Film Articles

The man behind “Politically Incorrect” on Comedy Central and, currently, “Real Time” on HBO, launches a bold, sorely-needed broadside against religion. The result is typical Bill Maher; unapologetic, blunt, and (mostly) funny as hell. But for a film that, with an irreverent game of gotcha, points out the ridiculous in various religions’ beliefs, Maher’s cannonade isn’t so much aimed at creating cognitive dissonance in believers but to shake atheists from their timidity in the face of nonsense.

The setting is extraordinary. An underground city a flicker away from total darkness, kept alight through thousands of streetlamps and suspended lights powered by a hydroelectric generator. Director Gil Kenan’s vision could be described, to coin a term, as grimepunk – steampunk’s proletarian sibling. Post-apocalyptic, decrepit, stylish in its lack of style, a focus on utility rather than prettiness, a patchwork aesthetic of grimy, rusty machinery barely maintained by a peasantry who know what the machines are for but not how they work. The city that gives the film, and the book on which it’s based, its name is like a low-tech, rudimentary analogue to Alex Proyas’ “Dark City.” Kenan gives Ember a claustrophobic, stagnant atmosphere, which is appropriate given that, as the prologue tells us, the confines of the city are all that generations of people have known throughout 200 years of isolation from an undescribed global disaster.

Stories about infidelity come with a certain amount of risk. It’s easy to get caught up in the melodrama of a person cheating on another, to dwell on the sexual and/or emotional betrayal in a way that renders the characters as caricatures drawn in black and white. Hard is resisting the impulse to moralize. Harder is presenting a nuanced psychology. Harder still is examining infidelity as it occurs in multiple sets of interconnected characters.
Yet, writer/director Kate Gorman pulls it off. “Five Moments of Infidelity” is the “Crash” of frail human relationships, although where “Crash” gets it wrong and ends up a blunt, brutish thing that leaves one sullied and bruised, “Five Moments” is perceptive, humane, and fully capable of handling the synchronicity of its ensemble cast. It is remarkably organic, a quality manifested as much in script’s meticulous construction as in the liquid, almost dance-like camerawork that elevates “Five Moments” above similarly-budgeted indie films – although flat, characterless cinematography does the film no favours.

The first question that came to mind when watching the trailer for “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” was: why Nick and Norah? What possible relationship could the film – based on the book by Rachel Cohn – have to the classic “The Thin Man” book and six popular movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy? After watching the movie, I still don’t know. Maybe it’s a reference to the pajama collection. Or maybe the book’s authors just liked the alliteration and the reference to those classic films is purely a pop-cultural by-product.

Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris didn’t share nearly enough screen time in David Cronenberg’s comic book treatise “A History of Violence.” But along comes “Appaloosa,” a classical Western rooted in a mature formulation of the buddy movie, to show just how comfortably these two pros fit together. As two friends and partners in the peacekeeping-for-hire business, Mortensen and Harris (who co-wrote the screenplay and directed) bring a wordless chemistry into the surgically-precise dialogue.

The railroad bridge in New York called Hell’s Gate got its name, we’re told, on account of lurking above the shipwrecking intersection of two waterways. It’s an ideal place to dispose of inconvenient corpses – divers never find anything dumped there – and a good title for the familiar morality play of a down-on-his-luck felon forced to make difficult choices in a situation that spirals far outside his control.

I suppose one could read into “Burn After Reading” a commentary on the quality and nature of intelligence gathering in the U.S. “war on terror.” Or, to wax philosophical, one could see in the film a cinematic, almost existential, musing on how humanity is adrift in a universe without any real knowledge or – eek! – truth. But my feeling is that the attempt to extract any kind of metaphysical significance ultimately strains the film to give more than it actually can, and not just because it’s a featherweight in comparison to the Coen Brothers’ previous film, the oppressive and heavy “No Country for Old Men.” There’s simply no real ambiguity, in either the characters or the slightly convoluted plot, on which to hang allegorical interpretations, and the film’s end drives the whole point home bluntly, if it isn’t already obvious beforehand.

Actor, radio announcer and film historian, Fred Crane who died on Friday, Aug. 22, was the
oldest surviving adult male cast member of the 1939 David O. Selznick classic film “Gone
With The Wind.”

In terms of contemporary identity politics, feminism gets sold out, tarted up and sugar-coated for mass consumption. Entrenched in the assembly line plot of black swan “losers” confronting big meanies to save their sorority home – and naturally becoming transformed in the process – “The House Bunny” offers a watered-down girl power message that boils down to praising smarts, but only when packaged in supermodel hotness. This is the conformity of fashion magazines and pop culture: it’s okay to be yourself…provided that you look good doing it and do it for boys too stupid and shallow, but ruggedly handsome, to appreciate women of substance.

As far as I know, Roger Ebert hasn’t beaten me to the punch, so let me introduce the modestly named “Frederik’s Law”: The ability to write up a lengthy film critique/review is inversely proportional to the sum of that film’s entertainment value and technical quality.