Week of « Prev | Next »
17 articles
In Magic Camp, It's Gratifying to Watch Budding Magicians
27 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
It's heartening to know that places like Tannen's Magic Camp exist.
A summer camp held at Bryn Mawr College for aspiring magicians ages 12 to 20, Tannen's is the subject of the slight but delightful documentary Magic Camp, which focuses on five campers over the course of the week-long session. The kids are all vastly different and yet exactly the same—whether dealing with Tourette syndrome, dropping out of high school, or being one of seven girls amid 96 boys at camp, each one needs a place to belong, and Tannen's is a haven. It's gratifying to watch the budding magicians hone their skills in card tricks, close-up magic, stage presence, and more, or cheering them on in camp-wide competitions that bookend the week; it's even more to bear witness to »
Laurence Anyways is Deeply Refreshing and Important
26 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Xavier Dolan faces a seemingly insurmountable challenge from the outset of his new picture, Laurence Anyways: how to make a film about the difficulty of transitioning in a transgender life without making that subject seem reductive or abstract? One of the cinema's ongoing problems of representation, among many others, is the near-total absence of transgender characters and stories, which makes Dolan's film both deeply refreshing and important. But what's remarkable about Laurence Anyways is that the lived experience it conveys—the struggle of Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), born a man, to reconcile the need to reject her birth-assigned sex and become a woman with her enduring affection for former girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément), who finds it hard to accept the c »
The Secret Disco Revolution Theorizes on "Party Songs"
26 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
There's a brain-frying moment in writer-director Jamie Kastner's flawed, mildly entertaining documentary The Secret Disco Revolution in which members of the Village People vehemently deny that double entendres run rampant in songs like "In the Navy" and "Ymca." "They were just party songs," insists the exasperated Construction Worker. "There was no innuendo." Group delusion turns mean-spirited when the Native American sniffs, "Those guys [songwriter-producer Henri Belolo and the group's late impresario, Jacques Morali] couldn't write a double entendre." Cut to Belolo explaining that the late, openly gay Morali definitely and pointedly worked to bring post-Stonewall liberated queer maleness to the mainstream with his most popular creation. That moment crackles in the film, »
The Heat Would Be More Likable If It Stopped Yelling Everything
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
If you've never seen Sandra Bullock blow a peanut shell out of her nose, and you'd like to, The Heat is your movie. That's not meant sarcastically: It's one of the highlights of this often dismal but occasionally inspired comedy from Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, which pits Bullock's hoity-toity FBI agent against a brassy Boston cop played by Melissa McCarthy. The two are thrown together in pursuit of an elusive drug lord, and much of the movie -- too much of it -- is spent testing the boundaries of how loud and obnoxious McCarthy can be. Feig doesn't hand this able comic actress the gift of freedom; he simply gives her enough rope, which isn't nearly the same thing. But The Heat has a spark of something, irregularly ignited by the unlikely kins »
Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You is a Wainwright Family Sing-Along
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
The miracle of Rufus Wainwright's voice—that it can be at once so strong and so tender—is also the miracle of Wainwright's family, both in temperament and talent, right back to the singing and songwriting of Rufus and Martha Wainwright's mother, Kate McGarrigle, and her sister Anna. A song like Kate's "Talk to Me of Mendocino" unfolds like a map of plaintive, universal feeling, even as the exact destinations it charts it are wholly specific to her. That song and a host of other sun-touched folk numbers from the late Canadian singer receive stirring treatment in Lian Lunson's Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You, a stirring performance film documenting a Town Hall tribute concert organized by the Wainwrights and Anna McGarrigle in 2011, a year after Kate's death. Tho »
A Band Called Death: A Beautiful Story of Life, Love and Family
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
By 1975, many acts had walked through the doors of Don Davis's Groovesville Productions offices in Detroit. None of them were quite like this, a band of three related-by-blood African-American brothers who played louder, faster, and weirder than anything anyone in the city that gave birth to Motown had ever seen. They were called Death, and they were—as the New York Times article that more or less announced them to the world more than 30 years after they'd played their last note together put it—punk before punk was punk.
A band of black brothers inventing punk in Detroit only to be discovered three decades after the fact? It sounds, as Henry Rollins says in the opening of a new film about the band's moving, hard-to-believe journey, "like a movie." And so it is »
100 Bloody Acres Plays Like a Down Under Elmore Leonard Novel
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"We're not psychos, all right?" says Reg as he gags a woman with duct tape. "We're small business operators." That line suggests a satirical intent behind the Australian comedy-thriller 100 Bloody Acres. Reg and his hulk of a boss proceed to talk business while they prep a car accident victim for an industrial grinder, all to get a better pH balance for their roadkill-based fertilizer operation. Damon Herriman, best known stateside as the hapless crook Dewey Crowe on Justified, doesn't stray far from type here; as Reg, he makes many dim-witted decisions, most notably picking up a trio of hitchhikers while he's got a fresh corpse in the back of his truck. His boss is his elder brother, Lindsay, whom Angus Sampson plays with relaxed menace; it's clear he's terrorized squirr »
White House Down Is the Most Sharply Observed Spoof Comedy Since Team America
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich's White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur's intentions be damned. It's not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today's all-exposition-and-explosion filmmaking, it's also a mad liberal's vision of an America beset by white wingnut terrorists, set in a sketch-comedy White House so broad that if you didn't know Jamie Foxx was starring as its president you might guess it to be Leslie Nielsen.
Apologies if revealing that the terrorists are Stormfront-types strikes you as a spoiler. Doing justice to the breadth of hilarity on display here will involve divulging some details, but the film is as crazy-dumb durable as »
The Anxieties Awful Men Feel About Women in Some Girl(s)
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Is it any surprise that a woman stares down a man and shouts "Why would you do this to me?" within the first 15 minutes of Some Girl(s), a reasonably engaging indie drama based on a Neil Labute play?
Now that the hegemony is starting to give, a little, maybe it's worth giving a fresh look to the work of the playwright/filmmaker/gender-war field marshal whose plays and films, both the good ones and the cock-ups, have taken on a rep as being, let's say, "problematic" in their view of women.
There was the one where the two bros set out to revenge themselves on all women, an idea that was funny when Merle Haggard sang "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can" in '71 but unsettling to see dramatized in the Clinton era. There's the one where the nice nebbish endures th »
Museum Hours Makes Art of Waiting
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
It's tempting, after watching the exceptional new film Museum Hours, to describe director Jem Cohen's visual style as chiefly "observational." The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition. As Cohen's camera makes its rounds through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (the interiors shot digitally, the outside on 16mm) it seems remarkably attuned to everyday details, soaking in local flavor and, in essence, defamiliarizing a world we might think we know.
What's intriguing and ultimately more compelling about this approach is its adopted perspective. »
I'm So Excited! is a Minor Work by a Major Master
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
With his anxious parable I'm So Excited! Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction not as a pretext for thrills, as in most films, but for a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not just the passengers' lives, but the country's.
Defective landing gear forces a jet to circle the Spanish city of Toledo, waiting for an airport to be outfitted for an emergency landing. For the sake of maintaining civility—or at least privilege—the plane's economy passengers have been drugged, and rest unconscious while business class copes with the situation. That coping is facilitated by the attentions of three gay flight attendants, Joserra (Javier Cámara), Fajas (Carlos Areces), and Ulloa (Raúl Aré »
How to Make Money Selling Drugs Cracks on the Romance of Pushing
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
The first act of writer-director Matthew Cooke's documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs is smooth, seductive, and almost glib as it eases viewers into the big business world of doing just what its title promises, on a global scale. It almost seems intended to court, uncritically, the folks who have made Scarface a cultural bible and the documentary Cocaine Cowboys a lifestyle guide, especially as it appears to share with certain fans of those touchstones a willingness to turn a blind eye to those narratives' cautionary aspects. Tricked out with video-game graphics and sound effects, kicking off with 50 Cent once again burnishing his mythology as he recounts his childhood days selling drugs, and running on the giddy energy—the high, if you will&mda »
"The Hitchcock 9" Reveals a Young Master
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
The surest way to see if a film makes strong visual sense is to watch it with the sound turned off, a test plenty of today's movies would fail, given how many filmmakers rely on exposition and voiceovers to move things along. The chance to watch one of the great visual masters at work without sound, on the big screen and with live musical accompaniment, no less, is one of the rarest of pleasures—particularly at a time when the concept of the "movie event," as it plays out at the multiplex week after week, has become so distorted that it's ceased to mean anything at all.
BAMcinématek's presentation of nine fully restored silent films by Alfred Hitchcock—a touring series that goes by the suitably dangerous-sounding name "The Hitchcock 9"—is a real</i »
Neil Jordan's Byzantium is a Vampiric Swoon
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all the Twilight movies were bad. The first, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit a teen-dream sweet spot, the point where gothic literature meets the iPod. And Bill Condon's Breaking Dawn—Part I reached spiraling levels of nuttiness, including a placentarific birth scene Dario Argento would have been proud of.
But Neil Jordan's Byzantium—its script by Irish-born playwright Moira Buffini—is more in league with Joss Whedon's cerebral, passionate Buffy the Vampire Slayer series than with the fangless Twilight universe. Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan play 200-year-old vamps on the lam, thou »
Pedro Almodovar: "The Whole World has Changed for the Worse"
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"The whole world has changed for the worse," Pedro Almodóvar says, a sentiment that's apparent in his latest comedy, I'm So Excited!. The film is reminiscent of another time, one the director admits he feels some yearning for: the 1980s, and, more specifically, Almodóvar's films from that era. "The thing I miss the most about the '80s is my own youth," he says, "but I also miss the feeling of freedom when Spain was coming out of the Franco dictatorship. There was an explosion of liberty. Right now, socially speaking, Spain is going through a regression. If people don't keep fighting for their rights, we're going to be in danger of losing some of them."
Spain is suffering from unemployment rates of more than 25 percent and a punishing austerity regime that »
Pedro Almodóvar's Forgotten Films: 5 of the Spanish Maestro’s Best Comedies
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Before he was one of cinema's finest dramatists (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces), writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was a provocateur and a satirist. The 63-year-old filmmaker harks back to that past with his first comedy in nearly 25 years, I'm So Excited!, a lighthearted, ensemble-driven bit of escapism set 30,000 feet in the air. Over the past two decades, Almodóvar's early comedies have gradually become the prolific director's hidden oeuvre, having been eclipsed by his elegantly garish melodramas. But longtime fans know that the filmmaker first came by his international renown with a comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and that those early, darkly comic films from the 1980s »
Gideon's Army: HBO's Most Illuminating Crime Drama Since The Wire
25 June 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Among the revelations you're likely to experience during the course of Gideon's Army, Dawn Porter's vital, moving new HBO documentary (premiering July 1) about the struggle of conscience waged by public defenders in the deep South: "Everyone is so young." Not just the suspects -- mostly black and mostly broke -- whom we see ground through the criminal justice system in places like Clayton County, Georgia, where posting bond on a shoplifting charge can run an unconscionable $40,000. It's the defenders themselves whose youth is so touching. In their mid-to-late 20s, facing impossible caseloads, inhumane hours, and an intractable system, as well as their own mounting student loans and the certainty that their law school peers are by comparison drawing serious b »
17 articles
company.