For a critic, loving a movie means never having to say you’re sorry … for a review that makes no sense to the average moviegoer. That’s the conclusion I came to after being swayed by rave reviews for the George Clooney thriller ‘The American’ such … Read more

Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns

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By now we’re used to notable directors pausing from their cinematic schedules to whip some short and fancy advertisement for everything from perfume to cars. David Lynch. Martin Scorsese. Wes Anderson. Terry Gilliam. Kathryn Bigelow. Michel Gondry. Even Frank Miller got into the trend this year.

But there’s one name you’d probably never expect to be linked to an ad — a fashion short no less! — Harmony Korine. The man who mused up Kids and then wrote and directed the likes of Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy, and Mister Lonely has crafted a short film for the fashion company Proenza Schouler called Act Da Fool.

Filed under: Trailers and Clips

Continue reading Watch This: Harmony Korine’s Fashion Short, ‘Act Da Fool’

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I suppose it’s a testament to the supreme craft and professionalism of Danny Boyle and his crew that watching 127 Hours feels a bit like having surgery; the kind where you’re asked to bite down on something. It’s gut-wrenching in a queasy, horror-movie way – a shield-your-eyes-from-the-screen, chuckle-in-relieved-astonishment sort of experience, done incredibly well. Which is to say: you probably already know whether or not you’re interested.

Then again, if you’re at all familiar with the book or true story on which the movie’s based, you probably already knew. There is, for once, truth in advertising. This is a film about a dude who goes exploring in a remote part of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, has a mishap, and gets his arm pinned under a rock. And gets stuck, alone, with a single Nalgene water bottle, a sandwich, and no cell phone. And eventually… Well, either you know how the story ends or you don’t, in which case you can likely guess. Suffice it to say that what does happen, we see and hear in excruciatingly painful detail – including what may be the single most horrifying sound effect in movie history.

This may sound like odd subject matter for the flashy, exuberant Boyle. 127 Hours is not his first attempt at a genre film, but his others – the zombie flick 28 Days Later and the underrated sci-fi drama Sunshine – both had an epic sweep that’s the antithesis of this purposefully compact story. Literally trapped in a narrow crevasse, Boyle instead expands the film through his protagonist, but there too, his ambitions are modest. It becomes, believe it or not, a sort of brutal coming-of-age story.

Filed under: Thrillers, Telluride, Theatrical Reviews

Continue reading Telluride Review: 127 Hours

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I’m coming back to Cinematical after a bit of a hiatus, so I thought I’d start with something that’s been on my mind. This morning Armond White’s review of Machete — in typical Armond White style — claimed that anyone who enjoyed it was a moron. I like Armond’s reviews, and that comment is more aimed at a reader response than at analyzing the movie, but he still misses the point. Machete isn’t a movie meant to be absorbed by the mind, even though it does deliver a righteous message on the immigration issue. Rather, Machete is a purely physical experience, and it’s a good one at that; it’s currently on my shortlist of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

What do I mean by physical experience? Let’s start with perhaps the most basic appeal of the movies: they’re like dreams. Humans have been dreaming in moving pictures and sounds for thousands of years, but moving pictures have only existed in reality for a little over one hundred years. No poetry, painting, opera, theater or anything else can remotely come as close to the mystery of dreams as cinema can. Dreams are personal; we get emotional and physical responses. They show us our greatest fears and our greatest desires. Sometimes they’re just so weird we have no idea what they’re about.

Continue reading Why You’re Not a “Moron” If You Enjoyed ‘Machete’

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The trailer for Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours appears to be working. It won last week’s poll with about 40% of the vote, beating out second- and third-place trailers A Horrible Way to Die (19%) and Legendary (14%). Good to see a number of you are also looking forward to the new documentary from Charles Ferguson, Inside Job (8%).

This week’s big movie is Machete, which is kind of based on a trailer. What kinds of movies do you advertise ahead of something like that? How about another movie kind of based on a trailer, like Hobo with a Shotgun? It’s especially appropriate because both of the original “fake” trailers were included in theatrical releases of Grindhouse – though Hobo was only part of the Canadian version. I’m just assuming that the Rutger Hauer-starred B-movie about a violent vigilante is attached to the Danny Trejo-starred B-movie about a violent vigilante. Let me know if your cinema missed the opportunity.

As for the rest of the roundup, it’s a pretty mixed bag, though there are a lot of international trailers this week, most for films we’ve already seen domestic spots for. Oddly enough, though, the English-language remake 13 had its first ad drop this week and none of it’s in English. Hopefully we’ll soon get to see the non-dubbed version, as well as a U.S. release date set for the well-cast thriller.

Find out my favorite trailer of the week — for a film which interestingly and fittingly opens the same day as Top Chef Just Desserts debuts on TV — and vote for your top pick in the poll after the jump.

Filed under: Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, Cinematical Indie, Trailers and Clips

Continue reading Trailer Park: Kings of Pastry, Miral, Amigo

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Peter Weir’s The Way Back enters the canon of survival films as perhaps the most sadistically intent on making you feel as much of its subjects’ physical agony as possible. Despite its impeccable awards pedigree and prestige pic status, it may be too straight-up harrowing to get much traction, either with the Academy voters or at the box office. For those with the fortitude to take the plunge, it offers an intense, morally thorny exploration of the limits of human endurance.

Weir, the great Australian director of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, and The Truman Show, is notoriously selective with his projects, and makes a film a couple times a decade. This purportedly true story, based on the ghostwritten memoir of Slavomir Rawicz (called The Long Walk, not to be confused with the great early Stephen King novella), obviously means a lot to Weir, and the movie gleams with painstaking effort. According to Rawicz, he and his companions escaped a Siberian gulag in 1940 and crossed the continent due south – on foot, armed with a single knife and one sack’s worth of food – to emerge from the Himalayas into India in 1941.

Filed under: Thrillers, Telluride, Theatrical Reviews, War

Continue reading Telluride Review: The Way Back

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Indiewire’s Anne Thompson has an early report from the Venice Film Festival on Sofia Coppola‘s new movie, Somewhere, and boy does it sound promising. Though Thompson’s piece is mostly an account of Coppola’s career to present, she is astute enough to provide us with a thematic link between Lost in Translation – which, as Thompson champions, is probably Coppola’s best — Marie Antoinette – a very satisfying little-big film if you can embrace its affect — and Somewhere: they all star “wealthy, pampered and sequestered celebrity who is trapped and bored.”

In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays Marco, an actor and truant father that’s just getting used to his newfound life of decadence and boredom. If this were anyone other than Sofia Coppola, I’d say that that’s automatically a boring subject but knowing that she can pull off stories about unhappy attractive, rich people, I’m actually pretty excited to see Thompson’s clipped but strong praise for the film. In particular, there’s one line in the review that stands out as its Thompson’s most gushing line in the piece: “These are breakthrough roles for both Dorff and (Elle) Fanning.”

Filed under: Festival Reports, Cinematical’s SmartGossip!, Venice Film Festival

Continue reading Buzz: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ Features “Breakthrough Performance” from Stephen Dorff

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In 2007, Robert Rodriguez hosted a grindhouse-themed trailer contest at SXSW. The first prize winner would get enough money to take their imaginary film and turn it into a big(ger)-budget feature film. Jason Eisener was last year’s winner. His trailer was for a high-concept film, which he had already made a low-budget version of, to end them all: Hobo with a Shotgun. The best part about this project: Rutger Hauer is the titular hobo. Oh yes.

A trailer for the feature-length film has surfaced already and boy does it look like…Rutger Hauer with a shotgun. A compliment, I assure you. Watching a haunted Hauer tell a maternity ward full of newborns what life is going to be like for them and how they’ll have to become junkies or prostitutes if they plan on living in the area is pretty priceless. Then again, I’m not so sure about the rest of the trailer. Check out the trailer after the break.

Filed under: Trailers and Clips

Continue reading Watch This: Trailer for ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’

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The folks over at New Line Cinema continue to make me a very happy person. If you’ve been keeping up with our Final Destination 5 updates, by now you know I’m an avid franchise fan and the fourth installment was a major disappointment. I put most of the blame on 3D. The Final Destination wasn’t made for audiences, it was made to put the technology to use and what we got was a slew of ludicrous kills, cheesy dream effects and to top it all off, a bunch of weak performances. In true Final Destination fashion, the fourth film was packed with no names. Sometimes that works in the production’s favor and we end up with top quality stars like Ali Larter, Seann William Scott, AJ Cook, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman and more, but in #4′s case, we got Bobby Campo and Shantel VanSanten who made for a pretty duo leading duo.

However, in terms of casting, things are really looking up for the new film. We don’t have any really famous faces, but we do have a handful of up and comers with some serious credits to their names. So far the cast consists of Miles Fisher, Arlen Escarpeta, Tony Todd, Nicholas D’Agosto, Ellen Wroe, PJ Miller, David Koechner and Meghan Ory, almost of all of which I’m confident have something to offer. Now we’re adding another name to the list and when it comes to this actress, that confidence because absolute certainty. As reported by JoBlo, Frozen‘s Emma Bell is now part of the FD5 cast.

Filed under: Horror, Casting, New Line

Continue reading Emma Bell Goes From ‘Frozen’ to ‘Final Destination 5′

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One of the better Star Wars spin-offs has always been the Star Tours ride at Disneyland.

It’s a simulator ride that takes you on a ‘star tour’ to the forest moon of Endor (the one where the Ewoks live). With a rookie robot as your pilot, the tour … Read more

Filed under: Movie News

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