On June 8th, 2010, I was “in conversation” with Christopher Hitchens at the 92nd Street Y in New York in front of his customary sellout audience, to launch his memoir, Hitch-22. Christopher turned in a bravura performance that night, never sharper, never funnier, and afterwards at a small,…
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“The thesis of The Rapture is that God is a narcissist, giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives.”
- Steven Santos, “DEEP FOCUS: Michael Tolkin’s THE RAPTURE (1991)”, Press Play; 25 October 2011.
Under a clear-eyed view of Christian theology, God comes off as some sort of sadistic playwright, one who wrote Eraserhead when he could have given us Mary Poppins.
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| — | Jerry Coyne, “Michael Ruse: Adam and Eve didn’t exist, but theology is still in great shape,” WhyEvolutionIsTrue.com; 12 June 2011. |
For me to have fun, to be entertained by a movie, I also have to be engaged, interested, provoked, maybe even challenged. If there’s nothing to think about, nothing that even holds still long enough for me to get a good look at it, it’s not much fun for me. I’d rather focus my attention on something else. Like something I can focus my attention on.
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| — | Jim Emerson, “Into the Great Big Boring”, Scanners blog; 9 June 2011. |
Elfin Teen Killing Machine: HANNA (2011)
As spry and palely prettified as its title heroine, Hanna leaps back-and-forth between globe-trotting spy thriller and relatively delicate coming-of-age tale with showy, kinetic concentration. Cut off from the world and trained by her father Eric Bana as an implacable killer for reasons unknown, Hanna lives her father’s commands and gradually discovers secrets about herself and her mysterious life’s purpose. Ostentatious action sequences, from Hanna’s kaleidoscopically-shot escape from an underground facility to Bana’s long-take fisticuffs with marauding agents (a more effective action movie analogue to director Joe Wright’s show-offy, unbroken Dunkirk shot in Atonement), are narrowly counterbalanced with delicate character moments for naive but ruthless Hanna, let loose into the world with too much information but too little socialization.
As Hanna, Saoirse Ronan’s quirky, alien beauty, not unlike that of her CIA nemesis Cate Blanchett, masks a streak of relentless purpose only softened by her on-the-run detour into the life of a traveling bohemian family. This subplot, shot in warm hues and marked by the film’s only stabs at humor, humanizes Hanna even as her violent reflexes mar this brief respite of normalcy. Hipster mercenary Tom Hollander, Blanchett’s hired henchman, delivers a weird performance that, like Hanna’s foray into normal social interactions, works to broaden the film’s scope but rubs against its surrounding music-video aesthetics. Although never less than interesting, Hanna nearly collapses in the end, its weakly delivered third-act revelations hampering the climactic showdown, set in an abandoned amusement park to emphasize the film’s fairy tale aspects (see last image below). A diverting thrill-ride, the adrenaline-fueled bastard child of Leon and Salt, but with enough eccentricities at the edges to merit engagement.
“I’m pretty happy with who I am. I like myself and what I’m doing. I don’t need to be the world’s greatest director or the most famous - or the richest. I don’t need to make a whole lot of great films. I can do my job and I can do it pretty well. This is the realization I’ve come to, later in life. It’s called growing up.” - John Carpenter
And to think that I just posted a pan of his latest. :-(
I love you otherwise, John!
Psyched Out: THE WARD (2010)
Not the comeback I’d hoped for, and much too derivative of some recent notable psychological thrillers. Clean, effective cinematography is a given even for John Carpenter’s most impersonal projects; here good use is made of shadowed corridors and antiseptic psych ward cells. Unfortunately this precision doesn’t extend to the visually distinct but one-dimensional characters, an aesthetic choice which gels in the final twist but only works for the film’s wholly unoriginal themes. What could have been The Ward’s more interesting elements, like the female ensemble’s self-destructiveness under the watchful gaze of a 60s-era medical authority, are barely sketched in favor of routine jump scares and uninventive bloodshed. It’s disheartening that Carpenter’s taken this long to release a new feature, and the result is this rote and uninspiring.
“It’s good…”
How Thierry Guetta says Banksy described his trainwreck of a documentary Life Remote Control, in Exit through the Gift Shop (2010).
“I was faced with that terrible thing where somebody shows you their work and everything about it is shit, so you don’t really know where to start.”
What Banksy really thought.
Jean-Claude Van Damme is the
Buster Keaton of our time.
Buster Keaton of our time.
“
| — |
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Critical Voices: Style, Substance, and Scope—The Art of Film Writing” panel at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; 23 April 2011.
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