Reviews

Well, he's halfway there, anyway. Only the release of Volume 2 will show whether-what am I talking about, of course Volume 2 will be amazing. Anybody who doesn't think so should have their head examined.

Kill Bill is quite simply the greatest action movie of this or maybe any other generation. It elevates trash to art, and then elevates art to trash, turning over everything we thought we knew about film, action, kung fu, exploitation, and Quentin Tarantino. Actually, it confirms what we already knew about Quentin Tarantino, but who would have thought that such a movie was possible?

For the one person who doesn't already know the story, Bill and his cronies take out Uma Thurman's wedding party, she survives, and she's out for revenge. But really, that's besides the point. Revenge is the vehicle for Tarantino to throw more stylistic flourishes and homages on the screen than any other movie since Tarantino's last movie. It may take several years before serious film scholars can finally lock down just how many references occur in this film, although film is so deeply built into Tarantino's subconscious that we may never know how much this movie owes to everything from the Spaghetti Westerns to the films of Sonny Chiba and Bruce Lee.

The action sequences are the best ever filmed. Period. Never have technical expertise and pure artistry intersected so beautifully as in these sequences. After a summer in which audiences were bombarded to no end with mindless car chases and banal shootouts, Kill Bill offers massive, stunningly choreographed fight sequences that never miss a beat. Tarantino manages to keep the pure exhilaration of his film at fever pitch until the false ending, intended to raise expectations for Volume 2 but succeeding only at reminding me of the epic that could have been. But if half of the greatest action movie ever made isn't enough to get you to slap down seven bucks, then you must really hate movies.

My subject heading was in reference to an article I actually read on this website, in which Tarantino said that he would not be satisfied with his career until he created a scene that matched the raw power of the final showdown in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I don't know if he quite matched it in Volume 1, although in several moments which I will allow you to find he came awfully close. If he doesn't match it in Volume 2, no scratch that, if he doesn't blow the final scene of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly out of the water in Volume 2, I may just be disappointed. But Tarantino is not one to disappoint.

I write this with nothing but respect for the artists involved in this project-Troy Miller is a brilliant comedy director, and Bob and David are the funniest men on the history of the planet. Do yourself a favor and buy the Mr. Show first and second seasons on DVD. You will not regret it, although your sides might! Because they'll be aching, what with all of the laughing you'll be doing!

Run Ronnie Run can only be associated with Mr. Show through the people who worked on it, and some of the characters from the show. The hilariously absurd writing is not there, the brilliant sense of pacing to be found in every single episode of Mr. Show was missing, and Bob and David deliver their lines without energy or enthusiasm. The joy of the show is that all of the cast members seem to be having the time of their lives during each and every single sketch. In this movie, everyone involved seems tired and bored.

The movie is a train wreck. The reason it hasn't been given a wide release is because it is not funny. I love Bob and David, I've seen them live and buy anything with their names on it, because I know it will be good, so I forgive them this unsuccessful foray into the film world. On their website they even admit that it isn't funny. If you want to see it, do so only as a novelty, and don't expect many laughs. I think I laughed really hard once, but that's just because David said the f-word, and that's always great. But I encourage everyone to keep supporting Bob and David, and maybe they'll be able to gain the support to make a movie worthy of their talents.

Roman Polanski's The Pianist is without a doubt one of the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust, and easily one of the top five films of the year.

The story is essentially Adrien Brody's quiet, good-natured classical pianist struggling to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. We watch him and his loving family as their hopes for liberation are slowly crushed, and, in an extraordinarily moving sequence, how he is separated from them, their fate left a mystery to him for several years. The rest of the film concerns Brody alternating between hiding and running from the Germans, witnessing pieces of the war, glimpsing and, to an extent, collaborating with the Jewish rebellion in Warsaw. It is a quiet, slow-paced film, often musicless but occassionally accompanied by beautiful classical pieces. Polanski's direction is subtle, disciplined, and impeccably well-timed. Brody's performance is also subtle, and he says very little, but compare his demeanor and facial expressions at the end of the film to how he looks at the beginning, and you see a profound change. Brody strikes all the right notes for this part, delivering a quiet performance of resounding power.

As far as the subject matter, you need to look to Polanski himself to truly understand why this film is significant. There have been several films made about this subject, most notably Spielberg's brilliant Schindler's List, but none quite capture the same tone that this film does. Polanski was himself a Holocaust survivor who survived not unlike Brody's Szpilman. He was not heroic, he did not defy the Nazi regime as Oskar Schindler did, but he hid, viewing the horror from an objective distance and avoiding it at all costs. Spielberg put us in the thick of the horror; Jews were shot and killed right before our eyes, the blood splattered in front of the camera. With Polanski's film we watch the horror unfold at a distance, from fourth story-windows we see tiny Nazi soldiers shooting tiny Jews in the street. There is a realism and urgency to what we are watching because we are seeing it as Polanski and Szpilman did, and we wonder if perhaps one of those soldiers may look up and see us.

The Holocaust was a horrible event most of all, Polanski reminds us, because heroism could not save the majority of Jews. Szpilman could not confront the Nazis head on, or he certainly would have died. Instead he hides in corners, watching and recording the events of a dark time in the world's history. The ultimate catharsis, for Polanski and for the late Szpilman, comes in the final scene, when the pain and suffering of the Holocaust is transformed into beautiful art, and Polanski places us in the audience, close enough to be touched but far enough away to feel as if we're really sitting in the same room. Playing piano was Szpilman's catharsis; filmmaking is Polanski's. The Pianist may not be Polanski's "best" film, but by watching it we see a glimpse of his soul, letting go of the demons left by the Holocaust.

I believe that this was the most severely underrated film of 2002, and it was also my personal favorite for a great year in film. Now, I sincerely doubt that many moviegoers would consider this one of the year's best, or even a great film, so this comes with a tentative recommendation. I wouldn't recommend this movie to just anybody, but I feel that fans of the prior work of Scorsese and Schrader will consider this a worthwhile endeavor. With this work Schrader continues his legacy of disturbed, distorted, doomed men whose selfishness and shallow nature ultimately lead them to great suffering as they destroy those who come close to them. Greg Kinnear's Bob Crane joins the likes of DeNiro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Gene Hackman's Harry Caul in The Conversation, and Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse in another Schrader masterpiece, Affliction. These are sad, empty men, for whom we can only half-sympathize; we feel for them because we suffer, but we condemn them because they force themselves and others to suffer.

The film follows the sexual exploits of Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, the real-life star of Hogan's Heroes, who during and after the show became a full-blown sex addict, ruining two marriages and possibly sabotaging his career in the process. Willem Dafoe is John Carpenter (no, I know what you're thinking, and he's not), Crane's partner in crime who lacks Crane's charisma with women but is fed some scraps by Crane in return for his extensive knowledge of and access to video equipment. Crane's fetish is using the home video cameras to record his sexual trysts, which he reviews over and over again, looking for something that we can't see, and that he probably can't see either.

Kinnear and Dafoe's performances alone are worth the price of admission. This is the best, boldest, and most nuanced work that Kinnear has ever done. His performance is all subtlety and detail; he introduces Crane as a regular, aw shucks family man, but as the movie progresses we gradually see the facade fall as his quiet desperation and insatiable sexual appetite begin to consume him. Not content to go over the top and yell at the top of his lungs to be effective, Kinnear instead puts on a fake smile and charms with a velvety voice while openly degrading and hitting on women. The effect is one of the most genuinely creepy performances ever committed to film. Dafoe is the perfect companion to Kinnear's subtle predator; Carpenter is a pathetic loser, easily angered and easily hurt. He gets angry, yells, and does all of the things that you've seen Dafoe do in his other portrayals of guys you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley, or a lighted one, for that matter. It's effective elsewhere, and it's effective here. Together, these men form a pair so utterly joyless and shallow that just seeing them on-screen together made my stomach churn. Their dialogue is only incidental, usually reminiscing on previous sexual escapades or planning new ones, but it's the little tics, gestures, Kinnear's untouchable confidence foiled by Dafoe's insecurity, Kinnear's hidden hunger foiled by Dafoe's overt desperation, that give these scenes their resounding power.

Not to shortchange Schrader's direction, though, which as usual is right on target for the material. He begins in a brightly colored, idealized suburban landscape, filled with all of the usual imagery you'd expect in this sort of light-hearted period and location. Then, slowly, he slides into darker territory, carrying us into the decadent seventies, breaking shots into shorter lengths, shaking the camera, depicting with his cinematography and editing the fall of his protagonist. Admittedly, the techniques Schrader employs here to depict Crane's breakdown have been used many times before, but I still found them extremely effective here.

For the last thirty minutes of the film, I felt genuinely ill; not because I thought the projector was out of focus, as many have complained, but because Schrader and Kinnear were taking me to a dark place and immersing me in it. As I said before, this type of film is not for everybody, but for those interested in the dark side of man, this film is not to be missed. I think that at the very least, the merit of these depressing morality tales is that they provide an exact blueprint of the way not to live our lives. I suppose that showing Crane checking himself into therapy and dealing with his problems and utimately healing himself would be valuable as well, but it wouldn't make for a good film, or a true one. Some people argue against the very existence of this type of movie. My response to them is that in real life for every strong-willed person who solves their problems and triumphs over adversity, there is another loser who ultimately fails to deal with life and implodes upon their own insecurity and weakness. Until this changes, someone needs to continue making these films.

Okay, maybe not the greatest movie ever made, but certainly my favorite. Coppola experienced a golden age in the 70s, making four of the greatest films ever made (The Godfather I and II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now), but this film, released at the end of a revolutionary decade in film, made in the worst possible conditions, plagued by mental and physical ailments among cast and crew, seemingly doomed from the start, comes across as a complete masterpiece, utterly absorbing for every minute and in many ways absolutely terrifying.

Martin Sheen, who suffered a near-fatal heart attack during shooting, shows pain and inner turmoil in every single line he forces out and every single facial expression. This can hardly even be called acting; when Sheen looks directly into the camera at different points throughout the movie there is no indication on his face that he sees it at all.

The same can be said of Brando's acting. As he rambles on about pilots writing obscene words on their airplanes and rubbing his thumb along his eyebrows, he seems lost inside his own mind. This is Brando's most obscure and inaccessible work by far, but it's a rush to watch him go over the top and down the other side.

Dennis Hopper, Robert Duvall, and a very, very young Laurence Fishburne also turn in amazing performances, representing different facets of the insanity of war. Also look for bit parts for Harrison Ford and Scott Glenn. But overall, just sit back and allow one of the most immersive experiences in the history of film take you on a very dark, very pretentious (I say this with nothing but respect) journey into man's "heart of darkness".(11/10) (or very emphatic 10, whatever sounds more reasonable)

That's a big statement, but I stand behind it without reservation. This is my favorite movie of the past decade and it easily makes my top five films of all time. First off, don't come in expecting a stylish, extravagant film with excellent cinematography. Neil Labute's direction is the epitome of minimalism, with virtually no camera movement and entire scenes played out in one shot. I'm not totally sure, but I'd say there are maybe two or three medium close-ups in the entire film, and that's it. The characters are always viewed from a distance, reflecting Labute's background in theater (if you like this, by the way, read Bash, it will blow your mind) and allowing his actors to be as realistic and naturalistic as possible. Contrary to popular belief, stage acting is more natural than film acting; Labute's distance and long takes create a realism that is rarely seen on celluloid.

This film is pretty much all dialogue, but this is some of the best-written dialogue I have ever heard. I don't think any man can watch this movie without recognizing some of the conversations that take place in this film. Aaron Eckhart and Matt Molloy are pitch perfect as the chauvinist, attractive, and ultimately evil Chad and the nerdy, pathetic, and ultimately emotionally doomed Howard. Stacy Edwards as the deaf Christine is also very strong; in fact, when I saw her in another movie speaking normally I almost fell out of my chair. I won't say much about the plot, for this is one of those movies that's really better to go in knowing nothing and watch the sickening events unfold. Let me just say that this film has a twist ending that marks one of the few moments in film that truly shocked me. In fact, I challenge anyone to sit still through this scene; I've seen the movie five times and it still makes me squirm in my seat. If you're looking for a big shock, look no further than this masterpiece, but don't expect a cheap thrill. Next to Vertigo, I don't think any film has hit me with a greater psychological impact. Oh, and if you're a female, and you don't want to become a lesbian, don't see this movie. Period. 10/10

Easily one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. I have watched it at least ten times, and it only gets better and better with each viewing. Martin Scorsese is absolutely the greatest filmmaker of the last quarter century, and this film is his best. The story of how boxer Jake LaMotta watched his career and marriage crumble under the weight of his violent temper and deep-rooted misogyny is told with no punches pulled (excuse the bad pun), as Deniro (in what may be his best performance) and Scorsese unflinchingly explore what drove this man over the edge, and what ultimately may have pulled him back. The boxing scenes easily rank with the most brutal and violent moments ever put on film, shot in stark, unadorned black and white and utilizing unlikely sounds including shattering windows and animal cries to great effect. Thelma Schoonmaker's jarring, discordant editing in these scenes also deserves special mention. The scenes of domestic violence are not for the faint of heart, but there is really no other way to tell this story. If there is a more perfect exploration of why as men we act the way we do, then I'd love to see it, because this movie made me re-evaluate my life. 10/10