When Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, those of us at home who'd been following the young Thai filmmaker's career were thrilled -- and puzzled. The new movie, we'd heard, featured talking monkey ghosts and a catfish skilled in the art of cunnilingus -- in other words, it sounded pretty much like business as usual for the adamantly nonlinear filmmaker known more commonly as Joe, and I, for one, couldn't wait to see it. But it certainly didn't sound like a predictable choice for one of the most prestigious film prizes in the world, and it meant that Joe's rapturously twinkling little star was ready to shine brighter outside the relatively cloistered world of film nuts. Joe's work was poised to reach a broader audience, God help them.
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Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer's exploitation extravaganza Drive Angry 3-D is not recommended for the squeamish, the highly suggestible, or children under 40. It should be OK for everyone else, though, particularly those with a high threshold for disreputability and a fondness for '70s-era drive-in caliber action junk. Its hero, played by Nicolas Cage, is a vigilante from hell; his mission, or at least one of them, is to tell the world to eat his dust.
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The chanting of the monks in Of Gods and Men has an immense power -- it drives away doubts and cleanses their minds, leaving them opening for the possibility of sacrifice. Xavier Beauvois' film conflates the power of exultation and loss by having them intersect. What he creates is distinctive -- an ascetic melodrama that massages its way into your soul. And rising to the challenge in this fact-based story is Lambert Wilson in the role of a lifetime -- as Christian, the leader of the Algerian monks abducted by terrorists, he holds the screen with an empathetic magnetism.
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Xavier Dolan's Quebecois love-triangle drama Heartbeats shows what happens when a director's filmmaking gets in the way of his filmmaking. Dolan -- who also wrote the script and appears in a starring role -- takes an intriguing idea and, instead of stripping it down to the sparkling essentials, layers so many curlicues around it that whatever appeal it might have had is obscured. There's a lot that works in Heartbeats -- so much that its flaws stand out in disappointingly sharp relief.
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The pleasantly crude Hall Pass reminds us of what's been missing from movies: Those squirm-inducing moments in comedy that produce enough discomfort that at points what we're watching is half a heartbeat away from a horror film.
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Happy Oscar week, you third-class stowaways. Quoth the thespian Bill Paxton, "Are you ready to go back to Titanic?" The point is you're not. It's 2011 and we're still 192 years away from comprehending Titanic's world-paralyzing success, its Best Picture win, and Jack Dawson's hack drawing skills. He's just never going to get into Oberlin at that rate. You won't find explanation for James Cameron's sorcery here, but near, far, wherever you are -- you will remember and recoil at the royal badness of Titanic.
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Stuff goes wrong in Brotherhood. Shit gets real, bottoms drop out, worse comes to worst and then some. Crowded with incident and untroubled by character, the film is an escalation machine that runs on clichéd coincidence and depends on everyone involved making the stupidest possible choices in any given situation. The machine gives off synthetic adrenaline as exhaust; trapped within the frame, its toxic cloud compounds the stupidity already on ample display. Director Will Canon has succeeded chiefly in creating a thriving micro economy inside of his very trying frat-house disaster flick, and dumbness is its GDP.
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You might want to catch We Are What We Are before its inevitable, much-too-glossy remake brightens the walls of American multiplexes. I saw it last fall at the 2010 Fantastic Fest in Austin, where writer/director Jorge Michel Grau's deft confidence at rendering his tale of family dynamics gone horribly awry in Mexico City got his film a jury prize.
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One of the potential upsides of a formula-driven franchise is a product finding a level of comfort and confidence in being exactly what it is. Big Macs, Gap T-shirts, and the latest Big Momma movie have it; their job is delivering on checked expectations, and yours is not making the mistake of wanting better. If anything I expected even less from Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son than it serves up, which is a reliable gimmick inhabiting a B-movie throwaway story. It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.
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Anyone who has ever been a child or played with one is familiar with the narrative universe of I Am Number Four, a teen alien/superhero/savior/vampire mash-up that's all guts and no glory. In it, things happen in an order that's too erratic to be called a sequence and yet too processed to amount to much of a story. Props, plot points, and ass-saving contingencies erupt only on the point of crisis, as they do in child's play: Oh you're an alien from a far-off planet? Well I am a different alien sent to kill you! Oh you suddenly have superpowers to deflect my intergalactic weapons? Well guess what--I have a monster Fire-proof shield!
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There are just two days of screenings left at the Berlinale -- the prizes are awarded on Sunday -- but today is my last day at the festival, my day of reckoning. This is the point at which I look back on everything I've seen and, more wrenchingly, tote up everything I wanted to see but missed. While I've tried to chase down most of the films screening in competition here, day by day my colleagues have been feeding me recommendations from the Panorama and Forum sections of the festival, which showcase films that generally have smaller budgets and take larger risks. I didn't get to see many of those pictures, and that's where my deepest regret lies.
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When someone makes a list of the most influential movies of the last decade -- has EW done that yet? -- The Bourne Identity should get its own category, not only because of the ruthless efficiency of its action sequences but also for the detached competence of its star, Matt Damon, whose deportment while stalking the gray, shadowy streets of West Europe suggested a man on a mission while lost in a dream. In the intermittently diverting Unknown -- there could also be a compilation of movies with that title -- Liam Neeson borrows from the Bourne playbook, as an American stranded in mysterious Berlin, his brow knitted even deeper by the fact that, after recovering from an accident, he's been replaced in his life by someone claiming to be him.
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Otherwise known as Your Honors Student Will Sacrifice His Livelihood For Porn. Holler, 2004! The Girl Next Door is one of the last horndog comedies to eschew parody and go for realism -- but barely. It lives in a post-Shannon Elizabeth universe where the untouchable hottie (Elisha Cuthbert) has to be a porn star because all other options are exhausted/boring. How stupid! I'm game! And so is Timothy Olyphant, the I Am Number Four/Justified star, who plays a sleazy porn producer here. We hope to answer the following questions with today's Bad Movie We Love: 1) Why do we like this scummy flick for oily masturbators? 2) Why is Emile Hirsch such an unconvincing loser? And 3) Most importantly: Why does Mr. Olyphant act like he's still in Scream 2?
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For the first long stretch of Pablo Trapero's Carancho, the camera swerves and wends behind, around and in front of its subjects, brokering space and mapping their movements with smooth, sympathetic constancy. It follows Sosa (Ricardo Darín) and it follows Luján (Martina Gusman), two professionals who cruise the streets of Buenos Aires at night with a vaguely overlapping purpose. Luján is a paramedic and Sosa is a personal injury lawyer. In Argentina, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 35, so their nights are long.
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There is something to be said for knowing what to expect, or there can be. Just Go With It, Adam Sandler's latest brand vehicle, opens with a flashback to a Long Island bride primping with her bridesmaids on the big day. One of them has a nose the size and shade of a Chinese eggplant stuck to the front of her face. It's one of the first things we see, and it sets the tone and the bar defiantly low -- if a movie could snicker at itself, the vacuum-sealed silences that frame many of the jokes in this one would at least have the laugh track it seems to have forgotten to add in post.
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