Monthly Archives: April 2007

Although the odor of buried sin and some vast, encroaching punishment hangs over most every frame of Jindabyne — intelligently adapted by screenwriter Beatrix Christian from Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” — this is hardly a religious film in the traditional manner. After a disturbing crime, church and an old family Christian tradition hold no succor. There seems to be only the wild vastness of Australia’s New South Wales, a landscape more comfortable with the rawer, less enfeebled spirituality of the few, benighted aborigines still living in the area. Given the ardor with which some of the characters pursue a form of redemption, one can only hope that there’s a god of sorts out there in the land’s soaring endlessness paying attention — and maybe even granting absolution.

My full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

In his exemplary and revealing new work of military history, The Changing Face of War, Martin van Creveld points out, with rather cutting sarcasm, the recent explosion in the West (the US especially) of civilian military analysts producing book-length reports on this subject or that is not actually symbolic of new and advanced thinking of such matters, but in fact just so much noise, the band playing on as the Titanic slowly slips beneath the waves. The point is made rather strenuously that all this think-tanking of the modern military is in fact “a sign of irrelevance, decline, and impotence as many of the world’s most powerful armed forces vainly try to deal with opponents so much smaller and weaker than themselves that it should be no contest.” In short, all the technology hasn’t appeared to help massive and well-equipped armies win conflicts against vastly inferior forces in Chechnya, Lebanon and Iraq.

My full review is at PopMatters. Link

It is hardly a reassuring sign when one of the more interesting things in a film is not even sentient. Over the title sequence of the new courtroom thriller Fracture, and in the midst of some of the duller stretches (of these there are many), we see a glittering sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, all shiny metallic tracks and carved wooden wheels, where small glass balls skitter and roll in an elaborately choreographed dance. It’s a beautiful piece of elegant machinery and, one hopes, symbolic of the many complex and artfully managed plot twists to come. Instead, what we’re given is Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling sleepwalking around each other as they navigate through one of the year’s laziest films.

My full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

The definition of opera, judging by the stylistic range of the product appearing on stages worldwide, is a malleable one, but whatever the ultimate limitations are, it seems safe to say that Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (aka Sang Sattawat) — whatever else it may be — is no opera. Commissioned by Peter Sellars’ idiosyncratic New Crowned Hope festival–celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary with a wide-ranging mélange of international cultural product that are all theoretically inspired by themes from the composer’s final compositions–the film is at heart two stories in different settings about the same thing. Reflecting the fascination with symmetry, balance, repetition and shifting perspectives so much in vogue among Asian filmmakers, Weerasethakul has crafted a film that is on its surface the story of his parents and how they fell in love, but is ultimately more about the subjectivity of memory and the powerful impact of landscape on personality.

My full review was published in Film Journal International. Link

It would always be important, but in the wake of last December’s sectarian lynching that was the execution of Saddam Hussein, a film document like Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965 takes on a particularly strident aura of necessity. Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner’s monumental documentary on Germany’s biggest war crimes trial after Nuremberg covers a broad swath of material and issues with a dispassionate candor, providing a roadmap to how societies should go about prosecuting the war criminals in their midst. Originally shown on German TV in 1993, the documentary recently had a brief theatrical run and is now on DVD.

My original review ran on filmcritic.com. Link

My full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

One can make plenty of cases for the moment when the ’60s died. Some claim Altamont, while others go with the Manson murders. But even though it came well after the decade was dead and buried, the 1978 mass suicide in Guyana by almost the entire membership of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple marked, if not the death of the Sixties, then the death of the idea of the Sixties. Never again would the idea of a large, interracial, revolutionary, spiritually-minded and liberal social experiment of this sort seem anything more than a cult bound, sooner or later, for self-annihilation. As shown in Stanley Nelson’s compassionate and sobering documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple, Jim Jones killed the commune. Nelson’s film, one of the greatest documentaries of 2006, is out now on DVD, and also showing on PBS from time to time.

My review originally ran on filmcritic.com. Link

Readers will appreciate that for his new novel The Book of Air and Shadows, marine biologist and former Carter speechwriter (?!) Michael Gruber chose a doozy of a McGuffin: the discovery of some 16th century papers that could just point to the existence of a completely unknown play by one William Shakespeare, the exclusive publishing rights to which would be worth many millions of dollars. Not a bad choice, as this device allows the author both a perfect gambit for indulging in both the imparting of some generalized Shakespeare scholarship as well as shootouts with Russian mobsters.

The full review was published at PopMatters. Link

At the very, very least, Hong Sangsoo’s wry comedy of manners Woman is the Future of Man understands that snow is the most sentimental of all nature’s wonders. The film registers not much else outside of its knot of emotionally entangled humans — the apartments and restaurants they frequent are nothing much to behold, just receptacles for their conversations — but the snow, drifting and blowing and conjuring up memories of relationships past, is practically its own character here. Set over the course of a few, fairly drunken winter days, Sangsoo’s film brings a trio of old friends and lovers (the lines are blurred with time and drink) back together for an ad hoc reunion that turns out to be nothing like what either the characters or the audience are expecting. It’s being released this week on DVD for those who missed it in the three or so days it actually played in theaters.

My review originally ran on filmcritic.com. Link