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John Sturges honors Kurosawa honoring Ford in The Magnificent Seven
John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven is Hollywood’s answer to Akira Kurosawa’s hugely popular Seven Samurai. It suffers in comparison, especially if, like this blogger, one watches them in quick succession. The remake is quaint, chaste, and dated in ways the fairly frank original isn’t. To put it another way, Seven Samurai is a period piece…
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Seven Samurai protect others to save themselves in Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is awesome and perfect, and this most recent viewing has affirmed its place among my all-time favorites. It’s a big movie, by which I mean it makes the best use of its generous running time with just the right amount of everything: romance, comedy, drama, suspense, and action. Nearly half the…
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Into the never-ending night of Alex Proyas’ Dark City
I recall Dark City being one of my favorite films of 1998, and I would have rated it quite highly had I been keeping score at the time. It is a bold science fiction film noir most obviously indebted to Blade Runner, but also to favorites Brazil (especially the sequences of buildings sprouting up out…
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Low live at Mercury Lounge, New York – September 22, 2008
I hope I’m totally wrong, but I picked up on a few hints that this latest tour by Low might mark the end of the band. My half-baked evidence: Alan Sparhawk seems to be having success with new side project, the Retribution Gospel Choir. This tour is not in support of a new album release.…
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Ghost Town is The Sixth Sense as a romantic comedy
David Koepp’s Ghost Town pulls at the heartstrings without being too nauseating. With a tagline that implies The Sixth Sense as a romantic comedy, its tone and subject matter are roughly comparable to As Good As It Gets: the thawing of a misanthrope with some good qualities. It mostly earns it, but the last 2-3…
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The Swell Season live at Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, New York – September 17, 2008
Glen Hansard (of The Frames and The Commitments) and Markéta Irglová recorded an album together called The Swell Season, and now tour under the name. They fell in love while filming the excellent Once, and are now a couple. Interestingly, they got their Oscar-winning song “Falling Slowly” out of the way right away, perhaps to…
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At the Worst of Times, the Worst of Us: Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is, simply, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Repeat viewings never fail to overwhelm me with some of the strongest gut-level emotional reactions I’ve ever had to a movie. I can only talk about it in superlatives: it’s a near-religious experience. One of the movies that makes me…
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Le fugitif: Guillaume Canet’s Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One)
Guillaume Canet’s Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) enjoyed a surprisingly wide US theatrical release for a French film without huge English-speaking stars (except for Englishwoman Kristin Scott Thomas, perfectly fluent in French). Roger Ebert rightly compared the tightly crafted thriller with The Fugitive, placing it squarely in Hitchcockian wrong-man-accused territory. Pediatrician Alex Beck…
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Love Will Tear Us Apart: Anton Corbijn’s Control
Control is one of the very few rare musical biopics to ever appeal to me, even though I am only passingly familiar with the music of Joy Division, and even less so of the history of its tragically doomed lead singer Ian Curtis. To testify to the film’s power, I immediately purchased The Best of…
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A Memoir in Pen & Ink: Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis
Named after the ancient Persian city, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is a memoir of her life in Europe and Iran after the Iranian revolution. This animated feature joins the growing ranks of comic book adaptations that prove that comics are not only about superheroes that dress up in animal-themed costumes to battle crime. Hopefully…
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Wong Kar-wai’s American road movie My Blueberry Nights
Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language film My Blueberry Nights is mostly set in bars and diners across America. His characters all indulge in the four great American pastimes: eating, drinking, gambling, and driving. Nobody films beautiful women, or should I say, nobody films women beautifully, like Wong Kar-wai. In Blueberry Nights, he has no less than…
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Get busy living or get busy dying: Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption
It’s hard to believe now, but The Shawshank Redemption was a relative flop at the box office, and overlooked in all seven of its Academy Award nominations (losing the 1994 Best Picture to Forrest Gump). But true to its own themes, it found redemption late in life, on television and home video. It regularly tops…