringe during the lectures of a mentally disturbed man that sees the horrible truth of a troubled relationship (Michael Shannon).

The announcement of Heath Ledger’s second nomination for the Academy Award on January 22, 2009 (he we nominated for Best Actor in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain) fell on the one-year anniversary of his tragic death. His fans were ecstatic at the sight of his name on a list with some of the most respected actors of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Ledger’s performance—no, scratch that—analysis of one of the most emotionally complex villains in pop culture history is bar none one of the most sinister, macabre, and sadistic villains to ever grace the silver screen. When I had tried to understand why The Dark Knight made almost $330 million more than its predecessor, I realized that Batman Begins simply did not have a memorable villain. The Dark Knight, in all of its subtextual glory, provided us with one of the most entertaining performances of our generation. Ledger’s Joker is more than just a vile wrongdoer. He is a character rich with twitches, traits, and lingual characteristics that scared audiences senseless.

In Round Three of the big categories, we’ll see a battle between a woman recently released from rehab (Anne Hathaway), a Los Angeles mother whose son was kidnapped (Angelina Jolie), a working-class woman who turns to smuggling illegal immigrants across the northern border (Melissa Leo), a stern nun with vengeful intent (Meryl Streep), and a former Nazi guard struggling to fit into 1950s Berlin (Kate Winslet). The Best Actress category just may be the most unpredictable of the night.

My choice for the Oscar is Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius Beauvier. Her intimidating character is powerful, controlling, and yet emotionally disturbed. Streep is the winner of two Oscars (Sophie’s Choice in 1983 and Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979) and nominated for 13 others. She currently holds the record for being the most nominated actor in the history of the Golden Globe Awards. Considering the fact that it has been roughly 26 years since her last Oscar win, I’d gladly give Streep the award for her strong performance in Doubt. As the head nun and schoolmaster of a Catholic school in the Bronx, Sister Aloysius becomes concerned over an ambiguous occurrence. What transpired during a meeting between the school’s only African-American student and the school’s priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman)? Aloysius’s certainty is what drives her to determine the justice for the potentially abusive priest. With authoritative control in every scene she’s in (and rightfully steals), Streep deserves recognition for her bold performance.

The Best Supporting Actress Oscar will either go to a naïve nun-in-training (Amy Adams), a hilariously unforgiving ex-girlfriend (Penélope Cruz), a concerned mother (Viola Davis), a nurturing and caring foster mother (Taraji P. Henson), or a stripper who romantically reconciles with a regular customer (Marisa Tomei). To most in the entertainment business, it’s clear who the winner will be (Cruz). But I have my own preference.

Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy in The Wrestler, is simply phenomenal. Her expressions of kindness and emotionality in her scenes with Rourke are unreal in their fluidity of feelings. As a stripper, single mother, and woman with convictions, Tomei delivers one of the most cordial and profound supporting performances of this decade. Tomei won the Supporting Actress Oscar in 1993 for My Cousin Vinny and was also nominated for the same category in 2002 for her performance in In the Bedroom.

The two screenplay awards—adapted and original—are often considered one of the most vital components to the Academy Awards. The banter between actors, the gracefulness of story progression, the themes, and the motifs are all created in the fingertips of the films’ writers.

In the Best Adapted Screenplay category, I’ve chosen Peter Morgan’s adaptation of his own play, Frost/Nixon, as the best option. Some may argue that the conversations in the film were just copied and pasted from actual history into Final Draft on Morgan’s home computer. But what’s more important is the conflictions of ideas and politics presented in the dialogue between magnetic stars Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. Morgan’s screenplay leads me to decide that the final scene of interviews between Frost and Nixon, about the Watergate scandal, was the greatest action scene of 2008.

Dustin Lance Black, a newcomer to the Hollywood film scene, deserves the win for Best Original Screenplay for Milk. The soulful dialogue in his screenplay emulates Harvey Milk’s generosity, courageousness, and compassion for others. Dan White’s paranoia and bigotry, Cleve Jones’ harmless naivety, and an overall well-recreated era of hope and dreams are also present in this monumental and triumphant screenplay.

The Best Director category, perhaps the most honorable award given in during the ceremony, is also a tricky category. The directors of these films are all judged based on their staging of the story, the orchestration of the photography, the handling of the screenplay, and the ability to engage the audience with fine acting and themes.

Danny Boyle, one of my favorite directors working today, is my pick for the Best Director Oscar. With his magical Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle brings us a life-affirming, extraordinary spectacle unlike any other I have seen this year. In a story of fantasy and romance, we see the deepest depths of India’s slums, all while we fall in love with the well-drawn characters that propel the film’s charm to unreal levels. Imagine the writing of Charles Dickens combined with the backdrop of Carlo Collodi’s story Pinnochio. It’s a rock-solid adventure that is more electrifying than any other this year. Slumdog Millionaire is a passionate fairy tale for adults and teenagers alike. He is a director just waiting to get noticed, and Slumdog Millionaire is his ticket to the big show. Let’s just hope he doesn’t sell out after this.

The Best Picture category is the one that people will remember in future years. Being the last category announced in the evening, it is the one that audiences look forward to the most.

“Once in a while, a movie arrives at such a perfect moment, its message and meaning so finely tuned to the current zeitgeist, that it seems less a cinematic event than a cosmic convergence, willed into being by a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars,” wrote Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post. My choice for the Best Picture Oscar, from the five nominees, is Milk. It’s an uplifting and inspiring biography that focuses more on the politics of the times rather than a preachy message to the audience, something that we do not get to see all that much. And for that matter, we should cherish this film for years to come.

Whether you’ll be screaming at your television with rage if The Duchess doesn’t win Best Costume Design, or if “Down to Earth” from Wall-E doesn’t win Best Original Song, the annual Academy Awards ceremony is a way for the general public to bond with the Hollywood community. And by doing that, we’ll simultaneously prepare for the well-stocked 2009 film season.

The 10 Best Films of 2008

2008-12-21T15:46:00.001-08:00

It is always difficult to narrow down a list of the 10 greatest films of one year, especially if you saw 61 of them. There are those that enrapture you, and those that make you lose faith in films altogether. I’m more optimistic, and would rather chase after the ones that I love. I bestow upon you the 10 films I treasured throughout 2008.

10. I Served the King of England - Submitted as Czechoslovakia’s entry for the 80^th Annual Academy Awards under the Best Foreign Language Film category, but sacrilegiously unnoticed, this fascinating tale of a slightly vacuous waiter with big dreams is incredibly charming and stocked with unique wit. Director Jiří Menzel, winner of a Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1966 for Closely Watched Trains, returns to the world of independent cinema with a story so fresh and subtly amusing that you will most likely laugh about the film’s sarcastic allure in retrospect rather than chuckling in the theater. As the whimsical and aspiring protagonist Jan Dite, Ivan Barnev retains his character’s comedic charm and intellect, much similar to that of a young Charlie Chaplin. It succeeds as both an engaging narrative about Czechoslovakia’s subjection to Nazi Germany’s power during World War II and as a story of life’s passions.

9. Slumdog Millionaire - Danny Boyle, one of my favorite directors working today, brings us a life-affirming, extraordinary spectacle unlike any other I have seen this year. In a story of fantasy and romance, we see the deepest depths of India’s slums, all while we fall in love with the well-drawn characters that propel the film’s charm to unreal levels. Imagine the writing of Charles Dickens with the backdrop of Carlo Collodi’s story of Pinnochio. It’s a rock-solid adventure that is more electrifying than any other this year that proves you don’t need special effects to make a story exciting. Slumdog Millionaire is a passionate fairy tale for adults and teenagers alike.

8. Revolutionary Road - A ‘dream team’ assembled for this adaptation of Peter Yates’ celebrated 1961 novel, and arrived at the loading dock with handsome aesthetics and a distinct style. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first film together since a little movie called Titanic in 1997 (Did I get that title right? Have you heard of it?), Revolutionary Road is an searingly dramatic relationship story. Sam Mendes’ direction of his actors is entirely believable and ardent in the recreated world of Connecticut in the 1950s and 60s.

7. W. - Oliver Stone returns in full form with one of the best intriguing political commentaries of farcical proportions since Stanley Kubrick satirized the Cold War in Dr. Strangelove. Josh Brolin (in a sadly underrated performance) stars as President George W. Bush in a film that capitalizes upon the idea that our current leader never took enough time to plan out or strategize his drastic actions, which led to an unfortunate career and harsh public opinions. As an avid democrat and anti-war protestor, I was shocked at how much sympathy I had for Bush at the end of the film. Sometimes, I guess, it is difficult for all of us to reach our highest dreams. That man was no exception.

6. Waltz with Bashir - Helmed by Israeli director Ari Folman, this masterpiece is the first feature-length animated documentary. Told from a first-person perspective, Folman narrates about the atrocities and disillusionments during the Shabra and Shatila massacres of Lebanon in 1982. Intellectual and artistic dedication to the historical events is displayed in the film’s animation, masterfully done by chief animator Yoni Goodman. The final moments of this documentary surpass emotional power. It’s a truly inspiring and imaginative adventure into the field of storytelling.

5. Let the Right One In - I gave this film an extremely positive review in the October issue of The Piper, and my opinion on it stands as such. This is an incredibly original story of friendship, love, and loneliness that successfully strays away from all conventions that make a traditional vampire film, and does so with an unmatched artistic flair. Let the Right One In reinvents the vampire genre in ways that we could not imagine. Not only should future horror filmmakers follow suit, but romantic drama screenwriters should pay equal attention to this film’s potential legacy.

4. Ballast - Lance Hammer’s somber and poetic film is an extraordinarily dramatic, expressionist film that is every cineaste's dream. In the Mississippi Delta, a man commits suicide, and three people (his brother, ex-wife, and son) struggle to cope with the experience of loss and sincere loneliness. After one of the most beautiful and touching endings of a film in recent years, the credits roll, and you would think that director Hammer and the three main stars (Michael J. Smith Sr., JimMyron Ross, and Tarra Riggs) have been perfecting their work for this film for their entire lives. But the shocking truth is that for each of them, this is their debut. Featuring no expository music, handheld camerawork, and a minimalist script, Hammer’s heart-wrenching drama brings us some of the most tempestuous scenes of 2008.

3. The Dark Knight - Simply put, it’s undoubtedly one of the greatest crime/thrillers of this decade, and without a doubt the greatest superhero film ever made. Well, at least until its sequel rolls around (for the record, any rumor you hear—from Eddie Murphy as the Riddler to Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin—is false, until writer/director Nolan says otherwise). Heath Ledger's Joker is one of the most macabre, sadistic and unpleasantly masochistic villains that has ever graced the silver screen. The Dark Knight conveys as much emotional power as some of William Shakespeare or Sophocles’ tragedies. And that, my friends, is something we should be proud of having in our generation.

2. Milk - Sean Penn establishes himself as one of the best working actors alive with his soulful and remarkable performance as San Francisco’s city supervisor, Harvey Milk, in the 1970s. Milk is an uplifting and inspiring biography that focuses more on the politics of the times rather than a preachy message to the audience, something that does not happen all that much. And for that matter, we should cherish this film for years to come.

1. The Wrestler - Darren Aronofsky’s dramatic masterpiece is a powerful and emotional illustration of contemporary artistic vision that houses an unbelievably touching and heartfelt performances by Mickey Rourke (my choice for the Best Actor Oscar), Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood. The film’s gritty realism is unstoppably gripping, culminating to perhaps one of the most memorable movie endings since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Transcending the idea of melodrama, The Wrestler will give you reason to celebrate life, opportunity, and love.

Review: "Defiance"

2008-12-14T22:32:00.000-08:00

While Defiance is a richly textured film with realistic performances and intense action sequences, it fails to generate any cathartic or poignant elements that linger with the audience.

Edward Zwick, director of 2006’s Blood Diamond (the number three film on my 10 Best list of that year), has returned to the screen with Defiance. It’s a film that has all the prerequisites for an entertaining and absorbing war film, but lacks strong expressive depth and character development, resulting in an unbalanced story of morality, revenge, and redemption. We are given the necessary factors to make it an absorbing story, but never the chance to shed a tear, which would be evidence to show it is an extremely passionate one.

In a powerful and energetic performance, Daniel Craig is fresh off the new James Bond film as Tulvia Bielski, one of three brothers who organized a community of Jewish resistance fighters in the deep forests of West Belarus during World War II. The other Bielski siblings, Zus and Asael, are portrayed with equal enthusiasm by Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell, respectively. Together, they assemble and protect a handful of Jewish citizens, allying themselves with Soviet partisans in an attempt to combat the Nazi army in 1941.

The film beings with plenty of energy, getting its wheels off the runway earlier than most modern war films. But that is not an unusual task for Zwick. In the first scene of 1989’s Glory, we see a newly promoted army captain (Matthew Broderick) fight in the Battle of Antietam. In 2003, Zwick opened The Last Samurai with an ex-U.S. Army captain (Tom Cruise) in his post-Civil War years feeling the tortured guilt of the harmed Native American community.

In this new war film, we are immediately given the backdrop of the German army capturing Jewish civilians in Belarus and Poland in 1941. Over a title card, there is a quick edit through the simple process of color correction, from a raid on a farmland to the uncannily-recreated rendition of the events depicted in what appears to be stock footage of the event. Zwick never wastes time. He leaps right into the story’s characters, atmosphere, and plot from the beginning, with no extraneous details.

Craig is easily intended to be the audience-drawing star of this feature. But Schreiber is unbelievably good as the aggressive, intellectual and stubborn brother with a thirst for revenge. He has nothing to lose, so he pours his broken heart into a grandiose attempt to destroy the invading German army. Craig, Schreiber, and Bell equally take turns at distinguishing their own defining characteristics that round off a perfect triangle of friendship and brotherhood.

Defiance’s energy wanes to a completely unemotional level in its second half. We are presented with enthralling battle scenes, full of gun blasts, bombings, and explosions, but what lacks is the emotional release that we have seen in Zwick’s earlier films. We are not invited to cry. As hopeful as that may sound for some, that is not a good thing. The writers ignore the climactic deaths of sadistic villains and images of bloodshed, which would have generated tears in the audience. I was afraid this was going to happen. In the eighteen years I have been alive, thirteen of the highest-grossing movies from each year feature action-packed scenes that clung audiences to their seats, a 72 percent majority. I suppose that writers Zwick and Clayton Frohman were envisioning Defiance as an untold war story with an ending that would appeal to the average Hollywood moviegoer, full of explosions and gunfights. Were Zwick and Frohman looking for an audience, or were they looking to teach us forgotten history?

While the messages and morals of Defiance may be sketchy, the engaging action sequences and dynamic performances from the three lead actors provide enough balance to keep it afloat.

Preliminary Oscar Nomination Prediction List

2008-12-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

A response to Sam Littman's recently-posted list.

Categories like "Best Animated Short Film," "Best Live Action Short Film," and "Best Documentary Short Subject" are beyond my choosing.

Films in each category are listed in alphabetical order. An asterisk indicates what I think will win the award. A film marked with an exclamation point in parenthesis indicates what I want to win the award.

BEST PICTURE

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight

Frost/Nixon

Milk

Slumdog Millionaire (!) *

BEST DIRECTOR

Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

David Fincher - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Sam Mendes - Revolutionary Road

Christopher Nolan - The Dark Knight *

Gus van Sant - Milk

BEST ACTOR

Leonardo DiCaprio - Revolutionary Road

Richard Jenkins - The Visitor

Sean Penn - Milk

Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler (!) *

BEST ACTRESS

Kate Beckinsale - Nothing but the Truth (!)

Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married

Kristin Scott Thomas - I've Loved You So Long

Meryl Streep - Doubt *

Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Alan Alda - Nothing but the Truth (!)

Josh Brolin - Milk

Robert Downey, Jr. - Tropic Thunder

Phillip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt

Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight *

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Penelope Cruz - Vicky Christina Barcelona *

Viola Davis - Doubt

Vera Farmiga - Nothing but the Truth (!)

Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Burn After Reading by Joel & Ethan Coen

Milk by Dustin Lance Black

Nothing but the Truth by Rod Lurie (!) *

Vicky Christina Barcelona by Woody Allen

The Wrestler by Robert Siegel

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by Eric Roth

The Dark Knight by Christopher & Jonathan Nolan

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan (!)

Slumdog Millionaire by Simon Beaufoy *

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

The Class - France

Gomorra - Italy *

I Served the King of England - Czech Republic

Let the Right One In - Sweden (!)

Waltz with Bashir - Israel

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Encounters at the End of the World (!)

I.O.U.S.A

Man on Wire *

Standard Operating Procedure

Trouble the Water

BEST ART DIRECTION

Australia (!)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight *

The Fall

Revolutionary Road

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Roger Deakins - Revolutionary Road

Claudio Miranda - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Wally Pfister - The Dark Knight (!) *

Harris Savides - Milk

Colin Watkinson - The Fall

BEST FILM EDITING

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight *

Frost/Nixon

Milk

Slumdog Millionaire (!)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button *

The Dark Knight (!)

Iron Man

BEST SOUND MIXING

Australia

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight (!) *

Defiance

Iron Man

BEST SOUND EDITING

Australia

The Dark Knight (!) *

Defiance

Iron Man

Quantum of Solace

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"I Thought I Lost You" - Miley Cyrus - Bolt

"Gran Torino" - Clint & Kyle Eastwood - Gran Torino

"Down to Earth" - Peter Gabriel - Wall-E

"Nothing but the Truth" - Coby Brown - Nothing but the Truth (!)

"The Wrestler" - Bruce Springsteen - The Wrestler *

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Alexandre Desplat - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button *

James Newton Howard - Defiance

James Newton Howard & Hans Zimmer - The Dark Knight (!)

Thomas Newman - Wall-E

A.R. Rahman - Slumdog Millionaire

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Australia (!)

Changeling

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight

The Duchess *

BEST MAKEUP

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight (!) *

Frost/Nixon

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Kung-Fu Panda

Wall-E *

Waltz with Bashir (!)

A Powerful Allegory Unlike Any Other

2008-11-24T16:36:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles, 1947. A respected administrator of a profitable corporation has been murdered. A private detective is hired to investigate the crime. Sources claim that the murderer is the husband of the woman who was romantically linked with the victim. Despite all the hatred toward the accused, the detective is determined to proclaim the innocence of his client in an environment of a corrupt judicial system and crooked policemen. This plotline may sound like a typical, post-World War II film noir. But the truth is that it is really a film of such frenetic energy and zany fun that it is almost impossible to notice the hidden subtleties of post-war angst and xenophobia. This film is Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In 1988, Robert Zemeckis fashioned a masterpiece of visual storytelling unlike any other. Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, Roger Rabbit is a blend of traditional animation and live action film techniques. In a decade loaded with popular John Hughes teen comedies and science-fiction obscurity, successfully creating a film noir is commendable on its own. Adding goofy cartoon characters into a story of murder and mystery is worthy of excessive applause.

My father, a film critic at the time, introduced me to the film when I was about three or four years old. The animation stunned me beyond belief, but I was far too young to understand the story and characters. Once I watched the film for probably the seventh or eighth time, when I was in junior high, I was able to understand all of the arcane historical references to war and bigotry. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is so expertly crafted in it clever allegories of the issues of World War II that it is still a roller coaster of surreal, madcap fun for someone who doesn’t have the advantage of knowing the history.

In Hollywood, the toons interact with the humans, but only in the industry. Otherwise, they are more or less ostracized to Toontown. Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer), a popular star of Maroon Cartoons, has been acting up with a new director. After the production is delayed, CEO R.K. Maroon hires Detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) to get dirt on the rabbit’s personal life. Valiant witnesses a private meeting between Roger’s wife, Jessica, and Marvin Acme, owner of the Acme Corporation. At first he suspects Jessica of cheating on Roger, but his photographic evidence proves that she has literally been playing “pattycake” with him. Emotionally destroyed, Roger flees the studio. Marvin Acme is found dead the next morning, killed by a safe. All hands point to Roger as the murderer. But the film’s plot is not as important as its historical and cultural allusions.

I find Who Framed Roger Rabbit a flawless metaphor for the troubles of the victims of fascism during World War II. The film is set in 1947, two years after the war and the Holocaust. Toontown is sealed off into a secluded area of Los Angeles, away from the lifestyles of those that deal with their own measly troubles in the Hollywood industry. But the toons have far much worse conditions to suffer through. They live in fear of not being accepted in society. They cannot make money unless they have an inside connection with someone at a studio. They are often criticized and compared to humans, who at the time are deemed superior. Their talents are squandered and overshadowed by those of said worthier beings because they are not given the off-screen opportunities for fame that they deserve.

Judge Doom, head of the Toontown District Superior Court and the real murderer in the story, is one of the most sinister film villains I can think of. In a comedy film, the fact that Doom (portrayed by Christopher Lloyd) wishes to exterminate all toons in Hollywood is a unique parallel for something so malevolent and ghastly. His image is menacing and daunting, much like that of a German Schutzstaffel officer, his outfit evoking a haunting image. A clean and pressed black cape upon his shoulders is complemented by a fedora, gloves, tinted glasses, and a pocketwatch. Judge Doom’s name is not purely nominal. His authoritative demeanor is represented by his unremorseful actions towards toons. No commiseration for the value of another organism’s life is displayed under his intimidating control. His “dip,” an acidic weapon used to persecute toons, represents the hatred and racism sparked by fascist dictators of World War II. With Acme’s will gone, he planned to purchase Toontown, creating an opportunity to eradicate all memories of toons with his acid. Judge Doom is a ruthless, unrelentingly menacing felon of unnaturally offensive proportions. Roger, however, is a symbol of the innocence left in the hands of evil and corruption in the era. His blamelessness reflects in his emotional struggle to fit in, all while being subjected to harsh criticism and punishment just for being different.

In spite of all the trouble, hatred, and malevolence the toons are subjected to throughout the course of the film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit embellishes its ending with uplifting joy and warmth of the heart, much like the allied victory of World War II. Once Acme’s will is discovered (it was written in disappearing-reappearing ink on a love letter), Roger reads it aloud to the other toons of Toontown. Progressing down the page, Roger’s tone of voice evokes the ethos of Marvin Acme’s charming persona, one that is undoubtedly charismatic and gracious. The joy, spirit, and liveliness displayed in Roger’s voice during the reading of Acme’s will is one of the few moments of bliss in film history that has resonated with me for the majority of my life; it is a profound moment of elation. It really says something when the animated characters’ emotions speak to a human audience at such a grandiose level.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as critic Roger Ebert said, is “the first film to convincingly combine real actors and animated cartoon characters in the same space in the same time and make it look real.” To call Dean Cundey’s cinematography extraordinary would be an understatement. Filming with camera tilts, pans, and rotations with a specific format and design to allot space for the hand-drawn cartoon characters must have been an absolutely grueling process, but it paid off without hesitation. Hoskins communicates (physically, verbally, and emotionally) with the animated characters, Roger especially, with as much prowess as Daniel Day-Lewis did with oil in 2007’s There Will Be Blood. Solely in front of the camera for the majority of the shoot, I can’t imagine the rigor and awkwardness Hoskins went through by speaking to himself for hours, days, weeks, of takes and re-takes. Nonetheless, the animated characters have lives of their own, and are entirely convincing as actors. Each and every one (from Betty Boop in her charming cameo, to the smarmy and malicious gang of Weasels), is beautifully rendered to fit into the environment perfectly. Shadows, lighting, and sound design of the cartoons all add bonus touches of delight and fun to the film.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit will always be one of my favorite films. It is a brilliant satire of the politics within the Hollywood industry, an immaculate mirror for the history of World War II, and overall a fun, endearing, and enchanting foray into a warped world of slapstick humor and captivating, memorable characters.

My Recent Videos

2008-11-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

James Joyce's The Dead

Richard Matheson's Through Channels

Terror - Written, Directed, and Edited by Hunter Lurie

Trailer for Take Care - Edited by Hunter Lurie

Take Care - Written, Directed, and Edited by Hunter Lurie

What Now?

2008-11-09T09:23:00.001-08:00

A Modest Proposal

2008-11-06T00:11:00.000-08:00

The Farrelly Brothers (There's Something About Mary, Dumb & Dumber), everyone's favorite duo in raucous and immature humor, have signed on to a Three Stooges movie for MGM. They've already co-written a script with Michael Cerrone (Me, Myself, & Irene), and have plans to direct the film.

Jeff Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere advocates a consideration of Russell Crowe for the role of Moe. I strongly support this suggestion. Crowe could use a comedic role to balance out his Oscar win. Who knows, maybe he's a funny guy after all. Hitting the hotel clerk in the face with a phone is a borderline-Stooges stunt on its own.

Anyway, I've done some amateur Adobe PhotoShop work to assemble my 'Dream Team' of a Three Stooges movie cast. Enjoy, discuss, argue.

Russell Crowe - Moe

Philip Seymour Hoffman - Curly

Robert Downey Jr. - Larry

"Let the Right One In" (2008)

2008-11-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

Transcending all current perceived notions of vampire movies, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In explores the emotional complexities of its characters, parading a compelling dramatis personae.

Throughout the years, the vampire film has changed drastically. Essentially debuting with F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922, the menacing night stalker of European folklore transformed as far as the Slavic-speaking bloodsuckers in David Slade’s 30 Days of Night in 2007. Swedish director Alfredson manages to exceed all possible boundaries of modern vampire clichés by focusing more on emotion, raw acting, and artistic vision rather than concentrating on gore, sex, and loud rock music. The depth of each character here is so meticulous that it is difficult to believe that the film is considered an entry in the horror genre.

Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a lonely boy looking for a friend. He is constantly bullied by a group of malicious boys in his class. And he does nothing to fight back; nothing in person, that is. Oskar dreams of extracting his revenge on his peers who belittle him every day. But one day, when a young girl and her guardian move into the apartment next door, Oskar develops an unlikely companionship. Little does he know, his new pal, Eli (Lena Leandersson) lives off the blood of humans. But ironically, what derives from a grotesque and horrifying characteristic is a rather touching and poignant story of adolescence.

The film is based on a 2004 novel by contemporary Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist. While I have not read the book, I can faithfully say that Alfredson’s movie is a masterpiece of modern storytelling. It is so stark in its depiction of one character’s empty and forlorn universe, it exemplifies the most desolate environment for an introduction of peril, and it shows us a realistic friendship sparked by utter curiosity. We don’t have to suffer through any painstakingly monotonous and contrived chance happenings that lead the movie to its character arcs. Oskar’s fondness of Eli shows in his emotion, not in his actions, a brilliant foray into true character-driven material.

It would be an understatement to call Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography (which won the Nordic Vision Award and a similar award at the Montreal Fantasia Festival) stellar. Every onscreen detail is eventually accentuated; the camera often focuses in and out, changing the depth of field. It centers our attention on one specific element of the story, while something equally as important could be happening at the same time. Mysterious occurrences could very well be happening right under our eyes, but we would never know it. Not immediately, at least.

Not since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial in 1982 has there been a film that gives so much power to children as lead actors, and well-balanced power at that. Both Hedebrant and Leandersson give marvelous debut performances that should certainly be remembered for years to come. Their scenes together are nearly flawless in terms of the breadth of their roles; the only things they are working with are each other and the snow around them. And what a fine ensemble cast that turns out to be.

It should be noted that this film won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year for “its mesmerizing exploration of loneliness and alienation through masterful reexamination of the vampire myth." While I cannot admit that I know what it was up against, it surely deserved the award. Let the Right One In is not a horror movie. It is not about jump scares, graphic violence, or mindless sex scenes. The film is a story of romance, a tale of friendship, a metaphoric narrative of life. It is one of the best movies I have seen all year, and perhaps one of the most remarkable movies of this decade.

Quick Film Reviews: Late 2008 Horror

2008-10-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

Mirrors

An intriguing concept about parallel universes starts out with some interesting elements that seem to thread into oblivion. But soon enough, the audience becomes less and less involved in the story enough to care to stay for the climax. Director Aja creatively establishes his shots intelligently enough to disguise the camera's appearance in the titular mirrors. The film is loaded with impressive cinematography and production design; overall, it certainly generates some chilling sequences. But the direction of the actors is mediocre at best, and becomes too much of a studio-controlled film in the second half.

Saw V

Certainly not on par with the first venture of the Saw franchise, but I have to admit that Saw V neatly ties together some unanswered questions that viewers of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th films have resonating in their minds. However, the film monotonously suffers from too many elaborate explanation sequences, bizarre soliloquies from Scott Patterson, and a horrible performance by Costas Mandylor. Some clever traps can't save this entry in the series from being as good as the first.

"I feel big as a damn mountain."

2008-10-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

I will always remember this film's ending as one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the history of cinema.

Funniest Moment of the...

2008-10-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

2000s: Hotel Fight - Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

90s: "Is it the frank or the beans?" - There's Something About Mary (1998)

80s: "Those aren't pillows!" - Planes, Trains, & Automobiles (1987)

70s: Cocaine - Annie Hall (1977)

60s: "Commie Rat!" - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

50s: "Nobody's perfect." - Some Like It Hot (1959)

40s: Zombies - The Ghost Breakers (1940)

30s: The Mirror - Duck Soup (1933)

20s: A Dog - The Gold Rush (1925)

10s: Milking a Cow - The Tramp (1915)

Top 10 Favorite Villains Lists

2008-10-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

MALE:

1. Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) - The Night of the Hunter (1955)

2. Mountain Man & Toothless Man (Bill McKinney & Herbert Coward) - Deliverance (1972)

3. HAL 9000 (Douglas Rain) - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

4. Sport (Harvey Keitel) - Taxi Driver (1976)

5. Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) - Schindler's List (1993)

6. Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) - Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

7. Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) - The Crow (1994)

8. Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) - Oldboy (2003)

9. Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) - Blue Velvet (1986)

10. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) - No Country for Old Men (2007)

FEMALE:

1. Beth Jarrett (Mary Tyler Moore) - Ordinary People (1980)

2. Nurse Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher) - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

3. The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) - The Wizard of Oz (1939)

4. Alien Queen - Aliens (1986)

5. Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) - Fatal Attraction (1987)

6. Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) - Misery (1990)

7. Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) - Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)

8. The Queen (Lucille LaVerne) - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

9. Christine Vole (Marlene Dietrich) - Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

10. Sal (Tilda Swinton) - The Beach (2000)

Review: "Blindness" (2008)

2008-10-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

Fernando Meirelles' Blindness is a rather despicable and repulsive film that creates no chance of forgiveness for the audience once they are subjected to perhaps one of the most abhorrent and unsavory plot devices in modern movie history. Although I have not read the original novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramango, I can imagine that his intentions with Blindness worked, and will only work, on paper.

Nowadays, it seems that the popular thing to do in films is to create an apocalyptic event. Resident Evil. 28 Days Later. The upcoming The Road. Typically, I myself would notice this cliched trend and avoid any premise that seems close to this. But when I learned that Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener), one of my favorite directors of this decade, was helming an infections apocalypse-themed movie, I was sold. After viewing the original teaser trailer a few months back, I was excited to see a new breath of drama and suspense fused into an arthouse spectacle.

Blindness concerns the lives of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore) in an unnamed city. One day, an unusually large handful of citizens begin to go blind from the malignant infection. But it's not that they can't see anything. They only thing they can see is white. "It's as if I'm swimming in a pool of milk," one character says. The government immediately responds to the occurrences by creating a quarantine zone for those who have lost their sight. The building housing our protagonists quickly fills up with three different wards. The newly arrived infected include a one-eyed man (Danny Glover), a prostitute (Alice Braga), and a local bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal). As the military guards the quarantined location, the infected are forced to ration their food supply amongst their designated wards. Once the bartender (now known as King of Ward 3) finds a gun, he demands control of all of the food, and distributes it to the others with his own chosen price. What most of the characters don't realize is that the doctor's wife isn't actually blind. She simply claimed to be, just to hop into the ambulance to be with her husband. She eventually becomes the de facto leader of Ward 1, and attempts a revolt against the malicious Ward 3.

The film begins with strong promise. We get a great sense of Meirelles' fantastic visual direction and editing styles with his arresting cinematography, music placement, and well-timed cuts. But about halfway through, Blindness semi-reluctantly dares to enter the rather shamed territory of sexual perversion and humiliation once the women in Wards 1 and 2 agree to subject themselves to the pleasures of the men in Ward 3. While it may sound cliche for me to say that I "watched the screen between my fingers," I really, really did. Never before had I seen a film that ventured into plot material that was so disgusting and derogatory that quickly.

I admire the film's lack of explanation for the blindness epidemic. Too many movies these days try to create an elaborate backstory for events that are better left in ambiguity. The lack of detail on the events that take place propels us further into the notion that this film is an allegory. It's not supposed to explain something. It's supposed to be something. Trouble is, what is it?

Once the deviant material has left the screen, we are forced to be happy for the characters, which I found most impossible. Not only is it completely unrealistic for them to be able to live on with a full heart after being raped by grotesque and abusive men, but the film also never showed us that they had a sense of hope for the future in the first place. Where is the ambition for a positive outcome? Did it get washed away in the blurry whiteness that all the characters see?

Blindness was an incredibly disappointing film. While I wouldn't say I hated it (since I appreciated the majority of the first half), I would feel safe in claiming that I was offended and disgusted by the second half of the film. Considering that this was my number two most looked-forward-to movie of Fall 2008, an epic sense of dispiritedness overcame me as I got up from my seat and left the theater.

Review: "Appaloosa" (2008)

2008-10-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

Ed Harris’s Appaloosa attempts an application of an innovative style to the revisionist western drama, but fails to remember that movies that teach us lessons must provide the audience with a resonating one.

The western genre has always been a medium of expressing the constant struggles of protagonists. For the past twenty years, the majority of westerns have been made in the revisionist style. These films attempt an exploration of the personae of the legendary heroes that once rode off into the sunset in a John Ford film. Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves gave audiences a perspective of the troubled lives of Native Americans in the era. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven lectured about the message of violence in society.

Based on a 2005 novel by Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa is Harris’s first directing credit since Pollock in 2000. In his new film, he teams up with his A History of Violence co-star, Viggo Mortensen, to tackle a storyline that hands a cluster of scenes to its viewers without asking for anything in return.

Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen) are two guns-for-hire that agree to protect the small, titular town after Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons). Bragg is a corrupt and controlling rancher who shoots the city Marshall and two of his deputies dead. But once the recently widowed Allison French (Renée Zellweger) arrives in town, Cole’s reputation and sense of responsibility for the town fall on the line. He becomes more and more distracted from completing his original objective.

Fortunately, the characters in Appaloosa are compelling enough to care about. Virgil is cold, determined, and assertive. Everett is eager, but at the same time too timid to get involved in messy situations. Randall is a villain who thinks he is pragmatic, but does not fully comprehend his menace. Allison is a winsome, innocent, and naive damsel. But the untoward misstep that screenwriters Harris and Robert Knott make is an oddly constructed love triangle that distracts the attention from the potential elegance of the story. What could have been an absorbing, nuanced melodrama unfolds into a bizarre, sentimental period piece about love conflicting with profession.

The problem with Appaloosa is not what the film gives us. Rather, it’s what it doesn’t give us. We as an audience are each handed a color palette to hold as Harris paints his western landscape on the easel that is the screen. Unfortunately, I sat in my seat, holding the palette, reluctant to extend the dabs of paint to Harris. I just couldn’t understand what he was asking from me, or anyone else, as a thinker.

While the film is far from having reverberating motifs of anti-heroism and societal corruption in the post-Civil War years, it has a fair share of interesting thematic assets to its benefit. I recognized a recurring pattern of children looking in through windows at Cole and Hitch. Are we to assume that the actions of our heroes are not their emblematic decisions? Are they outdoing themselves to make a better impression on the townspeople? Are they sending a message to the citizens of Appaloosa that they will present themselves how people like to view them? Maybe they’d just like to live up to the “hero” folklore that children are taught.

I walked in to my rather crowded theater (easily being the youngest person in the audience) expecting a film as poetic as Unforgiven. I certainly did not hate Harris’ venture onto the ponderosa, but I feel safe to say that I was disappointed with the film. With the talent involved, the film could have been much more. While Appaloosa has dialogue as quick as the characters’ drawn guns, it fails to paint a picture of the old West as legendary as other recent films.

Just For Fun...

2008-09-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

Watch until the end.

10 Best Character Entrances

2008-09-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

1. Harry Lime (Orson Welles) - The Third Man (1949)

2. Dave's Future (Keir Duella) - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

3. Darth Vader (David Prowse/James Earl Jones) - Star Wars (1977)

4. Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey) - Swimming With Sharks (1994)

5. Joker (Heath Ledger) - The Dark Knight (2008)

6. Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) - Dr. No (1962)

7. John Doe (Kevin Spacey) - Se7en (1995)

8. Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) - Beetlejuice (1988)

9. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) - Apocalypse Now (1979)

10. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) - A Clockwork Orange (1971)

5 Greatest Performances by Animals

2008-09-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

1. Mule - Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

2. St. Bernard - Beethoven (1992)

3. Jack Russell Terrier - My Dog Skip (2000)

4. Dolphin - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

5. Bloodhounds - Cool Hand Luke (1967)

10 Greatest [Cinematic] Acting Debuts

2008-09-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

1. Maria Falconetti - The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

2. Jean-Pierre Leaud - The 400 Blows (1959)

3. Anne Wiazemsky - Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

4. Orson Welles - Citizen Kane (1941)

5. Lamberto Maggiorani - Bicycle Thieves (1948)

6. Paul Le Mat - American Graffiti (1973)

7. Virginia Cherrill - City Lights (1931)

8. Jaimz Woolvett - Unforgiven (1992)

9. Brad Dourif - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

10. Justin Timberlake - Alpha Dog (2006)

Honorable Mentions:

Thomas Jay Ryan - Henry Fool (1998)

Justin Henry - Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979)

Top 10 Favorite Performances:

2008-09-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

1. Al Pacino - Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

2. Maria Falconetti - The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

3. Jack Nicholson - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

4. Tom Cruise - Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

5. Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood (2007)

6. Robert De Niro - Raging Bull (1980)

7. Jeremy Irons - Dead Ringers (1988)

8. Naomi Watts - Mulholland Drive (2001)

9. Charlie Chaplin - City Lights (1931)

10. Jean-Pierre Leaud - The 400 Blows (1959)

Top 10 Greatest (& Most Promising) Directorial Debuts

2008-09-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

1. Orson Welles - Citizen Kane (1941)
2. Francois Truffaut - The 400 Blows (1959)
3. Roman Polanski - Knife in the Water (1962)
4. Joel Coen - Blood Simple. (1984)
5. Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs (1992)
6. John Huston - The Maltese Falcon (1941)
7. Frank Darabont - The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
8. George A. Romero - Night of the Living Dead (1968)
9. Darren Aronofsky - Pi (1998)
10. Charles Laughton - The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Pretty Much the Greatest Video...

2008-09-17T23:58:00.001-07:00

Great Years in Film History: 1974

2008-09-07T23:05:00.000-07:00

Many people debate over which decade housed the finest 10 year span of films of all time. From my first-hand experience, many people will often say the 1970s. It was a time of political intrigue, the unfortunate end to one of America's most shameful moments, and an era when television and music were at their heights. But there was one interval of 365 days that had an unrelenting breadth of genius and intelligence in the film industry: 1974.

Personally, I found myself astonished when I came across a number of quality films that had been, little did I know, released in the same year. These films spouted revivals of paranoiac thrillers, film noir, slapstick comedies, romantic dramas, and crime sagas.

The films which I refer to are none other than:

The Godfather Part II

The Conversation

Chinatown

Young Frankenstein

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

I could simply review each of these 5 films, but let's be realistic here. Someone like me couldn't explain the brilliance behind a Godfather film or Robert Towne's acclaimed screenplay. And I've already reviewed Ali. On a more boastful note, I am proud to say that two of those films happen to be on my top 10 favorites list.

My Top 10 Films of Many, Many Years...

2008-09-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

2008

1. The Wrestler (Aronofsky)

2. Milk (van Sant)

3. The Dark Knight (Nolan)

4. Ballast (Hammer)

5. Let the Right One In (Alfredson)

6. Waltz with Bashir (Folman)

7. W. (Stone)

8. Revolutionary Road (Mendes)

9. Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle)

10. I Served the King of England (Menzel)

2007

1. There Will Be Blood (Anderson)
2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik)

3. No Country for Old Men (Coen)

4. Sunshine (Boyle)

5. Eastern Promises (Cronenberg)

6. Zodiac (Fincher)

7. Michael Clayton (Gilroy)

8. Once (Carney)

9. Alpha Dog (Cassavetes)

10. [REC] (Balagueró)

2006

1. Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro)

2. Children of Men (Cuarón)

3. Blood Diamond (Zwick)
4. An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim)

5. The Prestige (Nolan)

6. The Descent (Marshall)

7. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Charles)
8. Casino Royale (Campbell)

9. Flags of Our Fathers (Eastwood)

10. Running Scared (Kramer)

2005

1. A History of Violence (Cronenberg)
2. Brokeback Mountain (Lee)

3. Cache (Haneke)

4. The Constant Gardener (Meirelles)

5. Munich (Spielberg)

6. Jarhead (Mendes)

7. King Kong (Jackson)

8. Good Night and Good Luck. (Clooney)

9. Batman Begins (Nolan)

10. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Apatow)

2004

1. Touching the Void (Macdonald)

2. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Tarantino)

3. Sideways (Payne)

4. Collateral (Mann)

5. The Incredibles (Bird)

6. Shaun of the Dead (Wright)

7. Hotel Rwanda (George)

8. Les Choristes (Barratier)

9. Super Size Me (Spurlock)

10. The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass)

2003

1. Oldboy (Park)

2. Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki)

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson)

4. Shattered Glass (Ray)

5. The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet)
6. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Tarantino)

7. Finding Nemo (Stanton, Unkrich)

8. To Be and to Have (Philibert)

9. Big Fish (Burton)

10. Bad Santa (Zwigoff)

2002

1. City of God (Meirelles)

2. The Pianist (Polanski)

3. Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson)

4. Roger Dodger (Kidd)

5. Bowling for Columbine (Moore)

6. Adaptation. (Jonze)

7. Catch Me If You Can (Spielberg)

8. Minority Report (Spielberg)

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Jackson)

10. 28 Days Later (Boyle)

2001

1. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)

2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson)

3. Donnie Darko (Kelly)

4. Memento (Nolan)

5. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (Sprecher)
6. O (Nelson)

7. Black Hawk Down (Scott)

8. Monsters, Inc. (Docter, Silverman)

9. The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson)

10. Hannibal (Scott)

2000

1. Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky)

2. In the Mood for Love (Kar-wai)

3. High Fidelity (Frears)

4. Gladiator (Scott)

5. Cast Away (Zemeckis)

6. Meet the Parents (Roach)

7. American Psycho (Harron)

8. Chicken Run (Lord, Park)

9. Small Time Crooks (Allen)

10. U-571 (Mostow)

1999

1. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)

2. Magnolia (Anderson)

3. Being John Malkovich (Jonze)

4. American Beauty (Mendes)

5. Election (Payne)

6. The Blair Witch Project (Myrick, Sanchez)

7. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker)

8. Fight Club (Fincher)

9. The Matrix (Wachowski)

10. The Iron Giant (Bird)

1998

1. Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg)

2. Henry Fool (Hartley)

3. Pleasantville (Ross)

4. The Big Lebowski (Coen)

5. Rushmore (Anderson)

6. Dark City (Proyas)

7. Antz (Darnell, Johnson)

8. A Simple Plan (Raimi)

9. Pi (Aronofsky)

10. There's Something About Mary (Farrelly)

1997

1. Boogie Nights (Anderson)

2. The Ice Storm (Lee)

3. Funny Games (Haneke)

4. The Game (Fincher)

5. Amistad (Spielberg)

6. Cube (Natali)

7. Titanic (Cameron)

8. L.A. Confidential (Hanson)

9. Starship Troopers (Verhoeven)

10. Men in Black (Sonnenfeld)

1996

1. Fargo (Coen)

2. Trainspotting (Boyle)

3. The Frighteners (Jackson)

4. The Long Kiss Goodnight (Harlin)

5. The Crucible (Hynter)

6. James and the Giant Peach (Selick)

7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Trousdale, Wise)

1995

1. Heat (Mann)

2. Toy Story (Lasseter)

3. The Usual Suspects (Singer)

4. 12 Monkeys (Gilliam)

5. Se7en (Fincher)

6. Save (Haynes)

7. The American President (Reiner)

8. Apollo 13 (Howard)

9. Nick of Time (Badham)

10. Rob Roy (Caton-Jones)

1994

1. The Lion King (Allers, Minkoff)

2. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino)

3. The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont)

4. Forrest Gump (Zemeckis)

5. Swimming With Sharks (Huang)

6. Ed Wood (Burton)

7. The Crow (Proyas)

8. True Lies (Cameron)

9. The War (Avnet)
10. Speed (de Bont)

1993

1. Schindler's List (Spielberg)

2. Philadelphia (Demme)

3. Jurassic Park (Spielberg)

4. The Fugitive (Davis)

5. What's Love Got to Do With It? (Gibson)

6. The Sandlot (Evans)

7. Rudy (Anspaugh)

8. Tombstone (Cosmatos)

9. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick)

10. Dead Alive (Jackson)

1992

1. Baraka (Fricke)

2. A Few Good Men (Reiner)

3. Lorenzo's Oil (Miller)

4. My Cousin Vinny (Lynn)

5. Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino)

6. Unforgiven (Eastwood)

7. Bram Stoker's Dracula (Coppola)

8. Howards End (Ivory)

9. Aladdin (Clements, Musker)
10. Orlando (Potter)

1991

1. JFK (Stone)

2. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme)

3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron)

4. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise)

5. Point Break (Bigelow)

1990

1. Ghost (Zucker)

2. Misery (Reiner)

3. Dances with Wolves (Costner)

4. Dick Tracy (Beatty)

5. Edward Scissorhands (Burton)

6. Home Alone (Columbus)

1989

1. Born on the Fourth of July (Stone)

2. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen)

3. Parenthood (Howard)

4. Batman (Burton)

5. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg)

6. Lethal Weapon 2 (Donner)

7. Back to the Future Part II (Zemeckis)

8. Glory (Zwick)

9. The War of the Roses (DeVito)

10. UHF (Levey)

1988

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis)

2. Dead Ringers (Cronenberg)

3. Die Hard (McTiernian)

4. Rain Man (Levinson)

5. Mississippi Burning (Parker)

6. Beetlejuice (Burton)

7. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (Zucker)

8. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Oz)

9. Shoot to Kill (Spottiswoode)

10. The Land Before Time (Bluth)

1987

1. Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick)

2. The Princess Bride (Reiner)

3. RoboCop (Verehoven)

4. Au Revoir les Enfants (Malle)

5. Lethal Weapon (Donner)

6. The Untouchables (De Palma)

7. Fatal Attraction (Lyne)

8. Prince of Darkness (Carpenter)

1986

1. Platoon (Stone)

2. The Fly (Cronenberg)

3. Aliens (Cameron)

4. Blue Velvet (Lynch)

5. Stand by Me (Reiner)

6. The Mission (Joffe)

7. Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter)

1985

1. Back to the Future (Zemeckis)

2. The Breakfast Club (Hughes)

3. The Goonies (Donner)

4. Vision Quest (Becker)

1984

1. Amadeus (Forman)

2. Blood Simple. (Coen)

3. This is Spinal Tap (Reiner)

4. Ghostbusters (Reitman)

5. Gremlins (Dante)

6. Romancing the Stone (Zemeckis)

7. Starman (Carpenter)

8. The Terminator (Cameron)

9. Streets of Fire (Hill)

1983

1. Videodrome (Cronenberg)

2. Monty Python's the Meaning of Life (Jones, Gilliam)

3. A Christmas Story (Clark)

4. Risky Business (Brickman)

5. La Traviata (Zefferelli)

6. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (Marquand)

7. National Lampoon's Vacation (Ramis)

8. Twilight Zone: The Movie (Dante, Landis, Miller, Spielberg)

9. Blue Thunder (Badham)

1982

1. Blade Runner (Scott)

2. The Thing (Carpenter)

3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg)

4. White Dog (Fuller)

5. Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio)

6. First Blood (Kotcheff)

1981

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg)

2. Reds (Beatty)

3. An American Werewolf in London (Landis)

4. The Road Warrior (Miller)

5. Blow Out (De Palma)

6. For Your Eyes Only (Glen)

7. Superman II (Lester)

8. History of the World Part I (Brooks)

9. Escape from New York (Carpenter)

10. The Fox and the Hound (Berman, Rich)

1980

1. Raging Bull (Scorsese)

2. Ordinary People (Redford)

3. The Shining (Kubrick)

4. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner)

5. Airplane! (Abrahams, Zucker)

6. Breaker Morant (Beresford)

7. The Fog (Carpenter)

10 Greatest Guilty Pleasures

2008-08-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

Some films win Oscars. Others win Razzies. I prefer the former. But once in a while, we need some good middleground (but this list generally leans toward the Razzie party).

10. Friday (F. Gary Gray, 1995)

As far as movies that are 95% chemistry between the leads and 5% plot go, Friday is Citizen Kane. Rude, crude, and altogether hilarious, Friday is actually one of my favorite films of 1995.

9. Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996)

John Travolta getting bitch-slapped by a nuclear missile. Need I say more?

8. Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine, 2006)

You feel like you just might be getting dumber by watching this movie, but you are so intrigued by the stunts, pranks, and blunders by the cast that you just need to watch it fifty more times.

7. Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

Head explosion. Enough said.

6. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1997)

Though it's certainly a step below its predecessor, The Lost World puts some fun visuals on display, features more victims, and even has a T-Rex stampeding San Diego, CA! Can't go wrong there!

5. Last Action Hero (John McTiernian, 1993)

Loud, stupid, and full of bad puns, Arnie's comedic turn in this McTiernian flick is abysmal. But it's just too much excitement to be ignored.

4. Leviathan (George P. Cosmatos, 1989)

Some of the best creature effects I have ever seen (by the master Stan Winston). Who cares that it suffers from atrocious acting and bland dialogue? I just love the titular creature!

3. Heavyweights (Steven Brill, 1995)

Who knew how hilarious a movie about kids at a fat camp could be? Ben Stiller delivers in a performance that I am entirely convinced is the backstory to his White Goodman (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story). Laced with irreverent humor, this under-appreciated comedy needs to see the light of day.

2. Into the Blue (John Stockwell, 2006)

One of the most absolutely unnecessarily fun movies ever made. I will give cinematographer Shane Hurlbut immediate credit for his breathtaking shots of the Bahamas' beautiful locations. Into the Blue may easily be the most violent PG-13 movie ever made, but it certainly resonates with you by having explosive action and ferocious fun.

1. Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985)

This film, simply put, is Arnold Schwarzenegger's venture into awesome. It's so angry, raw, and gritty with its violence that you simply refuse to pause it, look away, or leave the room for a bathroom break. Horribly suffering from a malfunctioning script by Steven E. de Souza, Commando mends its broken wings by having Arnie hurl a metal pipe through a guy's chest.

RE: 5 Greatest Movie Musicals (by Hunter Lurie)

2008-08-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

Normally, I hate musicals. I often find myself wondering why the music is added in the first place. If a character emphasizes his/her point, why do they need to sing about it? Is it just a few extra minutes to accentuate the previously stated sentence? Nowadays, it seems that musical numbers don't add to the actor's performance. Jennifer Hudson (evidently) won Best Supporting Actress a few years back because she belted out a good voice in Dreamgirls. To me, singing and dancing doesn't do much else besides making the movie longer. I respect people's opinions that it raises the emotional levels of the characters and such, but I just don't see it. Anyway, below are the only 5 musicals that I have ever enjoyed any molecular morsel of.

5. Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

Rides alongside George Lucas's American Graffiti in its depiction of teenage life in the car-hopping, swing-dancing era.

4. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993)

The animation is undoubtedly spectacular, and the film mixes great themes of gothic surrealism with happiness, hope, and virtues. Normally, I'm okay with a film developing a fanbase (save a few), but Hot Topic was not the right way for this masterpiece of modern animation to turn.

3. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton, 2007)

Incredibly poignant in its dramatic tension between characters, Burton's musical is both adventurous and moving at the same time. Features excellent costume and production design, topped off with a great overlooked supporting cast.

2. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly; 1952)

An oftentimes hilarious satire of the introduction of sound into motion pictures. The dancing is without a doubt extraordinary, and the movie is simply legendary by today's standards.

1. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

The best exploration of the nature of dreams I have ever seen. The presented world of fantasy is lush, elaborate, and wealthy in its structure of imaginative design.

10 Greatest Movie Musicals, by Paige Lurie

2008-08-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

10. Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007)

Does a great job putting a story to classic music. Features wonderful actors that could also sing and some lovely visuals too.

9. Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969)

A pure classical wonder. A great story that will have you laughing to crying and contemplate true love. If it's good enough for Wall-E, it's good enough for me.

8. Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2007)

Zac Efron can sing and act? Who knew? Houses other great performances from the whole cast. It is only held back a little bit from some plot changes from the original show.

7. Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton, 2007)

Director Burton did a wonderful job of keeping the dark nature of this musical and carrying on the themes of love, revenge, and hate. I was especially impressed with the singing abilities of the talent young actor playing Tobias Raggs (Toby) What keeps this movie from being higher on the list? They cut out many songs or parts of songs that I love so dearly.

6. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (David Swift, 1967)

This is just a fun movie. There is excellent singing and dancing, fun songs, and a talented ensemble. Plus, now I can't stop singing "It's Been a Long Day" on my way home from school.

5. Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968)

This is a true classic story. Each of the many times I watch this movie, I find myself cheering Oliver on and singing along to the catchy tunes, especially "I'd Do Anything."

4. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

Don't lie. You have seen this movie and can quote it. You've also bought into the lies of the film, such as the hanging munchkin. This movie is an American classic that you love, and Toto too.

3. West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise; 1961)

A theater lover's dream. A great musical adaptation of one of the Bard's masterpieces. If you are not weeping at the end, you either slept through the movie or have never really loved some one. The emotions are strong, the songs are great, the gangs are tough. This film is a masterpiece.

2. The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)

This piece made Julie Andrews my hero; no doubt about it. Despite its length, I could watch this movie over and over without getting bored.

1. Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, 1971) - One of the most fun, yet serious musicals ever. I have yet to find a flaw in the script, music, sets, acting, anything. This is not only my favorite film musicals of all time, but it is one of my top ten films of all time. No other film on this list can say the same.

My 10 Most Anticipated Films this Fall:

2008-08-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Blindness
3. Revolutionary Road
4. Burn After Reading
5. Quantum of Solace
6. The Soloist
7. The Road
8. Miracle at St. Anna
9. Appaoloosa
10. Frost/Nixon

Review: "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" (1974)

2008-08-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

A Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

These days, it seems that we get a romantic comedy every other weekend. Everyone loves to see their favorite cutesy couple giggle and cuddle for 90 minutes, while suffering through some pretentiously written, yet incredibly cliched, relationship troubles. Recently, I watched a film that not only makes you hate yourself for subjecting your eyes to modern romantic comedies, but also teaches you why movies about realistic human romance are so moving in the first place.

"Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" concerns the lives of two somewhat lonely people: Emmi Kurowski (magnificently played by Brigitte Mira) and El Hedi ben Salem M'Bark Mohammed Mustapha, or, simply, "Ali" (a role played with grace by El Hedi ben Salem). Emmi dodges the heavy rainfall one evening by going inside a nearby bar, after being drawn by the Arabic music. There, she meets Ali, a timid Moroccan man who offers her a dance. Ali offers to walk Emmi home for the evening, which leads to him spending the night at her house, since he lives much too far away to walk. Emmi's subtle offering of a polite friendship leads to a romance that evolves into a happy marriage between her and Ali. Little do they realize the bigotry inhabiting their seemingly peaceful milieu.

Emmi's apartment tenants, friends, and family all have mixed feelings about her new husband. She is in her mid- to late sixties, while he is in his mid-thirties. But this is the least of their worries; he is a foreigner. Though he has lived in Germany for two years, and speaks the vernacular language with relative fluidity, Ali is more or less disregarded and ostracized from the care of the supporting characters. Emmi's family, when first confronted with their new stepfather, is angered and disgusted. The scene reminded me of a much more emotional, unnerving version of Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Only this time, I didn't notice Dr. John Wade Prentice's optimistic charm; rather, Ali's persona is confused and alienated.

The moderately touching ending of the film is where director Fassbinder utilizes his attempt at a catharsis that unfortunately does not succeed. To me, it seemed like he was aiming for a level of emotional release on a scale as high as F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant novel The Great Gatsby, a story about undying passion and love. However, the last three minutes of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul lack in emotional momentum, and the final shot unfortunately ends the film without a dramatic wipe of a tear.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, while somewhat slowly paced, is exuberant in its message. Fassbinder's wants the audience to infer that books should not be judged by their covers. Bigotry and xenophobia are simply obstacles that shouldn't affect what happens between two lovers. Clearly, some people buckle to the criticisms, hatred, and complaints toward us in our modern culture. But what Fassbinder is telling us is that we should be able to stand up for ourselves and retain the power to do what we feel is the right thing to do, and what makes us happy with ourselves. Oftentimes in the film the camera will dolly to and fro from the conversations. It will sometimes push in and pull out after strong words have been spoken. What I think Fassbinder and cinematographer Jurgen Jurges were planning here was to visualize the thoughts others had on the protagonists' relationship. Some people were so intrigued at the fact that Emmi could love a foreigner, while others would just want to stay away from it altogether.

Fassbinder's romantic drama was shot in less than two weeks. What amazes me is the fact that the emotional involvement of the story seems so meticulously planned out (cameras angled toward mirrors, dollies around tables and chairs) that it is hard to believe all this was done in under fourteen days. But if Fassbinder is able to write and direct a fifteen hour movie (Berlin Alexanderplatz, the next film on my Netflix queue) in eight months, I guess he can do wonders with any ninety minute movie!

What does the phrase "fear eats the soul" refer to? Does it mean that the relentless uneasiness we may have to take chances in live overcome us, so we become reluctant to do so? Or perhaps it suggests that the people that we know who watch us take such chances are anxious to see us fall, and even so they do not speak out about it. Either way, the relationship between Emmi and Ali affects the people in their environment.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a remarkable exercise in telling a tale of true love, and the obstacles people will go through to make it last. I dare you, I triple-dog-dare you, to see this movie, and then catch Music & Lyrics or Fever Pitch on cable. I don't plan on doing this, but I can only imagine how angry at Hollywood someone must be after an experience like that.

5 Terrifying Movie Moments

2008-08-24T23:43:00.001-07:00

Keep in mind that I'm acknowledging a specific shot, image, or jump scare from said film. The YouTube clip is attached.

1. [REC]

2. Carrie (start video at 5:30)

3. The Orphanage

4. Psycho

5. Friday the 13th

Current Top 10 Films*

2008-08-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

2. Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989)

3. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)

4. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

5. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

6. Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1998)

7. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

8. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

9. Blood Simple (Joel Coen, 1984)

10. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

*Subject to constant change. Forever.

10 Best Chase Scenes (and no, I have not seen 'Bullitt'!)

2008-08-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

This list includes any kind of chase scene; anything from on foot to by car.

1. The French Connection

2. Raiders of the Lost Ark

3. Banlieue 13 (District B13)

4. To Live and Die in L.A.

5. The Road Warrior (Part II can be found on the right side)

6. Casino Royale

7. No Country for Old Men

8. The Matrix Reloaded (Part II can be found on the right side)

9. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

10. Bad Boys II

*Scenes that would be on this list, but I failed to find YouTube links to them:

Point Break

Se7en (Found it!)

The Bourne Supremacy

10 Best Opening Credit Sequences

2008-08-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

1. Se7en

2. Psycho (1960)

3. Lord of War

4. Hostage

5. Goldeneye

6. Catch Me if You Can

7. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

8. Reservoir Dogs

9. Vacancy

10. Pi

2008-08-10T22:08:00.001-07:00

I would like to acknowledge the fact that Breakfast Joe (Joe Gustafson) has created his own blog. Please take time out of your busy day to enjoy it enormously.

RIP Bernie Mac

2008-08-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Comedian Bernie Mac died this morning from complications of pneumonia at age 50. I wish to extend my condolences to him, his family, and his friends. I truly admired his work on his television show, films, and stand-up comedy. He will be greatly missed.

Nostalgic Awfulness: "Marabunta" (1998)

2008-08-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Once in a while you come across a film that looks so laughably bad that it would be moronic to turn down a chance to watch it. Perhaps said film suffers from horrendously, unintentionally hilarious acting, bad special effects, or a mediocre script. Marabunta is not that movie. Alternatively titled Legion of Fire: Killer Ants!, this nature-gone-amok vehicle is far from watchable. I still kick myself for being able to sit through 90 minutes of sheer bland horror. But back then I was only 8 years old. However, I recently re-watched the film, and was stunned at the fact that my 2nd grade brain was able to take in so much stupidity.

Marabunta, directed by Jim Charleston (television director) and George Manasse (production manager of classics like Juwanna Mann, Death Wish 3, and Major League: Back to the Minors), is the stupidest, sorriest excuse for entertainment that I have ever seen in my entire life. Never before have I seen a movie that eliminates all credibility by using actors who seem like they don't even realize that they are being filmed. Nor do they seem to realize that they are human beings, for that matter. The entire film is presented in such a robotic milieu, and it is safe to say that I lost interest in the film 10 minutes in (the opening sequence is legitimately one of the most unintentionally hysterical scenes in the history of, well, ever).

You know you're in for a real treat when the FOX network original movie you're about to view was written by the writers of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Ski Patrol (Linda Palmer and Wink Roberts, respectively). The actors in this film are given such little to work with that their dialogue comes across as improvised. Let me make a quick note that a lot of Judd Apatow's productions have improvised dialogue. But this fact should not lead you to believe that Marabunta's venture into a pathetic time-warping black hole is credible in any way/shape/form. Anyone involved in the making of Marabunta should save themselves and join the Witness Protection Program. But it may already be too late after 10 years...

In short, Marabunta revolves around "a hive of South American, killer ants [that] have been lying dormant in Alaska for ten years until seismic activity causes subterranean warming, [which awakens] the ants. While many residents of Burely Pines, Alaska, are being eaten alive, a small group races to survive and to find a way to stop the ruthless ants." Does that sell to you? Would you eagerly wait for the hour hand to hit 8 so you can turn to FOX and watch a monstrosity of a film? I sure did! But then again, I didn't know any better.

Then I bought the bootleg VCD/DVD combo off eBay from the Philippines. Basically, this rant cost me $10. Totally worth it.

Marabunta houses one of the most intellectual, professional casts to grace the television screen. Starring Eric Lutes ("Caroline in the City," Codename: Silencer), Julia Campbell ("A Whole New Ballgame," Ned Bessing: The True Story of My Life), Mitch Pileggi (Shocker, "In Search Of..."), and last, but not least, a very, very, very young Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, Saved!) in his first role, Marabunta suffers too much from TV stars who don't know how to act in films.

This film honestly seems so rushed together that it may has well have been filmed in a week. I'd like to think that's true. The production design of the interior locations is so scathingly awful that it looks like it was filmed without any planning. Perhaps the crew members built the sets 20 minutes before the cameras began rolling. In the first earthquake scene, in the police station, you can see the walls wiggling and the obviously hollow tables and desks bouncing around like Mexican jumping beans. Marabunta's production designer, Stephen L. Nielsen (Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare, Tornado!) must have done his job while he was either under the influence of marijuana or while he was half asleep. Either way, his sets were not properly designed.

Marabunta might as well have some of the worst special effects that I have ever seen. Any time the scene cuts to a shot of a horde of ants marching their way to the vulnerable, lifeless characters' impending doom, we pretty much get a 20-second glimpse of some life-like National Geographic footage of ants. Was the special effects department too lazy to render any CGI ants? Were the directors too lazy to just film some ants up close? Nonetheless, the ants in this film are far from threatening.

This film is inescapably bad. There is no way that I could ever have remorse for what it has done to my thoughts on nature-gone-amok films. Those are the best kind of horror films, anyway. I feel compelled to bury any mention of Marabunta in my backyard. May this film burn in Hell. Yet I still own the bootleg VCD/DVD of it. Maybe I'll give it another viewing in a few years. Until then, it shall continuously pour my hatred into it.

"Boston Alexanderplatz" - A Film by Hunter Lurie and Sam Littman

2008-08-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

An ode to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15.5 hour masterpiece, 'Berlin Alexanderplatz,' 'Boston Alexanderplatz' is celebrated by critics and audiences across the globe over for it's artistic ambition and unique vicarious voraciousness. Written and directed by the adept minds of Sam Littman and Hunter Lurie, 'Boston Alexanderplatz' has been recognized as one of the preeminent short films of this decade.

Review: "Safe" (1995)

2008-07-29T21:25:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I watched what the Village Voice hailed as the greatest film of the 90s. "Safe," an early Todd Haynes film starring Julianne Moore in perhaps her best performance (of what I have seen her in), revolves around the concept of a woman who is fearful that she may have contracted an infectious disease from her calm, peaceful neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley circa 1987.

I was surprised at how this film was able to subtly tackle such controversial ideas, especially those that were sparked by theorists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both Emerson and Thoreau were Transcendentalist writers. They believed in the ideals of self-realization, which is the process of discovering one's individuality through his/her connection with his/her milieu. "Safe" appropriately transcends (Oh, dear. I'm going to hell for that one.) the limits of what Emerson and Thoreau rationalized.

"Safe" is similar to Emerson's ideas in that it explores the concept of singling oneself out, away from the hectic lifestyle of our modern cultures, into a world of peace and nature. Carol White (Moore) joins a community of people who fear the same thing she does: an environmental sickness. The film is similar to what Thoreau had to say in his essays written from Walden Pond, MA. The author lived in a cabin in the woods on a lake for over a year to connect himself with nature, hoping to further understand the limits of the human perspective of the universe as a whole. This is much like how Moore's character moves into the secluded, remote location miles away from her home to be with people that share the same desire she does.

Overall, "Safe" is a wonderfully thoughtful film with much to say, deeply hidden in its well-written script. I will admit, however, that for a movie that packs as much thought-provoking power as "Safe," it should not have been two hours. I think that 90 - 100 minutes would have easily sufficed for a lecture on individuality and spirituality. But "Safe" features an astounding performance by Moore and well-composed shots throughout. Although I do not think that it is the best film of the 90s ("Deep Blue Sea" came out in 99, so it's fair game for consideration), it certainly deserves recognition.

I almost forgot. "Safe" is incredibly difficult to find on DVD. Perhaps a VHS copy is out there on eBay or Amazon? But here I am, at Emerson College (who'da thunk it?), where they have an amazingly full library of DVDs. I feel lucky to have been able to catch a viewing of this film.

Clips from moviefilms that must be watched, regardless of their context.

2008-07-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

I am currently a sucker for nostalgic, retro scenes from movies that are full of oddball weirdness, emotional intensity, or just plain fun. I figured I'd share a few of my recent favorites with you.

A Promise of Greatness - "The Contender"

(WARNING: Spoilers)

Need I explain?

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I've Told Every Little Star - "Mulholland Dr."

(WARNING: Spoilers)

This scene houses an incredibly catchy 1950s tune amazingly lip-synched by a young Melissa George. Only David Lynch could get away with the complexity of this scene. We understand the pressure that Adam (Justin Theroux) is under, from his studio boss. We sympathize for his reluctancy to choose Camilla (George) for his film, while we know he is interested in seeing Betty (Naomi Watts) audition. All this goes on while we tap our feet to a melodious rhythm.

_____________________________

Leaning - "The Night of the Hunter"

(WARNING: Spoilers)

An incredibly chilling, profound scene that fits in to the context so ironically. While Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is a sociopathic, sadistic weirdo, his singing voice has such a mellow feel to it that it is seemingly peaceful and incredibly expressive. A melodic song with interestingly religious lyrics fits perfectly into a movie about a corrupt preacher chasing kids for a seemingly lost sum of money. Who knew?

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Kaneda - "Sunshine"

(WARNING: Spoilers)

Who knew that a death scene could be filmed so gloriously and beautifully? This scene is so gorgeously filmed, emphasizing the character's last hurrah and his determination to his work. Complete with John Murphy's amazing, overlooked film score, this scene from Danny Boyle's sci-fi masterpiece is truly mesmerizing.

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Acid Trip - "Easy Rider"

One of cinema's greatest drug trip scenes, the acid trip in Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider" is filled with haunting, surreal, Dada-esque imagery that reminds me of artistic expressionism from the Lost Generation. The extensive scene is also topped off with terrifyingly grotesque music that crawls inside your head and sticks with you.

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Ending - "City Lights"

(WARNING: Spoilers)

"Of the final scene, critic James Agee wrote in Life Magazine in 1949 that it was the 'greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid'" (Wikipedia). Clearly, Chaplin delivered to the world one of the most memorable final shots in film history. This film, while lacking dialogue, is so raw in that it shows how visual storytelling can oftentimes be much more powerful and romantic without having to capture the actors' voices.

___________________________________

I'm Happy, Harry - "Requiem for a Dream"

In one of the greatest pieces of acting in recent years, Ellen Burstyn delivers an emotionally explosive performance as the troubled older mother of Harry (Jared Leto), who has recently buckled in her battle against diet pills prescribed by her doctor. She explains to her son how it feels to be old, and rather than listening to her monologue vicariously, we as an audience actually feel her pain viscerally.

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Gun Battle - "Children of Men"

(WARNING: Violence)

The greatest one-take Steadicam shot of all time thus far. You can't deny your acknowledgement of the intensity that everyone on set must have faced on the day this scene was shot.

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Nudge, Nudge - "And Now for Something Completely Different"

One of my favorite Monty Python sketches, featuring Eric Idle as the inquisitive nuisance with a hilarious payoff at the end. His physical comedic tone is the complete opposite of subtlty, and it hysterically finishes with the naivety of his last line.

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Grammar Lesson - "Henry Fool"

A relatively simple scene, Henry's grammar lesson to Simon is so amusingly comical that the audience marvels at the fact that Simon is somehow able to construct the modern "Iliad" with this quick lesson of the English language. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) delivers his lines with such a monotone expression, much like hilarious comedian Stephen Wright, that I am amazed that Simon (James Urbaniak) is able to write a modern epic.

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Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite - "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Arguably one of the trippiest scenes in film history. An adventurous journey with more pizazz than any other, Stanley Kubrick crafted an illustrious, masterful trek through the moons and stars surrounding Jupiter, an area relatively undiscovered by human technological advancements. The endless display of beautifully rendered colors and images exemplify the unrelenting progress humans make in our modern world.

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Paul Allen - "American Psycho"

(WARNING: Violence and Spoilers)

This is the scene that fully drew me into Christian Bale's charismatic acting chops. I had previously seen him in things like "Batman Begins" and "The Prestige," in both of which he seemed like such a generic choice to me. However, after seeing "American Psycho," I began to notice how versatile Bale is with his choices of screenplays and directors.

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Those are just a few of my favorite scenes at the moment. I plan to frequently provide more links to the scenes I like.

Review: "The Dark Knight"

2008-07-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

"...And here...we...GO!"

Finally, audiences worldwide have found one of their most cherished rarities: the sequel that surpasses its predecessor. To my memory, not since James Cameron's "Aliens" in 1986 has a sequel been acknowledged as superior to its brainchild. With "The Dark Knight," British filmmaker Christopher Nolan has proven his versatility in his business. He clearly is able to successfully blend a superhero blockbuster with a mesmerizing crime/drama touch that also finishes off with a spark of social commentary and allegorical allusions to modern structures of police force and crime existence in the world.

I don't plan to write too much about the plot of the movie, for two main reasons.

A) I'm not interested in spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it yet.

B) The trailers should tell you enough already.

Let me get rolling on how amazing Heath Ledger is in this film.

The Joker. Undoubtedly one of the most complex villains in fiction history. There are many portrayals of said menace, but Ledger's spin on the classic nemesis tops Jack Nicholson's 1989 venture, and, yes, Caesar Romero's 1966 wacky goofiness. Ledger's Joker is by far the most sinister, macabre, disturbingly masochistic, sadistic villain I have ever watched onscreen. He, as he claims, "just likes to do things." For him, "things" are barbarous terrorist-like antics that seem to finish without any remorse for their victims whatsoever. I guess his childlike sense of humor gets the best of him in the grim world that is Gotham City. Heath Ledger ignites the flame of an unstoppable malefactor, and said flame remains as lit as John F. Kennedy's memorial. The voracious intensity of Heath Ledger's Joker is too brilliant to be described in words. The best way one can get the full effect of how good he is in the film is to see it. It's a damn shame that this was Ledger's final role. The only other movie of his I had previously seen was 2005's "Brokeback Mountain," which, if I may add, was a brilliant, moving, love story. Heath Ledger, in my opinion, has guaranteed a posthumous Academy Award nomination, which is more than deserving. The Joker in "The Dark Knight" is without a doubt one of the greatest villains in cinematic history.

That alone should convince you enough to see the film. But alas! There's more!

James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer have again composed one of the most frenetic, intense, and overall marvelous film scores in recent years. Hopefully, "The Dark Knight's" score will be at least nominated for the Oscar, after the Academy failed to acknowledge the brilliant balance between dramatic undertones and action-packed frenzied compositions in the thrilling score to "Batman Begins".

Christopher Nolan has once again demonstrated his bold, audacious style with "The Dark Knight". What is so great about his direction in the film is that he beautifully blends two genres that normally would either coerce pleasantly or fail tragically when applied. The crime genre and superhero genre intermix so perfectly in "The Dark Knight" that it is simply a genuinely perfect film.

I will say this, while saving all spoilers behind. "The Dark Knight" has what I think is the best applied make-up to any human actor that I have ever seen. It is so harrowingly gruesome yet strangely enticing that the audience marvels at the seemingly never-ending limits of prosthetics and make-up designers. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when I see it.

So there you have it; there's my quick on-the-spot review for the new mega-hit of the year. I may edit this soon when I think of more things to add. I'm here on business. I leave tomorrow. Now get rid of them. Come on, I'm tired. Get rid of the band, too.

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