September 30th, 2008 admin
2008
Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Brian Dennehy
Director: Jon Avnet
Runtime: 101 Minutes
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R
More than a decade on from Michael Mann’s underworld epic Heat, whether you are a hardcore cinephile or a part time movie patron, when talk turns to that cup of coffee, the hairs on the back of your neck still stand on end just a little. Ever since then there have been promises and rumors flying around of an extended coming together of arguably cinema’s two greatest living actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino – and now that daring dream is finally a reality. Except that it’s about twelve years too late and a bloody awful, needlessly convoluted genre picture that starring any two other actors in the world would be arriving at a Wal*Mart bargain bin instead of a multiplex.
On paper it’s clear how this unfortunate beast was born; the two actors, De Niro now 65 and Pacino 68 wanted to work together again, realized that they probably should have been more pro-active years ago and that it was now or never. Enter longtime producer, bit-part director Jon Avnet waving a sophomore script by Inside Man writer Russell Gerwitz about two dogged maverick cops hunting a vigilante killer and the scrambling “will-this-do?” project is a green light. From the opening credits onwards it’s clear that in the minds of those making it this isn’t a movie, it’s an event. A quick cutting MTV style credits sequence proudly slaps up PACINO and DE NIRO in gigantic lettering so big it’s a wonder that they even bothered giving the film a title at all.
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September 29th, 2008 admin
Check out what’s new in theaters with my weekly column at IFC.com
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September 29th, 2008 admin
2005
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh, Odessa Rae, Gilbert John
Director: David Slade
Runtime: 104 Minutes
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R
Now that Ellen Page has made such a sensational splash in this years little Indie that could, Juno, this 2005 film that quietly slipped under the radar might get a little retro traction as something more than a curiosity. If it does, it is no more than it deserves as this tightly wound thriller has enough tricks up its sleeve to shock and surprise with an audacity that is likely to catch more than a few people off guard.
The plot taps directly into the hyper-aware, ultra paranoid world of the parent confronted with the vast expanse of cyberspace, where potential predators lurk behind every seemingly innocent url. Ellen Page’s Hayley is a streetwise 14-year-old, who has an online romance brewing with Patrick Wilson’s much older Jeff. After meeting for the first time in a coffee shop, photographer Jeff takes her back to his apartment to burn some music. Already a sick sense of dread is bubbling at the back of the mind and director David Slade knows it and plays with it to the full. Once inside Jeff’s apartment the safe familiar medium shot is banished from the picture and Slade subjects us to a barrage of sweaty reverse shots and suffocating close ups. It’s a deliberately uncomfortable invasion of personal space. As Hayley begins to relax the flirting slowly builds the relentless, forced intimacy and has you climbing the walls for an escape.
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September 29th, 2008 admin
2006
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Burt Young, Antonio Tarver, Geraldine Hughes, Milo Ventimiglia, Tony Burton
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Runtime: 102 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: PG-13
When Sly announced that he was planning to resurrect his two iconic, but long past their prime franchises, Rocky and Rambo, the whole world rolled their collective eyes. Never was a project written off from the get-go quite like this one was. The Rocky sequels are the dictionary definition of diminishing returns and by the time Rocky V rolls around things have gotten so bad that it borders on the unwatchable. Surprisingly, it would appear that no one is more painfully aware of this than the man himself. How excellent then that he has dutifully followed the example of the Bond franchise and gone right back to the beginning, to what made the early films so good, and by God it works.
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September 27th, 2008 admin
2008
Starring: Francois Begaudeau
Director: Laurent Cantet
Runtime: 108 Minutes
Distributor: Sony Picture Classics
Rating: R
When you consider that debating the education system is essentially a French national pastime and combine that fact with the highly charged, often-volatile love-hate relationship the country shares with its young people, it’s not difficult to see why Laurent Cantet’s pseudo documentary chronicling a year in a Paris classroom took home the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes. A more quintessentially French film you are unlikely to find.
That’s not to say it’s undeserving. On the contrary, while it might lack the visceral explosiveness of La Haine, as a follow-up examination of disenchanted youth thirteen years on and a mirror to contemporary French multi-culture, it is every bit as timely and every bit as relevant. Perhaps more so in fact because this is the battle waged rather than Kassovitz’s battle lost.
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September 27th, 2008 admin
2007
Starring: Toby Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Rosemary Harris, Bryce Dallas Howard, J.K. Simmons
Director: Sam Raimi
Runtime: 140 Minutes
Rating: PG-13
Distributor: Universal
Far more than Memorial Day, the end of the college semester or the sweltering sticky heat, the beginning of Summer is these days heralded in by one thing – the arrival of the tent pole blockbuster movie. With one of the most impressive slates of releases for many, many years 2007 boasted the likes of Transformers, Pirates 3, The Bourne Ultimatum and Die Hard 4 to look forward to, which meant Spidey had his work cut out to be crowned king of the franchise pile.
Almost all films begin to wane and lose their magic as they move beyond the sequel into the realm of the franchise. It is the inevitable law of diminishing returns. Oddly in this case, Spiderman 3 appears to go the other direction and in excess becomes a victim of its own success. Spiderman 2 was simply so good that poor Sam Raimi seems to have no idea just how to top it and by being entrenched with the idea of making this one bigger and better than anything we’ve ever seen seems to have lost sight of what that really means and settled on the concept of “more.” More story, more special effects, more characters, more villains. There are three villains here, four if you count evil Spiderman. Pick one, Mr. Raimi, or even two. Four is just too much, we don’t know how to handle it and apparently neither does he. On top of this we have to make room for Peter and M.J. and Aunt May, as well as all the returning support cast, along with a boatload new ones. It’s an ambitious, overreaching mess and Spiderman 3 sags badly with a bloated and indigestible story.
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September 25th, 2008 admin
2006
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connolly, Arnold Vosloo, Kagiso Kuypers, David Harewood, Michael Sheen
Director: Edward Zwick
Runtime: 143 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Back in 2003 director Edward Zwick gave us The Last Samurai and with it his take on Western imperialism encroaching on a shrinking empire struggling to reconcile itself while dragging its people kicking and screaming towards violence laden progress. Those same underlying fingerprints that spell out ‘thank you for saving us from our own decadence, brave westerner’ can be found all over this action film masquerading as a humanitarian alarm bell. While Blood Diamond purports itself to be a serious film carrying an important social message about rampant human exploitation in the world’s forgotten continent, there is enough blood, guts and hi-octane explosions on display here to make Omaha Beach look like a Butlins camp.
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September 25th, 2008 admin
Starring: Dennis Haysbert, Max Martini, Robert Patrick, Scott Foley, Michael Irby, Demore Barnes, Abby Brammell, Regina Taylor, Audrey Marie Anderson
Creator: David Mamet
Original Air Date: 09/19/2006 – 05/08/2007
Network: CBS
Picked up for a second season The Unit finds its format extended from 13 episodes to a full 22. Unfortunately a consequence of that is the short, sharp shock treatment that was the show’s best weapon is now diluted. Instead of tightening itself up around the waist, the budget and the storylines are now even more spread out and The Unit’s second season finds itself thin in all the wrong places; missions are now almost Star Trek-esque with a cultural talking point of the week type attachment.
Also it seems that half the principle cast has gone missing. Given the expanded format you would think they could have at least found a way to fit everyone in, but the same unit members always inexplicably seem to be the ones rotated out that week. Season two does find the drama on the home front better written, but seems engineered no longer as narrative but as a mouthpiece for the show’s oversimplified political point of view. Where a show like 24 would happily swim around in the moral grey area between what is right and what is necessary, The Unit has no intention of even pretending to flirt with ambiguity. In fact the views of this show are slightly to the right of Genghis Kahn, and it makes no apologies for it.
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September 24th, 2008 admin
2006
Starring: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Plummer
Director: Spike Lee
Runtime: 129 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R
Spike Lee directs an all star line up for this stylish, high concept heist movie in which Lee attempts to show that he can do mainstream Hollywood thrillers just as well as politically driven dramas.
Denzel Washington is Keith Frazier, a police detective trying to make first grade but under investigation over some missing drug money that he claims he knows nothing about. When Clive Owen’s wily bank robber and his crew decide to knock off a bank, it forces Frazier to step in as hostage negotiator and try and prevent a bank full of hostages from coming out in body bags. Unfortunately, that is not all he has to worry about. There is also something hidden inside the bank’s vault that could be very embarrassing for the bank’s president. Jodie Foster’s political fixer is dispatched to lean on Frazier to make sure that Owen doesn’t get what it is that he wants and offers to make all his IAD problems go away if Frazier can guarantee that he won’t.
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September 24th, 2008 admin
2002
Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino, Phellipe Haagensen, Douglas Silva, Seu Jorge, Matheus Nachttergaele
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Runtime: 124 Minutes
Distributor: Miramax
Rating: R
City of God is an uncomfortable and unflinching journey into the underbelly of Rio de Janeiro, a world that is as far from the picture postcard image as can be. Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 film charts the parallel lives of several children from one of Brazil’s many favelas – shanty towns on the edge of cities where people eek out a meager existence in abject poverty. The story is told from the perspective of Rocket, a young boy with no taste for hoodlum life and ambition to one day become a photographer. Rocket narrates the rise of Bene and Lil Ze from their days as petty thieves in the favela through their bloody ascension to drug kingpins of the City of God, a lower class quarter in the west of Rio.
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