The Sorcerer's Apprentice Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I was already pissed (but not surprised) about Disney transforming their wonderful Fantasia episode into a live-action big budget picture, and thus, I had no intention of seeing it.  Granted, I do often skip the cheesier looking franchises anyway (for fear of wasting my time that could be well-spent watching more important films than these) but this one seemed even cheesier than most.   Yet something kept nudging my thoughts back to seeing it (probably my on again, off again relationship with Nic Cage and his acting career) so alas, I went and saw the damned thing.

There is something to be said about seeing Nic Cage and Alfred Molina going mano y mano in full-out sword & sorcery mode.  Of course, since the movie is from Disney (and rated a safe n sudsy  PG-13) and Jon "median strip" Turtletaub is the director (and Jerry "formula film" Bruckheimer is the producer), that something ends up being a rather bland something.  Yet, in amongst all that boiler plate banter, is a film that is quite surprisingly entertaining - to a point.

Cage & Molina do their best (though Cage is much better when left out of his, um, cage and allowed to go all batshitcrazy - a la Wild at Heart, Vampire's Kiss, Bad Lieutenant) but the film falters due to its (obvious and not the least bit startling) franchise-forming, product-placement ordinariness.  In other words, like much of modern mainstream moviemaking, it is dumbed down for the masses, and made into a safe (and quite predictable) product of Hollywood - taking no chances at all.  Then again, I suppose that is just what the reality-TV-obsessed mass audience wants.

Ah well, there are worse movies out there (much worse!) and worse ways to kick off an inevitable Hollywood franchise (much worse). Unlike most of them (the ones I have deigned to see) The Sorcerer's Apprentice held my interest - at least half-heartedly - for most of the time I sat there in the theater.

Read my review of The Sorcerer's Apprentice at The Cinematheque.

I Am Love Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I first saw Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love at a little arthouse cinema just outside of Philly, called The Ambler Theater.  The Ambler first opened its doors on the last day of 1928 (owned by Warner Brothers at the time) by showing the Harry Beaumont directed, Joan Crawford vehicle, Our Dancing Daughters.  After closing down in 1970 (as many classic cinemas were forced to do) and becoming a christian theater (specializing in showing 16mm prints of movies like The Robe) the Ambler began to deteriorate and finally shut down for good - well almost.  In 2003, The Ambler opened its doors again and to this day shows both new releases and classic cinema inside its fully renovated doors.

The reason I go on about the cinema itself is because it is a classic movie house in modern times and this is exactly what I Am Love is.  The whole complaint about how they no longer make 'em like they used to is put to rest with this beautiful, delectable new work of Italian cinema.  Go inside my review (linked just below) and read much more loving, gushing hyperbole on this film.  And if you ever find yourself in or around Philadelphia, check out the Ambler Theater.  I know I for one, am going back to see Lawrence of Arabia on 35mm next month!

Read my review of I Am Love at The Cinematheque.

Shutter Island Reviewed at The Cinematheque (!?)

The reason for the parenthetical interrobang in the title of this post is because I am just now posting my review of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.  (the link to said review posting can be found at the end of my rambling)  

Although I had originally seen it waaaay back in late February (and wrote my review in early March) for some strange reason I never posted it.  I realize I was on a sabbatical of sorts during this time, but even once getting caught up on those lost reviews from that time period, I still missed posting this one - which is especially odd considering it was then, and still is, my favourite film of the year (so far!).  


I suppose this is as good a time as any, since Chris Nolan's Inception has just been released (and reviewed right here, one post down!) and both films deal with DiCaprio and some pretty weighty marital issues.

Sure, the film has its haters (or off-putters?) and I suppose they have their own personal reasons for such, but in this critic's (and, to get all my cards on the table, admitted Scorsese worshipper's) not-so-humble opinion, I would rank Shutter Island somewhere between Cape Fear (also oft-maligned) and Gangs of New York (again, oft-maligned in the Scorsese oeuvre). 

In fact, since I do love me a good list, here are my top Scorseses.

1. Taxi Driver

2. Raging Bull

3. Goodfellas

4. Mean Streets

5. King of Comedy

6. Cape Fear

7. Shutter Island

8. Gangs of New York

9. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

10. Boxcar Bertha

I left out his docs/concert films and kept with the feature fiction thing.  I also left out New York, New York because I have only ever seen the film once and It was about twenty years ago (when I was but a young early twenty-something!) and I need to see it again to fairly judge its greatness.

Anyway, I suppose I am done rambling now and can finally leave you alone to peruse my aforementioned Shutter Island review (the link salivating for your click just below!) at your leisure.

Read my review of Shutter Island at The Cinematheque.

Inception Reviewed at The Cinematheque

Without further ado (I saw the damned movie three days ago already!) here is my take on a certain Christopher Nolan directed Summer blockbuster-to-be - but a blockbuster of a more artistic bent than most.  It may not be the so-called "game-changer" so many are hoping or calling for, but it is a damn fun ride to take.  A popcorn flick thrill ride one could say if one were so inclined.  See, when you read between the pretentious lines, I am capable of thoroughly enjoying a big budget modern Hollywood blockbuster.  That proves I'm not a film snob.  Well, not really, since I am still quite the film snob (and used the term popcorn flick thrill ride with tongue firmly in cheek!)... but I digress...and give you the following...

Read my review of Inception at The Cinematheque

...along w/ a bonus pic of the utterly gorgeous Ms. Cotillard, whose mere presence (and what a presence it is!) makes the movie in question sizzle just that much more.

Solitary Man Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I am on the road this week-end (the Godardian spelling!?) but wanted to post this review as filler of sorts until I get back home and post my reviews of I Am Love, Winter's Bone and Inception - three movies I thoroughly enjoyed.  The review in question here though, is for Solitary Man - and this was a film I rather did not enjoy (thoroughly or not).  It does have that great (and obvious) title song though.  Anyway, until I get back go ahead and read my review of this very middle-of-the-road indie mediocrity (the link is just fingertips away).

Read my review of Solitary Man at The Cinematheque.

Catching Up on Some Reviews (Finally)

I got behind there for a while, but I'm back baby!  Over at The Cinematheque I have finally posted my reviews of Please Give, Mid-August Lunch, Bluebeard and the waaaay overdue Fish Tank, The Ghost Writer and Clash of the Titans.

The Last Airbender Reviewed (and M. Night Shyamalan gleefully attacked) at The Cinematheque

By now, anyone who knows me well enough will surely be privy to the fact that I am huge M. Night Shyamalan hater.  Huge!  The Sixth Sense was okay at best and Unbreakable had some good performances, but everything after that is pure unadulterated crapola.  With each successive film, Shyamalamadingding gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.  From the silly Signs to the stupefied The Village to the ludicrous Lady in the Water to the preposterous The Happening to the unfathomable god-awfulness of The Last Airbender.  The crap pile gets higher and higher with each project.  In fact (as I make mention to in my review) I would be sorely disappointed if Shyamalan were to finally make a great, or even good, film.  I went into this movie knowing full well it was going to be mind-numbingly bad and was actually hoping for it to be so.  I can honestly tell you, I was not disappointed.  I take a perverse delight in watching the man fail over and over and over again, ad nauseum. In a strange way, this makes the film a better film for me, than it actually deserves to be.

Perhaps it is this perverse delight that made me jump up on my critical soapbox and blather on for 1000+ words about just how god-awful The Last Airbender is - even if this is exactly what I was hoping for.  Cheap and low base an attack it is, but once and awhile one needs to take the low road and blow off some critical steam, lest it eat away at him.  I suppose this means I am pretty good until, well, until the next M. Night Shyamalamadingdong movie comes out.  Anyway, click on the link below and see just how cheap and low base I can actually get when cornered with a beyond bad film such as this.

Read my review of The Last Airbender at The Cinematheque.

Mother and Child Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I have to admit I went into this film with thoughts of Lifetime/Hallmark channel sugarplums dancing in my head like little nauseous chick flick gremlins eating away at a brain full of Hawks and Welles and Ford and Mann and Scorsese and baseball and meat and other manly things.  (yea yea, I know, I love Musicals too, but let's keep with the manly-man image I am trying to build here!) 

Seriously though, I did expect a quite maudlin affair full of cloying cliches (insufferably so!), but what I got was a well-rounded film with a surprising amount of very un-Lifetime/Hallmark channel dancing sugarplummery (was that even a word!?).

Perhaps not the greatest film - it falters here and there, and here again - but it certainly comes as a rather refreshing surprise when all told.  And Annette Bening is simply remarkable in a role that could have easily fallen into the obvious and the pathetic.

Read my review of Mother and Child at The Cinematheque.

MacGruber Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I love Will Forte!  I love Kristen Wiig!  I even love Val Kilmer! (at least in the kind of snarky role he has here - think Iceman does Colonel Flagg from M*A*S*H)  Now my question is why didn't I like MacGruber!?  Okay, I suppose the question answers itself - after all, how many SNL skits (let alone rather poor ones like this) make good movies?  Anyhoo, no need to wonder why the film sucked so much (even with talented funny people involved) we just have to move on.  But before you do that, go ahead and peruse my review - Ya know ya want to.  And anyway, how can a film be all bad if it has, not one, but two scenes involving celery up the ass!?

Read my review of MacGruber at The Cinematheque.

Survival of the Dead Reviewed at The Cinematheque

Before going on, I must first admit to an unnatural (but wholly rational I tell you!) fear of zombies.  Forget vampires and werewolves and chainsaw-weilding maniacs.  Forget giant lizard like things burning up Tokyo, it is the undead, more than any other movie monster (as it were), that scare the living bejeezus out of me.  Don't know why (perhaps it is the fact that with most movie monsters, they can be stopped by daylight, but with the walking dead they just keep coming and coming and coming and...well you know) and don't care why.  I just know it is true and that is my (some may say ridiculous) burden to bear.

Anyhoo... my newest review is on George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (the sixth in the 42 year old series!) and (ir)rational fear aside, the movie just isn't that good.  It's not terrible (as it could have easily been) but it is certainly not very good either.  The weakest of the set, Survival does have its moments (including the hottest undead chick this side of never!? - yeah, I said it!) but not near enough to claim a seat in the class with Romero's first four ...of the Dead series (number five, Diary of the Dead, though better than most give it credit for, falls short as well).  The worst (or best) part is that the film never scared me.  The admitted zombiephobe!  Not scared!?  What worse of a criticism for such a movie could there be!?

Read my review of Survival of the Dead at The Cinematheque.

To Watch in a Theater or To Watch at Home (is that really the question?

The grand (and idealistic) idea of watching movies in a crowded theater being the proper (and some say only!) way to watch movies can seem a bit antiquated by some (the younger blogger/twitter crowd who have grown up on You Tube and Hulu) and a bit right-on-the-proverbial-(fucking!)-nose for others (the so-called old guard who chained themselves to the cinematheque doors back in May of '68 - at least metaphorically-speaking).  I personally consider myself a product of the generation inbetween these two (seemingly) warring factions. 

Born in 1967 (the Summer of Love as it were), I grew up watching movies on TV.  Sure I would go to the theater (it is quite the strange juxtaposition of having Benji and The Towering Inferno as the first two films I remember seeing in a theater proper!) but the movies that made me love the cinema were those I first saw on my little 12" TV in my childhood bedroom late at night (when I was supposed to be fast asleep dreaming of sugar plum fairies and warding off those dreaded bed bug bites!).  Films like King Kong, The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Philadelphia Story, To Have and Have Not.  These are the films that led to my love of classic cinema.  My love of the golden age of Hollywood and eventually my love of an expanded world cinema.

It wasn't in the theaters where this love was born, but on a tiny TV in a wide-eyed child's bedroom (ignore the hyperbole).  It wasn't until I became a (so-called) grown-up that the cinema houses became a haven.  Films as diverse as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Amadeus, A Passage to India, Sophie's Choice, Brazil and Ran (the very first foreign-language film I ever saw on the big screen).  Along with my duties as a film critic and (sometimes) film historian, I now run a three-screen arthouse cinema in Harrisburg Pa, with my lovely wife (sorry GK for usurping your loving spousal pet name) so even though the small screen gave me my first tastes of cinematic love, it is now the large screen that carries me along.

The reason I even bring this whole thing up is a post I recently read on Jim Emerson's wonderful Scanners blog, entitled "Cinema Isn't Dead, It's Just Different" (perhaps I was hooked by Jim including a pic of Godard that I personally use as my Facebook profile pic on a semi-regular basis - but it is a must read anyway!).  Many older critics (that damned old guard!) tend to grandstand that cinema is dead and it has the younger set to blame.  Granted the idea of instant gratification in critical duties (re: anyone can write anything on anybody - whether they have a talent for such a thing or not) is taken to the proverbial nth level these days and there are many (too many I suppose one could easily say) voices that know absolutely nothing about cinema or its history spouting off all over the web.  I suppose because many of these voices are the so-called younger set (though many are not) it is because of this that the old guard grumps and groans about cinema (and film criticism) being dead.  Their easy wail is that the internet has killed it!  Of course there are many "critics" out there with ties to "hard copy" jobs (those with gigs in the ever-dying paper world) who know less than nothing about cinema, and yet they keep flailing about with the respect often given out freely to anyone who is not "just an online critic".  Their names need not be named here, but we all know who they are.  Of course being one of these very same "just an online critic" (though I do have a regular film column in a local alt monthly) I must take offense at such generalizations.  But I am getting (sort of) off topic.

The whole debate (if one can even call it that - though I just did, so there!) has merits on both sides.  On one (Emerson's - among many others - side) there is the fact that because of today's technology there are so many more classic films available to watch that it is indeed a cinephile's boon.  On the other hand, to see something shimmering up there in glorious 35mm is a sight to behold indeed.  As I said, I fall inbetween the two warring factions so I suppose I can see both sides for what they are worth.  Though my cinephilia was born on that tiny bedroom TV (there is still a certain nostalgic romanticism to recalling seeing King Kong or Frankenstein on that tiny TV on the Late Late Show - even if modern technologies have made it null and void), and many of my favourite films I have never seen on anything bigger than my own grown-up big screen TV, I cannot deny the giddy rapture of watching these great films in 35mm on the theater's own big screens.

Just last year,  on one my many trips to NYC to catch some movies (as I am prone to do as often as I can) I had the opportunity to see The Red Shoes (one of the greatest films of all time I declare unabashedly!) at Film Forum.  Rushing in (much like those kids at the beginning of that very same movie) and taking my place front row, center, it was almost a religious experience.  No, I take that back - it WAS a religious experience!  Other favourites I have been lucky enough to see on the big screen include The Bicycle Thieves (at Lincoln Plaza Cinema during the same trip), La Dolce Vita (also at Film Forum a few years back), Casablanca (at Hershey Theater here at home - a wonderously restored art deco movie palace), Singin' in the Rain, Some Like It Hot and Vertigo on it's revival a decade or so ago.  There is nothing that can top these experiences, but (outside of a perfect world) this is not a practice to be had with every movie one sees - especially considering this cinephile sees at least 300+ films per year (with a goal of 500+ per year that I shamedly have yet to meet). 

I suppose my tendencies do lean toward the movie theater experience over home viewing (no matter how big and luxurious one's home system may be) though one cannot help but be put off by the rudeness of all those talkers, texters and tweeters strewn about the typical multiplex (then again, many of the films playing there end up unwatchable anyway!).  This 35mm theater screening (sans, the annoyances) is the ideal, but one must still take into account the amazingly vast availability of film on DVD/Blu-Ray that was never near as prevalent as back in those supposed halcyon days of lore.  And one must also take into account that many (nay, most) of the films one cannot easily see in a movie house, so home viewing is their only option.  My lovely wife and I often put one of our DVD's up on the big screen in our little theater after hours for our own viewing, so we do have a better opportunity to see these classics in a cinema (even if it is not 35mm), but others do not, so the DVD/Blu-Ray boon is, well, it's a boon.  Perhaps my ideal is to be front row center at Film Forum watching Moira Shearer twirl about - surrounded by like-minded cinephiles (NOT at the multiplex!!) or after hours at my cinema with my wife and a few close friends.  Then again, I watch movies (like a rabbit does other things) at home in the dark - and without interruptions (I so hate that!).  I suppose, no matter a young buck or an old head, there is something for everyone.  Like Emerson said, cinema isn't dead, it's just different.

Micmacs Reviewed at The Cinematheque

Jeunet usually equals sweet and sappy storytelling but with a visually macabre bent.  The filmmaker has his highs (City of Lost Children) and his lows (Amelie) and his inbetweens (A Very Long Engagement) and I suppose his latest would fit kinda snugly in that latter category.  Moments of giddy resplendence are rampant throughout (many claim an affinity to Chaplin but all-in-all it is sort of an homage to Tati and his jocular M. Hulot) and it never dips into the saccharine diet of a film like the loathsome Amelie.  I suppose the best I can say is I had fun while watching the movie.  That's a good thing, right?  Anyway, the full review is over at that there site of mine (you know the one) so check it out when you get a chance (the link is just below after all!). 

Read my review of Micmacs at The Cinematheque.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924)

The Saga of Gosta Berling is #569 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 01/11/10 on DVD from GreenCine

Ranked #931 on TSPDT

 

Much like the last entry in my Quest (see here) this is a film that had to wait several months before getting it's moment in the spotlight as it were.  Be that as it may (better late than never, eh?), here are my random thoughts on said film.

The Saga of Gosta Berling is mostly known as being the film that began it all for the elusive movie star, Greta Garbo, long before she just "vanted to be left alone".  Filmed in 1924 in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller, the film itself is not all that remarkable outside of Garbo frolicking around in the woods and on the beach.  Luckily there is quite a lot of said frolicking.  But that is pretty much it.

Much like his film, Stiller has never been much known for anything outside of discovering and bringing Garbo to the states.  Sure, The Saga of Gosta Berling has a sense of Greed at times.  But alas, none of this promise is gathered for long enough to matter - and on top of that Stiller died in 1928, after being essentially kicked to the curb by MGM (and probably Garbo too) hence never coming to the potential he at first exhibited. has its moments (even outside of Garbo) and even has slight innuendo that lean toward a filmmaking style such as Griffith or Von Stroheim, or his fellow countryman Sjostrom.  It weven Reminds one of

Overall, not my favourite of the 1000 (or even close) even though it did give us Garbo, which should be worth mucho points in itself.  Without Stiller (who had remade the ugly duckling teenage Greta into a ravishing beauty!) there would have been no Flesh and the Devil.  No Anna Christie.  No Grand Hotel!  No Queen Christina!!  No Ninochtka!!!  Without Stiller there would have been no Garbo, and that would have been terrible.  It is an interesting enough film though for me to search out the director's other works (Sir Arne's Treasure and Erotikon) and raise my knowledge (somewhat lacking in such) some on early Swedish cinema.  Oh yea, and there is Garbo (did I mention that?).