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.
Wes Anderson’s movies are magic acts, in the sense that he creates resonance out of broad comedy, eccentricity, and the ridiculous. I mean that both as compliment and criticism.
Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can’t survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.
Just to be clear, Michael Mann’s Collateral is a thriller, and an adept one at that. I say this up-front because that part of the movie isn’t of much interest to me. It doesn’t seem to captivate Mann, either. What Mann recognizes better than other directors is that investment in characters makes the action more tense and suspenseful. (Also, David Mamet’s Spartan.)
The adjective “competent” is a faint compliment if it’s praise at all, but it’s all the enthusiasm I can muster for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2. The movie is about as good as superhero movies get these days, but that’s not saying much.
With Monster, writer/director Patty Jenkins has fashioned a story of insistent, persistent desperation that is so fully embodied by Charlize Theron that I had a hard time believing the movie’s politics and psychology were so facile.
As a screed against George W. Bush to justify the feelings, suspicions, and thoughts of people who already dislike the president and plan on voting against him in November, Fahrenheit 9/11 is strikingly effective. But as propaganda – as a compelling case to convince undecided voters and GOP loyalists that Bush needs to be voted out of office – Michael Moore’s movie is an utter failure.
Here is a movie that so badly wants you to cry and to feel the heartbreak of emotionally stunted characters and to bask in their eventual breakthroughs that I did my damnedest to resist it. In America is one of the most shamelessly manipulative art-house movies you’ll ever find. It works surprisingly well.
The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It’s a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it’s so good that it’s easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot “spoilers” damage the experience one has with a movie.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban won me over quickly and didn’t loose its grip. Unfortunately, I fear it will become the series’ The Empire Strikes Back – the pinnacle that shows the bankruptcy of the rest of the entries. And for that, we should thank the good executives at Warner Brothers.
