Now Playing: ‘Paranoia’

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Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman wonder what they’re doing in ‘Paranoia’.

paranoia-poster1Opening tomorrow with a near-complete lack of fanfare is the techie-thriller Paranoia; which is perfectly made for folks who get interested when somebody says the words: “Liam Hemsworth.” You’re out there, somewhere.

My review is at Film Journal International:

It’s not that the director of Legally Blonde, Robert Luketic, couldn’t direct a decent thriller. But the director also responsible for 21 and Monster-in-Law (which one was that, you say? The one you didn’t bother to see because it looked so horrendous, that’s what) most certainly cannot. This is particularly the case when he’s saddled with an empty-eyed lead like Liam Hemsworth and a techie plot that would have seemed cutting-edge right around the time that the World Wide Web was trying to kill Sandra Bullock in The Net. Seeing the likes of Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman skulking around the premises just adds insult to injury…

Here’s the trailer, enjoy!

 

Now Playing: ‘The Canyons’

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Lindsay Lohan and James Deen (yes, that's a stage name) confront an exhausted, post-film landscape in 'The Canyons'.
Lindsay Lohan and James Deen (yes, that’s a stage name) confront an exhausted, post-film landscape in ‘The Canyons’.

thecanyons-posterA couple of enfant terribles (Lindsay Lohan and writer Bret Easton Ellis), a director with a good grasp of the lengths people will go to in destroying themselves (Paul Schrader), a clutch of blank-faced performers, abandoned movie theater ruin-porn photography, and a bed-hopping Hollywood melodrama make up the cracked camp quasi-classic that is The Canyons.

My review’s at PopMatters; here’s part:

Everyone is exhausted in The Canyons. But even as Paul Schrader’s and Brett Easton Ellis’ wickedly unnerving satire offers the usual Southern California power games, it also shows how soul-sapping this constant contesting can be. Everyone knows the machinery is lubricated by tainted money, but this is all that anybody seems to know. Even the allure of Hollywood fame seems to have disappeared, leaving nothing in its wake. Terrified of standing still, the characters just keep pushing back the night. The frightening thing is, soon all they can see is more night…

The Canyons is playing now in very limited release, and is also available on VOD, where Schrader and company think most people will end up seeing it. The hope is that their micro-budgeted indie will get some free publicity out of Lohan’s still-considerable tabloid profile. Given that big-budget movies have crashed and burned with regularity all summer, and anything that’s not big budget can barely get released, The Canyons could serve as a harbinger for a new kind of movie future. One with a lot fewer theaters to overpay for popcorn at.

One of the many stills of closed movie theater facades that Paul Schrader scatters throughout 'The Canyons'.
One of the many stills of closed movie theater facades that Paul Schrader scatters throughout ‘The Canyons’.

 

Quote of the Day: Loathsome Exercise

On By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment
satchelpaige1
Satchel Paige, in his St. Louis Browns uniform.

Are baseball players smarter than other athletes, or just more quotable? The Negro Leagues (and later Major League Baseball) great Satchel Paige is a case in point. In 1948, at the supposed age of 42—nobody really knows when he was born—he became the oldest man ever to start in the major leagues.

How did Paige remain a viable athlete into middle age? That’s obvious:

Avoid running, at all times.

—Satchel Paige

Who are we to argue with the guy that Joe DiMaggio called the best and fastest pitcher he ever faced and who titled his autobiography Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever?

Now Playing: ‘Terraferma’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

veniceterraferma

terraferma-posterTerraferma is the second movie that’s in theaters right now which digs into the tragic drama of the refugee crisis. The other one is Elysium—you can tell them apart easily since Terraferma is the quieter one in Italian that won several awards at the Venice Film Festival and features beautiful Mediterranean scenery and many fewer gun-toting androids.

My review of Terraferma ran in PopMatters; here’s part:

What happens to an island fishing village in the Mediterranean when the only things the Italian fishermen seem to be pulling from the sea are drowned or near-drowned African refugees? The economic, cultural, and personal effects of this shift shape Emanuele Crialese’s story of stark choices and uncertain futures. In this elegantly structured film, everybody’s concept of home is in flux, their eyes fixed either stubbornly on the ground beneath their feet or hopefully on the horizon…

You can watch the trailer here:

Screening Room: ‘Books: A Documentary’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Upcoming1 Comment

booksdoc

This is the killer Kickstarter pitch for a new proposed film project with the can’t-go-wrong title of Books: A Documentary:

This past August over 300,000 antiquarian books from Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up were sold at auction: This is the story of those Books.

Color us intrigued.

For those not already in awe of the man, Lonesome Dove and Brokeback Mountain author McMurtry also owns one of the nation’s great used-book emporiums. He told the tale of last fall’s great blowout sale at the New York Review of Books.

booksdoc2

According to Publishers Weekly, the filmmakers (husband-and-wife Sara Ossana and Mathew Provost) have already shot about half of the doc and need $50,000 to finish it up. Ossana notes that the film, which uses McMurtry’s sale to explore the modern book landscape, might be expected to be a downbeat tale about an industry and way of life in decline:

“We weren’t sure if the film would be a moratorium, or more uplifting,” Ossana said. “It’s turning out to be more uplifting.” That, she thinks, is due to a larger cultural shift afoot in America—brought on by the country’s economic need to develop a stronger foothold in the production of goods and in manufacturing—that is driving more people to ask where the objects they have come from, whether it’s the food on their table, or the hardcover novel on their shelf. “There is a cultural awakening happening now,” Ossana explained, “around what people find valuable. I think the book is a large part of that,” she said. And, with that, Ossana thinks physical bookstores are becoming more important as “cultural centers” on the community level.

Here’s to hoping that she’s right.

New in Theaters: ‘Prince Avalanche’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New1 Comment
Emile Hirsch and Paul Rudd get on each other's nerves in 'Prince Avalanche'.
Emile Hirsch and Paul Rudd get on each other’s nerves in ‘Prince Avalanche’.

prince-avalanche-posterDavid Gordon Green has carved out an odd career for himself in Hollywood, switching back and forth between artful mood pieces (George Washington) and stoner f/x comedies (Your Highness). His newest comedy, Prince Avalanche, tries to thread the needle between those two opposites and comes up a winner.

Prince Avalanche is playing now. My review is at Film Journal International:

In David Gordon Green’s new comedy Prince Avalanche, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch star as Alvin and Lance, both slackers in highly different ways. It’s 1987 in the great state of Texas and the two guys are spending the summer working in a park that was recently burned out by a massive fire. Their assignment is the prosaic stuff of road crews: repainting yellow stripes and putting in reflectors. Alvin, who fancies himself a thinker a, sees it as a time for self-sufficiency and self-reflection. However, Lance, who would be defined as your garden-variety “doofus,” is quietly losing his mind due to the lack of, well, women. Something’s got to give…

Here’s the trailer:

 

Readers’ Corner: New York’s Hidden Library

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The New York Public Library's Main Reading Room.
The New York Public Library’s Main Reading Room.

When you think “New York” and “library” there’s really only one that comes to mind: the grand main branch on Fifth Avenue facing Bryant Park. It’s gorgeous, it’s iconic, they have just about every book you can imagine (even if they’ve started trying to move a bunch of titles off-site); in other words perfect. The main Brooklyn branch on Grand Army Plaza is no slouch, either, either in architectural grandness or selection.

But there’s another library worth mentioning, and that’s the one underneath the Surrogate’s Court building in downtown Manhattan that nobody knows about: the City Hall Library. From last Tuesday’s New York Times:

Below the library are the cavernous storerooms and vaults that contain some of the maps, books, photographs and other items that are part of the Municipal Archives. They document the city’s government and leadership dating back to the unification of the boroughs into New York City in 1898, and back to the first mayor of the city, Thomas Willett, in 1665.

The history of the city is celebrated in old sepia photographs, wall-size topographical maps and reproduction manuscripts on display within the library and in a visitor center next to the library.

Yet there is not a hint of any of this on the granite exterior of the imposing Beaux-Arts building at 31 Chambers Street, behind City Hall….The librarians say the courthouse’s status as a designated landmark means that they are not allowed to hang a sign on the building’s exterior.

Grand Central Station, circa 1937 - one of the images available from New York city's Municipal Archives.
Grand Central Station, circa 1937 – one of the images available from New York city’s Municipal Archives.

If you can’t get there, though, no worry: Much of the Municipal Archives’ photographic holdings were digitized and put online last year—the interest was so immediate that it crashed the server. It’s an astonishing collection of historical imagery, which you can see here. Many of the old glass-plate negatives that the NYPD shot of crime scenes back in the early 20th century were used by Luc Sante in his ghostly book, Evidence.

 

New in Theaters: ‘Elysium’

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Elysium_dystopia_620x350
Los Angeles shows its 22nd century age in ‘Elysium’.

elysium-poster

There’s a stark and revolutionary allegory about privilege, capitalism, immigration, and even access to healthcare inside Neill Blomkamp’s new dystopian sci-fi actioner Elysium. Though it gets a little lost around the time Matt Damon gets a metal exo-skeleton riveted to him (two words: bone saw), this is still heady stuff for an escapist summer thriller.

My review ran in PopMatters; here’s part:

The year is 2154 and everybody still living on earth is having a miserable time. The Los Angeles where paroled car thief Max (Matt Damon) ekes out a living as a robot-making factory worker looks like a congested favela. Instead of the dark alleyways and cloud-piercing skyscrapers of many dystopic noirs, this city is familiar to anybody who’s spent time in chaotic megacities like Lagos, Cairo or Mexico City, where Blomkamp shot much of his film. The onetime infrastructure is decimated, with overwhelmed social services, no civic government to speak of, randomly authoritarian robot-police, and a relentlessly hand-to-mouth existence. It’s ripe for revolt…

Check out the trailer here:

New on DVD: ‘Oblivion’

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film2 Comments
Tom Cruise contemplates 'Oblivion'.
Tom Cruise contemplates ‘Oblivion’.

oblivion-dvdJust one of this year’s post-apocalyptic mega-budget sci-fi projects, Oblivion is a somewhat ambitious piece of work that doesn’t ultimately know what to do with itself. In part, that could result from the ever-amped presence of Tom Cruise, who doesn’t ever seem able to tamp down the Maverick long enough to register any true doubt in his own abilities to save the world. Again.

Oblivion hits Blu-ray and DVD today. My review is at Short Ends & Leader; here’s part:

Oblivion starts as some blissed-out spread in a post-apocalyptic edition ofArchitecture Digest before moving into Big Revelation science fiction. Tom Cruise plays Jack, a happy-go-lucky tech who’s one of two humans left on the Earth’s surface in the year 2077. Jack and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, lithe and ghostly) live in a gorgeously sleek pod of a place elevated hundreds of feet off the blasted landscape. It’s like one of those moderne postwar glass bungalows in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, only it floats above the clouds and is packed with all manner of gadgetry that would make an Apple fetishist’s heart beat dangerously fast…

Here’s the trailer:

 

Now Playing: ‘Girl Most Likely’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
Kristen Wiig and Annete Bening in 'Girl Most Likely'.
Kristen Wiig and Annete Bening in ‘Girl Most Likely’.

girlmostlikelyposter1Every so often a former SNL performer finds their way to a career outside sketch comedy. Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and so on. But there’s an even longer list of those who found that their talents just didn’t translate well into different mediums. One new addition to that list just might be Kristen Wiig, whose new comedy Girl Most Likely is out in theaters now. To her credit, she’s far from the worst thing about the the movie.

My review is at Film Racket; here’s part of it:

As the star of the flimsy, dreary debacle that is Girl Most Likely, Kristen Wiig joins the august pantheon of modern actresses forced to debase and humiliate themselves for ninety minutes or so of pop-song-scored OMG embarrassments. Her Imogene is another in a long line of female screen neurotics who are brought low by an inability to get out of their own head before being rescued by a patient, doe-eyed, and dark-haired dreamboat with a Crest Whitening smile. Michelle Morgan’s manic script — which cruises along on derivative and mean-spirited cliche before detouring into are-they-joking inanity in the last section — barely situates Imogene before it starts to destroy her; this may be an irrelevant problem, though, since she’s such an unpleasant piece of work that more time in her company wouldn’t have created more sympathy…

You can see the trailer here:

 

Readers’ Corner: Homemade Audio Books

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

familyreading1

The family that reads together … something something. In any case, it’s a common family trait for the parents to read to their kids at night. Helps send them off into dreamland so that they’re pestering the grownups lest. The family of Stephen King, though, seemed to have a different tradition. In Susan Dominus’ great feature article on them (and how nearly everybody in the family is a published author now) from last week’s New York Times Magazine, she notes that the roles were reversed in that household:

Entertaining their parents, for the King children, was part job, part enrichment. At bedtime, they were the ones expected to tell their parents stories, instead of the other way around.

King père also had an interesting job for the kids. Being a Maine guy, he had to spend a lot of him driving long distances. Like many dads, he used audio books to fill the time. However:

…he sometimes could not find the books he wanted on tape — or maybe he just did not bother. He had three children: Naomi, Joe and Owen. They could read, couldn’t they? All King had to do was press record. Which is how his school-age children came to furnish their father, over the years, with a small library’s worth of books on tape.

One of their jobs was Anna Karenina; one would hope that meant a decent allowance bump that week.

New in Theaters: ‘The Spectacular Now’

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Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller cuddle up in 'The Spectacular Now'.
Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller cuddle up in ‘The Spectacular Now’.

spectacular_now-posterThe new teen romantic melodrama from the writers of 500 Days of Summer and the director of Smashed opened yesterday and it’s definitely worth checking out … particularly if the words “teen romantic melodrama” didn’t immediately turn you off.

My review is at PopMatters; here’s part:

The Spectacular Now eases sublimely into the love story, from Aimee and Sutter’s meet-drunk through the expected senior-year trials. As he did in Smashed, director James Ponsoldt pays attention to the details of everyday ebbing and flowing, to the ways that moments of light comedy can help to ease us—viewers and characters—through crises. He teases warm, naturalistic performances from Woodley and Teller, both of whom have the bright eyes and quick give-and-take of born wits, but not that angular and underfed look of so many young actors. Their faces, their contemplations as well as their delights and disappointments, are set off by smart cinematography that is somehow both lush and nonshowy…

Here’s the trailer:

Readers’ Corner: New George R.R. Martin Novella

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books1 Comment
Winter is coming...eventually.
Winter is coming…eventually.

So, as anybody who follows anything to do with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books knows, the man takes a while to write them. No surprise, as they’re all 800 or so pages of 110-proof plot, not a lot of air in there for character-building or atmosphere. It’s action and intrigue all the way through. So when he took six years from the publication of the series’ fourth book, A Feast of Crows, to come out with the fifth one in 2011, A Dance with Dragons, people were getting agitated. Now, with the HBO series adaptation going gangbusters, and with everyone all caught up on the books, anxiousness builds for the sixth novel, which will be released…sometime.

Dangerous WomenAdding to the anxiety is the fact that Martin took time off from that book to pen a short novella for a new anthology titled Dangerous Women that’s hitting shelves in December; Tor just posted an excerpt from it here; this is how it begins:

The Dance of the Dragons is the flowery name bestowed upon the savage internecine struggle for the Iron Throne of Westeros fought between two rival branches of House Targaryen during the years 129 to 131 AC. To characterize the dark, turbulent, bloody doings of this period as a “dance” strikes us as grotesquely inappropriate. No doubt the phrase originated with some singer. “The Dying of the Dragons” would be altogether more fitting, but tradition and time have burned the more poetic usage into the pages of history, so we must dance along with the rest…

Enjoy the wait for the rest.

Laura Miller’s great New Yorker piece on Martin is here.

My review of A Dance with Dragons is here.

 

Now Playing: ‘Fruitvale Station’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New1 Comment
Ariana Neal and Michael B. Jordan in 'Fruitvale Station'
Ariana Neal and Michael B. Jordan in ‘Fruitvale Station’

fruitvalestation-posterNearly every year there’s a scrappy indie flick that comes into the Sundance Film Festival and blows everyone away. All too often, though, once the film itself comes down from the high mountain air, it seems markedly less unique. Fortunately, with Ryan Coogler’s devastating Fruitvale Station, that is not the case. It plays just as well in a multiplex alongside The Wolverine as it does in the rarefied festival air.

My full review is at Film Racket; here’s part:

Nothing about the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant makes sense. For his keen, impassioned debut, writer/director Ryan Coogler avoids one of the most common mistakes seen in based-on-a-true-story movies, he doesn’t try to make it make sense. It shouldn’t, because one version of what actually happened is the first thing shown in the film. A grainy cellphone video taken from the open door of a BART train car paused at an Oakland station shows a few young black men being held down by a few white transit police; there’s a minor-looking scuffle and then a shot goes off. The momentum of those shaky images,  is stuttering and randomized. When the tragic moment happens, it doesn’t feel right to happen like that. Not yet…

You can watch the trailer here: