Konsum: Terrified, She Waited
March 5th, 2008
Two reviews of movies opening this week just went up on About.com: David Gordon Green’s drama Snow Angels and the Jason Statham heist flick The Bank Job. This afternoon, I’m seeing Michael Haneke’s U.S. remake of his own Funny Games, and press screenings for New Directors/New Films start tomorrow.
In the meantime, a few items of note:
- Fresh off of etree, listen to a track from last week’s MMW show.
- David Hudson reports that Kriemhild was stabbed!
- Major Cyrillus’s Mystic Trip to Mars finds its tragic end, just in time for Commander Koenig’s birthday. Herzlichen Glückwunsch — just don’t celebrate with this guy! (NSFW)
- Dan Sallitt on Michael Clayton
- Lars von Trier’s music video for the Kingdom theme song.
- HiddenTrack’s Cover Wars feature Not Fade Away.
- In case you managed to miss these mashups: Saul Bass does Star Wars and The Red Crayola meets Thunderbirds.
- K. Silem Mohammad on Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades.
- Joseph Campbell’s Ten Commandments for Reading Myth.
- Faust image swiped from Tom Sutpen.
Snow Angels. David Gordon Green, 2008. **
The Bank Job. Roger Donaldson, 2008. **
Sweeney Todd — Or Not
December 5th, 2007
Because of a bloody embargo, I can’t yet share my thoughts on Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Sondheim musical, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Instead, here are clips from twelve musicals I love. Enjoy.
What good is sitting alone in your room?
“Cheek to Cheek”
“Wig in a Box.” I once saw John Cameron Mitchell perform this with the Polyphonic Spree, and it was a perfect fit.
Lars gets his Björk on — in DV!
“Well Did You Evah?” with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Some people apparently prefer The Philadelphia Story, but I don’t.
“Let the Sunshine In/The Flesh Failures”
I wish there was a longer clip of “Crash the Party” online. Anybody?
I like the island Manhattan.
The video of “Girls & Boys” from Prince’s woefully underrated second film. Also: Mountains. Wrecka Stow!
Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication. Also: Gethsemane.
“Falling Slowly”
The first time I ever teared up over a YouTube clip.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Tim Burton, 2007. N/R
The Boss of It All
May 16th, 2007
There’s a host of reasons why I make my modest living on the Internet and at the movies, but here’s one of the better ones: offices give me the creeps, and not just since the slapdash zoning violation filled with generator fumes and world-class drunks where I failed to catch a whiff of irrational exuberance. My aversion to soul-deadening cubes goes so far that I wasn’t able to stomach either version of The Office past the first few minutes.
But when Lars Trier makes a movie, I go. The Boss of It All is his first comedy–and his first Danish film–since The Idiots. Jens Albinus (also of The Idiots) plays an actor hired to impersonate the mysteriously absent CEO of a company about to be sold to Icelandic investors. The fish-out-of-water setup results in three kinds of humor: actor jokes, office jokes, and Icelandic jokes.
More on About.com when The Boss of It All opens next week.
Direktøren for det hele. Lars von Trier, 2006. ****
Syndromes and a Century
March 20th, 2007
The films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupy a fertile space between narrative and art object, where simple interactions accumulate and gain weight in a web of meaning that is held together as much by space and mood as it is by character and story. Like Tropical Malady, his new film consists of two parts, both involving a love story between doctors. The press notes explain that what can just barely called the plot is loosely based on the memories of Weerasethakul’s parents.
Both halves of the film are set in hospitals, one in the past and the other in the present, and Syndromes and a Century is probably the strangest hospital drama since Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom: Buddhist monks come to tell their nightmares and finagle pills for their entire temple, dentists sing cowboy songs, and boozing chakra healers hide their liqour in prosthetic legs. One doctor tells a lengthy tale about wild orchids, another supposes that DDT stands for “Destroy Dirty Things.” Presents are exchanged, reincarnation is discussed, hearts are — perhaps — broken.
Among recent films, the surrealist pull of Syndromes and a Century doesn’t resemble anything as much as David Lynch’s Inland Empire, bathed in sunlight and freed from violent threats. Both films have a fragmented, time-bending structure in which themes and motifs return and form strange connections. Both directors are fond of dreamlike sequences in which the camera prowls hallways to a brooding score, and both culminate in bizarre, catchy musical numbers. But here the similarities end. While Lynch dregs shocking epiphanies from the gunk of the subconscious, Weerasethakul’s mysteries lie right on the surface, in the obvious, seemingly trivial moments that are riddle and answer at once. Opens in April.
Sang sattawat. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006. ****
- Rotten Tomatoes
- At the 2006 New York Film Festival
- Official Site
- More Inland Empire, Links
- After the jump, the trailer
