http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Wed, 2 Jul 2003 08:32:49 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/02/083249.php Dave TepperSo stop me if you've heard this one. Three gay guys, a fag hag, and a lesbian (that would be me—no, really) go to see Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines......and the lesbian is the only one who hates it. Doesn't it just figure?Now, I'll grant you, there are chases and special effects out the wazoo, and ordinarily that would be enough for a perfect summer movie. But dammit, I feel like I grew up with the characters in the Terminator series. I saw Sarah Connor evolve from a waitress to a hardened survivalist. I saw her son John take the first baby steps towards being the leader of the future human revolution against the machines.So how could any screenwriter worth his salt (John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian, who aren't) turn John (Nick Stahl) into such a milquetoast loser? How could director Jonathan Mostow settle for rehashing the original Terminator as homage parody, when there are so many other stories that need to be told?For example, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes). Within hours, she goes from shopping with her fiancé to desperately trying to stop a nuclear war. How does she deal with it? How can she? What does she share with Sarah from the first two movies, and how is she different? Damned if I know. Danes is a fine actress and could have done an incredible job with a properly written role, but except for one memorable scene the producers could have replaced her with a cardboard cutout stamped "GENERIC GIRLFRIEND" and used the savings for even more F/X.And Ah-nuld. What are we to say about Ah-nuld? I love that the aging icon can poke fun at himself. Case in point: his Terminator is now an obsolete model, and a well-used model at that. Heh. I like the guy. I've watched almost every movie he's been in, even The Last Action Hero. But there are so many jarring, self-deprecating jokes that T4 should just abandon the pretense altogether and cast Leslie Nielsen as the Terminator.In the movie's defense, I will say this: Kristanna Loken, as the evil cyborg babe, is totally convincing as a wooden-faced, soulless machine.My advice is to wait until the movie hits the local cinema drafthouse and get drunk on cheap beer while watching it. If you don't care about that human-relationships stuff in your summer movies, you'll get laughs and explosions and a fun time out of it. And if you do care, at least it'll numb the pain. Video6674@blogcritics.org Wed, 2 Jul 2003 08:32:49 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/29/211240.php Dave TepperSo how was Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle? Well, I could talk about the acting of Cameron Diaz (Natalie), Lucy Liu (Alex), and Drew Barrymore (Dylan), but that would be a little pointless. It's all about the T&A—or, in the case of some of the males, N&R, nipples and ripples.I could, I suppose, say that this movie is a gloss on domestic violence, British-Irish relations, growing older (two former Angels show up, one of them played by a fine-looking Demi Moore, and I won't spoil the other one), sisterhood, the perils of fame, post-feminism, and post-post-feminism.But who am I fooling? It's about the boobies, the slope of Diaz's lower back, the martial arts, the explosions, and the fleeting celebrity appearances, in that order. The movie delivers spectacularly on all counts. If you want anything deeper, go wade in a kiddie pool. Video6598@blogcritics.org Sun, 29 Jun 2003 21:12:40 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/27/001535.php Dave TepperIdentity wants to be a good bad movie. It's got the A-list stars slumming—well, the B-plus-list stars, anyway—the fresh twist on the genre formula, and the camera chops to back it all up.The problem is premature climax. Just when the movie is building up a head of steam and rushing headlong toward an explosive finale, the script puts the conclusion where a major plot point should be. That means the last half hour or so has no suspense, no reason to care, no reason to watch really.The setup: On the night before a mass murderer (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is to be executed, eleven strangers with far too much in common get caught in a rainstorm and have to spend the night in a run-down motel. One by one they're killed, and that's really all I can safely say about the plot. There's lots of homages to horror movies and whodunits both classic and current, from Psycho and Ten Little Indians to I Know What You Did Last Summer. The shocks and scares in the first two-thirds of the movie are well done indeed, and if this film had more staying power, it could rival The Sixth Sense for creepiness and mind-bending ability.The cast mostly does great with what they're given. John Cusack (Ed) carries the movie as a limo driver with more secrets than even he realizes. Amanda Peet looks good as a hooker without a heart of gold, and Ray Liotta is THE MAN as Rhodes, a cop transporting another multiple murderer played by Jake Busey. Rebecca De Mornay as a washed-up actress is toe up, and I can't decide if that was just a wonderful job by the makeup department or if she really is aging badly. Clea DuVall, on the other hand, just stank up the joint as a newlywed whose marriage is already on the rocks. Most of the rest of the cast I didn't recognize, but they acquitted themselves quite well amid all the murderous craziness.It's worth a $3.99 rental when it finally hits the stores. Video4884@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Apr 2003 00:15:35 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/03/15/194826.php Dave TepperMaybe the string quartet Bond is just a guy thing. More than one of my female friends have accused me of liking this girl-group string quartet only for their looks.Okay, it doesn't hurt that they look like they could be, well, Bond girls during the Pierce Brosnan years. I envision first violin Haylie Ecker and violist Tania Davis as the good Bond girls, with second violin Eos and cellist Gay-Yee Westerhof as the bad Bond girls. Hummina hummina hummina.Now that I've gotten that out of my system, the question is, can they play? Their late 2002 release, Shine, fuses classical music with techno, trance, and world music, to generally good effect. The sound engineers go way overboard layering the electronica over the instruments, downplaying the women's talents.Good thing the electronics are as good as the strings. When they work together well, the result is sheer bliss. "Fuego" is pure giddiness and speed and panic, with each note blurred into the next in a rush of chaos. "Strange Paradise" began as Tony Bennett's "Stranger in Paradise" and evolved into a trancy, smooth soundscape. And could anyone else could take Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and turn it into a stately imperial march, albeit one with a spring in its step?Bond's other strength is their forays into world music. The title track is an Indian-inspired mid-tempo piece, by turns discordant and slinky. "Gypsy Rhapsody" is a straight-forward dive into Romany music, while "Sahara" has and African tinge to it. And in my dreams, Ms. Ecker and I are twirling around a ballroom floor to the feisty, playful "Libertango". Actually, a lot more happens in my dreams, but that's all you'll get to know about.The rest of the tracks suffer from that overelectronicizing problem, and range from the mediocre (the annoyingly twangy "Big Love Adagio") to the good-but-generic ("Ride" and "Space"). With Josh Groban and Charlotte Church making the "new classical" popular, Bond's next album ought to back away from the electronica a bit. They're excellent at classical and world music, and have a keen ear for reinterpreting classic rock and pop standards. It would be a shame for Bond to become just another group of engineered, soulless trance tarts. As things stand right now, Shine is more invigorating and liberating than the band's first album, Born, but shows less of Born's technical proficiency on the strings, which is where the focus on this group ought to be.Still well worth the full price of this CD. Music3831@blogcritics.org Sat, 15 Mar 2003 19:48:26 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/03/14/214342.php Dave TepperWhat is it with Hollywood execs and their remakes of foreign thrillers anyway? It's like they hear "remake" and they think they can create the exact same movie.Do they not get the differences in culture that can turn a wildly successful film into an Americanized mediocrity?Exhibits A and B are Ringu, the Japanese original film, and The Ring, its American remake. The plot in the two films are almost identical: People who watch a weird videotape receive a phone call telling them they'll die in seven days, and then proceed to do so. Intrepid reporter views the tape and has a week to save her own life... and her ex-husband's... and her son's.(Wouldn't you lock up something that deadly? I would.)The differences are in the details, the atmosphere. Ringu is presented as an Asian ghost story, with elements of mysticism added to the plot. The Ring, on the other hand, throws in a psychiatric subplot in an effort to make the movie more scientific, more Westernized, more believable. But if you're going to throw in Western rationality, you better have the explanations to back it up.I'm thinking in this particular case of where the heck the damn video comes from. In Ringu, you can passport away the video's beginning, by just sweeping it into the "supernatural" file and suspending your disbelief. As a result, it doesn't need flashy special effects to tell its story. It can be more stately, more chilling. The Ring asks more of its audience, but doesn't deliver as much in return beyond some PG-13 gore.Exhibits C and D are the Spanish movie Abre los Ojos, and its American counterpart, Vanilla Sky, and what the heck kind of title is that anyway? Again, only the barest skimming of the plot can avoid spoilers, but both movies depict a rich, successful man torn between the fuck buddy who's stalking him and his best friend's new love (in both movies played by Penelope Cruz). His face gets mangled in an accident and he's accused of murder, and yet... it may be all a dream!The difference again is not in the plot or the acting, but in the cultural maps of the two films. Ojos director Alejandro Amenabar and star Eduardo Noriega are clearly working from a more European-influenced, existentialist perspective. On the other hand, Cameron Crowe, Sky's director... I'll be honest, I can't figure out what the heck he's doing, and Tom Cruise is too much of an all-surface pretty boy to have any interiority at all. Heck, he looked worse in Born on the Fourth of July than he does here. Where Noriega's mangled features show the character's inner torment, Cruise's merely make him look constipated.The lesson here is, that the U.S. movie industry really ought to focus on making its own original thrillers. And so it does, mightily, in Donnie Darko, which I only learned about last week and have already seen three times. Part of its allure, I admit, is that it perfectly recreates the experience of going to a private school in late-80s Virginia. But no other teen movie, I bet, has successfully mixed so many genres into one coherent whole: teen comedy, horror, sci-fi. You got your Tears for Fears, your scary six-foot rabbits, your hallucinations, your time travel subplot. Best of all, it does Catcher in the Rye one better, presenting the title character's teenage alienation as something real and debilitating, but not making him a little snot like Holden Caulfield. He actually comes to realize that there is something bigger than high school and hormones.I loved that. You don't know how much my 30-year-old self wants to go back and tell my 16-year-old self that it's okay to be confused and suspicious of all the crap that adults shove on teenagers, but that it does get better.So let's get to the ratings. How many times will you want to watch the DVDs before you finally get it?Ringu: 1 The Ring: 2 Abre los Ojos: 3 Vanilla Sky: 1, if you don't give up halfway through. Donnie Darko: At least 4, plus look for the Easter eggs and visit the website for more clues as to what the hell is going on. Video3812@blogcritics.org Fri, 14 Mar 2003 21:43:42 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/16/202527.php Dave TepperWhen you decide to pick out ten movies you'd want with you on a desert island, you have to take into account that you won't be able to plug in your TV or DVD player. So ideally, you'll want to take movies where you can just look at the cover and have the entire film come flooding back to you.With that in mind, I'll count down my top ten movies I'd take to a desert island:The Philadelphia Story, not to be confused with Philadelphia. For one thing, Katherine Hepburn is a hell of a lot more luscious than a scrawny, scraggly Tom Hanks. Some Like It Hot. You just know all the women, and that includes Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag, are lesbians. Enough homoeroticism, sexual innuendo, and Marilyn Monroe bosoms to subvert an entire repressed decade. Clueless. Whole consecutive pages of quotable dialogue make up for the few easily concealed blemishes on this teen movie's face. A Fish Called Wanda. I like any movie when the paunchy guy gets the hot girl in the end. The Scream trilogy, although Scream 3 is the movie I'd eat first when I finally ran out of food because that's the weakest in the series by far. But the first one has that great scene where Randy is simultaneously telling Jamie Lee Curtis and his own actor, Jamie Kennedy, "Watch out, Jamie, you know he's around... Behind you!" Great stuff, even if Neve Campbell can never quite lift herself out of tortured-teen mode and have fun being the heroine. The Exorcist. I shouldn't need to explain why. When Harry Met Sally.... Did you know I can do Meg Ryan's deli scene word for word and scream for scream? But only when I'm really drunk. See if you can get me to do it if you meet me at a party. The Iron Giant, because I always cry like a big baby at the end. Sure it's a children's movie, but it beats out anything Disney has ever released. Se7en, for taking me on a wild ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche. What I thought was in the box at the end was even worse than what was actually in there. How twisted am I? I hate you, David Fincher, and thank you. Star Wars, the first movie that got my 4-year-old self to stop asking my folks, "What time is it?" at the theater. George Lucas's greatest battle was not with the Death Star, it was with an impatient preschooler. He put the kid into a state of slack-jawed awe and instilled a lifelong love of movies in the process. You win, George. Video1867@blogcritics.org Sat, 16 Nov 2002 20:25:27 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/10/212757.php Dave TepperWell, I've learned my lesson. If I'm going to see an art-house movie, I'm going close to the beginning of its run, instead of waiting for it to end up in an "independent" theater. "Independent", in this context, means that the lobby was decorated in 70's-reject style and Briana loves Jenna was playing on the next screen over. My skin was crawling, and every nerve ending was screaming, For god's sake, don't touch anything! The seats exacerbated an already aching back, and looking at the screen required tilting the neck up at an unnatural angle.But when Mostly Martha opened with luscious shots of beautiful food in a trendy restaurant's kitchen, I forgot where I was and lost myself in the film. If you've ever seen a food movie such Eat Drink Man Woman or Like Water for Chocolate, you already know what to expect. Emotionally blocked protagonist pours her soul into her food, and is liberated by family/a lover/one really good shagging. It's a simple story, but as Martha (Martina Gedeck) notes, you can tell a good chef by how she prepares the simplest dishes.Martha is the chef at the Lido, a chi-chi eatery in Hamburg with a habit of avoiding her fellow workers. Forced to see a therapist by restaurateur Frida (Sybille Canonica), she turns her therapy sessions into opportunities to have her psychologist (August Zirner) try out new concoctions.In quick succession, Martha's sister is killed in a car accident, her niece (Maxime Foerste) comes stay with her until she can find the girl's father, and new sous-chef Mario (Sergio Castellitto) arrives in her kitchen. The rest of the story you can fill in on your own, but food movies are about character, not plot. Good thing, too. Otherwise I'd have to take points off for the on-again, off-again subplot about a downstairs neighbor that goes nowhere.Ms. Gedeck does an incredible job in the beginning, keeping her brittle composure—or at least letting Martha think she is—while simultaneously revealing the whirling undercurrents below. I don't envy anyone that thespian task, but she gets the job done superbly. Young Maxime Foerste manages, at the same time, to underact and overdo playing a grieving yet bratty young girl. I'm not quite sure how she managed that. Castellitto does well in a role that could easily have degenerated into a stereotypical passionate-Italian. Instead, he throws away the recipe, so to speak, and tosses in his own intimacy and energy in his scenes with Ms. Gedeck; you can feel a slow flame between them heating up the audience.Luckily, as you read this you don't need to experience this film in a sometime-porno palace. It's available to rent now. Video1767@blogcritics.org Sun, 10 Nov 2002 21:27:57 EST