julioecolon Reviews

Michael Clayton (2007)

Bang for Your Buck

[10/10 · 24 January 2008]

There is a quiet energy about the film, Michael Clayton, that serves to heighten our growing sense of the evil, predatory practices of UNorth, a New York law firm specializing in litigation, where the eponymous lead character is employed as a niche attorney who cleans up legal snafus. For the past six years, UNorth has been battling a no-holds barred class action lawsuit by plaintiffs who suffered contamination or death from a pesticide manufactured at a company whose president is also a UNorth shareholder. Just as the UNorth team are on the point of prevailing in their counter-suit, in which they claim that no lab evidence contraindicated use of the pesticide at the time it was marketed, their lead attorney discovers a company document, long suppressed: it is a detailed laboratory analysis of the pesticide, conducted before the pesticide's dangers became public knowledge. Its authors concluded that the chemical substance would likely cause tissue damage if ingested even in minute quantities. Worse yet, the document bears the signature of its company's president. The problems escalate from there: the lead attorney's mental state begins to unravel just as UNorth is on the point of clinching an important merger that will make it a world leader in legal affairs. Michael Clayton is called in to staunch the flow. By so doing, he places himself at the center of a dangerous and deadly game. Tony Gilroy's direction is deftly handled, and it's not hard to imagine his conceiving beforehand of the tone and quality of this film as something imbued with a beautiful, diaphanous light throughout. But, it's especially the quiet calmness he must have urged on his actors that is the most notable and successful and which adds a special quality to this film that sets it apart from the typical thriller by staging even the most murderous plotting in the context of the uneventful quotidian, with the morning light filtering down. George Clooney is especially good in the guise of the divorced, burned-out ex-cop turned burned- out lawyer, who is now a financially over-extended gambling addict, and he delivers his lines with a remarkably quiet, steely reserve. Tilda Swinton delivers a carefully nuanced role as a lawyer of modest background, unremarkable educational pedigree, and average looks, who has now risen to great heights despite these impediments and thanks to her unbridled, immoral ambitions, but who is nonetheless never quite able to shake herself of the belief that getting your dowdy business clothes ready the night before, rehearsing your lines, and disposing permanently of human obstacles are three sure-fire ways to succeed. One has a sense of the many backs, including those of her lower-class family, that she stepped on to get to the position she has now attained and, if nothing else, her role should serve as a warning to all the young bucks out there now contemplating careers as attorneys and salivating at the financial gains they stand to make. I am less happy with Tom Wilkinson's performance as the lead attorney on the brink of insanity. His delivery is just a little too over the top and thus irritating. Had he toned down the King Lear-like ravings just a bit, his delivery would have aligned itself more productively with the quiet deliveries of the other actors and made of this film the perfect thriller. Although I'm no George Clooney fan, this is a film worth watching.

Juno (2007)

Half-baked bun in the oven

[6/10 · 21 January 2008]

There are many things that are redeemable about this film, but there are some flies in the ointment, as well. Let's start with what is not so good: The screenplay, which is hugely uneven, and has Juno and Leah spouting off one round after another of conceited but hugely clever, sixteen-year-old assessments of the world, in ways that no sixteen-year-old I have ever been around is able to do. Most sixteen-year-olds are anxious to sound adult, but what usually comes out of their mouths are carefully rehearsed, oft-repeated catch phrases that make the utterer sound and seem irretrievably stupid. Some of the quirkiness (and therefore attractiveness) in Juno has to do with her individuality, but she doesn't sound too terribly original when she insists that Iggy Pop made the best music that ever was (this sounds like something a teenager desperate to be different might have read and latched onto in Rolling Stone magazine), nor does she strike one as all that cool when she is shown with a cheeseburger phone that would certainly have seemed more fitting in the hands of a five-year-old. Worse yet, she decides to seduce the school dweeb, Bleeker, a boy with very little going for him except for his genetically inherited propensity for study and quietude. Unfortunately, the resolution in the film concerning Juno's relationship with Bleeker is far from satisfactory and left me wondering if I had just been to Disney. Juno's parents aren't nearly as upset as one would expect when she reveals the rather tawdry consequences of her seduction to them; but it's the heroic gesture made by Juno, to find good, loving parents for her soon-to-be-born child, that is the most muddled in this film. We are shown the characteristic suburban homes in the neighborhoods of the nouveau-riche (where the adoptive parents reside), all cookie-cutter in design and therefore lacking in originality; and I do believe that we are meant at first to dislike the adoptive mother, who comes off looking like a control freak who has stifled the last remnants of love out of a childless marriage. But then the screenwriter makes a U-turn and suddenly this woman is the victim, and the baby hers to keep, despite the break-up of the loveless marriage and the departure of the ex-husband for way cooler digs, a loft in the city. The screenwriter was at pains to show the class differences between Juno's parents and the adoptive parents, but he fumbles the ball by putting all the foul language in Juno's step-mother's mouth and by showing her out to be a hoyden most likely to take umbrage if you cross your eyes at her step-daughter: the tirade she engages in against the technician at the hospital, for example, is pointless. If it's meant to show the white working-class animus toward Hispanics, it doesn't quite work. And, it sounds terribly contrived, at the end, when Juno admits, as she's lying in her hospital bed with the dweeb, that the baby had never been her own from the start and had always really belonged to the adoptive mother. Good things about this movie: the performances of Alison Janney and J.K. Simmons, who were given precious little to work with, but who manage, just the same, to give the film some backbone; Jason Bateman's scenes with Juno are marvelously delivered. Ellen Page, on the other hand, needed to tone down the staccato rhythm of her interjections and give her character breathing room.

Murderous Intent (2006)

Nice Surprise

[9/10 · 24 December 2007]

I passed this film up on several trips to Blockbuster because I disliked the title and didn't care much for the photo on the DVD box. But, Blockbuster showcases so much crap, and I had basically exhausted all of my viewing choices when I finally settled on this DVD. To my great surprise, this is a fascinating movie, with just enough twists and turns to keep the viewer interested. Toni Colette is wonderful and believable in the role of a forensic psychologist tasked with interviewing a murder suspect. Her job: to weave together the fragments of his harrowing narrative in order to ascertain his culpability, which the impetuous arresting officer (he has testosterone seeping out of his pores) is eager to have confirmed. The film is brilliant because it pitches together a smart forensic psychologist who eventually has to pull her dusty textbooks off the shelf to read up on Gestalt, with a young man of remarkable, quiet brilliance and the cunning of a fox at the chicken coop. Well worth viewing.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Promises Kept

[9/10 · 24 December 2007]

This is a superbly-wrought drama that has just the right mix of tension, emotion, and violence to make it both credible and interesting. Viggo Mortensen is the show stealer, of course, and rightly so, since he invests his character with a cool, quiet reserve that allows his true sentiments to bleed through only at carefully chosen moments. His role is complex and nuanced and beautifully executed; it's a tour de force performance that hearkens back to memorable acting achievements of cinematic greats like Cagney and Bogart. The use of Christian themes (the story takes place during the Christmas season, and there is a newborn in swaddling clothes) works well to strengthen the tenuous message of hope amidst the blood-drenched world of the Russian Mafia in contemporary London. My only complaint is that we don't learn nearly enough about the character played by Naomi Watts (who is quite good, by the way). It would have evened out the story to learn more about her Russian heritage, to understand why she is still single, and to have more details on her connection to Russian culture. After all, as a character, she is supposed to feel drawn to and repulsed by a culture that is genetically her own, so Cronenberg might have thrown in one or two flashbacks of childhood memories to demonstrate the extent to which her mission is vital to her identity as a Londoner of Russian extraction. A fine film worth renting, nonetheless.

Inland Empire (2006)

Flat Tire Going 70 Ka Thump Ka Thump Ka Thump

[3/10 · 23 December 2007]

This film has some interesting moments, especially at the beginning, but it is entirely too long and disjointed. Lynch likes to make the point again and again that our sense of narrative is socially constructed, and he thus takes great delight in subverting our expectations by breaking the narrative line repeatedly. Okay. Enough already. We get the point. On the other hand, we might argue that a film with a tightly woven narrative line is never a bad thing. What is bad are the tiresome shots of darkened hallways, the constant entering into darkened rooms while the crappy electronic score kicks in (I guess we're supposed to feel a troubling eeriness in the air) in the background, and subtexted stage acts (in this case humans with fake rabbit heads) that don't enrich the story line, even though they are meant to thematize the breakdown in marital relations by showing how the language of married couples ceases to be communicative (gee, didn't T. S. Eliot already do this?). David Lynch, it's time for you to reinvent yourself. Stop dishing out cinematic crap that looks like a remake of your last film. This is a film for die-hard Lynch fans only. To call it enriching and fresh is laughable. If it were tomorrow, then I probably wouldn't have seen this film today. Right? Sheesh.

When Nietzsche Wept (2007)

I Wept, Too, in Misery

[1/10 · 23 December 2007]

I had to stop watching this film (a pseudo-intellectual product for pretentious film viewers) twenty minutes into it because it was mediocre and dull enough to inspire yawns, not to mention that I was soon near tears over the $3.99 I had wasted at Blockbuster. Joanna Pacula's acting and her awfully rendered Slavic accent are sufficiently terrible to set one to gritting one's teeth. I knew that two hours of her would be two hours too many. Both Breuer and Nietzsche are played by unremarkable actors of strikingly few talents. While we're on the topic of talent, Breuer's supercilious assistant appears to have been pulled out of a local acting troupe. She clearly has not learned her craft. In fact, she's really quite awful. All the public scenes looked staged, with the extras walking mechanically about in their Sunday best. Turning this film off was far more satisfying than turning it on. Don't rent this terrible movie. You will be sorry you spent your money.

The Bridesmaid (2004)

Dull Film

[2/10 · 4 November 2007]

I have not read Ruth Rendell's novel, so I cannot judge this film as an adaption of a fictional work. On the other hand, I think the film fails primarily because Rendell's story doesn't work well in a French setting. If I'm reading the film correctly, I think that Rendell wanted to get at class distinctions as a central topos of the novel, and this theme would play out superbly in an English setting, where class differences are part and parcel of the social fabric. In Chabrol's film, such distinctions are so understated as to be lackluster, if not plain dull, a thematic failure that is only made the worse by characters who are lifeless and lacking in the telling character traits and hard-scrabble wisdom one expects of certain class types. Everyone in Chabrol's film is bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois, and therefore just plain boring. The acting is not so great and I felt that the casting decisions were flawed. Finally, Senta is a ridiculously deranged young woman (wouldn't you, too, hear the stylus skipping across the LP if someone said they loved you and that you were the person for whom they had been waiting forever, after one afternoon of sex?), so it's difficult to imagine anyone taking her very seriously. Let's not forget the absurdity of Senta's mother and the mother's lover, played by untrained dancers (it's very obvious) who spend their waking hours practicing the tango in awkward and clumsy moves. Why didn't Chabrol do something else with them other than film the pair practicing steps they can never hope to master? I would not recommend this film.

All the King's Men (2006)

They Could Put Humpty Together Again!

[9/10 · 30 January 2007]

I was prepared to hate this film, since I am not a Sean Penn fan. He has a disagreeable, unattractive face and I was not looking forward to watching his mug for two hours. I have to admit though that, with the exception of James Horner's annoying score, which hearkens back to the days of big films like Doctor Zhivago, this film is of the first order. Much credit is of course due to Pawel Edelman's excellence behind the camera. He has accomplished a commendable feat in capturing visually, not only the feeling of an era, but that very feeling in a down-trodden, dirty-politicking Louisiana of yore. There are some carefully-crafted and memorable cinematographic moments, such as the shot of Tiny with the ferris-wheel as backdrop, that are artistic in the truest sense of the word. Steven Zallian's direction is tightly and expertly woven, and his screenplay must have been a delight for the actor's to read for its sheer literary excellence. Marit Allen gets huge points for costumes, and whoever did hair and makeup should be commended as well. The actors in this film have risen to the challenge of besting Robert Rosen's 1949 adaption of Rober Penn Warren's novel. I was especially impressed by Kate Winslet's subdued portrayal of the southern aristocrat who falls under the spell of the shady Governor, and Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins both give especially convincing performances of southern aristocrats caught in the pincer-grip of unshakable moral dilemmas.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

Slack Dullia

[2/10 · 26 December 2006]

Ellroy's novel (although not a great one) is much better than this adaptation, which misses much of the author's quirky obsessions with the homo-erotic world of uniformed bruisers and the fetid landscape they both inhabit and resist. In Ellroy, we have an unmitigated tension between the bravura of condensed, tight, idiosyncratic language and its uncannily photographic, incisively precise ability to capture the world of violent men on the edge of an unsettling California nightmare: the tense jaw, the flexed muscle, the bulged crotch, the billy club swinging in a sledge-hammer arch, all of this set against the seamy Hollywood landscape of easy women in cheap motel rooms, free-flowing booze, hijacked rolls of C-notes and amphetamine pills, pools of broken bones and blood, and causes-célèbres crimes committed on both sides of the law. Brian De Palma's film falls far short of the mark, however. Of course, one can't help thinking of L.A. Confidential, and with good reason, since L.A. Confidential, in a seemingly effortless way, pays homage to Ellroy's dark obsessions, and it accomplishes this feat quite successfully by casting actors with the skill to move between the dark and the light. Whoever made the final casting decisions for Black Dahlia needed to think more about the darker inner-core of human nature, however. Josh Hartnett, for example, does not work as Bucky Bleichert. His face is far too contemporary and he's just too pretty (and thus boring) for the role. Scarlet Johnansson doesn't have the acting skill needed to bring Kay Lake off well, and she's far too dolled-up throughout to make her more than a cream puff. Aaron Eckhart comes closest to embodying a palpable version of a character in Lee Blanchard, but we miss the rapport he is supposed to have with Bucky. In fact, none of the actors seem to be in synch with each other and this is most painfully obvious in the chemistry that fails to develop between Bucky Bleichert and Madeleine Sprague (Linscott in the film), the Elizabeth Short look-a-like played by Hillary Swank, who looks nothing at all like the Elizabeth Short in the black and white screen tests that Bucky pours over. Josh Friedman did a hack job on the script, which I found to be especially incoherent and difficult to follow (even though I have just read the novel.) All and all, not a film worth renting, but not a bad one to watch on a rainy afternoon when it's being shown for free on television.

Ambrose Bierce: Civil War Stories (2006 TV Movie)

Fouling Up Owl Creek

[5/10 · 26 November 2006]

As a narrative technique, framing a story, or a series of stories, within a larger story has its merits. But not so in this case. We don't need, after all, to meet Ambrose Bierce (who was far more handsome than Campbell Scott, by the way) or William Randolph Hearst, or a woman writer of dubious talents whom no one reads anymore, as a prelude to the filmic adaptations of Bierce's stories. But that is where this mediocre film begins and ends: on a rather cheap looking set (think Gunsmoke) designed as the parlor of a western hotel where the three meet and where Bierce reads three of his stories. The adaptations are not so good as I might have liked. The acting was only passable in most cases. The first story, about shell-shock, drags on interminably, the second has occasional good moments, and the third, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," almost manages to get things right. The quality is thus incremental but the attention dulls along the way. All of the stories are hampered by actors of limited talent who appear to have been culled from local theater companies, by rather dull cinematography, and especially by an exceedingly unskilled makeup and hair artist.

Hard Candy (2005)

Little Red Riding Hood Corners the Wolf

[8/10 · 26 November 2006]

I imagine much credit in this film is due to Jean-Clement Soret, the digital colorist, and to Jo Willems, the director of photography, for creating a rich palette of ochers, umbers, and tuscan reds that make this film a feast for the eyes. Ellen Page delivers a virtuoso performance as the avenging teenager. Her delivery is impressive both in its psychological depth and its disarming seamlessness. She is really quite brilliant. Not all casting decisions are so fortunate, however. Patrick Wilson is a bad choice for the male lead, for example. He has the smarmy, bespectacled look that fits the pedophile, but he doesn't have the rest of the package. There is never a moment, to cite the most egregious failure in his interpretation, when one sees the evil brooding beneath, and I imagine that another actor of greater talents might have been able to bring this dimension forth. Susan Oh is good as the mother too busy with her life to care for her kids, but her appearance at a critical moment in the film is not handled deftly, it seems. Any other mother of such sophistication and insight would have called the police immediately to report: Houston, we have a problem. The sound editors for the film get a D minus for making a mess of Patrick Wilson's heavy breathing scenes. Finally, the title of the film is awful. We need something that captures more the surface innocence and the underlying motivations of the teenager. Candy is too sexually-laden a term to work. Red Hood, Red Sweats, Red Fleece (something along those lines) would have been better.

Absolute Zero (2006 TV Movie)

Absolute Zero--It's All in the Title

[1/10 · 26 November 2006]

I like disaster films. It's comforting and entertaining to watch the world suffer imaginary cataclysmic events from the safety of one's couch. On the screen, everything goes kapow. Yet, the bowl of parmesan popcorn is within easy reach of my greedy paw and a cold beer froths in a mug. I sat through this film bored and annoyed, however. This is the kind of movie that begs the question: why make bad movies? Why go through the expense and the trouble when, given the effort, the results are so unaccountably awful? What is it exactly that propels unscrupulous producers, untalented directors, and third-rate actors to collaborate on cinematic ventures that never should have seen the light of day? Who makes the decisions to bring such aberrations to life and who stands the most to gain from them? Adam Sliwinski and Michael D. Jacobs, director and producer respectively, and the many actors of limited craft who participated in this film, all of you should be embarrassed to have this dreck floating about.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

A Royal Flush (of Embarrassments)

[6/10 · 20 October 2006]

There is much that is commendable in this film. For starters, I should mention Kirsten Dunst, who delivers an inspired performance in the role of the newly betrothed Dauphine and eventual Queen of France. The costumes, the scenes at Versailles, the attention paid to the strict protocol observed at every significant interval in the lives of the royals, all of these things help buoy this film above sheer mediocrity. The very best moment of the film occurs when the Dauphine, in a political move, deigns to speak to Mme. du Barry, the Louis XV's upstart, simpering harlot. It is a beautifully delivered, capital moment for Miss Dunst. But there are major problems with this film, as well. I found the American accents jarring and risible, for example. While fake French or Austrian accents might not have been the best solution, they certainly would have had the advantage of preventing actors who play characters of so weighty a history from sounding like they've just been shopping at the mall. I thought the soundtrack, a hodge-podge of mediocre pop music that no one will be listening to for very long, an ill-conceived idea that speaks more to Miss Coppola's (perhaps imperious) determination to do things her way than to the making of choices that best befit a period piece. Finally, the second half of the film is largely devoted to Marie Antoinette's decline into hedonism. We are made witness to a frolicking slapdash of parties and endless champagne and pastoral make-believe in muslin and gauze, to which we become mere spectators and during which we lose our connection to the Queen. Viewers interested in learning more about Marie Antoinette's sartorial excesses should read Caroline Weber's "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution."

Elizabeth I (2005)

Tour de force

[9/10 · 15 October 2006]

Helen Mirren is god. She is at her best when in a big role such as this one, which she can embody and flesh out with her remarkable intelligence and skill. The true test of good art is that it allows us to change our perspective as we immerse ourselves in it. This masterful production has certainly passed that test. The sets were not as interesting as one might have expected. One need only compare them to those of the mini-series Rome to see that there are sets that are inspired and there are those that are humdrum. The costumes were astoundingly beautiful. Kudos to HBO for making this stupendous mini-series about Elizabeth I.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

Altman, but not at his best

[6/10 · 14 October 2006]

Garrison Keillor, what's not to like? For years he has delighted radio listeners with his home-spun, corn pone, Minnesotan humor. Unfortunately, the magic of the radio show translates poorly to film, and I would venture to guess that the fault lies squarely with Keillor's achingly bad screenplay, which has, among other irritants, the normally accomplished Virginia Madsden on the stage of the Prairie Home Companion live show as the strange, buffoon-like angel, Asphodel. Worse yet, Altman decided to cast big names for this film when the point should have been to showcase the incredibly talented musicians who have customarily appeared on Keillor's radio show and have made of it the great preserver of a folksy, corny American musical culture of yore. As a radio listener of PHC, it has never occurred to me to wonder what might be happening backstage as the show is broadcast. As a disappointed viewer of the film, I can tell you that not much is happening, at least not much that is worth foregrounding.

Octane (2003)

Vampire Duds

[2/10 · 3 September 2006]

Although I saw this film on television and sat through it in its entirety, I feel this is a vampire story of limited worth. If you like vampire movies and decide to see the film, be forewarned that it has many problems that will keep your interest wavering. First, there is the mediocre acting delivered by the mother and daughter protagonists, who never rise above clichés. The two are dysfunctional in a tawdry, uninspired way (No, you can't go to that rock concert. Why not????? Because I'm your mother and I said so!!! I hate you!!) that left me hoping their SUV would careen off a cliff in a dramatic Thelma and Louise finale, and after I was only 10 minutes into the film. Yet, inexplicably, they are given far too much screen time to allow for the development of scenes that might otherwise have proved diverting or gripping. Second, the screenplay lacks verve or ingenuity. It doesn't help matters that the screenwriter was sufficiently enamored of his script to have characters repeating lines as if they were memorable and profound truths. Far more problematic is the lack of cohesion and the absence of any thematic development in his script. He fails to develop an interesting and compelling rapport between mother and daughter (as mentioned above), a terrible blunder that weakened the story. Additionally, there are enormous holes in this story that will have discerning viewers feeling impatient and cheated. We are never given enough information to understand how the vampires work nor what their motivations might have been in choosing our boring little Nat as their next victim. Nor do we understand how it is that the head vampire, from all appearances the kind of high-school degenerate who might turn tricks for drugs, knows that the amphetamine-popping mother attempted a self-induced abortion years ago to rid herself of her surprisingly tenacious, now fully-grown and leggy, but limp, daughter. Third, there is the problem of films set in America but filmed elsewhere that lack a truly American film (think Eyes Wide Shut.) Everything about this film looks as if it were filmed on a desolate tundra plain. The truck-stops look decidedly foreign, the stretch of roadways don't look like American freeways and, worse yet, the extras don't look American. Finally, there is an irritating film score that had me feeling nauseated.

Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)

A Bruising Cruise

[1/10 · 22 August 2006]

Tom Berenger must have been desperate for work when he signed on for this embarrassment of a film. It has the feel and tone of the kind of made for television movie you might watch out of sheer boredom and exhaustion on a Sunday afternoon when you're too tired either to locate the remote or to fire a bullet at the television screen. The acting is wooden and unnatural, and the music, which is supposed to be awesome, sounds curiously like a bad rip-off of Springsteen, even though the flashbacks in the film are set, for the most part, in 1963, when NOTHING sounded like Springsteen. Worse yet, the sets do not look at all like anything reminiscent of "1963." This is very clearly a cheap production, doomed from the start by an awful script, terrible acting, and a devil may care attitude about capturing the feeling of an era. Here's the premise of the film: years after Eddie, the tempestuous and dumb (can he spell Rimbaud?) lead singer of the Cruisers, has disappeared (he died in a car accident, but his body was never recovered), a reporter decides to write a story about the band. She has a theory that Eddie is still alive and believes that the band may be on the verge of a renaissance, if the missing final recordings, named A Season in Hell, can be located. She forces her presence into the lives of the remaining band members, who are, by the way, dull as dirt, to piece together the band's history. This reporter is so creepy and annoying that she'd probably have a restraining order slapped on her, nowadays. Ironically enough, A Season in Hell describes the viewing experience quite accurately.

The Iris Effect (2005)

Beautiful scenes of St. Petersburg, but nothing more.

[1/10 · 22 August 2006]

Have you ever seen a movie set in a foreign country and felt the impulse to book a flight there immediately? The Iris Effect had this effect on me. The images in this film, of Saint Petersburg, are spell-binding, to say the least. I felt immediately drawn to the mysterious, shadowy, plaintive tones that Irek Hartowicz's masterful photography captures of SP. Unfortunately, the film is otherwise an embarrassment. The script is uninspired, the acting, especially Anne Archer's performance, a sheer anguish, and the denouement absurd. I feel certain that Lebedev was thinking of Don't Look Now when he made this film, and he manages to create a similar atmosphere in The Iris Effect by thwarting at every turn the mother's attempts to uncover the truth regarding the fate of her son. But you can't make a film about a supposedly accomplished artist who has been missing for ten years and whose disappearance, following a fight with his mother, is linked to his quest for self-discovery and artistic glory, if the art he made is of the quality you might find, at best, at Pier One. The director also fails to develop the obvious iris/ iris metaphor--for some silly reason, I kept waiting for the director to do something with this, even though I knew, a minute into the film, that we were already scraping cinematic rock- bottom and that I could probably swim the length of the Gulf of Finland before anything momentous happened.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)

Wilting at the stem.

[1/10 · 19 August 2006]

I rented this with some reservations and now realize that I should have listened to my gut. There's something fundamentally creepy in the premise of this film: guy-friends so concerned about another guy-friend's virginity that they engage in an all out crusade to get his cherry popped. One hackneyed joke follows another, and there are countless moronic high jinks along the way as the characters trample on positive constructions of women's sexuality, exploit the male adolescent fear of being called gay, and dismiss the possible virtues of celibacy and the single life. This leaves us, ultimately, with very few genuinely funny moments. Good comedy doesn't require such sophomoric antics.

Americano (2005)

Not worth the effort

[1/10 · 5 August 2006]

This is an awful failure of a film, one of the worst I have seen in a while. The acting is absolutely abysmal, the story-line a bore, the characters self-absorbed zeros I would never want to meet anywhere, not even at a garage sale. Don't waste your time or money. Let's face it: films about ugly, ego-maniacal young Americans in Pamplona are a wasted effort. The story, told eons ago, doesn't bear repeating. Hemingway did it already, and he did it in a masterful way that the script writer for this film can never hope to match. This film might have been passably interesting had the story been about a critical juncture, occurring somewhere other than a stereotypically red and white bedecked Pamplona, in which the protagonist has to face real dilemmas far more profound than the tawdry "finding one's self" bromide tendered here. A DVD worth labeling and tossing as GARBAGE.

Evil (2003)

A Very Decent Film

[9/10 · 4 August 2006]

I would recommend Ondskan to anyone who is interested in coming-of-age films. American cinema has always been expert at such portrayals, and it is good to see so accomplished an example out of Sweden. I liked especially the fact that the director never wavers as he unmasks the unwholesome face of an angst-ridden, violence-prone, socially intransigent Swedish society of the not so long ago . Set in the fifties, mostly at a posh boarding school for the upper-class, where the sixth-form boys, led by an effete Swedish aristocrat, go about enforcing their arbitrary and violent rules while the faculty turn a blind eye, this film cleverly avoids the hooks, punches and triumphs of the underdog come to grips with the jack-booted status quo via his fists alone by allowing him to prevail to justice through the implementation of Swedish law. There are enough fisticuffs along the way, however, to satisfy the blood-thirsty among you. Well-acted, good script, beautiful cinematographic moments.