Director: Pablo Berger
Starring:
Rating: 4.5/5
Review: Maribel Verdú, Macarena García, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Sergio Dorado
Black and white, silent,
Snow White as a matador
What's there not to love?
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
In Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the fundamentalist of the title is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a young Pakistani man who moves to the U.S. to study business at Princeton. He eventually realizes the American dream—a Wall Street job, money, an attractive girlfriend (Kate Hudson)—but a variety of factors, among them America's prejudicial attitudes toward the Middle East post-9/11 and his feelings of responsibility to his family and home country, eventually drive him to possibly radical political views.It's a movie that might have worked had Nair made it five years ago. (Coincidentally, the novel upon which it is based came out in 2007.) We've had almost 12 years since 9/11 to absorb the fact that terrorism isn't as cut-and-dried as it appeared in the aftermath of that terrorist attack, so Nair beating us over the head with it here is less thought-provoking than annoying.
Lil Bub & Friendz is a movie by, about, and for people who love cat videos. That's it. It's that simple. Alongside snippets of Grumpy Cat, Henri the existentialist cat, and, of course, Lil Bub, the movie shows the owners of Internet famous felines talking about merchandise, cat video enthusiasts following Bub around at the Internet Cat Video Film Festival, and (no joke) a "meme manager." Yes, that's an actual job that someone has.Thursday, April 18, 2013
Audiences love an underdog story. But at times it seems like every variation of it has been told before. It's rare that a movie comes along that not only makes it feel effortless, but also new. The Rocket, directed by Kim Mordaunt is one of those movies.The movie takes place in Laos, where in the first scene a young woman, Mali (Alice Keohavong), gives birth to twins, one of whom is stillborn. In Mali's culture it is believed that one twin holds bad luck and one twin good, so the new mother is urged to kill her new child, as he could be the bad luck bearer of the two. Mali refuses, and her son Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) grows up to be a bright, energetic ten-year-old talented in mechanics and mischief. Unfortunately the prophecy that Ahlo would bring his family bad luck turns out to be true. After that bad luck manifests itself in several horrible ways, Ahlo decides to prove his worth to himself and his family by entering a rocket-building competition that, if he wins, would give them enough money to live on.
I don't want to spoil the ending for you, so let me just say that what happens is probably exactly what you think will happen. But there were times leading up to the climactic scene where I was sure the movie would go in a different direction. For all that The Rocket is a classic underdog story, it's not a light one, where nothing truly bad happens and the stakes are never really that high. So even though the ending is predictable, it never felt forced. The same is true of the characters. There's the supportive best friend, the crotchety old mother-in-law, the eccentric uncle. But they're all real, fleshed-out characters, played brilliantly by a cast of mostly non-professional actors.
The Rocket is a positive movie that avoids sentimentality and emotional manipulation. Above all else, it feels natural. As someone with a knee-jerk reaction against cinematic sappiness who also likes to watch movies that don't make me feel emotionally gutted, I for one appreciate that.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Thursday, April 4, 2013
It's not really about The Shining.
Granted, Room 237's interviewees all have a lot to say about The Shining. One thinks it's a metaphor for the genocide of the Native Americans, another for the Holocaust. A third thinks it's all tied up in how Kubrick faked the moon landing footage. (No, really.) It's insane: All these different theories springing from the same (dense, detailed, fascinating) 146 minutes of film.
The idea that anyone can "figure out" The Shining is preposterous. We'll never know all of what Kubrick intended to put into the film. Some of the interviewees acknowledge that: They note that they're reading things into the film that Kubrick didn't probably intend. It's film critique as a mental exercise.
And then you have the moon landing guy, who seemed absolutely sure that his interpretation was objectively true.
To me, Room 237 is a study of eccentrics, of people's need to take insanity and make order out of it. Specifically, the intersection of that type of person (and we're all that type of person to a certain extent) and film nerds. And what better lens is there for that than Kubrick, film history's number one eccentric?
One of the parts I liked best about Room 237 was seeing how people interpret the exact same aspect of The Shining in different ways. The Gold Room is hat tip to the Gold Rush. No, it's World War II-related! And both talking heads use as evidence the fact that Kubrick, or Kubrick's people, extensively researched Colorado's history and the Holocaust. Of course he did! He's Stanley Kubrick. He researched everything!
Room 237 did change my view of The Shining. I'm now leaning toward Kubrick being an absolute troll who worked all these crazy things into The Shining to A) establish mood—nothing troll-like there, and B) fuck with people who like to read really complicated things into films.
Don't read too much into this film. Don't think you're going to have a lightning bolt moment and discover the ~secret~ of The Shining. This movie isn't that complicated. But as an exploration of eccentricity and our personal (at times maybe too personal) connection to film, it's quite fun.
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