in Film: film review:
kill bill - volume one
directed by
quentin tarantino
Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too. » more
in Film: film review:
path to war
directed by
john frankenheimer
The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in 1989 in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made what is possibly the only watchable Van Damme movie*, Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Pretty much everything else in between and after has been disappointing, including Broken Arrow and the heavily flawed Windtalkers, though Mission Impossible: II was superbly staged. » more
in Film: film review:
the life of david gale (widescreen edition)
directed by
Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” is a really, really stupid film about a really, really vital subject. Is the Death Penalty justifiable, defensible? When? How does it square with fundamental human rights? » more
in Film: film review:
inception
directed by
christopher nolan
A favourite ploy of film critics out to trash a movie is to attack those who like it, usually by calling them feeble-minded, brainless, immature and so on. Then there are those for whom no film is ever quite good enough, even though they’re fundamentally incapable of writing or conceiving or making one themselves. A third category locks itself into a quaint past, holding up some cinematic relic that is wholly unwatchable today and finding the film under review wanting in comparison. And there’s the fourth, a critic or reviewer who just has to hate the film only because so many people love it — it’s so chic, so über-cool to hate it; this is the kind of reviewer who out-Kaels Pauline. » more
