Israeli director Eran Kolirin's film, The Band's Visit, about a wayward group of Egyptian musicians (the Alexandrian Police Band to be exact) astray in a small Israeli backwater town with only the (hopefully) good samaritan locals to look to for asssitance, just smacks of Aki Kaurismäki. It may be on the outskirts of 2000 miles away from Kaurismäki's native Finland, yet the characters in this Arab-Israeli comedy of manners could easily be deposited smack dab in the middle of any Kaurismäki film you choose and no one would be any the wiser - perhaps not even Kaurismäki.

Deadpanned and dry-witted, Kolirin's film, though having many of the same themes and qualities as a Kaurismäki work (i.e. humans getting along with other humans in the most sardonic of worlds), reeks also of over-sentimentality and that my friends is both a crime and a crying shame, especially with the potential for such a solemn hilarity right in its grasp. Sort of Kaurismäki without the fresh acidity. Kaurismäki sans the quaint austerity. It is Kaurismäki without the requisite pull back from the precipice, allowing a streak of unneeded (and unwanted?) sentimentalism to sneak its way into an otherwise subtle take on strangers in a strange land.

Pushing the envelope on sweetness, Kolirin's film, deadpanny as it may be, sinks (almost) too many times in the mire of syrup to be considered anything but a valiant effort - but, thanks to a cast of wonderfully tableaux'd faces (including the ever vibrant Ronit Elkabetz as the sexy light-in-a-storm saviour of the waylayed band) a somewhat enjoyable, if not a bit saturated valiant effort it ends up being. [03/30/08]

Chock full of enough heist genre glee to choke a raging meth head as well as enough heist genre cliché to...well, to choke that same said raging meth head again, Roger Donaldson's ode to seventies British cinema is nothing short of an homage to the slap-dash editing style of...well, of a raging meth head. Or for that matter, your typically testosteronic slick-witted (or is that dim-witted?) manic Brit heist film junky. Same thing.

Addled with enough twists and turns, and twists again to make one's head spin (meth-furled or not) with thoughts of impossible scenarios and exaltations of what-the-fuck's, and full of enough gaps in logic to make that head spin turn into a full-on explosion, Donaldson's paeon to past possibilities (the film is based on an actual event but no one really knows what happened so the director is free to fictionalize his ass off) is indeed the stereotypical roller coaster ride - albeit in a strangely hyper laid back manner (not near the frenzied absurdities and headache inducing flash cuts of many a recent Brit crime flick thankfully) - and being so, is quite superficially ridable for an alotted amount of cinema time. Guess what though? Time's up!

Not to knock the cast, for they do the most admirable of jobs considering the trite cliché of the film's mise-en-scene (and to watch Saffron Burrows ooze about the screen as if some sort of subtly sirenistic snake weaving a spell over all who are (un)lucky enough to set eyes upon her may very well be worth the ten dollars one may shell out for the privilege) but when all is said and done, stylistically anted up or not, based on facts or not, the exact thing you expect to happen happens - and happens again and again and again. Again, time's up. [03/14/08]

A paeon to the 1980's when VHS was king and bad taste (or at least bad judgement) was its hoary mistress - it's Mme. du Barry - Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, the story of two inept buddies (one decidely more inept than the other) who accidentally erase an entire store of video tapes and are forced (for some inane reason) to "recreate" the lost films using themselves as actors, is the young auteur's first true misstep as a filmmaker. Then again, perhaps misstep is too serious a word to use for a film that, if not very good, is certainly not all that bad.

Definitely nowhere near the "magical" (for lack of a better and less clichéd word) beauty of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep (or even his oft-maligned but durable debut feature Human Nature) Gondry gives us an almost amateur film for his latest - but then amateur actually works with what the film is about. A love story to the video cassette (Danny Glover's video store owner is most likely the last person on Earth yet to succumb to DVD) Be Kind is amateur filmmaking at its very best (sort of). Creating what they call "sweded" bootlegs (most only about twenty minutes long and obviously not the original product at all) our two inept buddies, Mos Def and Jack Black (guess which one plays the decidedly more inept one?) recreate everything from 2001 to Rush Hour 2 to King Kong to the most hilarious rendition of Ghostbusters ever "sweded". In doing so, we see the creation of films inside a film while at the same time yet another film is being made by the characters only they don't know it yet (I'll let you find that out on your own).

Perhaps not as slickly produced as his prior films, one can accept Gondry's amateurish Be Kind Rewind as a statement on media and manipulation (a subject he tackled somewhat in The Science of Sleep) played out in the same "sweded" knock-off way we see in the films inside the film inside the film. Of course that could just be the auteurist in me all full of thoughts of how even the worst Howard Hawks film is better than the best John Huston film. Or it could be a latent nostalgia for the cheapness of 80's cinema and a youth full of VHS memories (in 1984 at 17 I bought my first VCR). Of course then again, this could all be nothing but mistaken bullshit spewing from my mouth and Gondry just screwed up, but in the end, it is what we see that matters, and for good or bad (even purposefully so) what we get in the end is something else. Now the question remains, was that a compliment or was that something else? [02/24/08]

Review Coming Soon

Review Coming Soon

Perhaps if Marshall's last film, the sleeper-creeper The Descent, did not overwhelmingly (and quite surprisingly too I might add) kick the living shit out of me - vis-à-vis purely entertain this oft-maligning overly critical mind of mine with good old-fashioned whoop-ass filmmaking - I would never have ventured out to see Doomsday, and that my friends, would have been just fine with me.

Blundering forth, Marshall's latest, sort of a mish-mash of 28 Weeks Later, Mad Max and Escape from New York, entertains very little and very shallowly at that. The story of a deadly (and super contagious) virus that spreads across Scotland with blazing speed and nauseatingly physical reprucussions, and a British government that blocks off their northern tier from the rest of the planet, Doomsday quickly (even more rapidly than that fucking virus of theirs) falls into stereotypical nonsense and I just couldn't stop laughing. Of course this not being a comedy, cannot bode well for the rest of the film. It doesn't.

Heroe'd by Rhona Mitra's laughably named Eden Sinclair (eye-patched and ornery enough to resemble the possible daughter of Escape from New York's Snake Plissken) the poor woman's Kate Beckinsale (and what an insult that ends up being) Doomsday is the storied tale of a band of warriors who enter the "forbidden zone" of Scotland in order to find a cure for the virus that once again is attacking England and in short order find themselves trapped between two disperate bands of survivors - first a roving horde of cannibalistic punk rockers replete with their own version of thunderdome (though a hilariously placed Fine Young Cannibals song is the highlight of the movie) and secondly an enclave of medievel knight wannabes led by Malcolm McDowell, possibly the only person this side of John Malkovich who seems completely at home inside this over-the-top batshitcrazy monstrosity of a motion picture. And then, in the end...oh how could it even matter. [03/19/08]

I feel like I am in a dream of some kind. It is almost surreal. I cannot help but think somewhere in the universe time and space have shifted and a new, wholly different reality has set in to take the place of everything I have come to know and understand and even love. Damn, it truly is surreal. No matter how you look at it, it just cannot be real.

I speak of course about Drillbit Taylor, but more specifically about the fact that I did not hate it. Faint praise indeed, but praise nonetheless. I can't say I actually liked the film either, but all things taken in perspective it is quite the blow not to totally loathe this film with all its Judd Apatow'd snarkiness and trendy "new Hollywood"-y apathy. Granted the reason for this (un)likability(?) is not the filmmaker or even the film itself (they are both non-entities) but the person of Owen Wilson as the titular budget bodyguard hired to protect a trio of freshmen nerds from the school's resident sociopath bully. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Owen Wilson, no matter how ridiculous his movies end up being (I have the same strange attraction to Jack Black as well) and no matter how unfunny I should be finding him. My confession has been freed. Hallelujah and on with the critique. And here is where I get decidely meaner and start acting more like myself.

In the same vein as Knocked Up and Superbad (i.e. insipid slacker hoke) Drillbit Taylor, trying to be an Apatow'd update of 1980's My Bodyguard (the star of that film, Adam Baldwin has a rather funny cameo here), and produced or something of the kind by idiot king of the new nerds Apatow himself, is another in a long line of passionless soundbites playing themselves off as movies. If there is one thing a movie cannot survive it is the lack of passion. My inexplicable fondness for the less-than-skilled comedia of Wilson aside, if a film has no passion, if a filmmaker has no passion, why even bother watching. Cinema is a passionate art. I believe Truffaut said something along those lines and he was right. If there is no passion (even negative passion in the making of a bad movie) their is no cinema, and without cinema we would die. [03/23/08]