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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Claire Denis’s (”Beau Travail”) latest is a weird groundbreaking
otherworldly film that breaks down borders in a post-colonial realpolitik
(merging the northern and southern hemispheres) and cinematic way (similar
to Jean-Luc Godard’s blend of non-linear narrative into a dreamlike tale
to try and reinvent cinema). It demands a lot from the viewer but supplies
little help other than the opening statement that best summarizes the story
“Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart.”
Both the narrative and characters remain frustratingly vague. I had no
idea after viewing it twice what was going down for sure: if the main character
murdered an immigrant man or not, if he had one or two sons or for that
matter who did what to whom. It seems to mix reality with imagination and
it’s up to the viewer to sort things out for himself. The beauty is in
the majestic images, the lush photography, the intriguingly lyrical setup
and the possibility there’s weight in this elusive dramatization. It’s
inspired by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s memoir of his own heart
transplant. The ‘intruder’ was the cancer from which he suffered in the
aftermath of his transplant.

It follows the travails of 68-year-old self-sufficient Frenchman
loner Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), who lives on the snowy plains of the
Franco-Swiss border in a log cabin with his two beautiful huskies. Louis
definitely has at least one son, Sidney (Grégoire Colin), whose
border guard wife Antoinette (Florence Loiret-Caille) was seen in the opening
scene performing a customs check of a vehicle with the assistance of a
contraband-sniffing dog. They have two young children, but the son has
a strained relationship with his puzzling father (he thinks dad is crazy).
The little else we know about Louis is that the pharmacist (Bambou), who
provides his heart medication, is also his casual sex partner and he has
an eye out for his whip-cracking ‘Queen of the Northern Hemisphere’ dog
breeder neighbor (Beatrice Dalle)–but she wants little to do with him.
In this fragmented narrative, where the chronology of events are not in
order and much of the action is happening in Louis’s head as if it were
an abstract daydream, we soon learn that he hired a mysterious Russian
black marketer (Katia Golubeva) to get him a heart and later on she gets
into his head as his voice of conscience and the angel of death. We are
led to believe the operation might have taken place in Pusan, South Korea,
where he buys a big boat to go to Tahiti. 

By the time we get to Tahiti where Louis is searching for his other
son, the one he never knew, to give him money and give him his big boat,
we come to look upon the adventure as the guilt-trip of a haunted dying
man with a shady past saying adios to life and trying to find a way out
with some dignity and to see if he can live long enough to reinvent his
life.

In this elliptical and most challenging Conrad-like ‘heart of darkness’
film, Agnès Godard’s photography is stunning, Nelly Quettier’s editing
is handsomely done and Britain’s Tindersticks gives off with a mesmirizing
seductively sinister score composed by Stuart Staples of a repeated loop
of percussion, guitar and trumpet. The only thing not to like about the
film was that I got the feeling the more you tried to figure it out the
less satisfying you will find it. It’s one of those films where it’s best
to go with its maddening elegiac but elusive flow and let whatever comes
to you be enough. The heart is used here as a metaphor for what we accept
or reject in life, and Denis in her inscrutable way seems to be asking
us what do we really mean when we talk about things of the heart.

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Peter Bogdanovich (”Targets”/”The Last Picture Show “) directs this
charming Depression-era road movie comedy. It’s adapted from the novel
“Addie Pray” (1971) by Joe David Brown and written by Alvin Sargent. Tatum
O’Neal became the youngest ever Oscar winner for her Supporting Actress
performance. It’s one of the three best films Bogdanovich directed before
his rapid decline, where he became box office poison.

In 1936, the nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal, in her film
debut) is left an orphan in rural Kansas and her neighbors suggest that
the likable but unethical Bible traveling salesman Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal,
Tatum’s dad), her mom’s ex-boyfriend, who was the only stranger attending
the funeral and may or may not be her father, take her to St. Joseph, Missouri,
to stay with her aunt. Moses soon finds he can’t get rid of her and that
she’s no angel, in fact she’s a brat who smokes, cusses, and is a kindred
spirit when it comes to flimflam. They team up as con artists who prey
on the gullible. Madeline Kahn sparkles in a supporting role as Trixie
Delight, a sad-eyed carnival stripper who becomes Moses’ romantic interest. 

The black-and-white film (shot on location in Kansas and Missouri)
is superbly shot by Laszlo Kovacs, giving it that needed midwest dustbowl
look. It has Ford’s lyrical mannerisms (even shows a shot from his Steamboat
‘Round the Bend) and Hawks’ ear for comedy, two of the directors the former
film critic Bogdanovich said he most admired. To its credit, it avoids
mush and sentimentality by being so cynical. It also includes music performed
by Ozzie Nelson, Hoagy Carmichael, and Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra,
and snippets from the radio shows of Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly.

by



Eugene Novikov


Sep 1st 2008 // 5:02PM

Now, the seasonal windshield wiper is not exactly the jolly bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can lacuna between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's great about the glaze is its ability to create suspense and trinket around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' sooner demo of his symbol to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.

Flash of Genius

To its trustworthiness, the movie maintains this theme as it details Kearns' multi-decade duel: there's some redemption for him and his kindred, but the total doesn't find out hunky-dory. A around 20-year legal war takes its toll. F

tie of Adept

Chéri full video best quality

This is entertaining enough in the usual ways, with the added remuneration that Kearns isn't actually a advocate. It's also perfectly liable, and not nearly as riveting as what came before. Does anyone remember David Mamet's


The Winslow Boy


But what ultimately keeps

Flick of Genius

in the palatinate of mere adequacy, I over recall, is that there isn't much to Kearns beyond his dogged determination. Kinnear's portrayal is endearing, but neither he nor the screenplay a day in the end gets a sense of the man. He's a generically likable protagonist. Had he been more, the film's attempts to analyse his unconscious deterioration may have become moving instead of merely intriguing.

Part One concerned a group of teens who cheated death by failing to billet a news aeroplane, alone to perish Possibly man by ditty in freak accidents. The muddled sequel wastes no time in lining up unsophisticated fodder, with heroine Kimberly (Cook) having a gut churning premonition that allows her to save a motley group from a freeway aggregation-up. While the first film tussled half-heartedly with its sobering metaphysical implications, here the emphasis is on increasing the luridness of the crowd breeze scolding death scenes. These are elevated into black comic vignettes, where the fun comes from infuriating to fancy which of the ludicrously over-stubborn capacity hazards will give birth to the gory coup de grâce.

Large screen: Anime is whole of cliché’s whether monster robots, magnetic or wanton detectives always on the searching. City Hunter was a long running goggle-box series in Japan that spawned a not many movies, including this the same, which dealt with the exploits of a withdrawn eye who was known as the most excellently in his field with the self-explanatory quirks associated with his tastes in women. He is joined by a secretary who harbors a crush on him anyhow spurns his advances and attempts to screen all other women from him as well. The humor is tongue in cheek and day in and day out done with the highest (his secretary/partner seems to be skilful to mobilize large mallets incorrect of thin puff with which to smash him when he gets caught chasing women) but the editorial was rather avail and at least as OK champion as most tube shows.

In .357 Magnum, the lead, Joe Saeba, is assigned to protect a concert pianist, Nina, and help her find her long lost father. Along the way, it’s discovered that she is carrying a microchip with valuable information that foreign spies will do anything to get. With the help of some friends, he gets to the bottom of the whole matter but not before several high speed chases and lots of explosions take place. Think of this as a decent James Bond style show with better writing. I don’t want to spoil the whole show for you if you haven’t seen it but suffice it to say, it was good.

Picture: The picture is presented in full frame 1.33:1 ratio. The movie was made in 1988 and shows some of it’s age but looks pretty good nonetheless. The dvd mastering job obviously took some time as the print looked much better than a release I saw of this one awhile back on tape.

Sound: You get the choice of listening to the stereo track in either English, English with song subtitles, or Japanese with English subtitles. To be fair, the English dub was slightly better here in my opinion and my usual bias is towards the original language. The subtitles were not simply dubtitles either with subtle differences between them and the dub track.

Extras: The main extra was an episode of the original television series “One Cool Sweeper” which was, I believe, the first episode of the entire series. Pretty cool extra. The other extras were some trailers to other ADV releases but that’s it.

Final Thoughts: I’d never seen the series this was based on but I really thought it was fun to watch. In fact, I’d really be interested in seeing the series released in boxed set format (ie: a season at a time) if the price was right. Sure, it’s an older anime release which gets it’s strength mainly from good writing rather than flashy mech-robot designs or high tech anime styles. If the series is half as good as this movie, I suspect ADV will release it as their busy schedule permits.

My personal tastes in anime run toward the science fiction or fantasy related shows but every once in awhile, I see a movie like this that draws me in beyond what I would have expected. As such, I’m suggesting it as recommended but I can easily see where people would think I’m being too conservative in my assessment based on the show’s strengths.

Sharp, complex thriller/comedy about two individual women and the bourgeoisie they hate. With Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen. Screenplay by Claude Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, from the unconventional ‘A Judgment in Stone” by Ruth Rendell. Directed by Chabrol. In French with English subtitles.

Genre(s):
Manners / Horror / Science Fiction / Thriller

Fox
|| PG13 - 90 minutes || August 13, 2004

Reviewer:
|| Posted On: 2004-08-13

.:: F I L M ::.

.::MOVIE INFORMATION::.


Director:

Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer(s):

Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett ("Alien" characters), Jim Thomas & John Thomas ("Predator" characters); Paul W.S. Anderson (story/screenplay)

Cast:

Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner, Colin Salmon, Tommy Flanagan, Joseph Rye

In this movie, there's a love story between a Predator and a human(that's not a spoiler! I didn't say which human or which predator lol). Yes, that's the kind of idiocy we're dealing with in Paul W.S. Anderson's latest sloppy clunkfest,

Alien vs. Predator

.

The concept of the film has been a fanboy fantasy since the early 90's when Dark Horse Comics released the Alien vs. Predator comic books. Oh sure, people were fans of both franchsies before the books but it wasn't until then that people became really interested in the two franchises coming together for one film. Several years later, those fans' dream has come true? Or has it?

Alien Vs. Predator

's "plot" centers around the discovery of an ancient pyramid discovered underground in Antarctica. The Weyland corporation, headed by Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henrickson, reprising his role of bishop from

Aliens

, this time as the human his former android character was based on) wants to know what's in it. They build a team of explorers, soldiers, and scientists to go check it out. Sanaa Lathan is the lead explorer.

As luck would have it, a handful of Predators arrive from space intent on defending the pyramid cause it's VERY important to them (more than that is spoiling it) but little do the Predators or humans know, another type of Alien (a queen of aliens you might say), is already in the pyramid, making babies. Evil babies. DEADLY BABIES! Carnage ensues.

Now first of all, i'll tell you that i've never seen either of the 2 Predator films and although i've seen all the Alien ones(liking the first 2 and hating the last 2), I've never been a big fan. I went into this film knowing that the buzz was pretty bad but wanting to give it a chance anyway. Hoping the buzz was somehow wrong. Was it wrong?

Well…yes and no. There was some good to the film. For example, in the first 40 minutes or so, every shot that was used to set up the Aliens and Predators was great. The shots of the Predators landing and putting on their weapons, shots of the Queen giving birth, all good tension building scenes that made many members of the audience i was in whisper,"sweet" and "awesome".

But then that feeling all went to hell once the killing started. A lot has been made about how this one is rated PG-13 as opposed to R. I didn't think it would matter too much but it really REALLY does. Part of the thrill of the original

Alien

and

Predator

films was the gory, twisted satisfaction of seeing the monsters rip the people apart. That is all gone. In it's place are quick cuts and edits of people about to be killed and then their death happens offscrean. It leaves the viewer feeling cheated and I was kinda pissy about it.

Then there's the blandness of the human characters. The first half of the film wasn't bad but I didn't care a lick about ANY of these human characters in the slightest. They were sooooo bland. The original Alien films had characters I, at least, slightly cared about but all of the ones present here are throwaways. And as usual, when a horror (which this can barely qualify as. More like a horror-lite for the kiddies) movie is this silly, it's very easy to pick off who dies first and sure enough, I got it right everytime.

What's that? You don't care about any of that? You just want to know how the fights were? Well… They weren't "horrible" perse but there was nothing particularly exciting about them. I learned a few things from them though: 1) The Predators are big pansies. 2) I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Predators were so fakey and "man in suit"-ish that they might've been better off with more CGI. 3) Whenver the film starts running out of Aliens for the humans and predators to kill, just kill off a human character and within ohhh, 5 minutes, they'll be a new Alien (which is a gigantic smack in the face to the 2nd Alien movie! Didn't it take SEVERAL hours there?!) and 4.) (and most importantly). One of the Predators just wants to be loved.

Yeah, you read that right. As I said earlier, there's a love story btw one of the Predators and a human and it's the silliest thing i've seen in a LONG time! Not only is it stupid, but when said Predator takes off his mask, he shows us the face of a f**king Ninja Turtle. Now, I may not have seen either of the Predator films, but I KNOW the character isn't supposed to look like THAT. He looks like a happy, semi mentally retarded, Ninja Turtles. With Dreadlocks. After He took that mask off and started making goo goo faces at the human, I couldn't take him even remotely seriously.

Oh and one more thing. Alien Queen now equals the T-Rex or Spinosaurus from the

Jurassic Park

films. That's all I'll say. Cool looking but lame in concept.

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Sigh, I grow tired of rambling about this "film". Was it horrible? No, it's fairly watchable and at times mildly entertaining but there's just so much wasted potential here. This could've and SHOULD'VE been a much better film had they even tried to write a decent script. As is, it's just a watchable time killer.

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27 Dresses (Blu-ray)

27 Dresses (Blu-ray)


Fox

// PG-13 // April 29, 2008 // District A

List Guerdon: $39.98
[Buy rarely and hold at

Amazon

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Look over by

Ryan Keefer

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posted April 28, 2008 |

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The Movie:

You don't have to be a dummy to know that after her breakthrough motion picture success in

Knocked Up

that Katherine Heigl would be appearing in some star vehicle motion picture as quickly as possible, right? Well that's what

27 Dresses

feels like, a rushed motion picture designed to strike while the iron was as hot as possible, but while Heigl was thinking that this film would make her a viable motion picture star, someone forgot to read the script to the thing, because it's devoid on any real imagination that I can find.

Written by Aline Brosh McKenna, who adapted

The Devil Wears Prada

for cinematic storytelling, and directed by Anne Fletcher (

Step Up

), Heigl plays Jane, a woman that is the quintessential definition of "always a bridesmaid never a bride," as she's filled said position 27 times. Now think about that for a second, either she is very lucky, or she's got some sort of strange addiction that only Maury Povich might be able to cure. Making things more bizarre is that she keeps all the dresses, which leads me to think that the woman has some sort of fetish for artificially made fabrics that she wouldn't think of wearing again anytime soon. But I digress. Her younger sister Tess (Malin Akerman,

The Heartbreak Kid

) comes to New York and immediately starts a relationship with George (Edward Burns,

The Brothers McMullen

), Jane's boss and longtime crush. But since Tess is Jane's sister, she helps Tess out with lip fully bitten. When Tess and George announce their engagement, that's when Kevin (James Marsden,

Superman Returns

) makes a more pronounced appearance. Kevin met Jane earlier in the film and Kevin's cynical attitude was a turn off for Jane, though when Kevin is discovered as a wedding correspondent for the prestigious New York Journal, that's when minds start to get changed a little bit. Jane starts to act a little more selfishly, which after eating so many bad sandwiches of grief, is a welcome respite for her.

Now when it comes to romantic comedies, surely there would be some new gold to mine, or at least a different way to tell the tale, right? Well if there is,

27 Dresses

sure isn't finding it. You can time out when the main character conflicts are going to occur, and less than ten minutes into the film, my wife, who's seen her fair share of said romantic comedies, said that she knew what was going to happen in the rest of the film. We both did, for sure, but she knew what would exactly occur. And yeah, Jane and Tess get into a fight at some point, and while Jane is repelled by Kevin, she becomes more attracted to him the more she finds out about him, even if a small hiccup or two gums up the works, so to speak, early in the third act. To the credit of the performers, while Heigl seems to appear bored and lifeless in the first act, at least when Marsden is reintroduced more significantly into the picture, things are livelier and Heigl snaps out of it, almost as if she knows the script stinks, though she'll make every effort on it now that Marsden is here and is, you know, actually trying to make it work. So it might start off bad, it gets palatable as things unfold. But at 111 minutes, you feel like you're wearing all 27 dresses at times. Ten or fifteen minutes could have been trimmed without losing anything, if you ask me.

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As far as the roll call of capable comedic performers whose talents are wasted in supporting roles in big studio pieces of junk goes, the list is relatively small. Aside from those I've mentioned, Melora Hardin (

The Office

) plays Kevin's challenging boss, while Judy Greer (

Arrested Development

) plays Jane's best friend Casey. She does have a funny line here and there, but almost every scene she's in makes her look like she just woke up after a three day vodka binger. Now I know that's what her character is supposed to be at time, but I thought about this when I was watching the supplemental material. It's said (and hinted upon) in the movie that a bridesmaid dress is supposed to knock the woman wearing it down a couple of notches on the looks side of things, so the bride can look at the better come the day of the wedding. If that's the case, I think that Greer is a cinematic bridesmaid dress for Heigl for whatever unnecessary reason. Greer is not ugly by any means, but Greer seemed to be dressed down more when she shares the screen with Heigl, which was a little bit wasteful of her talents and I'd be a bit insulted if I were Greer. But hey, the film made over $75 million domestically and increased her visibility to the public, so ugly it up, right?

The Blu-ray:


Video:

27 Dresses

arrives to Blu-ray shelves with a 2.40:1 widescreen presentation and an AVC MPEG-4 encoded transfer on a BD-50 dual layer disc. While there are a lot of scenes on this disc that possess quite a bit of background depth, the overall lack of detail throughout the film was a disappointment. I was expecting facial imperfections and flaws, but at times, Heigl and Akerman look as if they're airbrushed figures. Or to put it another way, take a look at Marsden in

X-Men 3

and compare that Blu-ray to this one, and you might see what I'm referring to. The video qualities aren't a complete failure, as blacks look very deep and provide a solid contrast to things, but for a film that was released to theaters three months ago,

27 Dresses

should look much better than it does on Blu-ray.

Sound:

Fox brings their DTS HD 5.1 Master Lossless Audio to the table for

27 Dresses

and this sounds like a relatively ordinary soundtrack. Dialogue is planted in the center channel, though sometimes it's a little bit on the hushed side of things, so some volume compensation is in order. There are a couple of songs that play during the film, and while they sound clear they hardly possess any subwoofer "oomph". The only real chance for surround activity and subwoofer usage is during an ambient scene where the main characters are caught in a thunderstorm late in the film. And if you really want to, you can check out the Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin or Korean subtitles on the disc, but as I mentioned earlier, this is a new film that looks remarkably unremarkable.

Extras:

While the film lacks a commentary track with Heigl, Fletcher or anybody else, at least the extras are presented in high definition, so that's good, right? "The Wedding Party" (14:31) is your typical quick making of look at the film, with thoughts on the initial story by the cast and crew, and their thoughts on what they needed to do to separate it from other romcoms. The cast share their thoughts on the film, their co-stars and director, while the crew talks about the cast. It's your standard featurette where no one can do any wrong. Moving on, "You'll Never Wear That Again" (6:46) looks at the wardrobe in the film, because you can't really make a film titled

27 Dresses

without looking at, well, 27 dresses. The costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas talks about how she wanted to dress Heigl for the weddings, and there is copious footage of Heigl in all of the different dresses. "Jane's World" (4:38) examines the locations and set design, along with how all of the weddings were shot for the feature. "Running of the Brides" (5:05) examines the Filene's sale which occurs each year. For those of you who aren't married or went to the bar while your fiancée did this, basically it's a wedding dress store where dresses in the thousands of dollars are marked down to the hundreds. The Filene's personnel discuss the origins of the sale and the anxious brides talk about their strategies both before and during the rush. Three deleted scenes (3:58) are next, and they don't really show all that much worth talking about. The trailers for

Juno

,

The Devil Wears Prada

and

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

round out this disc.

Final Thoughts:

For the story that it has,

27 Dresses

seems to rely on the faculties of its stars to help elevate the material. This does occur a little bit as the movie goes on, but when the story does pop in from time to time, it reminds us that it's fairly unoriginal in terms of ideas and execution. The technical merits are somewhat disappointing and the extras are phoned in and threadbare, so if you really want to watch it, watch it for Heigl and little else. A solid rental at best.

When an unexplored virile (Matt Damon) is found floating in the Mediterranean Sea, the purely clues as to his identity is a Swiss bank account number implanted in his perceptive. Suffering amnesia, he heads to Zurich to unlock the security deposit box, and discovers cash, a gun, and his name, Jason Bourne, on multiple passports. A shady CIA spook (Chris Cooper) is alerted and immediately orders Bourne eliminated, calling on European agents such as communications expert Nicolette (Julia Stiles) and assassin The Professor (Clive Owen). Bourne’s instincts rebound in when memory fails, and he eludes annihilation with the assistance of Marie (Franke Potente), who drives him to Paris to unlock his days beyond recall. 

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Jean Harlow was the same of the first great blonde coupling symbols, and her status is the ostensible topic of this Frank Capra classic from early in the perspicacious era. Harlow had erupted onto the screen the year prior to in Hell’s Angels, and was at the acme of her stardom. But even though she is ostensibly the main attraction here, it’s Capra sentiment all the way in this categorize comedy.

Stringer Stewart ‘Stew’ Smith (Robert Williams) is covering the blackmail attempts of a Follies girl against the Schuyler kindred, but when he meets daughter Anne Schuyler (Harlow), he falls onerous. His charm and fast-talking enthusiasm wins Anne over, and the two are married, much to the displeasure of the Schuylers and the merriment of Stew’s fellow reporters. The balance of the personification takes a mirthful look at the tension between Stew’s low-class origins and the hoity-toity of the overflowing with.

The dialogue is fast and pain, with a ton of zesty ancient 1930s slang to boot. Separate from many ahead of time talkies, the chatter is quick and not dull in the least; the talkie medium is familiar to famed effect here in ways that unquestionably influenced such later pictures as My Man Godfrey. The script owes much of its cohesiveness to series of running gags, centering on the name Smith, double-endurance bicarbonates, birds in gilded cages, and garters for socks, but instead of meet wrong of steam, each stop up becomes funnier as the covering rolls along.

Most early talking pictures featured most static shots, but Capra includes a frankly astonishing (for the period) long-drawn-out tracking shot that follows Williams and Harlow through the Schuyler mansion. More distracting is the neighbouring-performed absence of qualifications scoring, as was calm the custom at the repeatedly, though there is some medium use of onscreen provenance music. The exception is a lighthearted comic bit as a bored Smith plays hopscotch on the mansion’s elaborate parquet floors.

Surprisingly, Harlow demonstrates little screen presence here; perhaps that’s partly due to the standoffish character she’s playing. Supporting actress Loretta Young (as Gallagher, another reporter) steals every scene that she’s in, with her smouldering eyes and charming allure. Robert Williams makes an appealing paramount humankind, making his death from appendicitis in the year of this film’s release a real loss to the sort. The lesser members of the cast are all enjoyable as well, most notably Halliwell Hobbes as the drily comic butler Smythe, Reginald Owen as the Schuyler family attorney, and Walter Catlett as a broadly funny competing reporter.

Above all, however, this is a comedy about classify. In the apogee of the depression, Capra understood that movie-going audiences for the most part both wanted to assure how the “other half” lives, and to back away from the profuse in a quick kick in the pants at the uniform time. The picture spends a quantities of point displaying the spend lifestyle of the Schuylers and contrasting it with the unadorned and straightforward lives of Gallagher and Anxiety. Although not quite the full-blown populism of Capra’s pictures of the tardily 1930s and 1940s, the essentials are all here.