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Reviews: June 2009 Archives
Life During Wartime
By Melissa Anderson on 06/24/2009
On stage with the cast of her latest movie at the Toronto Film Festival last September, Kathryn Bigelow leaned in closely to the microphone to dramatically proffer this greeting to the audience right before the lights went down: "Welcome...to 'The Hurt Locker.'" The invitation suggested that we were about to enter both a specific physical place (Baghdad in summer 2004) and psychic space (traumatized warrior masculinity). Once in, there would be no over-explanation, little backstory, no maudlin psychologizing; Bigelow's film, written by Mark Boal, who spent several weeks embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq, is an assiduous... MORE »
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Knowing It All
By Melissa Anderson on 06/17/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWoody Allen has returned to New York, but does New York want him back? For the excruciating "Whatever Works," his first Gotham-set movie since 2004's "Melinda and Melinda," Allen dusted off a script written around the time of "Annie Hall," intended as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, who died a few months after that film was released in 1977. The replacement mouthpiece for Allen's borscht-y misanthropy is Larry David, who, playing Boris Yellnikoff, frequently breaks the fourth wall, to hector, lecture and obsess. "This is not a feel-good movie," Boris, addressing the camera, pontificates at the outset. Rather, it is... MORE »
The Timing of "Pelham 1 2 3"
By Melissa Anderson on 06/10/2009
Filed under: ReviewsI first saw Joseph Sargent's original "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" at Film Forum less than a month before September 11th. The theater's later revival of the classic 1974 heist movie unspooled two weeks after the blackout of 2003. The coincidental timing of both engagements reinforced what makes Sargent's film (with a script by Peter Stone, based on John Godey's 1973 novel) one of the best movies about New York City: a group of disparate Gotham cranks, weirdoes and hotheads come together in the face of disaster. The original "Pelham" may have been made during the era when... MORE »
Four Women
By Melissa Anderson on 06/03/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWith apologies to Nina Simone, I'd like to dedicate this week in film to four women: Yolande, Mariah, Maya and Joan. In her last two lead performances, Brussels-born Yolande Moreau has shown exceptional nuance and grace in roles that could have easily toppled lesser actresses. "When the Sea Rises" (2004), which Moreau also co-wrote and co-directed, begins with a potentially disastrous premise -- a performance artist traveling with her bizarre one-woman show "A Dirty Business of Sex and Crime" begins a tentative relationship with a man who makes giant papier-mâché puppets -- and becomes one of the sweetest, most original... MORE »
