Tag: film

Screening Room: ‘Air’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Against all the odds, Ben Affleck’s new movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal when he had just started his career is actually not too bad, in a Jerry Maguire kind of way.

My review is at PopMatters:

A true underdog redemption story with an unexpected kick, Air is about how shambling sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) turned around his career, transformed Nike into a globe-spanning behemoth, and revolutionized the athletic endorsement industry. Regardless of what Alex Convery’s script would like viewers to believe, none of that is actually that interesting. As written, there are many moments when Air could come across as little more than a Harvard Business Review case study put on film. As a director, Affleck knows what he has going for him here. Damon, who—much as it would be nice to see him take some Tom Ripley-like swings again—makes clear again in his role in Air his gift for bringing gravitas and depth to everyday guys…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: A Remake of ‘Vertigo’?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

I wrote a self-explanatory article titled “Please, Please Don’t Remake Vertigo” in response to news about a new version being planned by Robert Downey Jr.

You can read it at Eyes Wide Open:

The real question, though, is not whether a new Vertigo would have value but why make it? Hitchcock was not precious about remakes: He directed two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much and for good reason: the 1956 version with James Stewart is far superior to the 1934 original. But whereas those films were entertaining variations on a sturdy potboiler plot, Vertigo was something different…

Screening Room: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’

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Back when he was just Ted Theodore Logan, who would have guessed that Keanu Reeves would eventually become the last true action star?

If that still seems strange to you, check out the epic epicness that is John Wick: Chapter 4, which opens March 24. My review is at PopMatters:

The air was charged at a recent screening of John Wick: Chapter 4. The thronged darkness buzzed with chatter and the occasional whoop. A man said to his friend that he was looking forward to a lot of “headshots”. When John Wick (Keanu Reeves) first shows himself in profile, delivering his patented “Yeah”—pained and elongated, the resigned sigh of the warrior monk hauled once more by box office demand into the bloody breach—cheers came in response. They had seen Wick before and now wanted to see him do his thing again, but more so. We all did…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Berlinale Film Festival

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

Back from this year’s Berlinale Film Festival, which was packed with celebrities, retrospectives (Spielberg), buzzy premieres (Sean Penn’s Ukraine documentary for Vice), and a very strong lineup.

I wrote up a few movies for Slant, each of which should (hopefully) be hitting a theater near you in the coming year.

  • BlackBerry: A semi-comic docudrama about the rise and fall of everyone’s onetime favorite smartphone.
  • Inside: Willem Dafoe’s master art thief is trapped inside a rich man’s penthouse.
  • Manodrome: Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody star in this unnerving dispatch from the frontlines of masculinity.
  • Teacher’s Lounge: An idealistic teacher’s best intentions go horribly awry.

Screening Room: ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, DVD - Film, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

Have you ever seen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen? Whatever the answer, the new Criterion edition provides ample reason to watch it now, whether for the first or fifth time.

My article about the film, and its place in Terry Gilliam’s career, is at PopMatters:

It is not surprising that Terry Gilliam’s film career went up in flames—not just once but on multiple occasions, and not just in flames but in great roaring bonfires that consumed reams of industry trade gossip, millions of dollars, and years of people’s lives. As Monty Python’s animator of lewdly monstrous grotesqueries and generally non-verbal performer, Gilliam was hardly the troupe’s chief troublemaker (that would be Graham Chapman, busier hellraising ala Keith Moon than trying to make films). But Gillian did have an easily detectable rebel streak that signaled poor receptiveness to fussy things like schedules and budgets…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Rio Bravo’

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Is Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo pretty much a perfect Western? I wrote about it at Eyes Wide Open:

In 1958, after decades of directing hits like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and To Have and Have Not, Howard Hawks was in bad shape. Nursing the wounds incurred by his ill-judged directing of the epic flop Land of the Pharaohs (1955), he had exiled himself from Hollywood to Europe. Casting about for a project to bring him back into the game, he seized on a smart new Western script by Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, who had also penned The Big Sleep for Hawks. Loaded with the witty dialogue he was known for and enough material for two or three lesser movies, it seemed like an easy bet…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Living’

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What would you do if you discovered you had six months to live? That’s the premise of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, respectfully adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) from Akira Kurosawa’s great Ikiru (1953).

Living opens today in limited release and expands around the country in January. My review is at PopMatters:

Living keeps the early 1950s time period, transposing Kurosawa’s story quite neatly from Tokyo to London, another capital city smothered under war trauma, social stricture, and emotional repression. Bill Nighy plays Williams, the head of a small unit of Public Works bureaucrats. His emotional register leaves as narrow a footprint as the work his people never seem to accomplish. Having buried himself in routine since the death of his wife, Williams keeps the world itself at bay by very simply never engaging…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘White Noise’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

Many have said that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an unfilmmable novel. Well, it’s a film with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and even a killer LCD Soundsystem-scored dance number.

White Noise is playing now in limited release. It will be on Netflix December 30. My review is at PopMatters:

Pity the person asking what White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s messy yet fun adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel of comic catastrophe and looming portents, is about. The response may take time to compose, arrive in paragraph form, involve contemplative gazing, and include the phrase “it’s about … America.” Such an answer may drive the potential viewer towards something starring Ryan Reynolds. This is a shame…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

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The new movie from Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from his first feature, In Bruges.

Banshees opens this week. I reviewed for Eyes Wide Open:

Given what Martin McDonagh puts his characters through in his latest bloody confabulation, The Banshees of Inisherin, and how poorly they explain and understand it, putting too much stock in what they say might be unwise. At one point, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) asks his until-recently best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) the name of the song Colm has been composing on his fiddle. Told it’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Pádraic asks why. “I just like the sound of the double ‘sh’s,” Colm replies. He might even be telling the truth. Of course, this is a man who has threatened to slice off his fingers one at a time if Pádraic does not stop talking to him. So Colm’s judgment and clarity might be questionable…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Escape from Kabul’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film-Documentary, streamingLeave a comment

The new documentary Escape from Kabul premieres this Wednesday on HBO.

My review is at The Playlist:

Jamie Roberts’ terse, painfully precise documentary “Escape from Kabul” zooms right in on one episode—the massive last-minute airlift of Afghans and remaining American personnel from Kabul in August 2021—and never looks away, even when you might wish that it did. It’s a close-quarters kind of war film that moves in tight and leaves little room to breathe. This seems an appropriate stylistic decision for a movie that is mainly about tens of thousands of people trying to escape a country as it is being reclaimed by medieval fanatics whose promises of equitable treatment were not widely believed…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Billy Wilder’s Rules

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Repertory, WritingLeave a comment

After Cameron Crowe failed to convince director Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sunset Blvd., too many other classics to mention) to play a small role in Jerry Maguire, the two struck up a friendship. That turned into a series of conversations. That turned into a book.

That book contained Wilder’s rules for writing. They mostly involve getting attention, not letting up, and then grabbing people’s attention again. He specifies it’s for screenwriting specifically, but many if not all apply to most any kind of fiction:

  • 1: The audience is fickle.
  • 2: Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
  • 3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
  • 4: Know where you’re going.
  • 5: The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
  • 6: If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
  • 7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
  • 8: In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
  • 9: The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
  • 10: The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Screening Room: ‘See How They Run’

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Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan head up the superb cast of the new mystery caper See How They Run, which opens next week.

My review is at Slant:

Set in London in 1953, the film busily corkscrews a whodunnit and a narrative about mismatched cops into the behind-the-scenes machinations around a planned movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, then only a few months into its 70-or-so-year run. After the adaptation’s potential director, the blacklisted and highly opinionated drunk Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), is found murdered and deposited on the theater stage, the police—pert and eager Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), depressed and cynical Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell)—set about determining which of the cast or crew did the deed…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘A Compassionate Spy’

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

A Compassionate Spy is the latest documentary from Steve James (Hoop Dreams). This time, he tells the story of Ted Hall, the most consequential spy at Los Alamos most of us have never heard of. It’s making the festival rounds now and should be released later in the year.

My review is at Slant:

A gentle piece of work that’s about as far away from cloak-and-dagger skullduggery as could be imagined, A Compassionate Spy is in part the story of an idealistic teenager who risked the electric chair in order to keep American hegemony at bay. But even though Ted isn’t a household name, that story was largely told already by interviews Ted gave before his death in 1999 and a 1997 book, Bombshell, whose authors are interviewed here in order to fill in more background detail. Given that, James focuses more intently on Ted’s character and family…

Screening Room: ‘Nope’

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Jordan Peele’s Nope opens this week. It’s like Get Out and Us … only not.

My review is at Slant:

In writer-director Jordan Peele’s chilling Nope, a struggling, Black-operated ranch that supplies horses for Hollywood productions faces an additional threat in the form of an extraterrestrial being that likes to suck animals and people up into the clouds. The Haywood ranch is a family-run operation, with OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) doing most of the work with a glum diligence while his upbeat sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), handles the people-interfacing duties. Though the siblings are hardly on the best of terms, when it comes time to face down the alien presence, they unsurprisingly rediscover a familial bond…

Here’s the trailer: