Ever since Quentin Tarantino directed Jackie Brown twelve years ago, critics have been calling on him to make a true successor to it, a film that harnesses his undeniable talents in a mature way. I've got good news for those pundits: They'll finally find the film they're looking for in Inglourious Basterds. The tricky part is that I mean that quite literally -- that long-desired Jackie Brown follow-up is in this movie, but it's battling for screen time with a separate storyline that might be Tarantino's least consequential yet.
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Movie audiences are strange beasts: pliable on principle, we will suspend disbelief on the briefest of pretenses. We will pay handsomely, in fact, to accept a world of homicidal robots, superhuman powers, or Woody Allen as a viable romantic option. But when it comes to time travel, our collective stickler intervenes: we want laws, we want the rules, we need to know exactly how this shit is going down. Without them we get crabby, preoccupied with, of all things, whether it's really possible and how this is all supposed to actually work.
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There's so much that's good about District 9 -- so much thought, so much technical virtuosity, so much energy and pitch-black humor and narrative meat and visual detail and giddy-making sci-fi adventure -- that my first inclination is to suggest that you stop reading about it and just see the damn thing. Made for an astonishingly low $30 million by first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp (our interview with him here) under the guidance of Peter Jackson -- who clearly recognizes a kindred spirit when he sees one -- District 9 tells the story of a race of walking arthropods, the lower caste of an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization who've been corralled into a shantytown (the one referred to in the title) two decades after their spaceship ran out of gas above Johannesburg.
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There are exactly two audiences for It Might Get Loud, the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim. One comprises aficionados of the electric guitar -- the casual, seasoned and even professional musicians whose primary instrument is profiled here. The other is composed of fans of electric guitar heroes Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, whose own philosophies and styles offer a vehicle for Guggenheim's exploration. Fortunately for him, those are fairly vast global demographics. Unfortunately, for all of Loud's access and ambition, they're both fairly underserved.
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Dylan Dakota Banana Murphy lives in Mankato, MN, where he is enrolled in Mrs. Kozolowski's 4th grade class at St. Sebastian's Elementary. In addition to film criticism, he is on the soccer team and the founding member of the YouTube club. His favorite movie is a toss-up between "Max Payne" and "Step Brothers", and his favorite band is Metallica. Because we completely lost our inner 10-year-olds somewhere in the Mall of America in late '80s, we asked Dylan to review "G.I. Joe" for us.
GI Joe: The Rise of Puke in my Mouth!
By Dylan Dakota Banana Murphy
Ok, like, I know my dad and all you hipster peeps totes got into GI Joe way back in the 60's or whatever and that's cool. I mean, I guess all you did was sit around and play with these dolls and watch your 3 TV channels NOT in color. Lame. I prob woulda killed myself. Anyway, Paramount went balls to the wall trying to get the "youth" into this stuff. Thanks to my monthly movie review in the St. Sebastians's Elementary Observer (shout out: Dylan's Hot Flix! woot woot!), they flew me and my staff to Paris for a junket, or whatever that is, and a special private screening.
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The debut feature from writer-director Sophie Barthes, Cold Souls opens with Paul Giamatti, playing Paul Giamatti—well, a version of Paul Giamatti, anyway—breaking down while rehearsing Uncle Vanya's Act IV monologue. "If I live to be 60, I'd have to live another 13 years," Vanya says, circles under Giamatti's red-rimmed eyes. "How could I do that? If I could just live what is left in a different way..." The director encourages his weeping star to lighten up: "It's not a tragedy. Where's your sense of humor?" Upon watching Cold Souls, a dour comedy that takes the whirligig inventiveness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and gives it a solemn Russian twist, you may wonder the same.
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INGREDIENTS
1 Meryl Streep, giving by a wide measure the most endearing performance of the summer as jolly giant Julia Child;
1 adorable Stanley Tucci, as her loving husband Paul;
1 Amy Adams, twinkling and pouting in a pixie cut and checkered Vans as blogger Julie Powell;
1 handsome hunk (Chris Messina) in what can only be called "the girlfriend role";
1 Nora Ephron, a director who for all her faults is at least honestly interested in women;
50 glistening shots of maddeningly delicious-looking food;
a pinch of Jane Lynch (as Julia's even-taller sister) and Mary Lynn Rajskub (as Julie's sardonic best friend).
Toss all ingredients together. Some lumps will remain. Simmer for two hours.
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Andrew Bujalski's films are all about improvisation. I don't mean that he doesn't write a proper screenplay, or even that he crafts his scripts, Mike Leigh-style, from actors ad-libbing in character. I mean that Bujalski's movies are about the daily improvisations of getting through life, the way events surprise or confuse us on a minute-to-minute basis. They're about how everything you say -- to your friends, to your lovers, to the lady at the cash register -- is improvised. "I needed the characters to be figuring out what's happening as the audience is," Bujalski has said. "Not telling the audience what's happening, but struggling through it themselves."
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The mysteries at play in The Cove, Louie Psihoyos's troubling, gripping activist documentary, begin at the surface and then, like the dolphin pods the film shows zooming around coastal Japan, go way deep.
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That there is an evolution to be traced in Judd Apatow's directorial career is impressive in itself, given that we're only now on his third feature. His ambitions to deal with more serious material, develop his characters, and add montages set to earnest songs to his repertoire are duly noted, but the most convincing evolution is evinced in Apatow's gradual shedding of all conceptual pretense to give us a full frontal look at his world, and how relationships work within it.
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From its promise of an instructive, girl-meets-unlikely-boy tale of wonder to the astronaut suit antics, twinkly, hipster-uplift soundtrack, and deadly Forrest Gump joke, the trailer for Adam, Max Mayer's ballad of love and Asperger's, said two things to me: strap on your adorable crash helmet and get ready to learn.
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The smartest movies in the evil-child genre expose nuclear families as never-ending horror shows of misery, rivalry and constantly simmering resentment. Is it any wonder that the beleaguered bourgie parents in Jaume Collet-Serra's enjoyably nasty Orphan are named John and Kate? The couple, played by Peter Saarsgard and Vera Farmiga, is not plus eight but three: pubescent Danny (Jimmy Bennett), deaf moppet Maxine (Aryana Engineer) and preternaturally poised, 9-year-old Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), adopted soon after Kate has a miscarriage. Before completely going off the rails with a series of false climaxes -- and a plot twist that undermines its most daring ideas --_Orphan_ stealthily portrays middle-class family life as the most pathological existence imaginable.
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The City of Brotherly Love is glutted with fathers, sons, and the holy ghost in The Answer Man, writer-director John Hindman's debut film. The specter of some of the most tiresome traits of Amerindie cinema also looms over the story of Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels), a reclusive writer made whole again through the healing connection to single-mom chiropractor Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) and 12-stepping used-bookstore manager Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci).
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While the gays have been twisting and rending the rainbow flag, fretting over whether Brüno is pro- or anti-homo, heterosexuals should be showing similar concern about romantic comedies, which have become their own brand of minstrel shows caricaturizing XX-XY mating rituals and behavior. Breeder ladies and gentlemen, ask yourselves: Is The Ugly Truth good for the straights?
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When a network uses the phrase "social experiment" to describe a new reality television program, that usually means the show is either too boring or too safe to get descriptors like "hot" or "sizzling" or "scandalous" applied to it. Sadly, ABC's new "romantic reality" series Dating in the Dark is both boring and safe, which might make for a good husband, but not a dating show. This is the first of six episodes of DitD, and unless the future participants get uglier and/or prettier, this might turn out to be one of the least interesting mid-summer replacements in recent reality memory.
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