Monthly Archives: May 2007

Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a crisp and pocket-sized novel that takes place—with the exception of a number of flashbacks—over the course of a single summer night in 1962, is as tautly constructed as anything he has written, though sprawling in imagination. It’s emblematic of a generation, a semi-scornful elegy for a repressed age, sarcastic about mores and unrelentingly honest about psychological and sexual intimacy. It’s a big book in a little space. You can feel the author at times wishing to burst the bounds of his limited span, to go crashing past these tightly constrained boundaries and begin sweeping up the host of other generational topics available to him. McEwan resists the urge, which is for the best, this is a book better suited for the sprint than the marathon; he’s no Richard Ford, thank god.

The full review is available at PopMatters. Link

Those watching Robert Altman’s 1974 Depression-era robbers-on-the-run film Thieves Like Us and looking for a Bonnie and Clyde-style antiheroic odyssey — charismatic young lovers, blaze of glory, the whole deal — will come away severely disappointed. Altman, fortunately, has other things on his mind than building up legends and stoking the coals of nostalgia. His robbers aren’t savage animals, but they’re far from dashing; opportunistic, venal, and unable to plan their lives more than five minutes into the future is a more apt description. The film received it’s long-overdue DVD release a couple weeks back.

The full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

It’s never easy to say just how seriously Hal Hartley is taking himself. Back in the days of his Martin Donovan films like Trust, the artificially aggressive dialogue and over-the-top theatrics, funny as they were, somehow fed into and reinforced their dead-serious emotional undercurrents. None of it was meant to be taken seriously…unless it was. Now we have Fay Grim, packed full of enough ludicrous plot twists to turbo-charge half-a-dozen Clancy-esque technothrillers, wherein a high-camp Parker Posey is shot through a pinball machine-like roundelay of conspiracies and secret agents, and yet still comes off as something resembling a real person.

The full review is available in Film Journal International. Link

If one discounts the animated Arthur and the Invisibles, Luc Besson hasn’t been behind the camera since his back-to-back hit and flop The Fifth Element (1997) and The Messenger (1999), preferring instead to reign over his mini-fiefdom of glossy pulp films he’s produced and/or written. Angel-A is his first directorial credit since then–released in France in December 2005–and it’s clear his prodigious energy hasn’t flagged one bit, though it’s also clear that he may have spread himself a little thin, creatively, over the past decade.

The full review is available in Film Journal International. Link

An honest-to-God, brawling, hooting, big ball of popcorn spectacle of a movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End fully embraces its ludicrous sense of summer season overkill without succumbing to the bloated tedium that afflicted its disappointing predecessor Dead Man’s Chest. Clocking in at just under three hours, it’s definitely longer than necessary, but given the number of unresolved plot strands that the last film left strewn about like so much tangled rigging, it’s actually amazing the filmmakers are able to tie everything up quite as nicely as they do.

The full review is available at filmcritic.com. Link

First Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, now this. In The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon finally unleashes the genre storyspinner who has been lurking inside him all these years. In the past, Chabon has used his love of genre as inspiration for well-crafted literary fiction, whether it was H. P. Lovecraft (Wonder Boys) or Golden Era comics (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). But this is the first time—excepting his so-so Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Final Solution or that comic serial he’s been writing for the New York Times– that he’s really just dove right in and told an entire novel, one worthy of ranking with his best, from a perspective that might not be so welcome on the genteel fiction pages of The New Yorker.

The full review is available at PopMatters. Link

As reported in Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater (Nation Books), one of the largest providers of private security assets to the U.S. military is more than a business: It’s a well-armed and well-funded cog in the military-industrial complex led by a self-styled Christian warrior with deep ties to the right’s theo-con fringe. In short, the sort of thing to keep any right-minded, small-d democrat awake at night. Although the book itself is essentially a magazine feature bloated up to book length without the additional research needed to justify the heft, the facts at its core are the eye-widening stuff of lurid conspiracy novels.

My review was published in the magazine In These Times. Link

It’s hard to measure perfection in films, there’s always something to complain about. They come along occasionally, and sometimes you only realize it after having gone back and seeing them a second or third time; repetition is a good way of proving it. But sometimes all you need is one viewing, and even if there are quibbles with the final product, close enough can be good enough. Such is the case with Howard Hawks’ fantastic 1959 Western Rio Bravo, starring the improbable lineup of John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson, and featuring a sardonic script from the team that wrote The Big Sleep. It’s being released this week in a very worthwhile two-disc special edition.

My review ran on filmcritic.com. Link

We have an embarrassment of information when it comes to the Iraq War. Unlike previous conflicts, in which information took too long to get back from abroad, or was too heavily censored to retain much of its impact, Iraq offers us all the dirty reality in whatever format we’d prefer. There’s emails from relatives and friends serving there, documentaries like Gunner Palace which skimp not a bit on the mucky details, rough-and-ready memoirs, and even blogs written by grunts just back from getting IED’d. In short, there’s no excuse if one doesn’t have at least a smattering of an idea of what it’s really like “over there” — unless one just really don’t want to know. This is not to say that Deborah Scranton’s fantastic documentary The War Tapes is in any way unnecessary, in fact, it highlights just how good Scranton and her collaborators are at what they’ve done; given how much competition there is out there. It played way too briefly in theaters last year and is now out on DVD, with hours of new footage.

My review originally ran on filmcritic.com. Link

Unfolding before viewers’ eyes like luxuriantly blooming nightshade, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark treat that delivers a powerful sting. The nightmare conventions are here in his story of a young girl whose moorings to the real world have been quite effectively cut, everything from mysterious forests and exaggeratedly evil father figures to subterranean monsters and a fairy world existing quite close to our own. But instead of losing himself in the otherworldly, del Toro bases this fantasia in the deadliest of realities. One of the greatest films of last — or any other — year, Pan’s Labyrinth is now out on DVD.

My original review ran on filmcritic.com. Link