jürgen fauth’s muckworld

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
Dullsville and then some. Artfully shot, for sure, but ripping off Malick isn’t as easy as it looks. The voice-over narration, always describing what we already saw, doesn’t create openings but locks the movie down even more than the airless, repetitive scenes between paranoid outlaws. Sam Shepard disappears much too early, and soon thereafter, the drama completely stalls. After thirty minutes, I was begging for Casey Affleck to shoot Brad Pitt in the head already, but there were two more hours to go. Andrew Dominik, 2007. *

3:10 to Yuma
Now, this is how you do a western: engaging, exciting, and steeped in sepia tones. Russell Crowe plays a bandit who has to be brought to justice; Christian Bale is the one-legged stand-up guy to do it. Together with his performances in Rescue Dawn and I’m Not There, Bale is one of my favorite actors this year. James Mangold, 2007. ***

The Bucket List
The trailer for this movie is so hideous, we just had to check it out. Also, we might have been drunk. If Jack Nicholson throwing up in a hospital gown or jumping out of airplanes is your idea of fun, go right ahead. Sanctimonious Morgan Freeman is starting to get on my nerves. Rob Reiner, 2007. *

In Between Days
We had high hopes for this unassuming coming-of-age story about a Korean immigrant. I’m perfectly willing to stomach a slight story, mannered direction, or uncommunicative main characters — but if you heap them on top of each other, I’m probably already asleep. 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. So Yong Kim, 2007. *

The Brave One
Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard have what they call “good chemistry” in this surprisingly gripping tale of New York City revenge. Neil Jordan, 2007. ***

In the Valley of Elah
Worlds better than Crash, but that’s not saying much of anything. Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron try to solve the murder of his son, an AWOL soldier on leave from Iraq. In the process, they discover all sorts of truths about important issues. See Redacted instead. Paul Haggis, 2007. **

Once
Every bit as lovely the second time around. I finally discovered the title in the film, and I have a new favorite line: “Can I bring my mother?” Marcy’s review. John Carney, 2007. ****

No Country for Old Men
Wildly overpraised. Yes, I can see the expert filmmaking here, but all the sumptuous cinematography and vivid attention to detail is lavished on a story full of walking cliches and a lousy third act. On second viewing, the glaring problems with both plot and character — what Marcy called “lack of soul” — are impossible to ignore. Llewelyn’s too foolish to care for, the Coens avert their gaze at the crucial moment, and Bell’s defeatist retread of Marge Gunderson leaves us with a dire moral: “you can’t stop what’s coming.” Oh well then. No Country wastes a lot of hard-boiled effort on a tale that ends with an Old Testament shrug. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007. **

• Matt Zoller Seitz
• Glenn Kenny
• Jim Emerson
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Rotten Tomatoes: 95%

Plenty of DVD commentaries are happy to dispense self-aggrandizing anecdotes or reveal information that permanently damages the viewing experience (I’m looking at you, Peter Jackson.) Instead, Guillermo del Toro talks about storytelling concerns, structure, framing, staging, color choices, sound design, edits, references and symbolism — in other words, the where and why of creative decisions that make up Pan’s Labyrinth.

If you’re one of the people who sort of liked the movie but ultimately didn’t quite know what to make of its blend of fantasy and brutal historical reality, this track should clear up some of your questions. If you recognized it for the instant classic it is, you’ll gain a new appreciation for the care and depth of thought that went into it. Together with Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather track, this is one of the best director’s commentaries I’ve heard.

El Laberinto del fauno. Guillermo del Toro, 2006. *****

• Marcy’s review
• Pan’s Labyrinth on Muckworld
• Pan’s Labyrinth DVD on Amazon

After transforming the bucolic English countryside into a site of horror with the nasty revenge tale Dead Man’s Shoes, Shane Meadows turns to Maggie Thatcher’s England with a skinhead coming-of-age story. This is England starts out as well-acted and superbly designed mid-eighties time-capsule but degenerates to a formulaic conclusion that cheapens everything that went before.

This Is England opens next Friday. Read the rest of my review at About.com.

This Is England. Shane Meadows, 2006. ***

Watch the trailer:

The first feature film by the director of Spellbound puts a refreshing spin on the coming-of-age formula, subverting what we expect from a story about a stuttering high school kid (Reece Thompson) who, with a little prodding by an older girl (Anna Kendrick), decides to join the debate team and win the coveted New Jersey state championships. Watch About.com for Marcy’s review by the time the movie opens on August 10.

Rocket Science. Jeffrey Blitz, 2007. ****

The first surprise is that Colma: The Musical plays it straight. You might imagine a musical about teenagers in a suburb south of San Francisco in which the majority of the population is dead to be an ironic tongue-in-cheek affair, using bursting-into-song conventions to poke fun at metastasizing franchise culture — Mallrats with a groove. (”Shakey’s is now iHop!” the news announces during the opening number.) But Colma doesn’t deflate or abuse the conventions of the musical; it relies on them to tell three heartbreakingly honest tales about growing up.

Head over to About.com for the rest of my review.

Colma: The Musical. Richard Wong, 2006. ****

The trailer:

Even after more than a decade in the US, strange little pockets of culture shock remain. Americans can’t possibly believe I’ve never seen a single episode of Gilligan’s Island or Three’s Company. (I counter with Augsburger Puppenkiste and Asterix.) Charlotte’s Web, the children’s story by E.B. White, is another blind spot in my education–or it was, until this new film version came along, starring adorable Dakota Fanning, slick CGI, and voices by Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Oprah Winfrey, Kathy Bates, Thomas Haden Church, and Robert Redford.

As far as stories about swine go, the barnyard Bildungsroman about Wilbur the spring pig and his unlikely friendship with a spider never reaches the lofty heights of Babe II: Pig in the City. The Danny Elfman score is laid on much too thick, and the ending suffers from a few too many sentimental speeches. But Charlotte’s Web is sweet and fun, and there are some very clever lines. When was the last time you saw a movie that raises the narrative question of whether or not the pig is going to spit out the spider’s egg sack the rat brought over? The moral of the tale: “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”

Charlotte’s Web. Gary Winick, 2006. ***

Bonus: Euro Nostalgia
YouTube is dominated by the new CGI Urmel aus dem Eis, so instead, here’s a delightfully trashy techno remix of the Jim Knopf theme, “Eine Insel mit zwei Bergen.” No German my age can resist this stuff. Die Wilde 13 was always my favorite.

The first two acts of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation are fantastic: Naomi Watts plays a woman who marries stodgy bacteriologist Ed Norton out of desperation and cheats on him with Liev Schreiber as soon as they arrive at his home in Shanghai. To punish her and himself, Norton takes her into the interior, to a village ravaged by cholera. The way the two steer their wrecked relationship through the lush landscape stalked by death is terrific–it’s sort of a grown-up version of Battle Royale, in which the stakes of love are ratcheted up to 11: if you leave me, you’ll die a grisly death. Toby Jones (Truman in Infamous) provides the cynical but helpful foreigner, and there are nuns.

I was less fond of the third act, in which Chekhov’s Law is adhered to much too slavishly: if there’s cholera around, somebody’s gonna get it! Still, The Painted Veil is big classic Hollywood cinema, splendidly engaging, marvelously acted and shot, sumptuous and emotional. The real mystery is why this film, far better than The Departed and most of the other nominees, didn’t get any kind of attention at Oscar time. In decades past, this would have been exactly the kind of thing the Academy would’ve gone gaga over. As a sign of how much times as changed, the The Painted Veil wasn’t even technically released by a major studio but by their “indie” distributor Warner Independent. It was drowned out in December’s mad movie rush, and now the official site is hocking the DVD as “just in time for mother’s day!”

The Painted Veil. John Curran, 2006. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 75%

Proving once again the infinite mutability of the coming-of-age tale, The Wendell Baker Story, written by Luke and co-directed by Luke and Andrew Wilson, grafts a number of borderline absurd conceits onto a ramshackle story about a small-time con-man trying to make his way in the world. In the dappled sunlight of Austin, Texas, Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson) sells fake IDs to immigrants and fails to appreciate his gorgeous girlfriend Doreen (Eva Mendes)–until he gets busted and shipped off to Huntsville Prison, where he comes across a copy of Conrad Hilton’s autobiography and decides to go into the hotel business.

But the “hotel” Wendell is sent to by his parole board is a retirement home under the command of a sadistic head nurse played by brother Owen. The inmates include Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton, and Seymour Cassel as horny old men hiding a secret or two. With their help, Wendell has to thwart evil schemes and win back Doreen. Their adventures are thoroughly ridiculous and enjoyable, but like Doreen, we can see right through Wendell’s goofy charm. The Wendell Baker Story is silly but lovable, occasionally very funny, and no dumber than most movies at the multiplex. It’d be fascinating to see what the Wilsons might come up with if they really tried. Opens May 18.

The Wendell Baker Story. Andrew Wilson and Luke Wilson, 2005. ***

• The Wendell Baker Story at Rotten Tomatoes
• The trailer: