Kathleen Murphy writes: The Woman in Black has scared the bejayzus out of audiences since first materializing in Susan Hill's 1983 faux-gothic novel. Subsequently, this Victorian ghost story's been adapted for British radio and television, and even for the stage. (The play opened in 1989 and is still selling tickets—the second-longest run in London history.) Now this durable haunt pops up in a mainstream scary movie, notable for being the first Hammer Productions release in 35 years and Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Potter showcase. Sadly, despite the dogged conjurings of helmer James Watkins (Eden Lake) and screenwriter Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass), this iteration of The Woman in Black is a slog through a dismal slough, jolted every 10 minutes or so by jack-in-the-box scares accompanied by loud, annoying blasts of sound. One or two moments of genuinely unsettling horror fail to keep this 95-minute ghost story alive and moving.Slog on at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-woman-in-black.3/
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we startedand know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot A number of 2011 films nominated for high-profile Oscars appear to have won acclaim for harking back to the past—most strikingly, the cinema's own past—either explicitly, in subject matter or by way of absorbing story and stylistic conventions from fondly remembered films of old. Some of them look back with passion and insight, charming and exciting us with artistry and inventiveness all their own. Some prove to be sounding brass: headlong charges into a distorting mirror. Collectively, they lend an odd cast to this Oscar season—and incidentally underscore how thoroughly the Academy has ignored, dismissed or just plain missed some of the year's most urgent, ultracontemporary films. But that, too, is an old story. Foremost among the backward-looking crop, and the consensus frontrunner for Best Picture of 2011, is The Artist. Not only is it a movie about Hollywood at the dawn of the talkies; it honors that historic late-'20s moment by opting to be a (mostly) silent picture in black and white, even hewing to the era's "square" screen format. By contrast, Martin Scorsese's gazillion-dollar, state-of-the-art 3-D Hugo is a history lesson disguised as fairy tale, reimagining a 1930s Paris where one of the fathers of cinema itself, Georges Méliès, is resurrected and his lost film legacy redeemed. Paris is reimagined another way in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, even as, unlike the studio-created world of Hugo, the real, present-day City of Light plays itself, albeit chromatically enhanced by the great cinematographer Darius Khondji (where's his nomination?). Departing from our movies-beget-movies theme, Allen sends his hero, an American tourist (Owen Wilson, delightful), on witching-hour taxi rides into the Lost Generation past and the stylish company of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, et al. Back in movieland, My Week With Marilyn recalls the late-'50s making of a minor comedy that happened to pair two major, markedly dissimilar screen luminaries, the eponymous Miss Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier. (To be cast as the actor-director whose career he's shadowed must be the fulfillment of a life's ambition for Kenneth Branagh. Not ready for Oscar prime time, however.) Continue traveling back in time at http://movies.msn.com/academy-awards/nostalgia-at-the-oscars/article/?icid=MOVIES2>1=MOVIES2
Kathleen Murphy has written a Spring Movies Preview for MSN.com. It starts like this: Traditionally, the first months of the new year are a Sargasso Sea of unmarketable duds and leftovers from December's flood of awards bait and holiday fare. Following that dead calm, March and April are "in-between" months. So lots of forgettable fare—like Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words, four years past its sell date—continues to wash up in our multiplexes. But happily, big-ticket items like The Hunger Games signal that summer's tsunami of blockbusters is on the way. Even a glance at the spring slate shows that Hollywood means to jolt us out of winter doldrums with the most kinetic kinds of cinema—comedy, science-fiction, horror, action flicks—all designed to tickle us into helpless laughter, scare us out of our skins, transport us into fantasy, get our adrenaline racing. Deep-dish drama for a more adult demographic and family-friendly movies do not dominate the season. Spring ahead at http://movies.msn.com/movie-guide-spring/intro/?icid=MOVIES2&GT1=MOVIES2
It's that time of the month again, when the impulse to schmooze about things movie cannot be denied, and the Straight Shooting cadre—Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy—meets with Robert Horton of The Herald and KUOW-FM for an hour-and-a-half session of Framing Pictures. The time is 5 p.m. Friday, March 9. The place: Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave. (between Pike & Pine on Capitol Hill). You don't pay anything, unless you're buying a beer or a glass of wine. You are also welcome to join the conversation, though that's not obligatory.
Back in 1993, during a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the auteur theory in America, critic-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader identified a then-current Hollywood trend: "If you learned your craft in episodic television, you learned two things. One: how to take orders and be on time. And two: how to please people. So now who are our 'auteurs'? Meathead, Laverne and Opie." Which was to say, Rob Reiner, Penny Marshall, and Ron Howard, respective acting alumni of "All in the Family," "Laverne & Shirley," and "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Happy Days." Laverne and Meathead soon ceased to matter much, but Opie gives no sign of slowing down. Read what's wrong with that at http://movies.msn.com/story/taxing-movie-people/ron-howard/?icid=MOVIES3b>1=MOVIES3b —RTJ
Kathleen Murphy writes: A remake of La casa muda, Uruguay's 2010 Oscar nominee for foreign language film, Silent House surpasses its source thanks to Elizabeth Olsen's powerful performance and Igor Martinovic's strikingly imaginative camerawork. Written and directed by husband-and-wife duo Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water), Silent House opens on a small figure hunched atop a lakeside rock. From a God's-eye POV the camera lowers to follow Sarah (Olsen) across a field to an old house, where her father drives up as though conjured by her very presence. Could be that our girl never leaves that rock, but stays still to loose the single, unbroken, real-time camera movement that comprises Silent House. That movement unreels a young woman's dream or fantasy, one long slip-slide from normalcy into nightmare and out again. (There are subliminal cuts somewhere in Silent House. Knock yourself out looking for them. The rest of us will go with the movie's very scary flow.) Continue that long take at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/silent-house.2/#Review_0
How many generations of little girls, tired of playing with dollhouses, have let their imaginations run wild with Robin Hood, Arthur, Huckleberry Finn and all the other adventurous boys in the pantheon of heroic questers? Go ask Alice, the rare bird who, passing through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, embarked on a full-fledged heroine’s journey. She’d likely tell you that Luke Skywalker, Frodo and Harry Potter may have benefited from distaff sidekicks and allies, but in the end the big myth, the sweet dream, had their names on it.
Kathleen Murphy wasn't the least bit hoodwinked by the latest animated feature to clutter the multiplexes. Read why at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/hoodwinked-too!-hood-vs-evil/#Review_0
Another of the all-time greats just went by on Turner Classic Movies. And no, it's not the Pacino–DePalma–Oliver Stone thing.
Among the best reasons for feeling optimistic about the expanded reach of SIFF Cinema—the new facilities at Seattle Center and the acquisition of the three Uptown screens nearby—is that it increases Seattleites' chances of getting access to institutional film programming from elsewhere in the movie universe. Case in point: the imminent sampling of "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema," due this Friday through Sunday. The crown jewel of it is the restoration of Children of Paradise, with Jean-Louis Barrault (pictured here).
Kathleen Murphy writes: Boy, was I not looking forward to Goon! The Great White North’s favorite gladiatorial sport, Jason-masked hosers wielding hockey sticks, slo-mo arcs of ketchup … not to mention Stifler (Seann William Scott) on steroids? But it turns out this little movie’s a charmer, perfectly calibrated as a sweet, slow-cooking sports comedy (and love story), chock-full of colorful characters who score, on and off the ice, by consistently breaking out of cookie-cutter caricature. (Exception that proves the rule: the fall-down-funny ditz who screeches a pregame “O Canada” so awful the rinkside commentator wonders if it might be “borderline treasonous.”) Goon is 100 percent Canuck, eh? That authenticity comes courtesy of FUBAR director Michael Dowse, hailing from Ontario, and Montreal-born Jay Baruchel (Knocked Up), who co-adapted (with Evan Superbad Goldberg) Doug Smith’s memoir about the ribald adventures of a minor-league hockey player. Baruchel also acts out as Ryan, the titular goon’s manic, pottymouthed best bud. Continue, at your peril, with http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/goon/
Todd Rendleman teaches film at Seattle Pacific University, a few blocks down Queen Anne Hill from us, and also happens to be a personal friend of ours. He has a book coming out next week, Rule of Thumb: Ebert at the Movies. Its subject is his fellow Urbana-Champaign hometown boy, film critic Roger Ebert. We recommend it, both to those who admire Ebert's work and those who don't all that much; this is no whitewash job, but a ... well, here's the blurb I wrote for the back cover: Todd Rendleman's book on Roger Ebert is a remarkable achievement—biography, cultural history, astute appreciation and analysis of the critic's methods and values, and on top of all that, a lovely read. Occasionally the author's tracking of an Ebert review takes on the narrative excitement and impulsion of close-reading a movie. Rendleman's point-by-point comparisons of Ebert's critical persona and tone of mind with those of two other major voices, Pauline Kael and John Simon, yield fascinating working portraits of the strengths and limitations of all three. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is its gentle assertion of a uniquely Illinoisan perspective on life and art, enhanced by the author's uninsistent marking of key moments in his own personal and cinematic itinerary as they sometimes parallel, sometimes intersect with Ebert's. It's a journey delightful to join. —Richard T. Jameson The publisher's website is http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=166384&SubjectId=952&Subject2Id=1625; you can order it from there, or at a reduced price from http://www.amazon.com/Rule-Thumb-Ebert-at-Movies/dp/1441192212/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334443313&sr=1-7. Or for the good of your soul and local film culture, visit that noble U District institution Cinema Books,4753 Roosevelt Way N.E. (206 547-7667).
It was announced a couple of times (though not here) that the next session of our roving chitchat on movies, Framing Pictures, would take place this coming Friday, May 4. That turns out to be a big gala fundraising day for our current host, Northwest Film Forum, so we—Kathleen Murphy, the Herald's Robert Horton, and I—are happy to shift our playdate a week later. Please come join the conversation at 5 p.m. Friday, May 11, at 1515 12th Ave.(between Pine and Pike on Capitol Hill). Admission is gratis, but the NWFF bar will be open, should that be of interest to you. As to the subjects up for discussion, we have yet to confer on that. Maybe we'll be taking a look back at Robert Altman's all-too-rare 1982 beauty Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, in which Altman's mystical mise-en-scène translates what must surely be a pretty bad play into thrilling cinema. The cast includes Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher. Incidentally, it was Altman who first cast Cher in a dramatic film role, a credit sometimes accorded the more widely known Silkwood. NWFF will show a restoration print this Saturday, May 5, at 5 p.m. Meanwhile, did you know Framing Pictures now has a niche on Facebook? You can keep close touch on us there: http://www.facebook.com/framingpictures —RTJ
The Queen Anne & Magnolia News collected wisdom on the "Millennium Trilogy" movies, originally posted in autumn 2010.
Yes, that title does beg derision, yet Kathleen Murphy maintains the movie's lively and worthy. In genuine Technicolor, too. Read her at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/hobo-with-a-shotgun/#Review_0 By the way, Rutger Hauer pushing 70? Life is cruel.