Tag Archives: Review

Rambo

17 Mar

Rambo

Inadvertent camp

With Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone closed out his pugilist franchise on a sentimental note; here, as director, co-writer, and star of what might be the final First Blood chapter, Sly seems to be angling for the same effect, the difference being that Rambo is devoid of humanity. We catch up with the title nihilist in Thailand wrangling cobras and pythons. A bevy of cloying missionaries entreat him to take them up-river into war-torn Myanmar (formerly Burma) so they can deliver medical supplies. As the film has it, the Burmese army is violating human rights as a matter of policy — rape, land-mine games, and death by pig nibbling are just a few of the gory gems. That shit doesn’t wash with Rambo. Machete-honed, the real carnage begins. Devotees will find rewards in the action sequences; the punch-drunk dialogue, however, reduces matters to inadvertent camp. Let’s hope the fork has been firmly planted.

 

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Rocky Balboa

17 Mar

Rocky Balboa

Solid for 15 rounds

It’s been 16 years since the last Rocky, and even then, most thought of star/creator Sylvester Stallone as a has-been kicking a dead horse. But we’re talking boxing, a sport propelled by kitsch and lore. So into the ring the 60-year-old actor goes again, outdoing George Foreman’s return by nearly a decade and a half, but before the big brawl against the undefeated champion (generic, real-life boxer Antonio Tarver) there’s the Rock update: Adrian has passed (perhaps Talia Shire got tired of being a shrew in the later Rockys), and as we learned in Rocky V, the aging pugilist is of humble means and estranged from his son. Stallone, who also writes and directs, is still able to conjure the rough and earnest underdog with infectious results. And the film is surprisingly wry, especially when Burt Young as Rock’s morose brother-in-law, Paulie, is on screen. It’s no knockout, but it does go a solid, nostalgic 15 rounds.

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In the Land of Blood and Honey

17 Mar

Review: In the Land of Blood and Honey

Angelina Jolie’s feature directorial debut

By TOM MEEK  |  January 5, 2012

Much has been said about Angelina Jolie’s feature directorial debut set against the bloody Bosnian conflict of the 1990s — vanity project, plagiarism, and so on. Putting that aside, Jolie has loosely reworked the story of Romeo and Juliet in an infamous setting familiar from CNN but here seen from the inside. Serb police officer Danijel (Goran Kostic, looking very Daniel Craig–like) and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim artist, make a fetching Sarajevan pair until the war hits and they’re relegated to opposite ends of the ethnic equation. Muslim women are brutally raped as a tactic, so Danijel, now an officer and the son of a prominent general, attempts to shield Ajla. His power is limited, and fate and internecine rage take over. Jolie’s narrative power also has limitations, but thanks to the cast and chaotic historical backdrop, the horror of hate and war takes on a compelling human face

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The Game

17 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 09/18/1997,

The Game

David Fincher’s grandiloquent mind fuck works tirelessly to maintain its heightened, if heavily engineered, state of paranoia. The film’s relative success lies in the dark, eerie moodiness that the director elevated to an art form in Seven. Here, however, his visual palette barely masks a slight, manipulative plot.

As Nicholas Van Orton, Michael Douglas resurrects his Wall Street creep, Gordon Gekko, except this time Douglas’s scrutinizing power broker has a hole in his life: he lacks love and excitement. So for his 48th birthday, Nicholas’s loopy black-sheep brother Conrad (Sean Penn catching minimal screen time) gives him a gift certificate for a high-concept gaming experience, a personalized adventure that comes to the player. Nicholas’s endeavors are surprisingly mundane as he is plagued by a series of minor life tragedies and near-Twilight Zone encounters that imply something larger and more devious is at work. The rocky blur between reality and fantasy aspires to be a Hitchcockian After Hours, but at two hours plus, The Game gets played out early on. Douglas and Penn help keep things credible with solid performances, and Deborah Kara Unger extends the sexual immediacy of her Crash role by playing the object of desire who doesn’t wear any panties.

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Kolya and Prisoner of the Mountain

17 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 02/06/1997, B: Tom Meek,

photo

Foreign correspondence

Kolya and Prisoner are moving tales of war

by Tom Meek

KOLYA. Directed by Jan Sverak. Written by Zdenek Sverak. With Zdenek Sverak, Andrej Chalimon, Ondrez Vtchy, Lilian Mankina, Iren Livanova, and Libuse Safrankova. At the Kendall Square.

PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAINS. Directed by Sergei Bodrov Sr. Written by Sergei Bodrov Sr., Arif Aliev, and Boris Giller. With Sergei Bodrov Jr., Oleg Menshikov, Jemal Sikharulidze, Susanna Mekhralieva, Alexei Jharkov, and Valentina Fedotova. At the Kendall Square.

During the first half of the 1990s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences developed a penchant for awarding the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to such lite romps as Mediterraneo and Belle Époque while slighting works with real integrity and depth, like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine. In 1994, the Academy interrupted this trend of false merit when it bestowed the distinction upon Nikita Mikhalkov’s stirring masterpiece Burnt by the Sun. This year, with the submission of the Czech Republic’s Kolya and the Russian Prisoner of the Mountains, the Academy will have two more opportunities to atone for past miscues.  Continue reading →

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Welcome to Sarajevo

17 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 01/08/1998, B: Tom Meek,

Bosnia calling

Michael Winterbottom’s scathing Sarajevo

by Tom Meek

WELCOME TO SARAJEVO, Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on the novel Natasha’s Story, by Michael Nicholson. With Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nusevic, Kerry Fox, Goran Visnjic, Emily Lloyd, and James Nesbitt. A Miramax Pictures release. At the Kendall Square.

Michael Winterbottom is perhaps the most-talented, least-known filmmaker of the moment. His fledgling accomplishments — Butterfly Kiss, the tangy road movie about two lesbian serial killers, and Jude, featuring the red-hot Kate Winslet in an idiosyncratic updating of the quintessential Thomas Hardy novel — demonstrated the British director’s knack for visual storytelling. But neither film would serve as an appropriate yardstick for what Winterbottom has achieved with Welcome to Sarajevo, the first cinematic rendering of the Bosnian conflict.

Based upon British war correspondent Michael Nicholson’s novel Natasha’s Story, and piquantly peppered with other journalistic reports from the front line, Welcome to Sarajevo is a blistering docudrama, as refreshing as it is horrifying. Told through the eyes of Western journalists, the film doesn’t concern itself with the nebulous details of the Bosnian Serbs’ terrorist assault on the city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics; instead it’s a simple, eloquent, chronicle of Sarajevans’ daily struggle to survive. Winterbottom sets the film’s stark tone in the unassuming opening sequence as his camera follows the ceremonial preparations of a bride and her wedding party. The pageant frolics along, carefree and unconcerned, until the rip of a sniper’s bullet terminates the moment of jubilation and ushers in the shocking reality of civil war.  Continue reading →

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Color of Paradise

16 Mar

Color of Paradise (reviewed 1999 in The Boston Phoenix)

Majid Majidi’s portrait of a torn Iranian family is riveting both in scope and emotional texture. At the center of Majidi’s universe is Mohammad (the arresting Mohsen Ramezani), an eight-year-old blind boy who spends the school year at an institute in Tehran and then journeys to the highlands to be with his family for the summer hiatus. As the film opens, Mohammad’s father (Hossein Mahjub, the film’s only professional actor) is late to pick up his son and when he finally does arrive; he is reticent to take possession. At home in the hills, where life unfolds in small simple strokes, Mohammad is warmly welcomed by his grandmother and sisters, but his father, a widower, remains disdainful.   He perceives the boy’s handicap as an obstacle to his proposed marriage with a woman from a strict Islamic family and tries to place Mohammad outside the homestead. The self-interested action causes a divide and triggers a chain of tragically fateful events.

Majidi, who impressed American audiences with “Children of Heaven,” makes a visually stunning film, and yet communicates the lack of sight with sensual brilliance: be it Mohammad pawing through a pile of leaves to save a hatchling or a gentle touch applied to his sister’s face to measure her growth. Like Mohammad’s ever-reaching fingers, and the soul they bear, “Color of Paradise” is poetically subtle and offers great rewards.

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The 11th Hour

16 Mar

The 11th Hour (published in Cineaste Magazine Vol. XXXIII, No 1)

 

If An Inconvenient Truth was a somber, sentimental warning about global warming and the repercussions that mankind could face after years of wasteful living, then The 11th Hour is a town crier, ampped up and propelled by a visceral montage projecting the imminent apocalypse. As the film has it, it’s not only the eleventh hour on the timepiece of doom, but 11:59:59 p.m. The future is a non issue  Yet for all its fire-and-brimstone certainty, The 11th Hour ultimately blossoms into a twenty-first-century PSA of sorts, buoyed by hope and optimism, providing solutions and answers where An Inconvenient Truth never did.

To deliver the bad news, the filmmakers, Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners (sisters), along with producer and de facto narrator/host, Leonardo DiCaprio, have assembled an impressive battery of talking heads. Most are scientists and doctors gleaned from the far reaches of their obscure fields, though some, such as physicist Steven Hawking—so commanding and enigmatic a presence in Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time—and healthy-living guru Andrew Weil, are immediately recognizable. Also in the eclectic mix are some stark and surprising choices. Continue reading →

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Chinese Box

16 Mar

From the Phoenix Archives May, 1998.

Puzzle Box

Wayne Wang’s Hong Kong story

by Tom Meek

CHINESE BOX, Directed by Wayne Wang. Written by Jean-Claude Carrière and Larry Gross based on a story by Paul Theroux, Wang, and Carrière. With Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, Michael Hui, and Rubén Blades.

Wayne Wang’s reputation as a director has unfairly hung on the immense and largely synthetic success of The Joy Luck Club. Whereas his ethnic and cinematic pride infused Amy Tan’s stiff adaptation of her bestselling novel with a soaking visual richness, Wang later, in two improvisational collaborations with writer Paul Auster (Smoke and Blue in the Face), proved himself a free-spirited filmmaker as he rekindled the quirky, on-the-street atmosphere that had been absent from his works since his American debut, Chan Is Missing. That’s whyChinese Box is such a refreshingly raw, emotional odyssey: Continue reading →

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