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Reviews: August 2009 Archives
"Taking Woodstock" Offers Nothing New
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/26/2009
Apparently determined to tackle every cinematic genre known to man, Ang Lee has thus far given us his take on the popular-lit adaptation ("Eat Drink Man Woman"), the classic-lit adaptation ("Sense and Sensibility"), the Civil War western ("Ride With the Devil"), the wuxia action flick ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), the Marvel comic-book summer tentpole ("Hulk"), the WWII espionage thriller ("Lust, Caution") and, of course, the gay cowboy weepie ("Brokeback Mountain"). It was inevitable, I suppose, that he would eventually get around to the historical docudrama -- or, as I've recently dubbed that generally useless collection of bullet-point factoids, the Wiki-movie.... MORE »
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A Head Without a Heart
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/19/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWhen each successive film from a new, audacious talent seems richer and more rewarding than the one before, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether the director is steadily improving or it's simply taking you some time and effort to learn how to watch his/her movies. Argentina's Lucrecia Martel arrived on the international film scene eight years ago with her unique style already fully formed; as much as I admired "La Ciénaga"'s exactingly off-kilter compositions and oppressively incestuous tone, though, I couldn't find much of interest lurking beneath that surface mastery. It took two viewings for "The Holy Girl"... MORE »
Putting a Fine Point On It
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/12/2009
Filed under: ReviewsTwelve years ago, Paul Verhoeven, ever the cynical prankster, turned Robert A. Heinlein's jingoistic '50s sci-fi novel "Starship Troopers" into a plug-ugly satire of homicidal xenophobia, making his whitebread human "heroes" even more grotesque than the giant insectoid creatures they regularly slaughtered. Trouble was, mainstream America didn't really get the sick joke, even when Neil Patrick Harris turned up in full quasi-Nazi regalia to conduct sadistic experiments on the captured bugs. Perhaps mindful of that film's commercial failure, South African director Neill Blomkamp dispenses with subtlety altogether in his similarly subversive debut feature, "District 9," crafting a political allegory so... MORE »
Minor Crises
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/05/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWhether he likes it or not -- and we're talking about a director whose characters feel so much ambivalence that you can practically see it radiating off of them in waves -- Andrew Bujalski has become the patron saint of the burgeoning grassroots indie movement misleadingly known as mumblecore. (The people in these films may not know for sure what they want, but they articulate their rococo indecision loud and clear.) To be honest, it's a movement I've mostly resisted thus far, if only because movies are among my few avenues of escape from dithering white postgrads. But while Bujalski's... MORE »
