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 Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:28:11 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/2005/10/29/232811.php Steve JacobsWoody Allen's newest film, Match Point, is quite possibly his most successful "serious" film to date. It bears hints of many of his past works - particularly Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and her Sisters, and Mighty Aphrodite - but this film is far, far more than the kind of antiseptic, backcatalogue poachery exhibited by Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this past summer. Match Point, although distinctly an Allen film, stands entirely on its own, untethered by the canon that came before it. Perhaps because Allen does not act in the film, perhaps because it doesn't take place in New York City, or perhaps because it simply has no trace of the all-too-familiar Woody Allen brand of comedy, but - whatever the case may be - this film defies comparison with its predecessors.The movie follows the story of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers of Bend it Like Beckham fame), an Irish tennis player who quits the professional circuit, becomes an instructor at a posh health club in London, quickly befriends one of his pupils, and begins a startling ascent into London high society. The pupil, Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), comes from a wealthy family who has a box at the Opera and, as chance would have it, "someone can't make it" for that evening's performance and, since Chris has mentioned an interest in opera over a post-lesson drink, Tom invites him to come along. Once there, Chris makes the acquaintance of the whole Hewitt family, including Tom's sister Chloë (Emily Mortimer). With a few more happy accidents here and there, Chris quickly elevates himself to a much higher rung on the socioeconomic ladder.The film - and all of the publicity surrounding it - famously asserts that, more than anything, life is a game of chance, that it is more important to be lucky than to be talented and Chris's experience certainly does assert the significance of happenstance. After all, the entirety of his success is reliant on a series of coincidences starting with the open seat in the private box of the wealthy tennis student he meets that day. Nonetheless, there's more to Chris's life than luck, even if he doesn't want to believe it.Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is fantastic as Chris, portraying a fish out of water who has willed his fins into the shape of arms and legs and forced his gills to breathe air. His performance - the character's, not the actor's - as an erudite, cultured young man who defies his low birth to rise to the level that his intellect demands somehow doesn't ring true. Like the film's scratchy, unmastered opera soundtrack that sounds more like an old record player than the actual aria it's playing, Chris comes off as not the real thing, but a very well-studied copy. Look for his reading material. Listen for the accent that would seem apparent from all of the times that Tom addresses him as "Irish," but simply isn't there. There is something else at play here other than luck, something over which both Chris and the film itself cast a veil of obscurity: trained and focused ambition, not hard work, but the actual overwhelming desire to achieve success, no matter the obstacles encountered.Scarlett Johansson also stars as Tom's fiancée Nola Rice, a sexy American actress trying to work her way into the London theatre circle. She, unlike Chris, has bad luck, loses her cool at every audition, and can never seem to earn a role. The way these two characters interact with each other show just how potently both luck and ambition figure as the two dominant factors in a person's path in life. Is it good or bad luck that these two meet one another? In the end, the only thing that matters is how they deal with the outcome.Allen has written and directed a very interesting and intelligent new movie. It is a film unlike any other that he's ever been involved in before, bearing a dark subtlety and layered complexity that goes almost entirely unsupported by the lightness of humor that Allen has made his name on. There have, of course, been serious and somber Allen films before, most notably his tragic Interiors, but that was more of a transposition of Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata from Sweden to New York than a film of Allen's own making. With Match Point, Woody Allen has found a new and powerful voice, one that might finally convince critics and viewers alike to stop holding every new film up to the thirty year-old gold standard he set with Annie Hall and just appreciate his work in its own contemporary context. He will never again make Annie Hall, but he just might make something better.(For more of the same, visit my other blog cin city) Video38731@blogcritics.org Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:28:11 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/13/113414.php Steve JacobsI rented New York Stories on Netflix and watched it the morning before my evening flight to Paris a few weeks ago. I thought it would be a fitting end to my wonderful summer in New York City, a tribute to my time there, a period to put at the end of that particular sentence of my life story. Having watched it, however, I am comfortable in saying that this movie should never have been made.A collaborative effort by Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen, the movie is overwhelmingly uneven. The film is divided into three segments, each directed by one of the above. It all starts well with "Life Lessons," the Scorcese segment about a successful but neurotic painter (Nick Nolte) living in SoHo, who uses his studio and the offer of "life lessons" as a means to bag young women to serve as his assistants/live-in lovers. It's a neverending exercise in self-torture for both parties, the girl (Rosanna Arquette, in this case) kowtows to the older, wiser painter until she realizes that he's really no more than a little boy with a paintbrush. At that point the tables are turned and he plays the fool for her until she kicks him to the curb, whereupon he washes his hands of her in a shower of tears and goes on to find the next girl. Humorously and touchingly written, fantastically and innovatively shot in a way that only Scorcese could pull off, and set to a great soundtrack, this segment gives high hopes for the rest of the film.The next segment, Coppola's "Life without Zoe," however, immediately dashes those hopes to the ground. Co-written with his then 18 year-old daughter Sofia, this piece is tantamount to a cinematic Take your Daughter to Work Day. The story is about a prepubescent Upper East Side princess and simply shouldn't have been written. Sofia was only a teenager at the time and she's more than made up for it with Lost in Translation. Daddy should have known better.The final piece, Woody Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" is something of a recovery (anything would look good coming after Coppola's piece), but in comparison to his other work, it's disappointingly one-dimensional. A farce about overbearing Jewish mothers, this short film is the kind of self-hating Jew schlock that only encourages modern-day anti-Semitism.It's an interesting idea to get a few distinctly New York directors together to make a tribute to the city, each focusing on his/her own neighborhood and lifestyle, but the city and these directors are all too big to limit to just one third of a movie. Scorcese did another movie about SoHo in the 1980s called After Hours that, while of an entirely different style (his one and only comedy), does a better job of encapsulating the atmosphere of Lower Manhattan during that time. Coppola isn't really the New York director that the other two are, but if you want to see his take on the city's overpriveleged elite, look no further than the first two Godfather films. As for Woody Allen, you can take your pick, but for a love song to New York, go with Manhattan. For a great New York comedy, watch Manhattan Murder Mystery.Just, whatever you do, don't watch New York Stories. Video37866@blogcritics.org Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:34:14 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/26/065540.php Steve JacobsNormally, American movies have a delayed release in Europe. The last time I was in France, I had to wait several anxious, hand-wringing months to see the second installment of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. It was therefore quite a pleasant surprise to find Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang already out in theaters in Paris, when it's not due for release in America until October 21.Robert Downey, Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a two-bit New York thief (and our narrator) who accidentally stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood movie and earns a shot at a part as a private eye. The producers fly him out to the Coast and set him up with detective lessons from the rapier-tongued and mean-witted Perry Van Shrike (Val Kilmer). Of course, when Perry takes Harry out on a case that's supposed to be boring and routine, they end up witnessing the disposal of a body and, before they know it, they're embroiled in a murder plot (not to mention a romantic subplot with a long lost love from Harry's hometown). Perry being gay - the producers refer to him as Gay Paris (French pronunciation), which went over well with the audience here - adds a fun and interesting spin to the film's take on the buddy genre without being just an excuse to throw in a bunch of gay jokes.In some ways, the movie is formulaic - it has to be or there would be no story - but it's also incredibly subversive. Black (for whom this is a winning debut directorial effort after a long and mixed career as an action film screenwriter) brings out every trope of film noir genre and then turns it squarely on its head. The real detective is gay and thus doesn't get the girl because he doesn't want the girl, but nonetheless he's far tougher than the straight protagonist. Melodramatic dialogue standard to 40s and 50s detective movies wiggles its way into the film, but the delivery is overwrought and ironic. Like lots of other films noir, there's a voice-over narration, but Harry doesn't just break the fourth wall orally. He is not only the film's narrator, it seems, but also its editor and his editing style matches his stuttering, nervous storytelling; he frequently stops the film, backtracks, and starts over, introduces admittedly "fictional" elements to his story as a point of self-mockery, and even writes and draws on the screen to better direct the viewer's attention.What's most subversive, however, is the joke that Black's movie actually plays on itself. A spoof of hardbitten detective movies and pulp fiction, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a black comedy, but the movie even turns on that genre. Robert Downey, Jr.'s Harry is more than just a bumbling loser hero blindly tripping his way through life à la Mr. Bean. Harry's self-deprecating humor - as delivered both verbally and visually - is a defense mechanism and, reminiscent of Black's past work on the original Lethal Weapon, occasionally his façade cracks, revealing that a lot of this stuff isn't really funny and also that Downey is still one hell of an actor.In a way, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the perfect contemporary American film for a contemporary French audience. It's up-to-date film noir: the kind of good old-fashioned L.A. detective movie that fascinated the French so much as to kick start the New Wave forty years ago. Like today's France, the movie is a reinterpretation of an old genre, respectful of its roots but also willing to make light of them. Even out of the context of a Parisian movie theater, however, this film is a winner and well worth a night out at the movies, even in America.(To see this and more, go to my blog cin city). ed/Pub:NB Video36815@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 Sep 2005 06:55:40 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/25/235409.php Steve JacobsLast night, for the first time in a good long while, I watched Reservoir Dogs. Like most movies I really like, I'd begun to take for granted that it was a great movie and no longer gave any thought to what made it so. Seeing it again (for the first time), I realized that, other than a weirdly sloppy deep-focus shot about three quarters of the way in, the movie is basically perfect. I'm of the opinion that, generally speaking, acting in a movie is not quite as important than most viewers think it is. Above all, film is an artistic medium; it is a marriage of picture and sound in which the actors are little more than another of the director's tools. I can't say for sure whether he was aware of it at the time or not, but Tarantino made a brilliant move by completely subverting this notion and actually making Reservoir Dogs about performance.In addition to serving as a showcase for marvelous acting jobs by all involved, the film's story is itself about acting. None of the robbers participating in the heist know each other, so they're all trying to act as tough as possible in order to impress one another. Acting. Additionally, they're all going by fake names in order to preserve the secrecy of their identities. They are each pretending to be Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blonde, or whatever color it is they've been assigned. Acting. On top of that, Mr. Orange is an undercover cop, so he's doing twice the acting that everyone else is. He's pretending to be a criminal who's pretending to keep his identity secret. For this role, he rehearses, learns lines, and otherwise works to get into character.At no point is this element of performance more clear than during the episode surrounding the commode story. Orange's boss makes him memorize "an amusing anecdote" about a drug deal that he can repeat to the criminals he's trying to win over and the manner in which the film illustrates Orange's process of learning and then recounting the story is nothing short of brilliant. Orange's boss, with all his idiosyncrasies - his penchant for bandanas, communist iconography, open vests, and oddly colorful meeting places - and his flair for the dramatic, seems much less like a law enforcement officer and much more like a theatre person. Like a true director, he molds Orange into the perfect actor; the story becomes so real to him that when Orange finally tells it to the group of criminals he's trying to infiltrate, he can actually see himself in the story, acting out the words that he's worked so hard to memorize. When he describes his emotions, however - something that takes time in the process of the storytelling, but in the real-time of the story takes less than a second to act out - it's the Mr. Orange in the story that takes over the narration, describing his "character's" emotions to the other fictional characters in the story. In this move, Orange embodies the character of the film; he makes the story more real for himself by actually making it about his performance rather than the events of the story.There are other cool performative elements to the film, but it would take far too long to describe them all. Tarantino's work is a constant invitation to this type of analysis, which I suppose is what makes him a great writer/director. The viewer continues to enjoy the film long after it's over.(For this and more, please visit my blog cin city) Video36798@blogcritics.org Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:54:09 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/17/102100.php Steve JacobsIf it's Robert Altman's trademark to direct large, ensemble-cast films, then Nashville is his flagship production. There are twenty-four significant speaking parts in the film, many of them played by high profile actors. The truly amazing thing, however, is that none of them ever really holds center stage for more than a moment or two; the spotlight consistently returns to the constantly churning collective that is the entirety of the production itself.The story focuses on the goings-on during a long weekend in the title city of Nashville, Tennessee. There are far too many characters to list and describe here. Suffice it to say that there are two parallel themes running throughout the film: music (primarily country, regrettably) and politics. Nashville was and is the nation's country music capital and politically Tennessee is - in the film, at least - something of a modern-day Ohio in that it almost always (only once did it not) goes to the winning presidential candidate. Nashville, Tennessee is the ideal arena in which either a musical or political contender would try to make a name for him/herself. But, as the films shows, when every person is trying to stand out as an individual, they each become imperceptible in the swarm.There are, of course, a few exceptions to the rule. In spite of all the competition, country stars Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) and Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) and political spin doctor John Triplette (Michael Murphy) stand out prominently from the crowd, but, like everyone else, they remain resolutely unindividual. Rather than exercising a certain authority due to their prominence, they merely have responsibilities; they are more like slaves than rulers. When Haven introduces Barbara Jean with the preface "Nashville's own" in the beginning, his words bear a more literal meaning than he realizes. As a performer, her celebrity is far more of a duty than a privelege; she is at the whim of her admiring public and, essentially, she is their property.Similarly, John Triplette is nowhere near as important as an individual as he is for what he represents. As prominent a physical role he plays in the plot of the movie, his significance to the story derives itself entirely from his connection to Hal Phillip Walker, a mysterious third-party presidential candidate who never appears on screen. Through the use of wit and finesse, Triplette charms his way into the people of Nashville's good graces, but he's little more than a salesman; as far as everyone else is concerned, he's not a real person but rather just the embodiment of Walker's interests. Like Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean with country music, it is not his personality that defines the character of his political party (the fictional Replacement Party), but rather the political party that defines his actions and behavior.As such, Triplette, Hamilton, and Barbara Jean (it's impossible to separate the one name from the other) are little more than placeholders; they have risen to their prominent positions entirely by chance and are sure to be replaced the moment they step down. Even though both politics and popular music are founded upon a certain cult of individual personality, the collective character of the movements in question far supersedes that of the individuals who stand as their figureheads.If there is any truly significant individual, it is the man who works behind the scenes. The most important characters in this movie, therefore, they are Hal Philip Walker and Robert Altman himself. Neither of them ever appear on screen, but they are both far more important to the story of the film than any of the on-screen characters. However, while Walker uses his power to draw attention to himself - or at least his name - Altman does not. He simply diffuses the viewer's attention across the entire film, thus preventing any one actor or actress from stealing the show. Distinct from most contemporary films, Nashville - like most of Altman's other works - is not simply a showcase for a celebrity or two; the actors are merely the paint to Altman's paintbrush and his style of direction insists - justifiably and successfully - upon the viewer's recognition that his films are indeed art.Being no fan of country music, I find it regrettable that Altman had to choose it as the subject matter with which he would strike a blow against the cult of the individual and demonstrate the almost ethereal strength of culture and politics. As the two-and-a-half hour movie began, I steeled myself against the upcoming onslaught of country and I can't say my appreciation for the genre has grown any since watching the film. Nonetheless, Altman's presentation of the subject matter was so subtly pervasive that, upon the movie's end, when the appropriately anonymous character of Albuquerque stands up and sings "It Don't Worry Me" before the largest audience presented in the film, I actually found myself singing along. ed:JH Video36333@blogcritics.org Sat, 17 Sep 2005 10:21:00 EDT