Click on a letter below to get to the list of movies starting with that letter.
# ** A ** B ** C ** D ** E ** F ** G ** H ** I ** J ** K ** L ** M ** N ** O ** P ** Q ** R ** S ** T ** U ** V ** X ** Y ** Z
Latest Entries »
Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, and Jena Malone. Written by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya.
As an initial sidebar, why does Snyder keep getting relegated to March? This would have been a fine summer movie. Spoilers below.
I am saddened by the crummy reviews this film has been getting. I know it’s very egotistical of me, but I think this is a case where the critics are largely just wrong. I think they have missed the point. I think, to be perfectly honest, that they are too old to see what’s really going on in this movie.
The word floating in my mind through a great deal of the movie was “post-fetishist”. Although putting women in thigh-highs and heels and enormous fake eyelashes for the entirety of a movie about a mental asylum-cum-brothel-cum-various war scenarios would seem to be a sexist move, designed to assert that women are submissive to men, I think there’s something newer going on. I think the intention is to convey empowerment.
It’s a dangerous thing to say that sexy scanty outfits are empowering, because then you unintentionally draw in the idea that being a ho is empowering. I do not believe that sluttiness is in any way empowering, but I do believe that feeling like a strong and sexy woman is, and – just as an example, one I don’t think is unique to me - I felt more strong and sexy when I wore garter belts under my office wear for a time back in 2003 than I’ve ever felt since. I feel happy and confident when I wear thigh-highs and heels (even if the thigh-highs just look like pantyhose to everyone else). My movie-going partner pointed out that putting women in such sexy costumes in fact gives them power over men, making men vulnerable to their feminine wiles; I think this is a good point, too. I can’t deny that heels have the whiff of foot-binding and encumberment about them as regards women, and that tiny outfits expose women in a very obvious way that men are not subject to. But I think that what’s happening here is that the women in this movie (girls, really) are choosing sexy outfits, choosing them because they make them feel like a million bucks, not because they want to be weaker or lesser but because they want to be stronger and more.
So that’s what the costumes are about, in my opinion. And that attitude of empowerment despite appearances extends to the rest of the movie; Snyder is simply not playing by the same patriarchal rules that all prior generations of male film directors have. It seems to me that for him, women are people, and the ultimate point of this movie is not that women are doomed to be lobotomized and lost, killed, ruined, but that life sometimes sucks. Sometimes you’re a decent person and still, your mom dies, you get stuffed into a mental institution by your murdering stepfather, you try your damndest and do everything Scott Glenn says, and still, you are granted freedom by way of an icepick jammed into your frontal lobe. That’s human life, not just the hard luck of the second-class gender.
This reviewer pointed out aptly that the “male gaze“, a staple of cinematic interpretation for half a century, is simply not at work in this movie. I agree. I pointed out to my movie-going partner that, as belied by the costume thing, women are the subjects rather than the objects in this film. I wanted to be up there kicking ass on clockwork Nazis in my schoolgirl outfit and high-heeled Mary Janes along with the rest of them. I did not see as how I was supposed to be identifying with the male characters; I think that even men viewers of this movie would be identifying with the female characters, instead of the male ones as the way has always been. Part of the reason for this is that apart from Scott Glenn’s sensei, the male characters, to a man, are awful; only the lobotomy doctor shows the glimpse of a soul. The rest of them are active destroyers. To me, this adds to the sense of this movie as a feminist piece. The dudes who objectify and harm the women are evil, hence objectifying and harming women is evil too. (Also of note: the first man listed in the cast is seventh-billed.)
The critics who’ve called this a big dumb action flick aren’t exactly wrong. It’s not brilliantly characterized, it’s got just a smidge too much action and noise, and visually it’s so grand and exciting as to be a bit overblown. But they are entirely wrong about the pedigree of this big dumb action flick, and about the stuff that’s at work underneath it. I think what you’ve got here is a classic male ensemble piece, like The Wild Bunch or The Great Escape, only the ensemble’s made of girls. I think Snyder is well and truly a visionary director, an adjective I thought was a little full of itself when applied in the trailer of Watchmen, when he’d made a grand total of one movie of importance. (But he is. He wants to show us things that are awesome, and things that are beautiful, and things that are ugly, and things that are perfectly staged, like moving art photography. He thinks in comic panels, and God, is it wonderful to see.) I think seeing women act like Stallone and Diesel is pretty damned awesome. I think watching two hours of such a complex tangle of influences and time periods is sort of magical, and I think Sucker Punch has a lot of the distilled essence of what movies are all about.
Directed by Karyn Kusama. Starring Amanda Seyfried, Megan Fox, and Johnny Simmons. Written by Diablo Cody.
There’s deep, dark, interesting stuff going on in this unholy child of Heathers and The Evil Dead, there’s fun on the surface, and really, it’s a neat movie. Fox is ideally cast, Seyfried delivers the goods, and Adam Brody acts with the ease and pleasure of Robert Downey, Jr., not something you can say about a lot of dudes on the screen. I have to mention Johnny Simmons, who makes the most genuinely likable high school kid I’ve seen on the screen in yonks. I still haven’t seen Juno, but I finally see what the press was talking about with Cody’s unique colloquial style, and I found it grating and terrific in equal parts.
Heathers was a good revenge fantasy for teens, and if I have to explain why, either you’ve never seen the movie or you were the football captain/homecoming queen in high school. But the people murdered were jerks – date-rapists, incredibly evil queen bees, etc. In Jennifer’s Body, a queen bee decides to make assorted decent high school boys into prey, and it’s not satisfying in the same way at all. These are good kids full of potential who go down at her claws, and it’s sad, which is a whole different thing. I think Cody was turning the predator and prey upside down, which is cool, but I don’t think she was after the same ideas as other teen black comedies. Which is interesting. That Jennifer uses her body as the bait is the thing that’s really sticking with me; I think scads of girls throughout the history of teenagehood have attempted the same thing and have gotten only empty encounters as a result. Jennifer, instead, gets to drink their blood. But it’s subjective on both ends and she’s still ridiculously insecure, having to go after more boys to keep herself alive, so there’s more complexity there than just a giddy, devilish devouring. Deep stuff.
There’s also the relationship between the two girls, which is the hub of the whole kaboodle. Relationships between high school girls are really damn complicated (despite appearances), and it’s hard to get at them without cliche, but this movie does the job reasonably well. I thought that the comedy and the horror were both just fine, well-mixed, neither aspect too over-the-top. I’ve been watching gore-bucket movies recently, so this one seemed almost tame, but that’s okay.
I was shocked by the numerous bad reviews of this movie, until I noticed that they were pretty evenly split down the middle: the girls liked it, the boys didn’t. One reviewer said that he didn’t think this was what feminism was supposed to look like, and I wanted to reach into my monitor and knock some sense into him. This isn’t feminism; these are the gladiatorial pits of high school. Feminism doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel. Written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin.
This film has gotten such extreme laudits that I was sure I would love it. I didn’t. I liked it, I found it very, very good, but I honestly don’t think it deserves such enormous praise. The praise seems to come from the fact that few films like this are being given wide release out there today, but just because a bird is rare doesn’t mean it’s automatically the best bird in the world. It can still have a too-loud squawk or feeding habits that ruin the environment or something else metaphorical for this film ain’t perfect.
And it ain’t. It drags in places, and I don’t think it does quite enough in many others. It strikes me as a film that’s built around a single bravura sequence towards the end, one that did indeed astound me. But there’s an additional two hours of movie that goes on before and after that sequence, and while a lot of it’s terrific, it’s not entirely spellbinding.
That’s not to say this isn’t a good movie. It is. Aronofsky is such an exciting director, with his own unique stamp, such a rare thing these days with cookie-cutter film-school directors. He utilizes a drunken camera to interesting effect, and he is unflinching when it comes to all things ugly, something I admire him for without loving him for it. The performances are all good, but again, it seems like more attention than is deserved has been heaped on Portman for her part. She’s one of my favorite actresses and she does an incredible job here, but the film revolves around her, somewhat without her involvement. Kunis is so natural and so enticing that she’s the one who caught my eye, actually. And Cassel is such a total sleazeball artiste, great work there.
I can’t wait to see what Aronofsky does next, but I don’t think I’ll allow myself to listen to quite so much of the hype next time. It hindered my enjoyment of the movie that was, waiting for the ideal movie I’d read about to come to cohesion as I watched, and ultimately being disappointed.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde. Written by Edward Kitsis and Edmund Horowitz.
The critics have been unkind to this movie. They have accused it of being too cold, with too little humanity and a weak, confusing plot. I neither agree nor disagree. It’s not a particularly human movie, true, and the plot is pretty thin and empty, but it’s some of the most mesmerizing eye candy I’ve ever seen on a screen, and I only wish that I’d waited the extra half-hour and seen it in 3D instead. Walk in with relatively low expectations, and I’ll bet you will be dazzled.
The music is also extraordinary – as involving as the visuals, in my view. Two big thumbs up to Daft Punk. The excellent sound design included a lot of old-school beeps and boops that delighted me, and the majority of the programs had filters on their voices, which I found a nice detail. The screenplay is reasonably good, with moments that actually made me go “huh, that’s actually…well-written.” The performances are pretty meh, especially our Shia LeBeouf impersonator main character, Hedlund, who did a pretty reasonable job crying but whom I just didn’t like. Good old Michael Sheen drops in to ham it up, and honestly I’m starting to wonder how we got along without him. Best part is easily the production design, because they very wisely did little more than expand on the original look and feel of TRON – which doesn’t look like any other movie that’s been made before or since – and that means This Shit Looks Awesome, Yo.
The plot is pretty dumb, though, and not really worth following. (“Confusing” is not the word I would have used.) I think they might have been trying to connect the former problem of the MCP trying to control all the programs to the modern problems of DRM, but they didn’t get very far with it. It’s a bit too long, but I have complained about that for virtually every blockbuster-style movie I’ve seen that was made after 2000. I could go on and tell you more about what was wrong with it. But all of TRON: Legacy‘s flaws pale in comparison to the look that was on my face when I saw the first Recognizer coming down out of the digital sky:
^ ^
o o
O
In that way, this is a thoroughly appropriate successor to the original TRON. That wasn’t much of a movie, either, but boy oh boy was it good to look at.
Directed by Elia Kazan. Starring Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, and Pat Hingle. Written by William Inge.
A very unique film. For one thing, there’s a whole lot going on that I was sure you couldn’t make movies about in 1961. For another, it’s a Sirk-level melodrama without Sirk’s lush gooey touch (both an asset and a liability), which makes it pretty damned absorbing and difficult to laugh at. It still has the stain of midcentury fear and shunning of mental illness, one of my pet peeves, but that’s a negligible issue for a film that is so much less vague and equivocating about mental illness than most of its contemporaries.
It’s extremely well-directed, much more humanly constructed than most Kazan movies I’ve seen, and Natalie Wood gives (at times) a subtle and mature performance. Beatty, in his screen debut, plucks his performance wholesale from James Dean. I can’t really blame him, since Dean was Dean and it was 1961, and I’d be willing to bet that they were thinking of Dean when they cast the movie. But it’s a shame, since I know Beatty will do so much better and so much more in the future.
Although I can’t give accolades to the screenplay, as it’s not written any better or worse in its particulars than any given film of the era, the story and the way it moves and progresses are extraordinary. I also like that the whole point of the film is summed up in the two or three lines of Wordsworth from which the film derives its name – you could go on and summarize the plot in a few paragraphs, but those two lines are really all you need to know.
I recommend this one. It’s an unusual entry in classical Hollywood and well worth watching.
(Incidentally, the Amazon reviewer calls this a great slice of American cheese. I respectfully disagree. I know cheese when I see it, and I think this one’s meant and well-taken in all seriousness.)
Directed and written by Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Juliette Binoche.
I watched this in two sittings, because, as I explained to BF, this is a Great Film, and Great Films demand an awful lot from their audiences without giving very much back. I said this to him rather quickly, but the more I thought about it the more I found it to be true. Often, Great Films are experiences that remain meaningful for us throughout a long period of our lives, but they are still not entertainment, in the same way that, say, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is entertainment. They are challenging and intellectual and they require emotional and mental work to sit through.
On the whole, I did not enjoy this film. I think it deserves the accolades it received, lo those many years ago, but I found little about the experience of the film that was redeeming or…enjoyable, I guess is the word. I was thoroughly depressed by the ending, wondering whether Ondaatje or Minghella were trying to make an antique point about the consequences of sin, and while the film was very beautiful, I didn’t find it interesting.
Part of the problem is probably that I hated the experience of reading the novel. I was baffled by it, and annoyed that the author could not simply tell me what happened instead of shrouding the entire plot in vague poetry. I know this is my fault, for not being more capable of enjoying a fugue-state piece of literature for what it was, hoping for something more straightforward, but still, that was my reaction. I liked that the movie told an actual story, but I found that it was not a story I liked.
Great color palette, though. Wonderful work by Binoche especially, but also the two leads. Just a hell of a downer of an ending.
Directed by Gore Verbinski. Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Geoffrey Rush. Written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.
I am a staunch defender of Pirates I. I think Depp deserved an Oscar. I think the script is witty. I think the music is cheesy and perfect. I think the direction is totally decent and the production design is terrific and the casting is wonderful. (Rush’s Barbossa is one of my favorite performances ever, because the way he rolls his words around before letting them go is utterly inspired.)
I sat through Pirates II twice, hoping to find it more memorable the second time, before seeing Pirates III. I discovered the problem on that second viewing: there’s too little plot movement stretched out over too long a period of time. There’s a lot of hijinking back and forth between locations, but there’s no momentum at all. Still, I fell totally in love with Tia Dalma and I thought the last 30 seconds were sheer brilliance.
And now I’ve seen Pirates III. The first adjective that comes to mind is “bloated”, one that was used by many critics fairly. (They also said that they got lost in the jumble of characters, which I have to say didn’t happen for me because I found all the important characters quite memorable.) Good items include the costumes, which are remarkable; much of the acting (oh, thank you, Rush and Nighy, you reaffirm my existence); the special effects, because although they were overly flashy, there was ever so much sublime mileage obtained from them; and the total cheesiness and fan service that went on throughout most of the running time.
Bad items, though, include its length. Huge deal-breaker there. There was a lot of that lack of momentum going on, and I kind of wonder why someone didn’t advise that they structure the two screenplays better, and redistribute or remove some of the ballast. And there was some cheesiness that was too over-the-top even for me, and is better suited to ten-year-olds, despite the movie being waaaaay too scary and gory for 10-year-olds. There was also the fact that betrayals and cross-betrayals ran so covert and changed so quickly that it was occasionally hard to tell who was doing what and why. There were also glaring, gaping failures to resolve subplots that I had much enjoyed.
The biggest problem I had was with the fate of two of the characters. I am a sucker for romance and happy endings, and they have been teasing us with this romance for an estimated seven hours of screen time now, and THIS is the payoff? Fucking weak. I know it’s partly my prejudice that presents the problem, but I was hugely unhappy with that ending and it soured much of the rest of the experience for me. It’s a Disney movie, guys, I don’t expect to be disappointed like that. You’re not working for Sony Pictures Classics here.
Overall, far better than the middle chapter, but has enormous failures that make it a totally inadequate fulfillment to the high promise of the first film.
Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Demi Moore, Viggo Mortensen, and Daniel von Bargen. Written by David Twohy and Danielle Alexandra.
I found this pretty stupid, overdramatic, unrealistic to a degree it’s unnecessary to state. I enjoyed a good deal of it, but when the final third of the film got going I stopped being able to look beyond the stupidness. (It did raise some interesting questions for me about what a post-gendered military would actually look like, but that’s too long to get into here.) I also think that the Amazon reviewer’s characterization of the Master Chief as “sadistic” is wholly incorrect; he is a drill sergeant and a reasonably normal one, with a point of view on women in the military that I find not quite sexist but realistic and thoughtful, and Mortensen brought some great depth to the part. I don’t think this film was remotely as meaningful and impactful as all involved seemed to want it to be, but they should have known better.
Directed by Radley Metzger. Starring Essy Persson, Anna Gaël, and Rémy Longa. Written by Jesse Vogel.
The history of this movie is slightly more interesting than the movie itself. The director later became a full-on porn director, and the whole enterprise of this film and his later career remind me a great deal of Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights: let’s make porn artful, with good stories. Sadly, not even Philip Kaufman can straighten that one out.
In any case, this approaches an art film, being deliberate, beautifully shot, and focused on higher issues like longing and coming of age. At the same time, there is a lot of nudity, and numerous erotic scenes with two young women together. The movie is adapted from a classic of French erotica, and the lengthy, explicit, purple voice-overs that accompany most of the lesbian scenes are presumably straight from the book. I’ve never heard sex described in such unique terms, and that was worth watching.
Overall, though, the film was transferred poorly, the dubbing really breaks the fourth wall throughout the whole movie (the entire thing was ADRed, despite most of the film being in English), and although there was a lot of beauty there, I mostly felt bored. I wanted more explanation, or more art, not something in between.
Directed by Amy Heckerling. Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, and Sean Penn. Written by Cameron Crowe.
I’d never seen this until now, and I think I might have missed the boat on it. It seemed slapped-together, with the different storylines only connected by the school they revolved around. I also thought the hilarity and legendariness of Sean Penn’s performance has been greatly exaggerated. Probably he set the bar for all other idiot stoner-surfer performances, but I didn’t think he was particularly funny nor particularly memorable. Plus, the movie wasn’t primarily about him, it was about the other kids. He seemed like a gimmick to bolster a pretty ordinary set of coming-of-age stories. Music was good, performances were decent, the early appearances of a lot of these later stars was interesting, but it just didn’t grab me.
