Over at The New Yorker’s film blog The Front Row, Richard Brody’s audacious observations about (forgive the shorthand) Mormon filmmaker Jared Hess; “Point by point, Manohla Dargis’s review of Jared Hess’s Gentlemen Broncos (2009) misses what’s going on. She and I were among the few writers who praised Hess’s previous film, Nacho Libre (2006). . […]
I have a deep and abiding aversion to the noxious stuff that streams into our homes every day, gushing through cables and flooding into living rooms, family rooms, bedrooms. Trance-inducing, rigidly structured around sales pitches. Story arcs that never land, like endless transcontinental flights that only pretend to have a destination, suspended mid-air by continual complications – whether mundane or melodramatic – until such time as certain contracts fail to be renewed and the exhausted shell of a thing comes crashing to the ground at last. . . .
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, October 12 2009 The new Ricky Gervais film, THE INVENTION OF LYING, postulates a world in which no one has ever told a lie. We know this because the hero tells us all about it in an opening voice-over. It is the first, small warning sign that the movie may […]
Back when I rallied the troops in early September, this was going to be a fall preview article. Now that fall is falling all around us, we’ll lose the pre. Still a mighty enticing list.
Richard Brody is the movie editor of “Goings On About Town” in The New Yorker, and writes their blog, “The Front Row.” Some notable recent entries: In MONKEYSHINES (Sep 14), Brody speculates that the failure of the Darwin biopic Creation (Amiel, 2009) to find an American distributor may have less to do with the opposition […]
Right up to the moment the fox opened his mouth to speak, things were going pretty well….
Excerpts from Roger Ebert’s Journal, September 20, 2009 Every year good films show at the Toronto Film festival that never open anywhere near you. This year some good films played that may never open anywhere, even if you live in Toronto–or New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin or upstairs over a Landmark Theater […]
Religion, however ironically disguised, makes its presence felt early in both of Stillman’s previous films, but for much of The Last Days the only cathedral is the dance club, the only faith an ill-fated allegiance to “the disco movement.” That absence, combined with the realistically rendered downward spiral of Alice’s search for love, lends the story a slowly accumulating gravitas that has much to do with moral consequence and spiritual emptiness: isolation surrounded by copulation, loneliness in the middle of a partying crowd. The director’s trademark irony falls away for entire scenes: he’s playing for keeps. This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.
Harvey Keitel: “I wanted to play this part because I have a deep desire to know God. Knowing God isn’t just a matter of going to confession and praying. We also know God by confronting evil, and this character gave me the opportunity to descend into the most painful part of myself and learn about the dark places.”