Steady Diet of Film

Review: Terminator Salvation

Terminator: Salvation (T4)

Rating (out of 5): ****

Even if you don't enjoy large, garish action films, you have to have a certain respect for the Terminator franchise. Created in 1984, it was predicated on the notion that computers (which were utterly foreign contraptions to most people at the time) would someday collect enough data on humanity to recognize us as a threat, become self-aware and eventually try to extinguish us all. Even considering today's audience (people who spend hours a day happily pouring personal data into computers for the brief rewards of convenience, comfort and internet fame), the series has managed to keep itself relevant enough to warrant big name talent and hundred million dollar production budgets.

For those of us who do enjoy large, garish action films, read on: Terminator: Salvation (henceforth T4) director McG fulfills the promise of Terminator 2, one of the greatest action films of all time. He demonstrates genuine respect for the somewhat nutty mythology of the series, while also making a noble attempt to incorporate the American mythology of ordinary people who survive--often only by chance--devastating circumstances just long enough to face inhumane evil with unlimited resources. What McG may lack in intellectual heft, he more than makes up for in effort, and in references to Apocalypse Now and Children of Men.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Kobe Doin' Work

Produced for ESPN and now available on dvd, Kobe Doin' Work trained 30 cameras on NBA superstar Kobe Bryant for the course of a full game, with commentary provided on the final cut by Bryant. The game, pitting the Lakers against their longtime rivals the San Antonio Spurs, would eventually lead to Bryant's first Most Valuable Player award. After a screening of soccer documentary Zidane at the Cannes film festival, legendary film-maker (and Knicks fan) Spike Lee decided a basketball version was immediately necessitated. Since Lee's dabblings in documentary film (When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Four Little Girls) has produced even more incendiary work than the provocative narrative films (Do the Right Thing, 25th Hour, Bamboozled) that cemented his reputation as a film raconteur, news of his involvement in the non-fiction form is always cause for excitement for those of us who like to see the pot stirred. While it's not an entirely fair comparison to draw, Bryant's checkered past, my complete lack of interest in professional sports and the long shadow cast by Tyson (James Toback's brilliant documentary on boxer Mike Tyson), one can't help but feel a little short-changed by such a straightforward sports procedural.

The enthusiasm and nearly scientific analysis in Bryant's commentary does convey a few interesting nuggets to even the most hardened professional sports hater. Despite these players and teams bringing in millions of dollars, their locker room looks like one in which high school players would congregate in. Many Lakers players have learned conversational Italian and Serbian to accommodate team members who struggle with English. Bryant's incredible graciousness towards the abilities of his competitors is downright gentlemanly. Otherwise, even Lee's interjections on the commentary track only serve to add more details about the actual process of the actual game.

On a recent panel at the Starz Denver Film Festival about believability in documentary film, film-maker AJ Schnack (in a discussion about Michael Moore) brought up the strange stratosphere that celebrity film-makers inhabit. In addition to garnering their projects an exponentially higher amount of publicity, they also regularly gain access to people and stories who might otherwise be considered too private to divulge. Chris Rock's participation in Good Hair is an excellent recent example of how this influence can lead to light being shed on difficult, personal subject matter and Bill Maher's Religulous being an equally strong example of how not to spend one's fame capital.

It's unlikely that a person who's recently been through a very public sexual assault trial would partipcate in any kind of documentary film project, even one with the modest aspirations of Kobe Doin' Work, if not for the credibility brought to the project by Lee. While viewers will walk away certainly knowing a bit more about shooting from the triangle, one might also wonder whatever happened to that raconteur of yore.

DVD extras include: an introduction by Spike Lee, deleted scenes, photo montage, music video for "Levitate" by Bruce Hornsby, a behind the scenes featurette and several audio options to watch the full game. 

See also: September Issue, Murderball, Hoop Dreams, Bigger Stronger Faster, The Heart of the Game, Gunnin for That #1 Spot.

Review: Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, just out in a new 2-DVD set from Criterion, is the India native's contribution to the unofficial canon of directors' final works from the homeland before emigrating to the United States. Like Milos Forman's Fireman's Ball, Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart or Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, Monsoon presents the complex story of a multi-faceted, changing nation through a single tight-knit community. The community here being an upper-middle class Punjabi family converging in New Delhi for an elaborate wedding.

Aditi (Vasundhara Das) is a modern working woman who wants to settle down but has a full-time job and an emotionally absent lover that occupy too much of her time to date effectively. She's acquiesces to a partially-arranged marriage (the family picks the suitor but they meet a few times beforehand) and the ceremony is fast-tracked so their new lives can begin. And as with most family procedures everyone is sure to bring plenty of baggage. We witness Aditi's more modern sister trying to talk the bride out of going through with it, a shy servant girl fall in love with the gregarious wedding planner, a stressed out aunt trying to shield the children from a predator she feels powerless to confront and a young nephew arguing unsuccessfully to keep from being sent to boarding school.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Good Dick

When in a state of terror, the brain begins to develop a series of processes to cope with the brutality. Watching a film as bad as Good Dick, I find myself first desperately clinging to hope, trying to find potential in any nook or cranny. Then the monotonous boredom reaches a near Zen-like state as my spirit begins to let go of any concept of there being a beginning or an end, a passive acceptance that what is happening merely is. Eventually, what breaks down the inner Bodhisattva is a profound sense of sorrow that there was a person whose mind generated not only these ideas, but wrote them down, and communicated them to the outside world.

Good Dick is the story of the unlikely romance between two people simply credited as "Man" (Jason Ritter) and "Woman" (Marianna Palka). He is homeless and she is borderline agoraphobic. Once a week, they meet at the video store where he works and she occasionally rents pornography. They have awkward exchanges about her film choices and through the power of terrible movie magic and even worse screenwriting, this all somehow leads to a profound emotional connection that baffles both his friends and any viewer. Man and Woman move in together and proceed to do and say horrible things to each other. Their cruelty is punctuated by long, boring scenes that could possibly be interpreted as happiness, but feel, to the audience, about as pleasurable as having a car door slammed repeatedly on your hand.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Scott Walker 30 Century Man

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man provides intimate insight into the world that surrounds a charismatic but elusive artist. Even to people who don't quite understand the appeal of Walker's music, it's quite fascinating that he can compel people to follow him despite having an overall vision that is never abundantly clear -- sometimes even in the final product.

Noel Scott Engel began his storied musical career as a crooner in the boy band Walker Brothers.

Engel’s broody, melancholic vocals mixed well with the baroque, orchestral pop stylings of the day and quickly made him a massive teen heartthrob. (Even now the Walker Brothers music plays like the Jonas Brothers mixed with pre-Jesus Johnny Cash.) In these heady days, the band headlined bills that also featured the likes of nobodies like Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and even Engelbert Humperdinck. After the bandmates parted ways, Scott Walker retained the stage name and went on to make a series of challenging, psychedelic opuses (titled Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and so forth). Each was heralded as a masterpiece by a rapidly dwindling audience.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Just Another Love Story

Just Another Love Story

Rating (out of 5): ***

Just Another Love Story opens on three rapid-fire scenes of couples in various states of romance, danger and despair. In the first, a wife sobs over the dying body of her husband (our protagonist). We then see an earlier, happier moment of this pair tenderly discussing their diminished sex life. And a scene of a much younger couple arguing with a gun. Cut to black. Gunshot. The corrosive effects of desire and deception on human connections is quickly established in director Ole Bornedal's (helmer of the 1997 American re-make of his own Nightwatch) self-conscious but thoroughly entertaining re-work of classic film noir tradition.

Jonas is sleep-walking through his life. He dislikes his job as a crime scene photographer, he's disgusted by his co-worker's crass jokes and dreams of a life photographing pastoral landscapes. His wife has become so consumed with the minutiae of maintaining their middle class lifestyle that he feels neglected. And child-rearing two adorable moppets has not proven to be the enterprise of endless fulfillment that the Hallmark cards promised. Psychological lethargy has taken hold and he desperately searches for deeper meaning and signals for action in his mundane daily existance.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Yes Man

Loosely based on the true story of British humorist Danny Wallace's attempt to inject more positivity into this life, Yes Man stars Jim Carrey as Carl Allen, a mid-level loan officer whose strategy for promotion is to take no risks with his bank's money and suck up to the boss. His lackadaisical approach to work has bled into his personal life, Yes Man opens on a scene that is both funny and melancholic as Carl makes up a series of elaborate excuses to a friend for why it is imperative he stay in and rent videos that night.

After a huge blowout with his best friend, pushed to the limit with Carl's obstinance (coupled with a dream depicting dying alone and having his face eaten by bugs) Carl decides to choose life and attends a self-help seminar led by Terrence Bundley (played by Terence Stamp). Bundley, an oddly effective combination of Tony Robbins, Mr. Miyagi and Robert McKee uses a delicate blend of emotional blackmail and mild hypnotism to convince Carl to, you guessed it, answer in the affirmative when his initial response would've been the negative.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: The Order of Myths

The Order of Myths

Rating (out of 5): ****½

Margaret Brown's documentary The Order of Myths examines the social labyrinth of Mardi Gras carnivals in Mobile, Alabama. The oldest celebration of its kind in the country is dominated by two racially segregated organizations that have held separate coronations and parades for over 300 years. To an outsider, the divide, so rigidly defended yet cloaked in hospitality, is an incredibly costumed prism to look at race relations as a whole in America. Brown follows the white queen Helen, an inarticulate but gracious debutante that the film tacitly acknowledges has been elected more due to bloodlines than royal qualities; and the black queen Stephanie, a schoolteacher who is scraping to pay for the elaborate dress and festivities (upwards of $20,000) but holds the tradition in equally high esteem.

Adding a layer of unease to the proceedings, both queens know off hand that Helen's direct ancestors were involved with one of the final slave transactions in Mobile, which brought Stephanie's family to this country. Explaining how a black neighborhood now known as "Africatown" was formed, a white woman cautiously recounts the story of a shipful of captured Africans who were forced to flee into the woods while the boat was torched in an effort to destroy evidence.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Uncounted, the New Math of American Elections

 

On last Sunday's episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, reporter Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned during the journalists' roundtable that a lack of polling place preparedness could sway the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and she was nearly laughed off the stage. I repeat, the very notion of compromised voting eight years after the supreme court appointed a president and just four years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (in a joint decision with Congress) deemed it necessary to send international observers to monitor our elections for the first time, was immediately discarded by a group of prominent political writers from the most widely read news sources in the country. It's possible there's never been a clearer illustration of the mainstream media's apathy to question status quo that has served us so well for the last several years. This void has left a public more primed than ever for the chaos and clumsiness of blogs, talk radio and agit prop documentaries.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Heavy Metal in Baghdad marks an important step forward for the widely ignored school of Iraq docs, it depicts the plights of middle class people who in all likelihood led lives that bear more resemblance to documentary viewers in the States than films about soldiers, prisoners, orphans or war criminals. Heavy Metal in Baghdad tells the story of Acrassicauda (which translates to Black Scorpion of the Desert), the only known heavy metal band in Baghdad. Before the 2003 invasion, these young men each identified as being happily apolitical. But after the war broke out their lives changed rapidly: strict street security and curfews made it impossible to get gigs, their practice space was bombed and eventually employment became so scarce all band members had to relocate to Syria to support their families as laborers.

It's a haunting story, told over several years as film-makers Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti made several trips to the Middle East to catch up with the men. Each time finding them in high spirits despite their increasing downward spiral.

Read the rest of Heavy Metal in Baghdad at Greencine.