FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) **½/**** DVD - Image B+ Sound B- BD - Image A Sound B Extras B+ starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram screenplay by Victor Miller directed by Sean S. Cunningham
by Alex Jackson
"Do you think you can get through the summer?"
"I don't think I can get through the week."
One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th and we can see they're displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don't have any past and they don't have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they're really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange--life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they're just talking about work and boredom.
by Angelo Muredda "If you want to give them an identity,
children should be traumatized," illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn't Far Enough,
speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the
macabre. Brad Bernstein's feature debut has the benefit of an articulate
subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in
Strasbourg--"the sphincter of France," as he calls it--to his early
American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of "bondage
and so on," he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the
civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the
way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly
score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.
**/**** directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
by Bill ChambersThe Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for
Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids--though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to
think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert
Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child
playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's
desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an
aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a
last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos).
The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who
finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her
mandatory psych stay at home--specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic
City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives
with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt
Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old
room.
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria directed by Panos Cosmatos
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by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it's best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece--a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the "unremembered '80s."
by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about
criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him
to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he
writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his
columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into
camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee
Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of
Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's
writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less
bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed
shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or
character dynamics.
by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to
American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne
delivered his James L. Brooks movie inThe
Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in
the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with
2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron
Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.
Après mai **½/**** written and directed by Olivier Assayas
by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas's new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, "APRES
MAI" ("After May"), with the mousy English translation,
"Something in the Air." The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman's yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-'60s American idealism falling into '70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas's personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn't significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.
***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Tim Burton
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by Walter ChawRaging Bull for starfuckers, Ed Wood is in a lot of ways the quintessential dissection of the allure of Hollywood, allying it more closely, perhaps, with a different Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. (It's The King of Comedy recast with the stalked celebrity a willing participant in the stalker's obsessive lunacy.) Ed Wood diverges from most biopics in director Tim Burton's tactic of skewing the film towards the same sort of kitsch-surreal of Wood's own films, managing in so doing the trick that David Cronenberg performed with Naked Lunch: a hagiography that's as much critical analysis as hommage. It engages in a conversation about how Wood's films are seen at the same time that it endeavours to tell the highlights of Wood's life. The result is a picture that bridges the gap between cult and camp classic; the melancholic and the melodramatic; and the difference between a director of vision and a director with a vision that sucks.
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