Tag: 2007
-
Michael Haneke’s Funny Games confronts audiences with the violence they paid for
Director Michael Haneke has made Funny Games twice, a decade apart. They are essentially the same movie: nearly shot-for-shot, with the same title, similar music and location, and at least one of the actors physically resembling one of the original cast. The few adjustments include the spoken language, updated telephone technology, and added Americanisms. So…
-
The Pod People Film Festival: The Invasion
Nicole Kidman must be one of the unluckiest stars in Hollywood, having recently starred in at least two big-budget catastrophes. Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives (2004) was sabotaged by cast members dropping out, extensive reshoots, and competing script revisions that left significant logical plot holes in the finished film. Next, Invasion is best described as…
-
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Writer and director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 luni, 3 s?pt?mâni ?i 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) is an unsensational drama on a very sensational topic. Like Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, it is shot in Dogme style with a handheld camera, long takes, and no score. Both films remorselessly lead…
-
Things We Lost in the Fire is kind of a drag
Susanne Bier’s Things We Lost in the Fire is a melodrama in the vein of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams in almost every way: the story of a nuclear family shattered by a random death, told as a nonlinear narrative, with conspicuously arty cinematography, and costarring Benicio Del Toro. Even a single-sentence description of the…
-
The 8 Best Movies I Saw in 2007
Followers of this blog (a statistic which I believe can be plotted on an arc approaching zero) may have noticed an accumulation of digital dust this past year. Indeed, I watched my own blog drop off the first page of Google results for my own name. Who’s feeling lucky? A new year, another birthday (good…