Movies

Movies

The Ethics of Desperation

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A key reason Dirty Pretty Things works so well is that the audience can never be sure in what direction it will go. It might be a sober exploration of issues related to immigration, or it might be a romance, or it might be a humanistic thriller, or it might be a Lynchian mystery, or … . It’s all those things, actually, and at least pretty good at all of them. The movie is nimble, and just when you think you’ve nailed it, it swerves in another direction.

Tagged: Dirty Pretty Things, Reviews, Stephen Frears
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Movies

Village Idiocy

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Bashing The Village, of course, is easy. But out of M. Night Shyamalan’s plodding, over-deliberate bore — neither intellectually stimulating nor marginally entertaining — could have been salvaged a good, serious, potentially wrenching exploration of the concept of the social contract.

Tagged: M. Night Shyamalan, Reviews, The Village
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Movies

The Magic’s in the Details

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Film Rotation pointed me toward an article that does an excellent job of explaining and demonstrating how motion-capture technology itself (as used in computer-animated movies) is only the means to an end, not the end itself. In the case of The Polar Express, the author argues (and shows), the animators botched the detail work, resulting in bizarre-looking, seemingly possessed characters. By way of comparison, he offers Gollum and the decidedly unrealistic CGI of The Incredibles.

Tagged: CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, Motion Capture, Technology, The Incredibles, The Lord of the Rings, The Polar Express
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Movies

Forced Whimsy

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Watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou initially created a pleasant sensation — ah, yes, my old friend Wes Anderson — that over two hours turned tedious and finally grating. Anderson has taken his love of artifice and dry humor to its logical end and proves that it doesn’t work. Now, hopefully, he can go back to making rewarding movies.

Tagged: Reviews, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson
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Movies

Competent, Worthy, and Lacking

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Maria Full of Grace is a straightforward, clinical, nearly artless movie that starts out as a rote tract on the human cost of the drug trade and eventually builds itself into a story in which the audience has an emotional investment. In the end, it sits somewhere between the brilliant and razor-sharp British miniseries Traffik and its obvious, too-condensed American re-make Traffic (directed by Steven Soderbergh).

Tagged: Dramas, Drugs, Joshua Marston, Maria Full of Grace, Reviews
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