I saw OBLIVION today and it was quite the visual spectacle. Director Joseph Kosinski (TRON LEGACY) has a most assured hand in directing action and movement, and his impeccable compositions with cinematographer Claudio Miranda are of the utmost polish. Tom Cruise is once again proficient in his action heavy performance, he has complete command over his physical being. As a large scale science fiction film I found it more fulfilling than Prometheus (sorry, Ridley) and far more engaging in its fashion. Recommended for seeing on a very big screen with a beefy audio system. Go see it!
James Fazzaro
A JMF Filmworks Compendium and Showcase
Category Archives: Film Review
Spring Breakers
SPRING BREAKERS. Holy shit, I loved this film. Harmony Korine, who first broke onto the scene as the writer of the notorious KIDS, has gone on to make several independent and singular films, such as GUMMO, JULIEN DONKEY BOY, MR. LONELY and TRASH HUMPERS, of which I’ve seen the first three and recommend them all for adventurous viewers. SPRING BREAKERS, his first ostensibly “mainstream” film on account of having James Franco and several former Disney/teen idols starring, is a truly kaleidoscopic and impressionistic trip. Beautiful, dangerous, seductive and sleazy, it depicts four young girls who trek down to Florida on their spring break looking for adventure and an escape from their humdrum lives. Over the course of their partying they are arrested, and local rapper/drug dealer Alien (James Franco, who is completely fantastic) bails them out. He enlists three of them in his crime sprees, and things spiral out of control.
This film is the dark side of the American Dream, filled with repeated mantras of wish fulfillment and better lives while showing how easily the protagonists are ready to fall to make their fantasies come true. All the actresses (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) bravely bare all and discard their former Disney/pop personas in their exploration of darker themes. I can understand the parental backlash given their daughters would see this bad-impression film, but they miss the point of why these girls do what they do, what drives them to lose themselves so completely. As stated before, James Franco hits a bunch of home runs here, he’s obviously having the time of his life essaying this grody gold teeth wearing gun toting shit slinging pusherman, a total trip. I cannot more highly recommend this film, see it sober or stoned (believe me, the visuals are tripping balls), it’s the best thing I’ve seen in theaters this year.
GiJoe: Retaliation
GIJOE: RETALIATION was loud and bombastic but sadly not my cup of tea, despite a nicely executed cliffside swordfight, some interesting effects (London, why you get so messed up?) and one supremely silly scene involving all the places one can store guns in a suburban house. Good for the kids, I suppose, if they enjoy the massive collateral damage and bloodlessness that the cartoon from my childhood embodied.
4:44 Last Day on Earth
So a couple of nights ago I saw a Bluray double-bill. (Part 1)
First up, Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH, an end-of-the-world meditation focusing on Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh as two lovers in New York City awaiting the planet’s final demise. They spend that time making art, Skype-ing relatives, vaguely watching TV apocalypse analysis, screwing, pontificating, and basically winding down. A few years ago I’d likely have chortled a bit watching this, but this film has some resonance with me as I wonder where I’ll be heading in this strange world of ours. It is handled well, and Mr. Dafoe has some pretty intense moments where his anger and helplessness threaten to boil over. Not a large or a great film, but on its small intimate scale it works. The end itself is more left to our imagination, KNOWING or MELANCHOLIA this isn’t. Which is sort of a good thing.
Natural Born Killers
Bluray double-bill (Part 2)
I haven’t seen Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS in a very long time. I saw it twice in the theatres and couldn’t get enough of it, being the bloodthirsty little demon I was in my 20s. I last watched it on VHS or early DVD in the early 2000s, so it was high time to revisit this film.
The rapidfire editing has since been surpassed speedwise, but it retains a rather poetic and lyrical feeling to it that more modern films often lack. Robert Richardson’s cinematography still holds up very well. This was shot on 35mm, 16mm, Super8, and video, and at the time it was a very large postproduction undertaking to get it assembled. I do love the myriad textures and fluctuations of color and black and white, it certainly captures the unfettered minds of our two protagonists, Mickey and Mallory Knox (a wonderful Woody Harrelson and an impish Juliette Lewis). The writing, revised from an early Quentin Tarantino script by Stone and two others, mostly holds up despite some overdone humor notes and simplistic views on media/violence/etc.. The filmmaking and acting are what keeps this fresh and engaging.
I didn’t get the same rush as I had back when it was released, a sign of my own changing tastes and mellowing/melancholia. It is certainly a fantastic document of the 1990s, and I don’t see something like this being made in Hollywood today (unless you count Tony Scott’s DOMINO, a 2002 film which I revisited recently and quite favorably). The rock and roll energy and brazen experimentation mixed with a crazy sick loving and longing, a blood drenched vibrant twisted heart, that passion is tougher to find.
Get with it, Hollywood, we need more crazy twisted shit. Stuff your Hobbits and Die Hards.
No
Directed by Pablo Larrain, NO is an excellent study of advertising and its effects in politics, specifically in the Chilean plebiscite of 1988 when General Pinochet allows a general election to see if anyone will challenge his rule. Rene (Gabriel Garcia Bernal), a fresh young advertising producer, is tasked to mastermind the NO television campaign that will be used against Pinochet’s YES party line. Despite certain trepidations he accepts, and creates a poppy Coca Cola style vision filled with irreverence and humor that his party, having witnessed and endured countless atrocities of justice under Pinochet, have great reservations over. However, Rene knows that the only way to defeat Pinochet is to go big and brash, sweeping the pain and suffering under the carpet in exchange for a more utopian view that will actually change opinion. Lots of challenging ideas here, and tons of actual commercial footage is shown, which as an amateur student of advertising I found to be a real treat. Several of the actual participants of this history are brought in to re-enact their roles, and I felt quite good after watching this, even though in the end Rene goes back to selling more mindless product. Such is advertising.
Lore
LORE, directed by Cate Shortland, documents the journey girl Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) and her siblings must make across Germany after the end of WWII. Their Nazi sympathizer parents are captured early on, and the once magical landscape is now frought with danger and coldness for our young protagonist and her charges. Her concepts of country, family and friendship are tested and ultimately shattered. The film renders this vision in an impressionistic manner, shown in snippets and fragments, raw beauty and brutality captured in Super 16mm. Perhaps not as grim as I have described, it is nonetheless a harrowing experience.
Side Effects
So I went to see SIDE EFFECTS today. Steven Soderbergh directs what he says will be his last feature film release, and it’s a real doozy! Pharmaceutical gamesmanship meets medical thriller with some late game tawdriness thrown in for good measure. I should write a proper synopsis, but I’ll just say that Jude Law gives a great harried performance as a psychiatrist who gets caught up in a heavy game of therapeutic medicine, murder and deception. Rooney Mara (of GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remake fame), Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum all contribute excellent and unfussy performances, and by the end of the film I was giggling with delight at the twists and turns in Scott Z Burns’ script. Recommended!
Silver Linings Playbook
SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK has been out for awhile, and I finally got a chance to see it. I felt it started off as a semitough look at mental illness, then turned into a crazy-guy fantasy where everything around was surreal and absurd. Played straight by all, and played well, one can still see this as a well made Hollywood/Weinstein Brothers Oscar nabber. Call me cynical, but nevertheless I was entertained and director David O Russell did a good job with the material as it was. I preferred THE FIGHTER, THREE KINGS and going way back SPANKING THE MONKEY by him, but this film with its good box office and Oscar buzz should allow him to return to more daring fare. Bradley Cooper was pretty good, and Jennifer Lawrence can add another feather to her cap for her work here.
Die Hard 5: Live Free or Die Hard
So I attempted and failed to sit through the entirety of A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD. I got about 35-40 minutes in, felt my brain screaming in agony and listened to it. Got my refund. Did my laundry with said refund. A far more useful application of that money.
Do you reaaaallllyyy want a review? Ok. It’s an abject piece of shit. Nonstop wall to wall car crashes and scraping of metal on metal or concrete. Writing that would shame a third grader, unless they are already being bred and taught that stupid in school. Bruce Willis looking tired, bored and waiting to collect a big paycheck, which I’m sure is where a significant portion of the budget went that didn’t go towards car crashes and explosions. Director John Moore should be kicked in the balls, as he gave no shape, sense, wit or context to any of his videogame shots. I won’t even ask how much good money was pumped into this lifeless zombie fodder.
Believe me, it hurt how bad it was. It was a retarded playground for Russian vehicles to get smashed to pieces. Absolutely no regard for any human element whatsoever, though that has diminished since the 2nd film. No wit, no glee. All perfunctory and manufactured, thought up by a computer that had ingested too many action films and THOUGHT it knew how to make one on its own. Soulless garbage. I don’t know what else to say. Shit. Utter shit. I don’t walk out of films EVER unless there are techincal issues, and this looked and sounded flawless. The sheer insipidity was stunning.
Here’s an alternate plot: John McClane is sent in to rescue original director John McTiernan from prison, who is currently serving a year for perjury in a Rollerball wiretap case (that was some fun drama!), and then together they storm 20th Century Fox with machine guns and wipe out the clueless executives in charge. I cannot say this would make a better film, but a lot of executives would be dead, until more were manufactured at the Hollywood Executive Factory.
Go see LOOPER instead. I’m sure it’s out now on Bluray and streaming, and Mr. Willis gave a good performance there, in a film that had a real sense of time, place, and character. And this was a time travel film to boot.
Die, DIE HARD franchise. Rot in hell.
James Fazzaro 