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an irregularly-updated repository for out-of-continuity Multiplex strips,
non-Multiplex-related comics, drawings, movie reviews, and more

Posts Tagged ‘five stars’

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Review: Yasujiro Ozu, Part One (Tokyo Story and Good Morning)

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Twenty-five of the 33 surviving features by Yasujiro Ozu comprise the current retrospective of the brilliant Japanese filmmaker’s career at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

So far, I’ve only seen the five available in four Criterion Collection DVD sets (Tokyo Story, Good Morning, Early Summerand Stories of Floating Weeds, containing The Story of Floating Weeds and its remake, Floating Weeds). Although, if I ever get over this wretched cold, I hope to see a few more at the Siskel Film Center in the coming weeks. Each film I’ve seen has been a touching portrait of a Japanese family (or families), beautifully told.

I encourage you to see any of them that you can, particularly those that are not available on DVD, since it may be the only chance you get for some time. But since I can only properly discuss those films I’ve seen, I’ll be touching on Tokyo Story and Good Morning in this column, to coincide with their upcoming screenings at the Siskel Film Center. Next month, I’ll talk about The Story of Floating Weeds and Early Summer, to more closely coincide with those films’ screenings.
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Review: The Incredibles & The Iron Giant

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

The Iron Giant

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel, Christopher McDonald, John Mahoney and Eli Marienthal.

The Incredibles

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee, Elizabeth Peña and Brad Bird.

Brad Bird’s first feature film, The Iron Giant, was a tiny masterpiece that, despite almost universal critical acclaim, slipped in and out of theaters with almost no audience whatsoever. (The film made back only half of its $50 million budget.) Loosely based on Ted Hughes’ 1968 children’s book, The Iron Man, the less-suable-by-Marvel-Comics Iron Giant is the story of Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) and his giant, monosyllabic robot (a perfectly typecast Vin Diesel) from outer space, set during the Russophobic 1950s. Sent to investigate what is initially believed to be a meteorite landing, Kent Mansley (Happy Gilmore‘s Christopher McDonald) quickly learns that something else is wandering out in the woods near the Hughes’ home. Once Mansley finds his proof, General Rogard (Frasier‘s John Mahoney) comes in to destroy the giant at all costs. At turns hilarious, poignant and thrilling, The Iron Giant gets a bit heavy-handed with its anti-gun message, but not so much so that those of us without racks on our pick-ups would be turned off.
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Review: Four films by Seijun Suzuki

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Underworld Beauty

Starring Michitaro Mizushima, Mari Shiraki, Yusuke Ashida, Toru Abe and Hideaki Nitani.

Tokyo Drifter

Starring Tetsuya Watari, Tamio Kawaji, Ryuji Kita, Chieko Matsubara and Hideaki Nitani.

Branded to Kill

Starring Koji Nanbara, Joe Shishido, Mariko Ogawa and Annu Mari.

Kanto Wanderer

Starring Chieko Matsubara, Hiroko Ito and Akira Kobayashi.

Seijun Suzuki worked as a director in the Japanese studio system from 1956 to 1967, until, after filming Branded to Kill, he was fired for making an “incomprehensible” film, and, after having seen four of his films, it’s pretty hard to argue that claim. Taking the unprecedented act of suing his former production company, Nikkatsu, he won, but soon found himself blacklisted and didn’t make another movie for 10 years. Seijun Suzuki’s films are shockingly innovative on a visual level, and his characteristic narrative tangles have been a huge influence on modern-day filmmakers from Wong Kar Wai to Quentin Tarantino.

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Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Directed by Michel Gondry.
Written by Charlie Kaufman from a story by Charlie Kaufman & Michel Gondry & Pierre Bismuth.
Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind centers on Joel (Jim Carrey), who, upon learning that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone a procedure to completely erase him from her memory, undergoes the same procedure himself — but as both his bad and good memories of her begin to fade away, he changes his mind and he begins to hide her away in other memories where she doesn’t belong, in hopes of protecting his memory of her from the erasure. It gets weirder from there.

Charlie Kaufman is without doubt the most imaginative screenwriter working in Hollywood today. His resumé gets more impressive every year: Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind are all terrific, funny and highly imaginative movies, though each is flawed in its own way. Michel Gondry’s previous attempt to turn a Charlie Kaufman screenplay into a movie, Human Nature, though definitely enjoyable, was the weakest of the four, mostly due to surprisingly uninspired work from the director of several wonderfully inventive music videos (for Björk, Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers, among others).

With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, working from a story developed with Michel Gondry and artist Pierre Bismuth, Kaufman improves on all of his previous scripts by adding a touching, melancholy love story, as well as several achingly beautiful, often fleeting, insights into the nature of memories and relationships. It also benefits from having the strongest ending of any of his scripts — Being John Malkovich, in particular, suffered from a somewhat disappointing final act that didn’t live up to the promise of its nearly flawless first hour. Eternal Sunshine is at the same time his most coherent, most insightful and most out-there script to date. For Mr. Gondry’s part, he has filmed not only the best Charlie Kaufman film to date, but one of the most visually exciting films in years.
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Review: Lost in Translation

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Lost in Translation
movie: | DVD:
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola.
Starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

Remember how with back in the olden days of videotapes you had to fast forward through the trailers to get to the movie? Well, those days are back with the Lost in Translation DVD, a textbook example of annoying DVD authoring. You get a self-promo ad for Focus Features (the production company), trailers for 21 Grams, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Swimming Pool — five and a half minutes in all, if you choose to watch it all. I wouldn’t have minded much if you could skip it easily, but the Menu buttons on your DVD player are disabled; the Track/Skip buttons are disabled, too; hell, even if you wanted to hit Pause (to check out Kirsten Dunst … er, I mean, read the credits in the Eternal Sunshine trailer, perhaps) — that’s disabled, too. You can Fast Forward past the trailers, but I thought that never having to do that again was part of the charm of the DVD format.

Once you get to the movie, it’s brilliant, of course. For those who haven’t seen it yet (shame on you, it was in theaters forever), Lost in Translation is about two Americans, aging has-been movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and aimless photographer’s wife Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who meet in Tokyo and find a strange, deep connection with each other that is beautifully romantic yet almost totally platonic. Some will argue that Lost in Translation is all atmosphere and no plot, but so what? The fact that they don’t profess their undying love for each other and cheat on their spouses doesn’t make for very good melodrama, but under Ms. Coppola’s guiding hand, Bill Murray and the far-too-talented-for-being-only-19-years-old Scarlett Johansson communicate volumes with just a glance or a gesture; sometimes, in both movies and relationships, words just get in the way.
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