Category: 3 Stars
-
Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho’s Tokyo!
Tokyo! is a portmanteau film comprised of three shorts set in the eponymous city, all by directors not themselves from Japan: Michel Gondry and Leos Carax from France, and Bong Joon-ho from South Korea. Gondry’s “Interior Design” is based on the comic book Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell, with the action…
-
Semper Gumby: HBO’s Generation Kill
The HBO miniseries Generation Kill comes from David Simon and Ed Burns, the masterminds behind the superlative series The Wire. Simon himself is a former journalist, the state of the industry thereof being a primary preoccupation of the fifth season of the The Wire. So it makes sense that he would be drawn to a…
-
An Act of Journalism: Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir could easily be filed away under any or all of the following genres: documentary, autobiography, memoir, journalism, and nonfiction. If there’s one thing all of these have in common, it’s that none make for natural cartoons. The exception that proves the rule is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which began life as…
-
A muggle tries to make sense of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince
As Pottermania began some years ago, I recall being amazed at how similar it all seemed to Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic, which predates J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel by about five years. In it, boy wizard Tim Hunter, equipped with broken glasses and an owl, is prophesied to be an immensely powerful wizard.…
-
MGMT live in Brooklyn, July 1, 2009
The electronic/disco/pop/rock group MGMT has made a huge splash, earning spots on tours with no less than Paul McCartney and Beck. The wildly catchy “Time to Pretend,” “Electric Feel,” and “Kids” (the latter featuring a truly deranged music video) are not out of keeping with the rest of their repertoire in terms of style and…
-
Explosions in the Sky live in Central Park, June 30, 2009
Explosions in the Sky is an instrumental post-rock quartet from Texas. Their characteristic formula of a chiming guitar power trio on top of pulsating drums is a bit more palatable than their extremely loud, menacing Scottish peers Mogwai (read our review of their April show in New York). Personally, I hear a kind of homogeneity…
-
Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still
Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the few essential science fiction movies that has lasted, overcoming dated special effects, acting styles, and the end of the Cold War — the provider of subtext for many a horror story. In the company of Forbidden Planet (Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space), The…
-
Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s Milk
Any friend of this blog will know that I almost universally hate biopics. As I’ve complained in my reviews of Control, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and even Walk Hard, I believe that the feature film is fundamentally ill suited for biography. One seemingly minor lesson from college that wound up sticking with me…
-
Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes) is a Brain-Spraining Chronological Conundrum
A grotesquely costumed, knife-wielding creep on the Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) theatrical poster promises an exploitative slasher pic along the lines of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To some degree, considering the degradations made upon a breathtakingly beautiful girl alone in the woods, it is. But Nacho Vigalondo’s Spanish science fiction puzzler is a friendlier sibling to Shane…
-
Kate Winslett evokes emotional illiteracy in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader
Director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot), producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, and screenwriter David Hare’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader examines evolving notions of German postwar guilt and culpability. Unfolding across three distinct time periods (1958, 1966, and 1995), The Reader hinges on a significant reveal in its middle that recasts…