There’s no doubt that Sideways makes for an entertaining two hours, but if this is the best Hollywood has to offer in 2004 – and it might be – it’s been a pretty sorry movie year.
I liked 2002’s The Bourne Identity a lot, but I didn’t think the character/premise could sustain itself over a series. I was wrong.
As flawed as it is and even though its freshness and shock value have been diminished by imitation and time, Eyes Without a Face still works amazingly well – primal, raw, troubling, and real. Its authenticity makes it superior to 95 percent of horror movies, and it illustrates how horror operates even when it’s not terrifying.
If you’re interested in the impending “format war” for the next generation of DVD players and software (movies, music, etc.), Slate has an excellent and easy-to-understand primer.
Shaun of the Dead, Super Size Me, and Trembling Before G-d
The premise of The Five Obstructions is simple, elegant, and gloriously artificial. A pupil gives his teacher under-any-circumstances-difficult assignments with absurd conditions, and the mentor complies – with no agreed-upon goal beyond the completion of the tasks. Through the assignments, the movie emerges as a portrait of a submissive relationship that’s not at all one-sided.
The subject of Intacto is “luck,” which is not to be confused with the random workings of “chance.” In director/co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s vividly imagined movie from 2001, luck is a tangible if not quite quantifiable thing that certain gifted people harness, steal, collect, and gamble. That they have nothing to gain from it is something they don’t seem to recognize.
Jim Emerson, the editor of Roger Ebert’s new Web site, here offers an intriguing psychosexual reading of Donnie Darko. You see, Donnie has feelings for his sister. Ahhhh, that explains everything!
The best part of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is its reputed backstory. Commissioned by Metallica’s record label as a promotional film about the making of the metal band’s new album, it instead documented the group’s near-implosion. Yet as engaging as the film is, it’s still strangely amiss. It’s lean but feels too long; it’s probing through the camera’s omnipresence but too gentle and polite; and it’s revealing without ever getting to the heart of the band or its leaders.
I anticipated finding Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut a lesser film than its forebear; I thought writer/director Richard Kelly would use it mostly as an opportunity to try to explicate his impenetrable plot, and to impose his reading on a text that had been ambiguous to the point of beautiful inscrutability. And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s the funny thing: I liked this version nearly as much as the theatrical cut, but for very different reasons.
