From Kathleen Murphy: No less a filmmaker than Jane Campion gave her seal of approval to Sleeping Beauty, Australian novelist Julia Leigh's writing-directing debut. It's a mystery how the director of In the Cut and The Portrait of a Lady, uncompromising explorations of female psychosexuality, could find value in this dull preachment about the objectification of women—or more accurately, portrait of a disaffected droop. Sleeping Beauty [not to be confused with the current Catherine Breillat film of the same title] never stops nagging you to take it Seriously as brave and radical Art. Truth be told, Leigh's shocked discovery that the services of women are bought and sold every day in many different venues is yesterday's news, and her notion of how to let us in on the awful truth is often stylistically silly. Look Down Under for more: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/sleeping-beauty.21/
Kathleen Murphy hails a superb new film: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins in darkness. Some of that dark shapes itself into silhouette, knocks on a door. A wizened old fellow materializes in a wedge of wan light: "You weren't followed, were you? Will you come in?" And finally, "Trust no one." Thus does director Tomas Alfredson formally signal the nature of the haunted house we're invited to enter. The elements of that unsettling prologue—mysterious shade admitted from mausoleum dark by ancient gatekeeper—suggest horror movie, especially Alfredson's breakout vampire film Let the Right One In (2008). We're primed for the perfectly crafted Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to be a spook show in more ways than one. A meticulously visualized anatomy of melancholy, this challenging movie freezes you to the edge of your seat, adrenalized with terror and pity. Alfredson seamlessly merges the genres of espionage and horror: John le Carré's dispassionate Cold War spycraft now plays out in a tomb-world, sucked dry of air and color, prowled by walking dead. Let the Right One In used vampirism as metaphor for essential, if perverse and fleeting, human connection; Tinker Tailor expands the metaphor to embrace the human condition as an awful state of suspended animation, in a climate that withers love or faith. Further intel at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy.2/
"How'd you find me?" inquires Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill), dazed survivor of a mad night's journey into manhood. Smiling, his radiant girlfriend-to-be (Kylie Bunbury) quips: "I just followed the trail of breadcrumbs." That line's a clue that The Sitter's something more than a buffet of superbad yuks and hijinks courtesy of the funny fat boy. Surprisingly, this romp's a raunchy, deadpan, trash-talkin' fairy tale, featuring Hill's lost Hansel, the three dwarfs he reluctantly babysits, and the witches, trolls, giants and hard-hearted fathers who test this unlikely "family" along the way.Follow the breadcrumbs with Kathleen Murphy at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-sitter.3/#Review_0
This was the final installment in Parallax View's participation in the "For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon" that ran from Feb. 14 through Feb. 21 on sites across the Interwebs. It was written at the invitation of Film Comment magazine editor Richard Corliss for an all-film-noir issue (Nov.-Dec. 1974). Corliss also supplied the marvelous title. And how quaint: At that point in time we still found it necessary to italicize film noir.
Might Wagon Master be John Ford's greatest film? With so many worthy candidates, we needn't insist. But it's the purest. No one else could or would have made it. There's not a second, not a frame, that answers to any convention, any imperative beyond the director's wish that it be as it is, look at what it looks at the way it does. Read about this remarkable Ford picture—and 17 others, if you like—at http://www.fipresci.org/undercurrent/issue_0509/wagon_master.htm
OK, movies it's not, but Seattle's own (well, Seattle and Spokane's own) Julia Sweeney will be in town this weekend for The Jill and Julia Show—"a night of music, comedy, improvisation & monologues." For several years now the Saturday Night Live alum has been touring with singer-songwriter Jill Sobule. They present a "one-of-a-kind performance [that] revolves around embedding Julia's stories into songs of Jill's that share a common theme, creating a sum greater than the individual parts." Showtime is 7 p.m. Sunday, March 13; venue is the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W. (789-3599), http://www.tractortavern.com/calendar.asp. Tickets for the seated show are $16/$18 in advance. And as for that movies thing, Sweeney's been in movies, written movies, even directed two movies. So give us a break, will you?
Opening with slices from four dead-ended lives and a series of stark white-on-black, screen-spanning plaints ("I don't love my wife," "I can't get hard," "I'm scared," etc.), I Melt With You screams downer from the get-go. Director Mark Pellington dreamed up this story with writer Glenn Porter, possibly under the delusion they were crafting something like a modern-day The Sun Also Rises—if Hemingway's novel about shattered hopes and beleaguered manhood had been penned by a brace of self-indulgent, self-pitying Peter Pans. Relocating his 21st-century Lost Generation from Spain to Big Sur, Pellington assembles four longtime college pals for an annual reunion-cum-bacchanal in a spacious rental overlooking the Pacific. Hellos and hugs have barely been exchanged before these sad sacks are laboring to get happy, via coke, joints, Scotch and a trove of pharmaceuticals. Downer-screaming continues with Kat Murphy at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/i-melt-with-you/
Kathleen Murphy writes: Few directors possess Steven Spielberg's gift for imagining movie worlds with such dynamism and exhilarating cinematic precision. His Dickensian taste for tales of abandonment and reunion speaks to the lost child in all of us, defining the primal desire for home, in boy or man, alien or artificial intelligence, war or peace. But in some circles, Spielberg's storytelling has long been dissed for sentimentality of the calculating kind. Many resent and resist the masterly audacity of this director's stylistic embraces, dismissing them as manipulative and faux-naïve. To which I've almost always riposted, "Bah, humbug!" But not this season. When it comes to War Horse, nearly every Spielbergian touch goes toxic. Like Dickens and D.W. Griffith, the artist who dreamed The Color Purple and A.I. has always been able to walk right up to the edge of sentimental sadism to harvest powerfully authentic emotion. But in this new, so-called family film, Spielberg's sense of balance has gone MIA. War Horse careens wildly from treacle to horror, from blatant artifice to hyper-realism, from one genre to another. Tonally jarring and structurally disjointed, it's a punishingly long and bumpy ride. Continue reading at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/war-horse/#Review_0
"Boorman has said that he wanted to make Excalibur 'as if it is the story—not a retelling of the myth, but the very events on which the legend was based.' In this, I believe, he succeeded." Thus wrote Kathleen Murphy for a University of Washington film series program note in 1982. John Boorman's film had come out the year before, and now it's out on Blu-ray. Which is a fine thing, not only because of the director's definitive take on Camelot and all that, but also the superb, hands-on cinematography by Alex Thomson.
Red Riding Hood is on the prowl again, and Kathleen Murphy has her number: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/red-riding-hood.6/?icid=MOVIES1>1=MOVIES1
Kathleen Murphy and I first threw together a "Moments out of Time" feature for the year 1971. I'd had a brief go at it in 1969 for Seattle's premier counterculture rag The Helix, and pretty perfunctory it was—only a dozen or so films referred to, in lines like "The terrible beauty of The Wild Bunch...." The 1971 tribute ran to several pages of the first 1972 issue of Movietone News, the Seattle Film Society newsletter that, just about that time, turned the evolutionary corner en route to becoming a legitimate film journal. As for "Moments out of Time," it continued, and grew, each year through the decade MTN was published. Subsequently it appeared when and where opportunity presented—including one year in the early 2000s when our host was the spiffy German film mag Steadycam. For the past half-dozen years we've been graciously showcased by the Movies section at MSN.com, where editor Dave McCoy has patiently accommodated us as we (all right, I) send one e-mail after another, tweaking words and punctuation to get the lines to bump in the right place. The 2011 installment has just gone up. Find links, and the first few lines of the feature, on our "Read More" page. —RTJ
Two weeks ago I posted the results of the National Society of Film Critics' awards voting, and promised an update when I had more comprehensive information. Having recently pored over the tally sheets from the Jan. 7 voting, I can now make good on that promise.
"Less than two weeks into its run, The China Syndrome had grossed $11 mil. Then came a crooked smile of serendipity that transformed the picture from just another top-grossing flick into a news event, and eerie prophecy." Here's a flashback to the Three Mile Island moment in the history of nuclear disasters, written by a very irritated and apprehensive man. Check it out at http://parallax-view.org/2011/03/15/china-is-near/
Shorn of his h, Max Ophuls became Max Opuls and made four splendid films in Hollywood in the late Forties. Letter from an Unknown Woman has had the benefit of a Criterion release on DVD, but the others remain maddeningly hard to see in this country: The Exile, the one swashbuckler that demands to be called exquisite, and two films some would probably insist on labeling noir, Caught and The Reckless Moment. Caught was briefly addressed in connection with a TCM showing.
The guys who started the Saw franchise—which was a good thing to do, till it did become a franchise—are back with an oft-grabby horror concoction, Insidious. Kathleen Murphy welcomes it, up to a point: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/insidious.3/#Review_0 —RTJ