2006 - PARIS, JE T'AMIE, aka PARIS I LOVE YOU

If you like love stories set in Paris this is the film for you. The catch is that they are only about five minutes long which brings the number of love stories featured in this film to eighteen.  It's safe to say that if you don't care for one short love story another one will come along in a bit.  This film was shot all over Paris by a number of very good directors so it's also a nice tour of the districts of Paris.  My understanding from the special feature included on the DVD is that the directors only had about two days to film their segments but were allowed creative control.

 

This film is well cast and why wouldn't it be.  No actor was stuck on location for months at a time and hey they were in Paris.  It's a mixed cast of British, American and French actors, some I recognized and some I didn't.  The directors were also a mixed bunch as well but they clearly were careful to not let the Parisian landmarks overwhelm their stories.

As far as these love stories go, generally they are pretty good.  Joel and Ethan Coen contribute a short film set in the Paris metro which is one of their typical sourpuss plots with Steve Buscemi as their star/victim.  German director Tom Tyker has a very stylized love story which involves a young Natalie Portman as an actress in love with a blind Parisian student.  Wes Craven of all people does a decent job telling the story of a young woman in the Père Lachaise Cemetery who is infatuated with the writer Oscar Wilde much to her fiancee's irritation.  You get the picture.

 

There is a vampire love story from the underrated but very talented Vincenzo Natali .  Probably the only short film I didn't enjoy was the one about mime artists but I believe it is an accepted fact that nobody can stand mimes.  Towards the end of the film Ben Gazarra and Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes's wife and close friend have a nice bit in a restaurant where they are waited on by Gérard Depardieu. Alexander Payne summons the film up at the end with a touching story.  Actor Margo Martindale plays a middle aged woman visiting Paris for the first time as she narrates a voice over about her love for the city.

A entertaining if unconventional way to tell a series of love stories but considering the production challenges, very well done.  The producers turned this concept into a series of  films set in New York, Berlin and Rio using the same short story approach with apparently diminishing results.

This film has written by Emmanuel Benbihy with input from the various directors.  The running time is 120 minutes.

2006 - THE BLACK DAHLIA, extremely disappointing film from Brian De Palms

Considering the expensive look of this film, the impressive photography and the involvement of Brian De Palma, this film is a major disappointment.

The film is based on the true murder of a woman called Elizabeth Short in 1947 Los Angeles a still unsolved crime.  The author of the novel James Ellroy took the factual aspects and wove them into a fictional narrative of a couple of LA PD homicide cops who attempt to solve the crime. The director Brian De Palma was clearly trying to make a 1940's crime thriller along the lines of Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep or Out of the Past, but something seemed to go completely wrong the pacing and storytelling is all off.

The screenplay is a convoluted mess extremely difficult to follow.  The casting is completely wrong.  Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart may look like 1940's characters but they seem completely unable to get a handle on their characters, the writing certainly doesn't help them.  Even De Palma who is a technically brilliant filmmaker good at mixing eroticism with violence seems constrained.  The film has a few standout scenes but for the most part it's just a matter of setting up the shots and letting the confused story roll out.  Hate to harp on the screenplay but it does seem to be the major issue with this film.  It's hard to believe an experienced filmmaker like DePalma didn't recognize the problems with the story.

 

Apparently the original cut of the film was three hours which according to the author James Ellroy played very well.  However the studio financing the film insisted that it be reduced to a running time of two hours.  It's hard to know the truth since I doubt anyone will ever see the original three hour version of this film.  

 

The Black Dahlia kind of represents the end of the line for Brian De Palma.  He makes a couple of indifferent films in Europe after this, but this film puts him in what film critics like to call "directors jail."

The film was written by Josh Friedman, the running time is 120 minutes.

2006 - SMOKIN' ACES, violent garbage pretending to be an action comedy

 Usually I enjoy writer/director Joe Carnahan's type of action/crime film.  He's basically Quentin Tarantino on speed lots of speed as it turns out.  He also likes lots of cool talk and everyone is constantly yapping away. However this mess of a film was not very good.  Basically the film is about an informant that the FBI and the mob want to get there hands on before he can testify in court about his relationship to a mob boss.  Smokin' Aces involves lots of hit men and law enforcement officers chasing after the informant either to kill him or keep him alive.

The movie has one of those everyone is in it casts.  The bigger named stars get killed off right away and by the end of the film the body count has significantly reduced the main actors.  Just to name a few, Ben Affleck, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Keys, Chris Pine, Common and Andy Garcia are beaten, shot or stabbed.    This helps the viewer sort out who is doing what to whom as the various killings help shrink the number of actors one has to keep track of in this very convoluted plot.

 

Even for Joe Carnahan the plot is ludicrous with improbable situation after improbable situation piled on top of the viewer until it is all resolved by shooting every conceivable actor who has a credit in this film.  I suppose if you like lots of violent action you can enjoy this film.  But the action doesn't seem to have much context when it comes to moving the story along it's just there to titillate the action junkie 

 

The running time is 109 minutes.

2006 - SOMETHING NEW, an interracial romantic comedy

This is a modest but enjoyable romantic comedy about the love life of a high achieving career driven African American woman.  Urged by her friends to do more with her life than just work, Kenya McQueen accepts a blind date with a handsome landscape architect, Brian Kelly who just happens to be white much to her surprise.

The film charts the course of their romance as they negotiate their different social standings and navigate the challenges of their romance.  For a story set in a fairly worn out genre the film does make some good points about the place of African American women in this country's workplace.  Of course it's going to have a happy ending since that is the nature of the beast in these kind of films.

 

The film has a very attractive couple playing the leads.  Sanaa Lathan is the driven accountant and Simon Baker is the laid back landscaper she becomes involved with.  They manage to work up a decent amount of couple's chemistry between them.  

 

Something New was notable for having three African American women behind the camera, Sanaa Hamri the director, Kriss Turner the writer and producer Stephanie Allen, the running time is 99 minutes.

2006 - BROKEN TRAIL, good TV mini series

The 3rd in Robert Duvall's old codger western film series, preceded by Lonesome Dove and Open Range.  If Duvall is still playing Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove,  he plays the character very well.

The story is about two cowboys driving a herd of horses up to Canada for sale to the British Army.  Along the way the rescue 5 Chinese girls who have been sold into prostitution The remainder of the mini series is about their encounters with a tough gang of outlaws determined to get the girls back.

 

The film was directed by Walter Hill who is probably one of the few remaining filmmakers to have a real feeling for the old west.  The film was shot on beautiful Alberta Canada locations.  This is an example of a high quality television product made by very talented people.

 The writer was  Alan Geoffrion, the film runs 184 minutes. Duvall was one of the producers.

2006 - MIAMI VICE. the movie

The film version of the trend setting (at least for a couple of years) TV cop show that was filmed on location in Miami.  The original executive producer Michael Mann directed the film in his usual meticulous style. As is the case with Mann the film has an amazing look to it.

Unfortunately the story that Mann constructed is a convoluted mess.  It has something to do with drug smuggling, a bunch of Neo Nazi's and lets face it a very boring love story between our cop hero Sonny Crockett and the CFO of the drug ring played by Chinese actor Gong Li.

 I think you have a problem with your film when the TV show has more interesting stories than the 132 minute big budget movie that the show turned into.  Mann is supposedly a tough guy to work for but from what I've read the film was plagued with production problems.  Apparently there was a hurricane to deal with during shooting and a lot of star temper tamtrums.

Still a very good looking dynamic film.  It could have used a few more action scenes.

2006 - SEARCHING FOR ORSON, another Orson Welles documentary

Another trip down the never ending road of the film career Orson Welles.  This documentary looks at his later years when one project after another was left unfinished for various reasons.

This film focuses on the relationship of Orson Welles and his "companion" Oja Kodar.  The film has the usual talking head bunch of Hollywood personalities such as Spielberg, Bogdanovich, Merv Griffin etc.

There really isn't a whole lot here.  I think most filmmakers would acknowledge that Welles was a master of the cinema.  I don't think anyone needs Spielberg to tell them that.  A few hours watching DVD's of his completed films would more than get the point across.

As always these documentaries seem to find tantalizing scenes of unfinished Welles films.  Pieces of The Dreamers, Don Quoxite, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice and The Other Side of the Wind show up throughout this film.  These unfinished films look fascinating and it's unfortunate they were never completed.

80 minutes

2006 - THE SINKING OF JAPAN or Japan Sinks or Nihon Chinbotus or Doomsday: The Sinking of Japan

Toho Studios produced this science fiction epic about what else the sinking of Japan.  It's almost like they decided to make one of their kaiju films and got rid of all the monsters.

This is an extremely serious film.  How do you evacuate an entire nation?  Where do you put them?  What about your culture?  There are meetings with high level politicians, scientists and disaster relief workers.  It's all treated very solemnly.  But it's also time for a lot of special effects, cities get pulverised, earthquakes shake things up and all with out the assistance of Godzilla this time.

Films like this are unsurprisingly lacking in characterization and The Sinking of Japan is no exception however no other studio can destroy the world like the pros at Toho.

135 minutes, written by Masato Kato.

2006 - BUG, horror film from Friedkin,

You get what you get from a film directed by bad boy William Friedkin.  Bug has something to do with everyone's favorite character the "deranged war veteran" hooking up with a white trash waitress working at a southwestern lesbian bar.  The film evolves into a horror/black comedy as the crazed veteran projects his nutty vision that aphids planted by the United States government are crawling around inside him.  Eventually the waitress ends up acting as crazy as he is. 

Friedkin has seemed to find his soul mate in the playwright and screenwriter Tracy Letts who takes an already crazed situation and ramps it up with lots of loony theories about the government, lesbian girlfriends, cocaine and a crappy southwest motel setting that wouldn't have been out of place in Hitchcock's Psycho.

The picture above gives you an idea of what you're getting in for when you watch this film.  I suppose if you are in the mood for one of these extreme films where the director lards on the violence, crazy dialog and over the top performances you can get a kick out of this film.  I wasn't in the mood this time.  

Since the commercial success of the Exorcist, Friedkin has seemed to think that these over the top stories have a potential for commercial success.  On the other hand maybe Friedkin is just attracted to this type of material.  Who knows, who cares.

102 minutes, written by Tracy Letts.

2006 - CRANK, 2009 - CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, taking the Crank viewing challenge.

Crank - What does one make of this crazy mess of a film   Directed like they gave some ADD kid a video camera, the film's spastic action scenes and camera work made me nauseous with all the bobbing and running around.  Clearly this film was not meant to be taken remotely seriously.  The humor is low brow Three Stooges style with a lot of gun play and blood thrown in. 

Crank is also an extremely racist and misogynistic film with something to offend everyone.  Particularly hard to watch is the treatment of the female lead Amy Smart.  The directors Neveldine and Taylor seem to get off on humiliating her especially in a public sex scene.

Bottom line, didn't care for the over the top Crank. 

Crank:  High Voltage - Since Crank made money a sequel was required and this film is really something to see.  Take Crank and exaggerate it exponentially if that is even possible and you have Crank:  High Voltage.

Everything is now completely played as a huge joke.  This time out, Jason Statham does an imitation of Godzilla, Amy Smart manages to humiliate herself even more than was possible with a sex scene during a horse race.  The actor Bai Lng plays some kind of bizarre crack whore, who is subtitled throughout the film even though she speaks English and on and on it goes with cinematic quotes from They Saved Hitler's Brain of all things.

Unfortunately you have to sit through Crank to enjoy the dementia of Crank:  High Voltage but it's well worth the trouble to see something as insane as this film.  Crank: High Voltage is an example of the old saying "nothing succeeds like excess," or something like that.

This film is totally crazied.

Crank, 93 minutes

Crank: High Voltage, 96 minutes

2006 - PAPRIKA - Japanese anime about a machine that allows you to enter dreams, hum...

Well I think I've seen this one before.  Scientists has invented a machine that allows people to enter and alter the dreams of others.  Two of these machines are missing which causes all sorts of havoc as the dream world starts to merge into the actual world

Although using the same basic idea of the dream machine as Inception,  Paprika clearly beat it to the punch by about five years.  The film was based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui which was published in 1993, this dream machine idea has been around a while.

Paprika is quite interesting and since it's an anime it has a lot of unusual visual stuff going on in it.  The story is a science fiction whodunit with the villain able to do serious damage to a victim's mental health. The film tends to get confusing  probably due to the short running time.  

Paprika is like a lot of these science fiction anime films, they all end in a near apocalypse.  Still in spite of that cliche that is one of the more interesting films in this genre.

90 minutes.

2006 - EXILED, bang, bang, you're dead and shot through with a lot of holes

The director Johnnie To filmed Exiled a film that was considered his comeback.  Since I have never seen any Johnnie To films I'm not sure what he was coming back from or where he went.

In any case, Exiled is the usual Hong Kong action stuff, an incomprehensible story, some very suspect plot coincidences, men being men especially with guns, lots and lots of stylized and pretty cool gunfights.  Which all adds up to yet another over the top action flick.

The story involves childhood friends who are now killers, the beginning of the film features them shooting at each other in an empty apartment.  Suddenly they all stop and decide to furnish the apartment which is now full of holes instead.  Apparently this scene was to show the four friends as members of rival triad gangs being ordered to kill each other but deciding to resume their friendship  instead of killing each other.

I know all of this only because I read the Wikipedia entry for Exiled to find out what the hell was going on after I watched it.

The film features Anthony Wong the Al Lettiere of the Hong Kong film world.  Al Lettiere was a go to actor who specialized in bad guy roles and was usually shot by Charles Bronson,  Clint Eastwood or John Wayne by the end of any film he appeared in.

 Johnnie To has been acclaimed as a director who has uses stylized visuals to tell a story rather than conventional film techniques.  This just means that in the case of Exiled, all of the violence is used to keep the view distracted from the lack of story.

100 minutes.

2006 - VOLVER or "To Come Back" is a very satisfiying chick flick for a change.

The difference between chick flicks coming out of Hollywood and chick flicks coming out of Spain is really apparent in Volver.  It helps to have a good director like Pedro Almodovar calling the shots, instead of some Hollywood hack.  It also helps to have a very interesting story and good actors.

Penelope Cruz is the lead and she actually gives a performance for a change instead of walking around  sticking her chest out.  Carmen Maura who I haven't seen since Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown shows up as Cruz's mother or ghost of her mother. But the entire female cast is quite good. 

Considering what could have been some seriously out of control melodrama in this story, Volver is a pretty impressive piece of film making from a very good director.

A quality film.

121 minutes.

2006 - THE GOOD GERMAN, attempt at a Casablanca/The Third Man type of thriller with some dirty stuff thrown in.

The director Steven Soderbergh, has loaded up The Good German with lots of film making skill and style.  Soderbergh is a big admirer of Carol Reed's The Third Man.  He even repeats a few of the shots from that film.  However Soderbergh is stuck with a story that just isn't very interesting. 

George Clooney stands in for Humphrey Bogart or Joseph Cotton or Ronald Reagan.  Clooney wanders around post war Berlin looking for his lost love the too skinny Cate Blanchett.  Blanchett's the wife of some German Nazi rocket science guy who the Americans want to help them with their rocket program.

 The Good German is reminiscent of films like, The Quiller Memorandum, The Kremlin Letter, Funeral in Berlin and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  One of those "dirty side of the spy game," films where the good guys aren't really any different from the bad guys and everyone is a corrupt bastard.  Besides having that in common all of these films usually had completely incomprehensible plots and The Good German stays true to this formula as well.

Soderbergh's a great director, with an independent streak.  He makes interesting films that certainly aren't the usual Hollywood pap.  Unfortunately he also makes interesting films that just don't have much of an appeal to the general public. 

The Good German is nothing if not downbeat, it's also not The Third Man.

105 minutes.

2006 - PAN'S LABYRINTH, updating Hans Christian Anderson's, The Little Match Girl, with lots of blood and violence

The director Guillermo del Toro, is an interesting guy.  He's very talented when it comes to making movies.  He knows how to stage and photograph a scene.  He  is up on the latest technological tricks to integrate special effects with live action.

Del Toro spends a lot of time working on his films to get them perfect.  But story wise he hasn't been exactly aiming for a Citizen Kane or a Schindler's List.

Here is a partial list of his films:

Cronos - a vampire story about a guy trying to destroy mankind.
Blade 2 -  vampires trying to destroy mankind.
Mimic -  giant icky insects living in the sewers trying to destroy mankind.
Hellboy - comic book about a demon from hell fighting off monsters trying to destroy mankind.
Hellboy II - see above, more of the same still trying to destory mankind.

Then there's the film Pan's Labyrinth,  his attempt at sort of respectability by filming a very dark fairy tale.

In Franco's Spain during World War II, a young girl lives in the woods with her mother and evil soldier stepfather.  She meets a fawn who tells her she is the queen of the fairies ( or something like that).  If she fulfills three magical challenges she will live in the fairy world ( or something like that).

 

The idea appears to be to contrast the fairy world with the cold cruel world of man.  This is really hammered on with the character of the evil step father.  His job is to put down any resistance to the fascist Spanish government.  He goes about this by smashing people in the face with hammers, sawing their limbs off and just generally being an unpleasant guy.

 

Obviously the fairy world would be a happier place to be, except that world apparently has monsters who like to bite the heads off of cute little fairies and chase cute little girls around as well, that doesn't exactly seem like a fun place to hang out.

As much time and attention as del Toro spends on creating his fantasy world, he probably spends even more time on figuring out ways to show people being shot, stabbed and tortured.  The film was rated "R" when it was released, so going into it I was aware that the film was going to be kind of dark.  However I was unprepared for the level of nastiness that I was about to watch.

I get that the real world can be a harsh and cruel place, I don't need del Toro to tell me that I have cable news.  However in this incredibly pointless film, fairyland isn't much better.

119 minutes.

2006 - X MEN THE LAST STAND is the future of movies

The future of movies will not be pretty because it's X Men The Last Stand.

 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is "the" summer family movie this year, more so than Pixar's Up. Concurrently all of the "adult" type films released in the last couple of month have flopped. In tough financial straits, Hollywood is looking for the golden goose. Hollywood thinks they have found it with Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is just another version of X Men The Last Stand. 

 

 
Released in 2006 as part of the X Men trilogy. 20th Century Fox sold it as a wrap up of the story arc. The truth was that cheapskate studio Fox was no longer interested in paying the large salaries of the big cast. Bryan Singer had directed the first two films and had done a decent job but Singer left the franchise to direct Superman Returns,  which as it turned out didn't really work out all that well for him. Faced with a summer 2006 release date, the studio turned to legendary hack director Brett Ratner to take over the direction of the third film and get this sucker into the theaters in time. Fanboys, X Men comic book readers, and science fiction nerds whined that the untalented Ratner would ruin the conclusion of the series. They were right the finished movie was very lame but it also made a lot of money.
 

  

But Brett Ratner wasn't to blame for the movie. The truth was that Ratner never really directed the movie, the special effects department did. Every five minutes of the film had some sort of special effects sequence. As the movie went on, the effects just got more and more over the top. The actors were basically props for the ever increasing explosions, laser blasts and flying thru the air crap that ran throughout the film. In the end what the audience was left with was a movie full of pretty people stuck in some ridiculous action sequences. 

 

With an over engineered sound track and a lot of computer simulated explosions, the exhausted viewer probably returned home to medicate themselves with lots of alcohol to calm their nerves.  The success of this film and the horrible Spiderman 3 revealed the future of movies.   It would be lots of crappy cartoonish films coming at the audience in the years to come.

 

As if the movie wasn't annoying enough, X Men The Last Stand featured Ellen Page the grating star of Juno. Apparently the special effects department decided not to blow her up.  

 104 minutes, (BOOM).

2006 - THE HOLIDAY, 1947 - LADY IN THE LAKE, 1951 - QUO VADIS...Three on the weekend

THE HOLIDAY-My wife and I took a road trip down to scenic south eastern Minnesota this Saturday. When we got back we were tired and vegged out in front of the tube that night. We ended up watching The Holiday on TBS. The plot is actually two stories. In the first story, the viewer has to decide who is prettier, Cameron Diaz or Jude Law. In the second story the viewer is forced to watch in horror as Jack Black is cast as the the romantic lead to Kate Winslet. Throw in a couple of cute kids and a colorful old geezer for no particular reason to make the movie drag on even more. This movie is full of tiresome inside movie jokes, no sale.

 136 minutes.


I had started Lady In The Lake a couple of weeks ago, so I finished it off on Sunday morning. This was one weird film. It's a movie made in 1947 by the actor Robert Montgomery using the camera as the main character. I guess they call it the subjective camera technique, as they said in the advertising "you are one of the characters". This movie was based on a Raymond Chandler story, and with all Raymond Chandler stories the mystery is so impossible to follow that by the end of the film I wasn't sure who had killed who and why they were killing anyone at all. This was an interesting failure but no sale.

 105 minutes

 

Finished off Sunday night with Quo Vadis a MGM spectacular. The odd thing about this movie was that it wasn't filmed in a wide screen process, so the movie looked great on our TV instead of the usual postage stamp size that you get with letterboxing. This is one of those ancient Romans persecute the Christians things. I enjoyed it a lot. The romantic leads Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr were a couple of stiffs but I doubt they could have done anything with these characters anyway. However Peter Ustinov is great hamming it up as Nero and Leo Glenn is also pretty darn great as Petronius, the author of the Satyricon. His death scene is pretty darn great as well. You also get to watch the burning of Rome, Christians getting eaten by lions, Christians burned at the stake and a "cast of thousands" enjoying it all in the Coliseum you gotta love all that debauchery. Highly recommended.

 171 minutes.