23 May
I’m going to be writing about myself in this review. Not the whole time, of course. I’ll mostly be sticking to the topic of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight. But one of the things I’ve learned from that film and its two predecessors (Before Sunrise and Before Sunset) is that, sometimes, unabashed self-examination can triggers insights into the world at large.
23 May
In this episode, Mat and Thrasher discuss Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful.
23 May
Get into a discussion for even a short period time about a film like Furious 6 (damn right that’s the onscreen title), and someone will inevitably say, “why don’t they just make an 80, 90-minute version with just the action scenes? That’s what people go for, right?” But that would never work in a traditional set-up. The audience needs people to root for, personalities to drive them. And yet, Furious 6 comes as close as any movie I’ve seen to achieving the sort of goal that drives all great action films – expressing character through action. People in this film communicate their desires, their priorities, their inner selves behind the wheel of a car. The stilted dialogue may be the result of acting-as-posing and unimaginative screenwriting, but it reveals, even accidentally, the greater truth that these people are not fully themselves unless they’re engaging physically. Only then, they release their inhibitions, expressing what they so clearly cannot put into words. There, they are alive.
22 May
In this episode, Rudie and West discuss the first film in the Transformers franchise.
22 May
Given the overwhelmingly bourgeois, liberal sensibilities of the world cinema crowd here in the U.S., it’s rare that we get to see a film set in a devout, cloistered, tradition-based religious milieu that doesn’t stand in judgment of it. Despite the fact that Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void concerns an eighteen-year-old woman being maneuvered into an arranged marriage, there’s no moral tsk-tsking. It’s simply a human drama, albeit one that takes place in a unique surrounding. Unfortunately, that uniqueness is not enough to keep it from often being very dull.
21 May
The following movies have been released on DVD and Blu Ray:
BEAUTIFUL CREATURES
PARKER
20 May
A follow-up to 2002’s Yossi & Jagger, Eytan Fox’s Yossi continues the story of the title character, now a 34-year-old cardiologist living in Tel Aviv. For those who haven’t seen Yossi & Jagger, it is definitely a film worth checking out — a simple, yet beautiful romance between two Israeli active-duty soldiers. I’m not sure if the film made many waves when it came out, but it’s pretty remarkable to think of a film that so maturely depicts a homosexual relationship in such a masculine environment (and three years before Brokeback Mountain, at that). We don’t often see sequels to small, foreign romances, and Yossi is a pretty good one.
20 May
In this episode, Tyler and David discuss the upcoming Summer movies that they are looking forward to, and some that they are dreading.
20 May
Kenji Mizoguchi’s heartbreaking Sansho the Bailiff feels almost like it was conceived by Charles Dickens. Our main character’s circumstances change so rapidly that we feel as though he can’t keep up. As the film progresses, we discover that we are right. While we appear to be seeing a man, we are actually watching a scared young boy trying desperately to understand what has happened and what he should do. And when he does what is right, we see the hopelessness in his eyes as he realizes that it seems to all have been for nothing.
