Film Articles

Timidity is rarely an attractive quality in either people or film, and The Men Who Stare At Goats features plenty of both. The film’s protagonist, a hapless but likeable sort thanks to Ewan McGregor’s easy-going appeal, floats along like driftwood with the currents of the plot, never truly affecting anything and learning only the flimsiest of life lessons.

There is a scene in which the indeterminate monster Carol (voice of James Gandolfini) erupts into a rage and rips an arm off his bird-like friend Douglas (voice of Chris Cooper). There is no fountain of blood; sand trickles out of the stump. If that surprising, whitewashed act of violence — this is a movie based on a children’s book? — isn’t enough, one-armed Douglas spends the rest of his screentime with a twig pathetically jammed into the stump.

Stories centered around a) sports and b) underdogs inevitably expose themselves to a climactic dilemma: Do the plucky challengers win that crucial match against seemingly invincible champions or do they build character through a glorious second-place finish? Call it the Robert Frost conundrum; the end result involves taking the predictable road to avoid taking the other predictable road

There are three more days of events and screenings at the 4th Backlot Film Festival, based at the Vets Auditorium, at the intersection of Overland and Culver Boulevard.
Highlights of the next three days include a screening of Patrick Swayze's last film, “Jump,” which will be released in December.

In an elaborate form of preparation for next Thursday’s signal community meeting with County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Baldwin Hills area activist group is sponsoring a free screening on Friday evening of a film warning of the perils of oil drilling for neighbors.

“Split Estate,” a documentary billed by supporters as “a film everyone living near oil and gas production must see,” will be shown at 7 o’clock at Windsor Hills Aero Magnet School Auditorium, 5215 Overdale Dr., city of Los Angeles.

A unique Culver City happening, the fourth annual Backlot Film Festival, begins a 4-day run this afternoon at the Vets Auditorium.

This is the first year Backlot has been staged in the autumn.

Not coincidentally, the opening film, to be screened at 2 o’clock, 1940’s “Strike Up the Band,” stars Mickey Rooney, who will be honored with Backlot’s most prestigious award.

A delightful penchant for inappropriately spouting Shakespeare in the midst of a children’s play isn’t the only sign of life beneath Arcady’s worn façade. A sparkle in actor Aleksey Maklakov’s eye, a burst of passion, a gesture…we get the feeling there is a bon vivant coiled inside Arcady, suppressed by the inertia of countless years performing the same role in the same play in the same theatre. This inertia has the entire cast stuck in rut but it is Arcady who has the talent and passion to be more than a rabbit in a cutesy fairytale. The role of King Lear, for example, beckons.

9 could have been an eloquent eulogy for an extinct civilization from the perspective of non-human life, ironically cast as humanity’s unwitting legacy to an otherwise dead planet. As the titular, doll-like hero gains those first glimmers of consciousness and takes hesitant steps into a world of rubble and ashen skies, the gloom of a masterfully articulated, post-apocalyptic landscape takes a firm hold. How and why the world ends is, of course, one of the film’s key mysteries, alongside other concerns such as what the dolls (dubbed “stitchpunks” by Acker) are and how it is they can be alive. But though wildly stirring the senses with stunning imagery of potent, melancholy beauty – the kind that crowns director Shane Acker with the risky title of visionary – 9 blunts with a story that gradually subjects its premise to the slow death of déjà-vu.

Like the tonally similar Easy Virtue, My One And Only is a layered film that puts a comic veneer on some form of pathology. The difference is that where Easy Virtue’s wit is droll and mordant, My One And Only is more caustic and poignant, a shift that comes from focusing on the dysfunction of a broken family rather than Noel Coward’s barbed observations of class hypocrisy.

A bumper sticker summary might read “chick flick for guys,” but that would be a glib description for a film that inverts Hollywood’s usual cut-and-paste gender roles on-screen romances. This time around, it falls to the guy – played with a sparkling despair by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that almost makes us forget his part in the trashy G.I. Joe – to fulfill the thankless, tormented role of a lovesick romeo.