Monthly Archives: September 2006

The attempt to deny voting rights to minority voters in Florida in 2000 was bad enough, but when the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio — a close buddy of Bush — went ahead and tried it again on a broader and more galling scale in 2004, it makes you truly wonder about the frailty of our democracy. The ground-scorching documentary American Blackout, which spends too little time addressing this subject, does what it can to raise consciousness on the issue, even if it does follow its hero, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, around too much like a political groupie. It’s radical verve and barnstorming gusto helps the film blow right past any such problems like that with minimal fuss, however. The film is in limited theatrical release and is also available on DVD — handy, no?

My review ran in Film Journal International. Link.

There’s been a fair amount of web commentary about whether or not distributor Magnolia killed the chances of the documentary Jesus Camp by first opening it in some Bible Belt regions before opening it in the bigger cities, but that’s all neither here nor there. Absolutely chilling when I saw it this spring at the Tribeca Film Fest, it’s an extremely important document of how far-far-right evangelicals try to indoctrinate their young into becoming full-fledged Christian soldiers, pledged to clean up this “sick old world.” What the filmmakers lack in ideological subtlety (they clearly can’t stand the woman who is their primary subject, and rightly so) they make up for in empathy: some of these kids will just break your heart, they’re so needy and desperate to belong. In short, perfect fodder for tomorrow’s abortion clinic bombers.

My review ran in Film Journal International. Link.

So we all know the story: as originally written, John Hughes’ script for Pretty in Pink called for Andie (Molly Ringwald) to end up falling in love with her old buddy, Duckie (Jon Cryer). However, test audiences hated that ending, so they reshot the one currently seen in the film, where she winds up getting back together with the boring rich guy, Blane (Andrew McCarthy) who dumped her due to peer pressure. Yes, it felt like a betrayal, a cheap sellout, all those things. But some of the extras on the new DVD release suggest another take on the whole matter: It’s just a movie and not necessarily a call for class warfare.

Pretty in Pink (Everything’s Duckie Edition) is now out on DVD. My review ran on CultureDose.net. Link.

My review ran on PopMatters. Link.

Now showing: a beautifully-made fantasy that never quite coheres and one loud, fast and pissed-off documentary. The former is Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, a well-conceived bit of silliness about a young man’s inability to separate his vivid dreams from his waking life. Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) knows exactly how to replicate the illogic of the dream world, but his attention falters when it comes to the real world, in which a semi-generic romance moves forward only in fits and spurts. High grades for imagination and ingenuity, less so with the script. Hard to say that it’s an entire waste, but it’s also hard to say it’s worth the price of admission.

My review is at filmcritic.com. Link.

The punk rock documentaries just keep coming, and this one is probably the most encyclopedic of them all. Paul Rachman’s American Hardcore is a passionate and ultra-specific document covering those few short years (1980-1986, give or take) when hardcore punk took over from the dying embers of the original late 70′s movement. In a series of grainy VHS footage, we see all the fledgling and soon to be legendary bands playing in basements, VFW halls, whatever, and the list is impressive: Bad Brains, Black Flag, you name it. What’s truly great about the film though is how personal it is, how closed to the outsider. Most who were not in the movement or aware of it at the time will watch this film and wonder what the big deal is with these pissy, screaming teens. For those who know, however, it’s weirdly nostalgic, a reminder of a time when a non-consumerised underground still existed, and mattered.

My review is at filmcritic.com. Link.

Likely to come and go in the blink of an eye, Old Joy is a film that, besides having one of the world’s least sexy titles, is also something worth experiencing. A minimalist account of two old friends who take a rather poorly-planned hike into the Pacific Northwest woods, it doesn’t really do what film is supposed to do: provide story, action, character arcs. Instead, it’s more a portrait of the woods themselves and the very nature of these men’s souls, as they hint and lightly spar around the very palpable fact that their lives have taken drastically different courses. All is implied, very little is actually said. There’s a point where the film just seems plain stubborn in its refusal to give us a confrontation (nobody is this evasive), but the purity of its vision is unassailable, as is the Yo La Tengo soundtrack.

My review ran in Film Journal International. Link.

It just doesn’t sound that promising to begin with. An autobiographical account in which depressed and terminally underemployed French writer Grégoire Boullier describes how miserable he felt after an ex-girlfriend (who dumped his pretty shamelessly, by the way) calls up out of the blue to nonchalantly invite him to a party. The book that resulted though, The Mystery Guest, is a little slice of perfect. Boullier’s attention to the minutae of depression and the spasmodic and its self-pitying mental reveries turn this slim book into something that’s not quite great literature but something quite a bit more than some guy whining about his ex. Funny, sad, and strangely meaningful.

My review is at the PopMatters website. Link.

Blowing up from Australia on a foul and benighted wind, the scruffy, gorgeous, profound, bloody and addictive Western called The Proposition was one of the year’s great films, even if it barely showed outside a few major markets. The brilliant songwriter Nick Cave, whose gothic murder ballads have hewed to predictable but beautifully conceived subject matter, wrote the film as an allegorical epic about the violent conquest of the Australian outback. With a Peckinpah-esque feel for grotesque violence and a batch of Oscar-worthy performances (Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone), it’s the best Western in years and unlike most anything you’ll see for quite some time.

The Proposition is out on DVD this week. My review originally ran in Film Journal International. Link.

Now showing: one promising project that turns into a complete disaster and an out-of-nowhere agitprop shocker. The former is Brian de Palma’s campy, ludicrous take on James Ellroy’s seminal neo-noir The Black Dahlia, in which the actual real-life murder of Elizabeth Short took a backseat to the story’s main love triangle and its tangle of psychosexual obsession. De Palma strands his many fine actors — Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank — without direction and throws in so many different styles at any given time — camp, noir, police procedural — that it’s hard to keep track of what kind of film this is trying to be. And eventually you just lose interest. What’s more upsetting than it just being an awful campy mess is the knowledge of how crucially it misunderstands the book, a minor classic. File this one under disasters that didn’t have to be.

My review is at filmcritic.com. Link.

From Robert Greenwald, he who makes very very angry films about red-state monoliths like Fox News and Wal-Mart, comes Iraq for Sale, a punchy look at the swampy morass of corruption, both financial and moral, that characterizes military contractors in Iraq. Taking aim at the biggest elephants in the room, military profiteers like Blackwater and the always popular Halliburton, Greenwald comes up with a seemingly endless array of examples of waste and outright theft. For some reason, though, the film is taking the guerrilla distribution route of small theatrical runs and a quick DVD release when in fact it should be showing in every multiplex throughout the land.

My review is at filmcritic.com. Link.

The DVD industry’s ability to repackage its own product in new and hardly different ways is oddly impressive if obnoxious — how many “special editions” has Universal been able to squeeze out of the likes of American Pie? But every now and again, they come up with one that actually makes you turn back for a second look. So it is with Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, a nifty little package (mocked up like an actual military dossier) that contains both the original theatrical and director’s cuts of the film along with a treasure trove of extras. The films are pretty good, too.

My review ran on Culturedose.net. Link.