During the torture-porn heyday, zombie maestro George A. Romero issued a curt but cutting assessment of the trend: "I don't get [them]. They're lacking metaphor." Coming from the father of a micro-genre he has successfully tweaked to suit the times for more than 40 years, that had to hurt. The cyclical resurgence of zombie films -- of which Romero's 2008 Diary of the Dead and now Survival of the Dead are only a part -- suggests that the metaphor is key to its endurance; the market for graphic internal anatomy lessons seems more finite. But while Survival of the Dead does its best to work up a decent allegorical bent -- this time involving territorial pissing matches within a country under siege -- its power is diffused (and frankly, confused) by its execution. Instead of closing in for the metaphorical kill, the film frequently wanders off in a new, noncommital direction.
more »
In the hands of filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whimsy is practically an automatic assault weapon. That doesn't mean his pictures aren't sometimes inspired. At their best -- as with A Very Long Engagement (2004) or the The City of Lost Children (1995) -- they can be wondrous, otherworldly mechanical inventions, the kind of dark, glittering things Jules Verne might have dreamed up if he'd fallen asleep watching Mulholland Dr.
more »
Every era has its excesses, its mullets, its chunky removable car cassette players, its Quarterflash. But MacGruber, the feature-length comedy adapted from the strange, slender recurring Saturday Night Live skit, relies too heavily on the idea that the past -- corny, irrelevant, suffering from chronic bad taste -- is funny by itself. The drag is that when you've seen one Blaupunkt, you've seen them all.
more »
That the Shrek films have always had one eye firmly on the chaperones -- regularly casting clever asides, storybook mash-ups, and classic rock riffs into their corner -- is one of their canniest innovations. While appealing to parents is standard procedure today, at the time of the original's release, in 2001, it still seemed like a clutch move, elevating the film above the steady flow of Disney treacle it took pleasure in subverting and taking up Pixar's gauntlet. Almost a decade after its inception, having slightly adjusted the bar for family entertainment, the franchise finds an apt farewell in Shrek Forever After. More redux than sequel, the final Shrek is more parent- (and specifically dad-) oriented than ever; it may also produce the first twinge of nostalgia in the kids who thrilled to the original at a formative age.
more »
The Hasidic community is mysterious to outsiders, and for good reason. This isn't a group that reaches out to strangers, preferring to keep themselves isolated in their own neighborhoods, where they can follow their own long-established mores and customs while avoiding dangerous distractions. We're not supposed to look at them as if they're time travelers from the 19th century, but seeing the men dressed uniformly in their somber, loose-fitting suits, the women in their ankle-grazing skirts and dark helmet-shaped wigs, it's hard not to. These are people who don't want the modern world to find them. How could outsiders -- all of us swept up in the modern world whether we like it or not -- not be curious about that?
more »
Loose, flinty, and a little in love with itself, Perrier's Bounty struts the fine line of self-consciousness drawn by neo-gangster capers like The Usual Suspects, In Bruges and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's still a relatively new -- and presumably malleable -- design, but director Ian Fitzgibbon seems comfortable within its broad strokes: Chronic f*ck-up angers casually vicious, slightly absurd kingpin; bon mots and a body count ensue. Not designed to blend in (can a film in an eccentric mold achieve true eccentricity?) and yet lacking the extra inch to distinguish it from its better-known kin, Perrier's Bounty is content to merely measure up.
more »
Public humblings are a risky maneuver, whether engineered by politicians, tycoons, athletes or movie stars: Nothing less than abject vulnerability will do, and the performance will be scrutinized for sincerity with a righteous, collectively hooded eye. You may not have been aware that Michael Douglas was scheduled for a public humbling, and yet every aspect of Solitary Man, a lewdly annotative study of aging male salaciousness, is engineered to tweak our received ideas about its star. Part two of this exercise, Oliver Stone's sequel to Wall Street, which finds former financial alpha lizard Gordon Gekko freshly released from prison, may have a better shot at tapping those ideas; it at least has more reason to presume they have remained relevant in the public imagination.
more »
It's hard to know why movies that tell completely made-up stories often feel more real than those that tell true ones. Maybe it's because fictionalized versions of real-life events always stir up questions not just about what really happened, but about how that something happened. Watching a filmmaker interpret those events dramatically demands that we trust him or her implicitly: A fiction film based on real events is a kind of shaped reality, which isn't, of course, reality at all. The best we can do is to trust a filmmaker's instincts, and his heart.
more »
Dark and queer enough to catch your attention but lacking the story power to hold it, Metropia is an aesthetic in search of an author. The first animated feature from Swedish director Tarik Saleh, Metropia posits a familiar scenario -- middle-class male malaise -- in a near-future Europe made exotic by its fall into dystopian ruin. The allusions made by the opening titles to the environmental and financial crises that have ostensibly brought Europe together (the countries have been literally connected by an inter-continental subway system) are a little misleading: As they attempt to build a paranoid allegory around the monolithic potential of the European Union, Saleh and writer Fredrik Edin move further and further into the experience of a call-center employee named Roger (voiced by Vincent Gallo). Ultimately this approach shrinks the scope of a setting that seems designed for bigger things.
more »
Testing the versatility of Queen Latifah's appeal has become something of a cultural, platform-hopping pastime: Hip hop artist, jazz singer, sitcom star, talk and awards show host, (Oscar-nominated) supporting player in a major movie musical, cosmetics model, and finally leading lady in the affecting Last Holiday -- her non-threatening likability has made her triple threat about three times over. It's painful, then, to watch her seeming eagerness to please lead her to streamlined vehicles like Just Wright, a film so tightly rigged that even its star's centrifugal charms can't keep you fully checked in.
more »
Gary Winick's Letters to Juliet is such a gentle romantic comedy that it barely feels like a romantic comedy at all, at least not in the way we currently define the genre. There's no Amy Adams hilariously slipping through the mud in her high heels, no Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey uproariously pretending not to like each other as they traipse around some tropical island in their shorts, no dueling brides catfighting about who's going to have her dream wedding at the Plaza on a specific day. Letters to Juliet also has the distinction of featuring a marvelous performance from the woman who is, in my view, our greatest living actress.
more »
Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii's favored daughter remains under-told. Skimping on detail and narrative depth, the film manages to misuse its embarrassment of natural resources -- beautiful brown people in Victorian garb, for one thing; the tetchy notion that British colonization suited the Hawaiians better than American imperialism did, for another -- in its determination to honor them with a queasy blend of History Channel import and Merchant-Ivory sweep.
more »
In days of yore, the myth of Robin Hood was embodied by brave and noble men: Douglas Fairbanks outwitting the king's thugs by sliding down the length of a slippery medieval brocade curtain; Errol Flynn striding jauntily into a great hall with a dead stag draped around his shoulders like a royal's stole. But, as Ridley Scott's Robin Hood suggests, those are heroes from a lost age. Today's Robin Hood is far more complex, a tortured soul suffering from repressed-memory syndrome, a freedom fighter whose perpetual scowl speaks of a highly attuned sense of justice. Today's Robin Hood is the spirit of freedom disguised as a grumpy gus in a leather jerkin, and he carries something far heavier than legend -- or even Errol Flynn's stag carcass -- on his shoulders: a backstory.
more »
Few filmmakers are as achingly earnest in their political views, and as deeply in touch with the soul of the proletariat, as Ken Loach is. If only we could just admire his movies without having to actually watch them.
more »
Another candy-apple red ride to the Mid-Life Crisis Invitational, Multiple Sarcasms is the antsy family man of indie films: Taking its capable, under-seen cast for granted, it blows the central character's problems all out of proportion. Written and directed by first-timer Brooks Branch, the film presents the smoothly running life of architect Gabriel Richmond (Timothy Hutton) circa 1979, just as it begins to stall. "What if there's no reason to feel sh*tty, but you do anyway?" he asks, setting up what seems like either a pointedly unpromising premise or an Abilify commercial. Back in the last days of disco, apparently, instead of consulting pharmacologists bored men became playwrights, in this case to underwhelming cinematic effect.
more »
