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Film: Review:Broken Embraces
19 November 2009 12:07 PM, PST
Blind writer Lluís Homar begins his day memorably in the opening scene of Broken Embraces. Having been helped across the street by a beautiful woman, he successfully turns her offer to read him the news into a seduction. When their encounter ends, he looks satisfied but unmoved. Warned against letting strangers into his house by his manager (Blanca Portillo), he says that everything that could happen to him has already happened. He lives life as an epilogue, remembering a time before he lost his sight, when he directed acclaimed films under his own name instead of hacking them out ... »
Film: Review:The Blind Side
19 November 2009 12:06 PM, PST
Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low. In the character of “Big Mike” (real life success story Michael Oher, played by Quinton Aaron), a poor, undereducated teenager later groomed into a top-tier offensive lineman, the film suggests a gentle, oversized puppy in need of adoption. (The family that takes him in literally picks him up from the streets during a rainstorm, like a stray. All that’s missing are the children pleading, “Mom ... »
Film: Review:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
19 November 2009 12:05 PM, PST
Not since Snakes On A Plane has the line between movie and Internet meme been as confused as it is with Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s remake of the Abel Ferrara shocker Bad Lieutenant. When the project was first announced at Cannes, it immediately triggered reaction along the lines of “What kind of crazy train wreck is that going to be?” And once the wondrously insane teaser trailer went viral, it turned into, “Oh, that kind of a crazy train wreck.” So what about the movie? Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans—the subtitle makes it charmingly unwieldy ... »
Film: Review:Planet 51
19 November 2009 12:04 PM, PST
Through the same mysterious alchemy that gave the moviegoing public back-to-back CGI insect adventures (A Bug’s Life and Antz), deep-sea fish adventures (Finding Nemo and Shark Tale), and films about escaped zoo animals returning to nature (Madagascar and The Wild), 2009 has produced two films about peaceful alien civilizations disrupted by human invaders. The first, May’s Battle For Terra, was a cheaply animated but heady, ponderous think-piece about the nature of humanity and the causes of war. The second, the new comic adventure Planet 51, is Terra’s opposite in every way. Its visuals are far more sophisticated ... »
Film: Review:The Sun
19 November 2009 12:03 PM, PST
Following portraits of Lenin (Taurus) and Hitler (Moloch), Russia’s Aleksandr Sokurov shifts his gaze to the land of the rising sun, where bunker-bound Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) is waiting out the end of the Pacific war. Shooting in candlelit half-dark so extreme that the subtitles often cast the brightest glow—an effect that will likely prove impossible to translate to the small screen—Sokurov zooms in on Hirohito’s U.S.-mandated un-deification, the key to breaking the will of Japan’s notoriously tenacious troops. Intriguingly, Sokurov takes Hirohito’s renunciation of divine status at face value; ceaselessly twitching ... »
Film: Review:Red Cliff
19 November 2009 12:02 PM, PST
Financed for $80 million, the most money ever allotted to a Chinese production, the immense period action epic Red Cliff is John Woo’s first film in the six years since Paycheck ended—for the time being, anyway—his rocky sojourn in Hollywood. From the looks of it, the cultural exchange cut both ways: Woo’s flair for slo-mo theatrics has become a common visual stamp for Hollywood actioners, while his longtime interest in Western themes found a natural home in America, even though the blockbuster conventions of movies like Mission: Impossible II often eclipsed those themes. Bringing all his ... »
Film: Review:The Missing Person
19 November 2009 12:01 PM, PST
There’s a mass of incongruities—some clever, others shockingly ill-conceived—in Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person, a neo-noir that attempts to update the genre while providing a self-conscious throwback to its tarted-up dialogue and grimy ambiance. Bridging the gap between eras is Michael Shannon, a strange, exciting character actor whose very presence tends to put a movie on edge; whenever he popped up as a mentally unstable truth-teller in Revolutionary Road, the film’s brittle marital drama suddenly dipped into chaos. Shannon is the perfect actor to play Buschel’s hard-drinking gumshoe. He can swill gin and mumble ... »
Film: Review:Mammoth
19 November 2009 12:00 PM, PST
Rarely has a filmmaker experienced as rapid a rise and fall as Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. His intimate 1999 romance Fucking Åmål (a.k.a. Show Me Love) and his sprawling 2000 comedy Together were praised for their warmth and insight. Then he swapped optimism for pessimism with 2002’s heartbreaking (but artful) Lilya 4-Ever. After that, Moodysson tested audiences with the intentionally repellant A Hole In My Heart and the aggressively experimental Container, and in just a few short years, he went from being a favorite of critics and audiences to being a director whose name evokes winces ... »
Film: Review:The Twilight Saga: New Moon
19 November 2009 12:00 PM, PST
New Moon goes through great pains to present itself as a descendent of Romeo And Juliet, except without all that icky tragedy in the end. There are warring clans—in this case, werewolves and vampires—a rival suitor, tragic miscommunication, and at the center of it all, two self-absorbed teenage lovers. Throw in a revenge subplot and an ancient, power-hungry clan of evil Italian vampires, and it all sounds potentially thrilling. But in spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center. After ... »
Books: Review:Derek Nikitas: The Long Division
18 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Though ostensibly a crime novel—complete with shootouts, plot twists, and recriminations—Derek Nikitas’ The Long Division is more a work of literary fiction than a genre exercise. Nikitas shows an interest in language and form that outpaces most other authors who write about murder, and it manifests in passages that express the characters’ internal lives in terms of what they see around them. The Long Division is never hard to follow—and it’s peppered with memorable descriptions, as when Nikitas has one character look at a tray of pizza rolls and see “two dozen freezer-burned thumbs”—but Nikitas ... »
Books: Review:Paul Auster: Invisible
18 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Throughout his career, Paul Auster has invented puzzle-box novels where the puzzle is less in the plot, which often seems to bore him slightly, and more in the construction of the novel itself. It’s common to find an Auster novel where the answers don’t emerge from the storyline or the characters, but from what tense he tells the story in, or the point of view he adopts throughout. His latest, Invisible, is just such a novel, but it ultimately proves so enamored of its puzzle-like nature that all of the characters are unknowable. It certainly doesn’t help ... »
Books: Review:Gregory Maguire: Matchless: A Christmas Story
18 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
The shitty Christmas novel is a grand tradition most popular authors fall prey to eventually. Richard Evans has made a cottage industry out of sappy tales of holiday cheer, while no less than Glenn Beck has also contributed a big ball of goo to the genre, with a book apparently about a magical sweater or something. Gregory Maguire doesn’t wholly escape the pitfalls of the holiday novel with Matchless, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” but he comes closer than most. Maguire originally wrote the short story to be performed on NPR on Christmas ... »
Books: Review:Stanislas Dehaene: Reading In The Brain
18 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Reading In The Brain: The Science And Evolution Of A Human Invention is a lot like the organ the book discusses: While it’s filled with fascinating information, it can be discouragingly difficult to understand. Author Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive neuroscientist, intended his book to be accessible, a way to present the public with the research he and his colleagues have done on the unlikely invention of literacy. His goal is to understand how humans are capable of the complex processing required for reading and writing, since human brains should have needed millions of years to evolve to the ... »
Books: Review:Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson: The Gathering Storm
18 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Likely no one was surprised when it was announced that A Memory Of Light, the planned final entry in Robert Jordan’s mega-bestselling Wheel Of Time fantasy series, was so large that it had be split into three volumes. Jordan died in 2007, leaving the then-11-book saga incomplete, but even before his death, the Wot had bogged down in needlessly complex plotting and a dearth of forward momentum. Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy writer Jordan’s wife selected to finish the tale of the Dragon Reborn and his battle against the Dark One, has an unenviable task; working from Jordan’s ... »
DVD: Review:Forrest Gump
17 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
How does a movie go from being a triumph to a punchline? The multi-Oscar-winning hit Forrest Gump experienced what later movies like Crash, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionaire would go through, suffering such a strong backlash that in some circles, it’s all but impossible to find anyone who even likes the movie, let alone thinks it deserved to be named Best Picture of 1994. And yet in other circles, Forrest Gump remains beloved, and on its original release, it was widely considered a breath of fresh air: a summer blockbuster with wit, heart, and style, sweeping through ... »
DVD: Review:Xavier: Renegade Angel—Seasons 1 And 2
17 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
In its second season, Vernon Chatman and John Lee’s kid-show parody/avant-garde mindfuck Wonder Showzen didn’t just go out with a bang, it damn near committed highly public suicide, after salting the earth to ensure that nothing could ever grow in its place. When you’ve smuggled a Molotov cocktail of heresy, provocation, vicious satire, and flagrant puppetry onto MTV2, then taken the unholy result to places never dreamed possible on basic cable, what do you do for a follow-up? If you’re Chatman and Lee, you create a furry, deluded New Age spiritual guru with a beak ... »
DVD: Review:Downhill Racer
17 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
Bob Dylan sang about how there’s no success like failure, but in the films of Michael Ritchie, the opposite is often true. Elected to the Senate after a brutal, compromise-filled campaign in The Candidate, Robert Redford turns to his closest advisor and asks, “What do we do now?” He’s lost sight of the sure moral ground on which he once stood, and the trip across the finish line has left him—to borrow another Dylan line—with no direction home. The Candidate was conceived as the second in a series of Redford-starring/Ritchie-directed movies about what it takes ... »
DVD: Review:DVDs In Brief: November 18, 2009
17 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
An awful lot in J.J. Abrams’ re-imagining Star Trek (Paramount) doesn’t make much sense, starting with the way smug, show-offy asshole James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) hops over an entire military hierarchy to become captain of the starship Enterprise. But that’s par for the course in this energetic Trek, which is more interested in sleek, pretty actors and heady action than in the well-intentioned but sometimes clunky humanist preaching of Treks gone by. It isn’t always palatable or believable, but it’s almost always exciting… After Borat transformed Sacha Baron Cohen from pay-cable cult hero ... »
Music: Review:Norah Jones: The Fall
16 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Overwhelming popularity can do a number on an artist. Nirvana’s success resulted in what is arguably the band’s best album, In Utero, but also likely hastened Kurt Cobain’s downward spiral. Like Nirvana, jazz singer Norah Jones is the rare diamond-selling artist: Her 2002 debut, Come Away With Me, has sold more than 10 million copies. Unlike Cobain, Jones has found success liberating. She has been prolific, releasing two albums under her own name and forming two bands, the country-minded Little Willies and the more raucous El Madmo. She’s even tried acting. All of this speaks to ... »
Music: Review:Them Crooked Vultures: Them Crooked Vultures
16 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
What should be expected of Them Crooked Vultures? Put Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones in the same band, and it’s hard not to do some basic rock ’n’ roll algebra. Adding Queens Of The Stone Age’s catchy crunchiness to Nirvana’s relentlessly driving rhythms and Led Zeppelin’s flowing basslines and rich orchestral textures certainly sounds, well, super. But Them Crooked Vultures is not the sum of its members’ most famous bands. Thinking that it could be means overlooking an obvious fact about super-groups: Rock stars don’t form bands with other rock stars in ... »
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