My full review of the DVD / Blu-ray release of the gorgeous but strangely Twilight-esque Snow White and the Huntsman is available at PopMatters:
Like the original Snow White tale, although romance is ultimately involved, the film is truly more concerned with the fight between beautiful young Snow White and the slowly withering old hag Queen Ravenna. (The gender politics are none too subtle here, with Ravenna’s monstrousness keyed to her sensuality, as she is practically the only character in the film to show any evidence of a sex drive.) The Huntsman, a drunk who only took the Snow White job so Ravenna could use her dark arts to raise his dead wife back to life, supposedly falls for the princess on the run but there’s little evidence of that on screen…
It’s been a long time since the toga-wrapped revolution of Animal House and the whole National Lampoon “slobs vs. snobs” gauntlet toss. Long enough that in Whit Stillman’s long-awaited collegiate farce Damsels in Distress, his lead damsel can intone darkly about how at elite Seven Oaks college, “an atmosphere of male barbarism predominates,” and we are meant to think the better of her for saying it. It’s not that Stillman is trying to get away with some dire, Tom Wolfe-ian jeremiad about declining standards. Instead, he seems to want to upend the school-set comedy with his own brand of highly literate, quasi-conservative thoughtfulness (characters intoning about how much more interesting homosexuality used to be before wider societal acceptance, and so on) and splice it with a crisp and pastel-hued surrealism. It’s Dadaism for the preppie set…
Damsels in Distress is available today on DVD; check it out. My full review is at the AMC Movie Database.
It would be too reductive to say that Wes Anderson’s films are about people who don’t fit in. Yes, his characters are on the oddball end of the spectrum. But in Anderson’s better films (like The Royal Tenenbaums), he doesn’t fall prey to the common bugaboo of those artists who celebrate the unique. Namely, he doesn’t even bother creating an outside world to judge them for their curious behavior. There is no island of misfit toys for his characters to retreat to, because the whole that is visible doesn’t seem much different. Everybody doesn’t fit in, together…
The Royal Tenenbaums is available now in a beautiful new Blu-ray transfer from Criterion. Read my full review at PopMatters.
Filmmakers run all kinds of risks when they try to update the classics; for all the universality of some of the great dramas, they can fail miserably when downloaded into new and sometimes incompatible formats (witness what happens when studios try to dress up Austen and Shakespeare as candy-colored high school comedies). Nadine Labaki’s zesty Where Do We Go Now? has to navigate two minefields: updating Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and setting this comedy amidst modern Lebanon’s murderous religious strife. The result isn’t a new classic, but stands nevertheless as a potent and lively satire about how the violence of men tears societies down and the lengths to which women go to staunch the bleeding…
The Oscar-nominated Where Do We Go Now? comes out today on DVD. My full review is at AMC Movie Database.
The metaphor doesn’t get any clearer than this. As battling spouses shout at an invisible judge sitting where the camera is, the message is undeniable: they’re not just fighting over a relationship, but over a country, one that has both abandoned and entrapped them. The wife doesn’t want to stay with her husband, but it’s more their circumstances that she’s fighting to escape from with their daughter. Not that she, or Ashgar Farhadi’s film, comes out and says this. Iranian writer-director Farhadi’s subtle but explosive domestic crime story, dancing nimbly around censorship rules, makes a ringing statement as clear as the injustice witnessed in each of the main characters’ eyes…
A Separation comes out today on DVD; it was one of the most potent, unforgettable films to hit screens in 2011—foreign or domestic. My full review is at AMC Movie Database.
Now, there were many things to dislike about the 1984 Red Dawn, that hopped-up NRA-ad of a John Milius Cold War teen empowerment fantasy. The generally atrocious sub-Brat Pack acting (looking at you, C. Thomas Howell). The idea that Soviet armored divisions could pour into the country across the Bering Strait to hook up with Nicaraguan paratroopers who took the Rocky Mountains(!). Thinking that entire units of Spetsnaz could be taken out with ease by some high school kids with AK-47s and Wolverine letter jackets.
Of course, there were also many things to love about that movie. The opening scene with paratroopers drifting down outside a classroom’s windows. Harry Dean Stanton bellowing, “Avenge me!” from behind the prison camp wire. That strangely touching subplot about the war-weary Cuban colonel (played with some gravitas by Super Fly himself, Ron O’Neal). Thinking that entire units of Spetsnaz could be taken out with ease by some high school kids with AK-47s and Wolverine letter jackets.
But now, since Hollywood is apparently bereft of all new ideas and must recycle, recycle, recycle, they’ve decided to take a film best left in the dustbin of beloved adolescent classics and dust it off in an entirely irrelevant way for a new generation. To make things even more preposterous, in a time when the United States isn’t locked in pseudo-conflict with a country that has a massive conventional army, in the remake the Commie invaders hail from … North Korea.
Max Fischer at The Atlantic points out the many, many, many absurdities of this premise, going well beyond North Korea’s staggering “poverty and military weakness,” here.
Trailer for the apparently entirely humorless remake is below, showing only that Chris Hemsworth is no Patrick Swayze:
For a film about John Bunting, one of the most infamous serial killers in Australia’s history, The Snowtown Murders comes at its subject stealthily and almost wholly without sensationalism. Creating a slow-burning portrait of its depressed South Australian suburban milieu and the layers upon layers of dysfunction found therein, Justin Kurzel’s assured feature debut approaches its themes with care. Even when the story shifts more towards Bunting’s murderous exploits, the tone remains even. It’s as though what’s happening is no surprise at all, just the natural outgrowth of this toxic brew of poverty, rage and sickening abuse…
Somewhere buried deep in an email chain that’s been slung like Spider-man’s web from producer’s office to various screenwriters to yet other producers in Hollywood right now may well reside infinite variations on this question: How do we make a movie out of the board-game Clue?
It’s extremely likely that nowhere in this abstracted committee of moviemaking has anybody suggested, “Hey, how about making it into something of a sex farce that’s also an allegory for the McCarthy era?” That’s not just because it was already done but because such an idea would never fly. Except it did, in 1985. Somehow…
The Blu-ray release of Clue: The Movie hits stores today; and yes, it includes all three endings. My full review is at PopMatters.
Joseph Cedar’s high-toned Israeli comedy about an embarrassing scandal in the world of Talmudic scholarship is overflowing with coolly-delivered mockery, but tempers it by delving deeper into the tense father-son relationship at the center of the scandal. Shot in sky-bright blues and backed with a richly emotive score, this is a rich banquet of a film, even if the final course leaves you wanting…
The Oscar-nominated Footnote is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. My full review is at AMC Movie Guide.
If you’re living in a region with a public television station that’s smart enough to air Independent Lens, one of the nation’s greatest resources for getting the best indie films before a bigger audience, then tonight you’ll be able to watch Hell and Back Again. A raw and brutally evocative piece of work that flips back and forth between a Marine trying to survive the crucible of conflict in southern Afghanistan and his attempts to adjust to life back home, was one of the greatest practically-unreleased documentaries from 2011.
Make sure to check it out, if not on PBS, then on DVD. My review is at filmcritic.com.
My full review of the DVD / Blu-ray release of the gorgeous but strangely Twilight-esque Snow White and the Huntsman is available at PopMatters:
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