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The-wolfman

“Even he who is pure at heart
And says his prayers by night,
May turn into a wolf
When the wolfbane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright.”

Although vampires have been dominating pop culture lately (when haven’t they, really?) the werewolf is also keeping a steady presence. They exist in the Twilight books and films, and Benicio Del Toro is starring in a new version of the tale set for release soon. But I am drawn back to the original films–the Universal horror films of the ’40s, in which the templates for these things were created.

As part of their Legacy series, Universal has released multi-disc sets of all of their monsters, and I recently took a look at those in the Wolf Man boxed set. To see all of them, it necessitated crossing over into the Frankenstein and Dracula sets as well. All told, there were five films featuring the Wolf Man, with two others incorporating the theme but were not part of the canon.

The Wolf Man was the third member of the trinity of Universal monsters, originating in 1941, well after Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. He was the only one of them who was not based on a literary source. In fact, he was mostly the brainchild of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who took some Eastern European folk tales and remade them. Turning into a wolf when the moon is full? Can only be stopped by a silver bullet or knife? Wears the sign of the pentagram? All of these were products of Siodmak’s imagination, which have carried forward to all werewolf tales that followed.

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Film_Poster_An_Education

An Education is a fine, engrossing character study set in a particular time and place, and studded with fine performances. The only thing keeping it from absolute excellence is a conventional structure that ultimately lets a little air out of the film’s tires.

The setting is Twickenham, England, a suburb of London. The time is 1961. The protagonist is Jenny, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, played by Carey Mulligan. She is smart and has an ambition to be accepted to Oxford, or rather that is the ambition of her father, a bumptious but meek man (Alfred Molina) who is both a tightwad and a dullard. Her mother, Cara Seymour, has drifted into a life of obsequiousness to him, though flashes of personality indicate that Mulligan is her mother’s daughter.

Enter David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), a rakish older man who gives Mulligan a lift in his sports car in a driving rainstorm. He is witty and dashing, and knows how to have fun, which earns Mulligan’s affection immediately, as she wants to shake off the dust off her provincial town and listen to French records, read books, and be a full-blown Bohemian. Sarsgaard wants to show her things, and together with his friends, Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, they paint the town red, going to swanky restaurants and classical music concerts.

Sarsgaard is the kind of guy who can want something from someone and manage to spin it so he can make it seem like the thing he wants is the other person’s idea (he does with Molina when he wants to take Mulligan on a weekend trip to Oxford, dropping the name of C.S. Lewis while doing it). Of course this means he’s a man of slippery ethics, as Mulligan finds out while witnessing what kind of business he and Cooper are in. But she’s too dazzled by him to let it bother her, despite the protestations of a sincere English teacher (Olivia Williams) and an officious headmistress (Emma Thompson).

After all, her parents don’t object. In 1961 a 34-year-old man could court a teenager without too many eyebrows being raised, and Mulligan realizes that her father thinks her being provided for in a marriage to a man of means equals an Oxford education. Therefore when she discovers a secret about Sarsgaard her entire world crumbles.

The film is based on a memoir and written by novelist Nick Hornby, and the screenplay crackles with clever dialogue. The direction, by Lone Scherfig, is unobtrusive–this is not the work of an auteur. The smartest thing Scherfig does is let her writer and cast dominate, particular the lead. A lot of ink and pixels have been expended on how this is a star-making turn for her, and I’m not disagreeing, as its a performance of incredible poise and depth. Her facial expressions at certain points in the film will linger with me a long time, and I feel, after just under two hours in her company, that I know the character she creates well.

The supporting cast is just as strong. Sarsgaard has played these sorts of shifty types before–he’s an actor that specializes in ambiguity–but it’s strong work (his best performance remains the one he gave in Shattered Glass as a man with impeccable integrity). Molina, touted as a surefire Oscar nominee, is good, but the part is the flimsiest in the film. He’s a man who’s afraid of life–he has to be dragged to a fancy restaurant because he’s worried he won’t know how to order a starter–and he’s funny, but there’s something phony about the character. He gets a speech at the end that’s supposed to tell us all about him, but instead it only makes him more obscure. Williams, who previously played a different kind of sympathetic teacher in Rushmore, is quietly effective as a woman whom Mulligan initially wants to be nothing like, but later finds she has a lot to learn from.

It’s the film’s final moments that knocked it down a peg for me. I’ve seen too many films that climax with a character receiving a letter from the college they hope to attend to see it pop up in a film like this one, and then a voiceover narration by Mulligan closes the film. I’m not against voiceover narration, but it hadn’t been heard at all up until the final minute of the film, so it was awfully jarring to hear it, especially since the dialogue was particularly trite.

That quibbling aside, this film has a wonderful look and great performances, and is one of the better films of the year.

Opening in Chicago, 11/09

With the release of A Christmas Carol, it would appear that the holiday movie season is officially upon us. I’m not too excited about that movie, but there are a few other interesting movies out this week.

Bliss
Director: Abdullah Oguz
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Turkish film about a young woman who escapes an honor killing by fleeing her small village.
Metacritic: 76

The Box (trailer)
Director: Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Previously reviewed on this site by Nick, who concludes that it’s “a step in the right direction” for Kelly after Southland Tales. That sounds good to me … I didn’t hate Southland Tales as much as everyone else.
Metacritic: 45

A Christmas Carol (trailer)
Director: Robert Zemeckis (Contact, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Beowulf)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Zemeckis used to be a favorite of mine, but I confess that I don’t understand the appeal of his motion-capture movies. This one looks pretty bad, both in the sense that it doesn’t look very good, and in the sense that it actually looks bad. Maybe the movie looks better, but so far it doesn’t seem like the motion-capture stuff is advancing at all.
Metacritic: 54

The Fourth Kind (trailer)
Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Personal Interest Factor: 1
The fifth kind: anal probes. The sixth kind: nattering on about your abduction to a disbelieving, state-appointed psychiatrist. The seventh kind: being brainwashed by aliens into seeing stupid horror movies.
Metacritic: 34

The Horse Boy (trailer)
Director: Michel O. Scott
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Documentary about parents who take their autistic child to the outer reaches of Mongolia in order to treat him.
Metacritic: 63

The Men Who Stare at Goats (trailer)
Director: Grant Heslov
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Reviews haven’t been the greatest, but it looks like fun to me. Director Heslov co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck with Clooney.
Metacritic: 56

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (trailer)
Director: Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Tough call on this one. A lot of good reviews, dating back to Sundance. But I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t look like two hours of pure misery.
Metacritic: 76

(Untitled) (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Parker (Bartleby, The Californians)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Comedy starring Adam Goldberg, set in New York’s art world. Haven’t really heard anything about it.
Metacritic: 59

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.” – Mohandas Gandhi

The iHeart RevolutionHillsong United started out as a band playing music for their local church (Hillsong) in the youth ministry (also called United) in the late 1990s.  As their talents matured and the songs caught on they made a commitment to release an album every year “as long as God keeps bringing us songs.” Their popularity continued to extend beyond their home in Sydney, Australia and reached the far corners of the Earth. In 2005 they embarked on a 2-1/2-year world tour (not contiguously) that took them to places they had only heard of and opened their eyes to things they had only read about. They decided to document their journeys and this movie (as well as last year’s double-album and the continuing movement at www.i-heart.org) is the result. I’m almost positive they set out to make a concert DVD & CD project but along the way it turns out everyone was more touched and changed than they originally thought possible.

The purpose of the film is summed up fairly well in the  final trailer by United frontman (if you can call him that) Joel Houston when he realizes that the streets the band travels down to get to the concert venues are likely to be unchanged by what happens inside the venue itself. “Maybe we’re missing the point,” he laments.

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Random Thread for November

Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.

Crap, it’s Friday. I almost forgot to do Openings! Perhaps it’s because there’s really nothing going out this week that seems at all worthwhile. Nonetheless, my apologies for being a few hours late.

Bronson (trailer)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Pusher II, Pusher 3)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Prison story that won some hype at Sundance, especially for the performance of Tom Hardy as over-the-top psycho “Charles Bronson” (there’s a long true story here if you want to look it up). Anyway, since I’m blessed with an abundance of time, I’ll probably check this out sometime next week out of boredom as much as anything else.
Metacritic: 69

Labor Day (trailer)
Director: Glenn Silber
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Documentary of the 2008 election filtered through the eyes of SEIU – partly financed by SEIU.
Metacritic: 18

This Is It (trailer)
Director: Kenny Ortega (Newsies, Hocus Pocus, High School Musical 3: Senior Year)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
For more than a decade, I’ve made an effort to see films that get Ebert’s 4-star rating, but this is the second time in the last month that I’m going to have to take a flat-out pass (the other was We Live in Public. Perhaps not coincidentally, both films are documentaries of a sort, and even more to the point, both trade in a sort of celebrity-worship culture that I have no interest in or use for. Besides which, random Michael Jackson rehearsal footage constitutes a movie these days?
Metacritic: 67

21 and a Wake-Up
Director: Chris McIntyre
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Never heard of this before, but both Chicago critics hated it. Based on the director’s stay in an Army hospital during the Vietnam era.
Metacritic: not listed

The Yes Men Fix the World
Director: The Yes Men
Personal Interest Factor: 5
The Yes Men are what you might call industrial pranksters; they do stuff like pose as corporate representatives for companies that they don’t represent to take responsibility for disasters that the real companies certainly do not take responsibility for. That’s all well and good – I have no real sympathy for corporate interests in general – but, well, eh.
Metacritic:

Review: Antichrist

antichrist

Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Released by IFC Films.

(Note: This review discusses specific events late in the film, so SPOILER ALERT. Seriously, I’m giving away the whole game here. Be aware that you may find the discussion overly graphic and/or repulsive.)

Danish director Lars von Trier has long had a reputation for misogyny, and there’s little question that he’s prone to putting his actresses through the proverbial wringer. Of his past work, I’ve seen Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville, and all three featured stories that put their heroines through wave after wave of abuse and humiliation. Dogville eventually allowed Nicole Kidman’s character to turn the tables on her tormentors, but by and large, all three films portrayed these characters as innocents under assail. That may be a form of casual misogyny itself – seeing women as helpless, innocent, and frail – but I thought the targets of those films were the male characters and their unrelenting weakness and cruelty.

While that may also be the case – to an extent, anyway – in Antichrist, there’s no denying that it’s a different beast altogether. The film is about a couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (given no names, and referenced in the credits only as “He” and “She”), who are grieving over the loss of their infant son. He is a therapist, and takes it upon himself to treat her extreme grief. Eventually, as part of her treatment, he moves them to their isolated cabin in the woods, which they call “Eden.”

At this point, it’s clear that von Trier has more on his plate than simply the interactions between a grieving couple in a broken marriage, and indeed the film becomes a merciless allegory of grief, pain and despair. von Trier introduces different religious and historical elements into the story in such a flurry that it’s hard to keep up with them – Satan, the burial and resurrection of Christ, witch trials. Finally, the film climaxes in an eruption of sadomasochism so brutal and hopeless as to suggest that the world is a fundamentally evil place.

It’s an understatement to say that this is an ambitious film, but I found myself wondering if von Trier really has the discipline as a storyteller to pull it off. If the film were less of a frenzy, it may have been overwhelming, but I think von Trier goes so far over the top as to undermine himself. For example, it’s one thing for a man to have his genitals crushed by a fireplace log. When you proceed to have a woman jerk him off, however, and then have him ejaculate blood while he’s passed out … how is one supposed to take that kind of imagery seriously?

I’ve written before about my innate self-defense mechanism that kicks in when a movie becomes difficult to watch. Simply put, when I’m pushed too far, that fourth wall is broken, and I find myself consciously thinking about how everything I’m seeing is fake. One example that I’ve used in the past is during 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, when we’re given a lingering shot of the fetus on the bathroom floor. Up until that point, I had been absorbed in the film, but that shot took me out of it. As it lingered, I found myself thinking that it obviously wasn’t real, and as the shot continued it started to look like the fake it was. It was a mostly masterful film, but that shot was a miscalculation.

Instead of a single shot, I think the entire last act of Antichrist is a similar miscalcution. Besides the bloody ejaculation, we’re treated to seeing Charlotte Gainsbourg drilling a hole in Dafoe’s leg and fastening a grindstone to it. We’re shown a graphic (but again, obviously fake) shot of her cutting off her own clit with a pair of scissors. He’s buried alive before being dug up again. And he strangles her in a long, drawn-out sequence. Perhaps I’m simply unwilling to face the horrors in the world, that I find myself unable to take these images seriously. Or perhaps I simply understand that I don’t have to just because I’m at the whim of some huckster with a movie camera.

I wish I could report that the film is an admirable misfire. I generally do admire Lars von Trier and his willingness as a provocateur. Some of the less painful imagery is astonishing; in particular, von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, along with their special effects artists, have created an effect in some shots I haven’t seen before, where landscapes appear to move like animated paintings. And the performances by Dafoe and Gainsbourg are certainly worthy of respect, even if I couldn’t help but think “Green Goblin!” a half-dozen times as Dafoe glowers into the general vicinity of the camera (probably my fault more than his or von Trier’s). I feel it’s worth seeing if you’re an admirer of the director or otherwise up to the most challenging semi-mainstream film likely to appear for some time.

But I genuinely feel that the movie is a failure of communication. Whatever von Trier’s intentions, they’re lost in a mix of heavy-handed symbolism, impenetrable allegory, and corrosive imagery.

A Decade in Film: 2006

Part seven of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2006.

1) Best of 2006?
2) Worst of 2006?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2006 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005

And here it is:

A completely pointless, toothless, plotless, wholly non-scary, poorly-written, acted and directed genre exercise that has gotten drunk off its very own brand of ‘request me!’ Kool-Aid.

Paranormal Activity Directed by Oren Peli

Paranormal Activity Directed by Oren Peli

Please ignore the poster. It is not one of the scariest films of all time. It does not leave an imprint on your psyche. I would have thought audiences would have learned, after Blair Witch Project, that just because you say it, doesn’t make people believe it. (I am still convinced, all these years later, that so many people went to Blair Witch because they couldn’t figure out why they didn’t see what so much of the ‘hype’ told them they should).

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the movie. But I expected better than a b-level exercise in an already-tired “Let me follow you with a camera, wait, you’re upset, wait things are happening, wait, now you’re angry, wait, this is going to work, wait, this is worse than it seems, wait, this is what happened before, wait, we’re all…” but then, I wouldn’t want to spoil the completely expected and really pretty standard ending you’ve seen in a million other movies of this type, in one similar derivation or another.

The movie opens with loving couple Katie and Micah moving into a nice new home that, surprise! is visited by a presence that really doesn’t like the nice, smiling young lady.

And that’s about it, folks. The hauntings get increasingly severe, there are moments and issues the director touches on but that go nowhere, and I mean genuinely creepy instances occur but then are thrown to the movie ether to focus on a really trite demonic specter. If the director had placed his faith in the story he was building and had he not focused so much on this one pretty intense ‘Macguffin’, he really may have had something here. Never has someone getting up and turning and just…standing…been so effectively creepy.

As it is, he has twenty minutes of a smiling, loving couple and something like sixty minutes of running with a camera, a shaking chandelier, a weird Ouija sequence that is almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous, and baby powder footsteps walking across the floor. (I just chuckled a bit thinking today’s kids would even sit through the rest of the movie after the Ouija sequence).

The poster says ‘Don’t see it alone’. Do yourself a favor. Only see it alone. Because whether you bring a date, a relative, or an enemy, it’s going to still be a pretty bad movie.

Directed by Spike Jonze.

where_the_wild_things_are_ver3

Where the Wild Things Are is a film for all ages, but not in the same way as something like Toy Story.  It’s an emotional film that more adults may identify with than kids.

Max (Max Records) is a young boy who runs away after having a fight with his mother (Catherine Keener).  Through his imagination, he ends up on an island and meets the giant creatures known as the wild things.  They decide to make him king because he convinces them he has special powers and can make everything perfect.  After a while, it becomes apparent that Max doesn’t have special powers and the wild things return to their unhappy state.  Max tries to make amends and “travels” back home.

There are no adults in Max’s imagination.  The wild things act how Max would act, which is the true genius of the film.  Everyone wants to be true friends and do everything together.  They run around.  They destroy things.  They build a fortress.  And they have dirt clod fights.  The strained relationship between Carol (James Gandolfini) and KW (Lauren Ambrose) is possibly reflective of Max’s parents divorce, but in a much less mature way.  I also suspect “downer” wild thing Judith (Catherine O’Hara) in some way represents Max’s older sister.

I was thrilled to see the Jim Henson Creature Shop do the costumes.  I’ve always been a fan of Jim Henson, and think the creatures really capture the spirit of his work.  It’s too bad the heads were CGI, but logistically it seems there was nothing else that could be done.

Speaking of Henson, in many ways  Where the Wild Things Are is similar to Labyrinth.  There is a recurring theme of friendship and betrayal.  And instead of songs by David Bowie, we get songs by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs).  But there is no clear cut divide between good and evil in WTWTA.  Is it possible that Max is both the protagonist and the antagonist?

Spike Jonze does a great job capturing the emotions and imagination of a child (and Max Records is great as Max).  In some ways it brings me back to my own childhood.  My mother used to type up my stories as I told them to her.  I once had a huge meltdown after someone called me names.  And I ran out of the house and went for a long walk before coming back.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of their childhood while watching this movie.  I’m thinking that Where the Wild Things Are will become one of my favorites to be added to classics like Princess Bride and Labyrinth that I will enjoy watching for years to come.

Opening in Chicago, 10/23

Amelia (trailer)
Director: Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair, The Namesake)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Sounds like this one is a pretty huge misfire. Let’s be honest, though, there was never any reason to think that “Hey, let’s make a movie about Ameria Earhart’s love life!” would be a winner, either creatively or in terms of box office.
Metacritic: 41

Antichrist (trailer)
Director: Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville,Manderlay)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Been steeling myself for this one since the disastrous screenings in Cannes. Thing is, von Trier’s films are always hard to watch in some sense or the other, and he always is tough on his female leads. And a lot of critics hated Dogville, also, but I thought that one was interesting (missed Manderlay, sadly). I guess what I’m saying is that I suspect the whole controversy is overblown, but I’ll see for myself.
Metacritic: 52

Astro Boy (trailer)
Director: David Bowers (Flushed Away [co-director])
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Looks harmless enough but still not anything I really feel the need to see.
Metacritic: 55

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (trailer)
Director: Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy, In Good Company,The Golden Compass)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Blah, blah, blah, vampires, blah, blah, blah.
Metacritic: 44

An Education (trailer)
Director: Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Strong reviews since it premiered earlier in the year at Cannes, and even the trailer is charming. Looking forward to it.
Metacritic: 84

Léon Morin, Priest
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville (Les enfants terribles, Bob le flambeur, Les doulos,Army of Shadows)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Melville is one of my favorite directors, based on the four of his films that I’ve listed (and especially Army of Shadows), and every chance to see another one is exciting to me. The Gene Siskel Film Center is doing a weeklong run of this film as the centerpiece to their mini-retrospective of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s career, which will also include, among a few others, Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid and Godard’s Pierrot le fou.
Metacritic: not listed

Saw VI (trailer)
Director: Kevin Greutert
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I’ll let the Personal Interest Factor speak for itself, I guess.
Metacritic: no score yet

Walt & El Grupo (trailer)
Director: Theodore Thomas
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I’ve never heard of this; apparently it’s a documentary about Walt Disney and his crew of animators taking a trip to South America on a government-sponsored goodwill mission in the 1930s. I’ll leave any further comments to Joe, our resident Disneyologist.
Metacritic: 58

Review: Rashomon

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto. Reissued by Janus Films.

(Note: Specific plot points discussed, so beware of spoilers.)

Rashomon was Kurosawa’s first big international hit, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and being recognized with an Honorary Academy Award in the US (Oscars for foreign films were not awarded at the time). It made a star of Toshiro Mifune, the film’s leading actor. And Kurosawa, of course, went on to create any number of classic films, eventually passing away in 1998 with his status as a master of cinema secure.

The film’s great contribution to cinema is its structure of dueling flashbacks. After a wealthy man is found slain in the woods, a notorious bandit Tajomaru (played by Mifune) is arrested, and he tells the court that he lured the dead man into the woods to capture him and rape his wife. A duel between the two men follows, and Tajomaru tells of his respect for his adversary and his honorable death. When the wife – and then the dead man, summoned by a medium – give their stories, however, their testimony hardly matches Tajomaru’s, and in all we see four distinct, incompatible versions of the events.

By all accounts, Rashomon introduced the concept of unreliable flashbacks to a wide audience, and the film’s influences can still be seen today. Recently, films like Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects and Joe Wright’s Atonement have used the device to pull the rug out from under their viewers, but Kurosawa’s intentions are more complex. He questions not just the reliability of eyewitness testimony but the nature of memory and even objective truth itself.

After all, the natural question to ask is which of the film’s characters we can believe? The answer seems to be that all of them have motives to hide the truth not just from the court but from themselves. The plain suggestion made by the film is that not only are these characters unreliable, but anyone’s interpretation of what they see and remember is based on their own personal motives and biases. Perhaps none of us are capable of relaying the objective truth of what we see, and if we can’t, does it even exist?

The movie also finds Kurosawa subtly mocking the well-known – and perhaps stereotypical – preoccupation with personal honor in Japanese society. Not only does each character give different testimony, but Tajomaru, the dead man, and his wife are all so driven to preserve their sense of honor that they each admit to being the killer rather than dishonoring themselves. Tajomaru has no difficulty admitting to being a rapist and a bandit, but he assures the court that he had nothing but respect for the man’s swordplay and gave the man an honorable death. The wife is so overcome by shame that she inadvertantly slays her husband, apparently in a trance. And the deceased himself claims to have committed suicide at the shame of being overcome by a bandit and failing to protect his wife. In a society that was still reeling from their destruction during World War II, this must have seemed like a hollow joke, and indeed the film – and Kurosawa himself – was not popular with Japanese moviegoers at the time.

To be completely honest, I don’t think Rashomon holds up as well as many other Japanese classics. The framing device, featuring three men holed up during a storm in a ruined castle, doesn’t really cohere with the rest of the film, and seems to contain as much heavy-handed symbolic importance as narrative relevance. At times, the pacing lags. And the ending veers dangerously close to outright mawkishness. Personally, among Kurosawa’s 1950s work, I much prefer Throne of Blood or Ikiru.

Yet it’s undeniably an important film. I was lucky enough to see a newly restored 35mm print that’s playing here in Chicago, and it looks wonderful. Hopefully, this restoration makes its way to DVD (and Blu-ray!). Whatever its minor flaws, it’s certainly essential viewing for anyone interested in Japanese film and foreign film in general.

Review: A Serious Man

serious_manWritten and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. Released by Focus Features.

The middle of the decade found the Coens in something of a rut. Intolerable Cruelty was poorly received, although I found it amusing, and The Ladykillers is indisputably the worst film of their career. After taking a few years off, though, they returned with a couple of fine films, and A Serious Man finds them still on a roll with one of the best films of their career.

The film is about Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor from suburban Minneapolis whose life is crumbling around him. His wife announces that she’s fallen in love with a neighbor and wants a divorce, he’s having problems at work, and his aimless and socially inept brother won’t move out of his house. He’s fearful of his Gentile neighbors, and he’s mortgaged to the hilt so money is tight. And to top it all off, his TV reception is fuzzy.

Larry’s response to his troubles is to seek wisdom from the rabbis, and the intersection of his misery and religion form the heart of the film. He wonders why he is earmarked for such suffering when he’s been trying so hard to be a good, serious man, while the rabbis do their cheerful best to remind him that just maybe he isn’t meant to know. “Accept the mystery,” one character tells him, and even though the line comes in a different context, it serves as the most straightforward statement of the film’s guiding ethos.

The Coens have always had an arch sense of humor, and that’s perhaps more true than ever with this film. In some ways, Larry bears some resemblance to Jerry Lundegaard, William H. Macy’s character from Fargo, in that they both always seem about to explode as their bad luck continues to accumulate. Larry is a much more sympathetic and complex character, of course, but as with Jerry, the Coens seem to take some perverse pleasure in watching him squirm. If there’s one constant in their career, it’s the humor to be found in watching the best laid plans go awry. More so than their other films, however, the best laid plans this time around have a more existential bent. Who is Larry, if he is not who he thought he was?

In terms of casting, the Coens take a much different approach than they have lately, with no big-name actors in the cast and only one, Richard Kind as Larry’s misfit brother, that I even recognized (aside from a cameo by Fyvush Finkel, although I didn’t exactly “recognize” him). Stuhlbarg is excellent, balancing a sympathetic portrayal of his character with the movie’s not-so-vague sense that Larry is missing the forest for the trees. Another standout is Fred Melamed as the worst kind of asshole – the kind that is easily able to convince the world that he’s a deeply decent fellow, even while looking someone in the eye and stabbing them in the chest.

With No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and now A Serious Man, the Coens have made a trilogy of sorts that reflects an uneasiness that has been central to the American experience during the Aughts.  No Country warned of the consequences of unchecked arrogance, and Burn disguised seething rage against American intelligence services behind a dopey violent farce. Now comes A Serious Man, which openly asks how “serious” American middle-class priorities can really be considered to be. If the film’s ominous ending gives any clue to the answer, it’s “not so much.”

I hope Nick doesn’t mind me borrowing his dormant topic…

I attended a concert last week where they showcased the increasingly popular “I Am T-Pain” iPhone application during one of their in-between moments. I caught it on video. The audio isn’t too great, but if you turn it up I think you can get the gist of what’s happening.

A friend of mine had mentioned this application to me last month, but I didn’t realize how much it had taken off. Auto-tuning (a specific sort of pitch correction you can read about here) came to prominence through Cher’s 1998 hit Believe:

Even though it’s been around a long time I’m now beginning to notice it everywhere. Yesterday I found “auto-tuning the news” which left me in stitches. Just the thought of politicians and heads of state singing back and forth was enough to make me chuckle, but their execution here is mostly flawless. There are 9 so far, but I’m only putting up the first 2.

#1

#2

Gone Elsewhere Mobile?

Not sure if someone changed something behind the scenes or if WordPress rolled this out across the board: but GE is now mobile browser friendly. Screenshot is from an iPhone. Pretty cool.

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