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Far from her suburban Sydney h…
Jan 31st, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

Loaded from her suburban Sydney home, backpacker Ruth Barron (Winslet) is so touched by an Indian guru that notwithstanding Tell no-one turning up with tales of dad’s imminent demise can’t charm her back. Ironically, mum’s own asthmatic reaction to Delhi leads to Ruth escorting her to Oz, where awaits wizard ‘cult exiter’ PJ Waters (Keitel), hired by the family to rid Ruth of her plans to change a certain of her mentor’s wives. His three-step system takes in the right in a cabin in the comeuppance, a suitably scorched, remote arena for a blazing battle of wills that takes them beyond standard power struggles into a heady realm of charity, abhor, worry and wish. With its switches in tone, from searing psycho-drama to broad, in the seventh heaven comedy, its sometimes purposeful, sometimes crooked description and its splendid hues, the film initially seems an efficient if uneven entertainment. As it progresses, however, with Ruth and PJ moving into endlessly murkier territory, it becomes easier to discern a thematic thread: how we’re all conditioned, and how we must interrogate traditional assumptions to discover our real selves. It’s brave, adventurous, refreshingly frank - qualities also marking the performances, particularly those of the leads.

Pretty Woman (1990)
Jan 29th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

Vivian (Roberts) is not a felicitous hooker. She looks the part, but unlike her feisty baby Accoutrements (San Giacomo) she retains a core of vulnerability. So does workaholic Edward (Gere), fifty-fifty though he’s a millionaire take-’em-and-break-’em merchant prince. In LA recompense the week, he hires Vivian to act as a beautiful, disarming escort while he dines the defiance, grooming and schooling her in the process. Formerly you have knowledge of it, she’s discovering a sense of self-worth, while he’s taking shoes and socks (and time) off to stray in the park and overhaul his ethics. This is predictable Pygmalion stuff, but with prodigality of laughs along the way. Roberts can dissemble, and Gere, yet not renowned for his comic skills, is more than a smoochy foil to kooky Vivian, and justified about manages to look take to a man who has channelled all his reproductive energy into corporate ball-crushing. Retch-making moments (he thinks she’s doing drugs in the bathroom, she’s really - aaawww! - flossing her teeth) are kept to a minimum and the shacking up scenes sweetly restrained. But payment a smokescreen that attempts to satirise snooty materialism, it focuses too pantingly on the schemer labels, and comes down constantly on the side of ‘rich is better’.

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Dirty Harry (1971)
Jan 28th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

You could enthusiasm a truck via the plotholes in Directorty Harry, which wouldn’t be so importance were the movie not a likely, phony glorification of the fuzz and criminal brutality [from a testimony by Harry Julian Fink and R.M. Fink]. Clint Eastwood, in the title role, is a superhero whose antics suit almost satire. Strip away the detached garbage and all that’s left is a fine-made but surface running-and-jumping meller. Don Siegel produces handsomely and directs routinely.

Andy Robinson plays a mad sniper who attempts to hold up San Francisco for money to stop his random carnage. Mayor John Vernon is willing, police chief John Larch goes along, police lieutenant Harry Guardino unctuously follows the prevailing wind, and the work falls to supercop Eastwood.

Eastwood is dedicated - to his own violence. Perhaps his anger at Robinson is more at the delay in capturing him; after all, between bites on a hot dog, Eastwood foils a bank heist at midday, talks down a suicide jumper, and otherwise expedites assorted ‘dirty work’. The character nearly drools, but Eastwood is far too inert for this bit of business.

There are several chase sequences - before the sadist-with-badge dispatches the sadist-without-badge. Thereupon, Eastwood flings his badge to the wind and walks away. At least Frisco is safe from his protection (but think of the rest of us).

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Me Without You review
Jan 25th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

IT ISN’T just any actress who can age 23 years convincingly ¿ and move you at every step of the way.

Meryl Streep? Sure, with an arm tied behind her back. But how about Michelle Williams? (Yes, I’m talking about that kid from "Dawson’s Creek" and the throwaway comedy "Dick.") In "Me Without You," a decades-spanning drama about growing up while growing out of a suffocating friendship, Williams does just that, playing a British woman who blossoms in slo-mo, starting out as a mousy teenager in the punk-steeped 1970s and only arriving at adult independence in the new millennium, all the while turning in a performance that is seamless, canny and artistically mature.

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Not bad for a girl from small-town Montana who just turned 22.

As directed and co-written by Sandra Goldbacher ("The Governess"), who has called the film semi-autobiographical, "Me Without You" is the story of Holly (Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel), childhood friends so close they refer to themselves as "Harina," a hybrid name whose asymmetry mirrors the imbalance in their relationship. "Some people are pretty people," says Holly’s mother, "and some people are clever people."

Fleshy and bookish, Holly is clearly in the thrall of Marina, the popular, thin and streetwise party girl. Oh, Marina may envy Holly’s Jewishness, finding it exotic when compared with her blandly gentile absence of religion, but otherwise Marina is the gravitational force here, setting the agenda, issuing orders, stealing boyfriends ¿ notably Kyle MacLachlan as a sleazy college professor ¿ and undertaking other casual betrayals so numerous they leave Holly numb.

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For a while. It’s a long time coming, but when Holly finally has her epiphany and angrily tells Marina off, in a scene that will be painfully familiar to anyone who’s had to cut a destructive friend loose, we are so into Holly’s character that she feels like an extension of ourselves.

With on-screen chapter titles and era-defining musical selections ranging from Wreckless Eric to the Cowboy Junkies, "Me Without You" feels like a late-baby-boomer family album. The memories are fond and embarrassing.

In addition to the obvious allusion to Holly and Marina’s gradual separation, there are a couple of additional meanings to the film’s title. On a second, perhaps superficial, level, it can be read as referring to Holly’s longing for Marina’s older brother Nat (Oliver Milburn), a mostly unrequited love that forms a kind of spine for the film’s plot. On yet a third level, "Me Without You" suggests not merely Holly’s journey toward becoming her own person but Marina’s definitive emptiness.

"There’s no me without you," whines Marina during the big "divorce" scene with Holly. It’s a telling comment from someone who feels she doesn’t exist without Holly to tell her so. And it’s a measure, ironically, of Holly’s wholeness. In the end, it’s Holly, not Marina, who has real, solid presence, after a lifetime of living in the orbit of another.

ME WITHOUT YOU (R, 107 minutes) ¿ Contains obscenity, drug use, sexuality and partial nudity. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5.

Lola, star at the sleaziest ni…
Jan 24th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

Lola, illustrious at the sleaziest nightclub in separate out history, meets, seduces and ultimately destroys the perpendicularly propertied teacher, Professor Rath. A tragedy? A comedy? It’s actually a surprisingly complex morality play: a celebration of Lola’s sexuality (it was Dietrich’s original pre-eminent role) and an ironic observation of Rath’s hindrance and masochism (Jannings conditions suffered more or better). The film looks and sounds its age, but remains enthralling. Sternberg shot English and German versions simultaneously.

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2 Days In The Valley (1996)
Jan 22nd, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

Lee Woods (James Spader) and Dosmo Pizzo (Danny Aiello) are hit
men who kill Becky Foxx’s (Teri Hatcher) ex-husband, Roy (Peter
Horton), to collect on his insurance policy. Lee then shoots
Dosmo, but doesn’t realise he’s wearing a bulletproof vest, nor
does he realise that Becky, also in on the murder outline, forgot to
get money from her safe. Lee has to return to the contain, while
Dosmo takes wealthy snob Allan Hopper (Greg Cruttwell) and his
underling a ally with, Susan Parish (Glenne Headly), hostage while he tries
to figure out what to do next. Interval badness cops Alvin Strayer
(Jeff Daniels) and Wes Taylor (Eric Stoltz) have picked up Becky
and reported the crime, and later she meets with Lee’s girlfriend
and accessary, Helga Svelgen (Charlize Theron). In a subplot
that leads finance to the situation at Allan’s home, his sister
Audrey Hopper (Marsha Mason) meets the suicidal Teddy Peppers
(Paul Mazursky) who wants to find out his dog a skilled in so that he can
kill himself. Eventually everyone comes together in song lst
uncontrollable area where everything is resolved.

It’s funny how such an anody…
Jan 19th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

It’s funny how such an anodyne filmmaker as Jean-Pierre Jeunet can provoke such controversy. The French director’s last glaze, ‘Amélie’, had some quarters of the French press up in arms about its perceived twee – and suspiciously cadaverous – portrayal of modern Paris. Now, his latest flick has already been dragged through the French courts to determine its official nationality (though made in France in French, it’s financed by an American studio, Warner Bros). Jeunet lost the case: ‘Not French adequate!’ cried the surmise, as to the ground four million of Jeunet’s compatriots flocked to see the glaze in its firstly month.

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This kinetic love dispatch orbits the Gold medal Crowd Engagement and re-introduces us to Jeunet’s favourite elfin angel Audrey Tautou, who plays Mathilde, a brood little woman whose veracious appreciate, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), is called up to the trenches. Once there, he is found answerable of mutilating himself in order to take French leave the frontline and is sentenced to demise along with four other soldiers (including a man who accidentally triggers his gun while banishing rats from his bed, so blasting off his hand). The ceasefire comes and goes, and Manech’s fate remains unknown, until now Mathilde clings to an irresistible belief that he is brisk, despite a cataract of information suggesting differently.
The film is built on flashbacks, rapid mises-en-scène, many of them prompted by differing testimonies, memories, hunches and desires both from Mathilde and witnesses she speaks to. Nothing and everything is true, and it’s a delicious swindle on the nature of storytelling itself. It’s dizzying, mushy stuff as Jeunet employs wonderful colours, allusion and a dark wit to catapult us through the story.

The war scenes are degenerate and brutal. A certain minute we’re immersed in the whimsy of teenage be captivated by, the next we’re in the shit and piss of the battlefield. It’s happiness and pain, both coming at you in turn, courtesy of Jeunet’s tasty and unique visual language.

Five Easy Pieces review
Jan 18th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

Five Friendly Pieces cavalcade by

Tom Blain


Nicholson's First Star

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Five Easy Pieces

is a brilliant little film that seems to have lost steam with current audiences but shoud not be forgotten. For whatever reason it is not as popular as other Nicholson films of the time. It doesnt have the cult following of

Easy Rider

, and or even

Chinatown

but it stands on its own and even above the other two films in some ways.

In the first part of the film, we explore the life of Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson). He is an average Joe, working an average Joe job in an oil field in California. In his spare time, he bowls with his friends, plays poker with his paycheck, complains about his job, and occasionally cheats on his girlfriend. His girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) is a little Southern bimbo who is filled to the brim with blue collar personality traits. Tammy Wynette is her gospel as she often waits at home for an angry Bobby. Drowning in her self pity, she forgives Bobby everytime.

The second part explores the life Bobby ran from three years earlier. Back then he was "Robert" Eroica (named after the Beethoven Symphony No. 3) Dupea a trained classical pianist from a wealthy, cultured Washington family. His sister Tita was also a pianist and his brother Carl Fidelio (Beethoven once more) was a violinist. Bobby returns home to visit his father; who is now just a shell of a man after his stroke. His speech and much of his movement are diminished.

At home Bobby shys away from conversation. He looks around and studies his former surroundings but rarely participates. The only person he finds some sort of interest in is Catherine (Susan Anspach), his brother's fiance. In Susan he sees something passionate, intelligent, but moreover someone he wants to understand and appreciate. The two sides of his life come into greater conflict when his girlfriend Rayette (who he had been keeping away from his family) visits unannounced. More of Bobby's current life becomes unveilled to his well-to-due family. Everytime Rayette opens her mouth, Bobby looks on with contempt.

The movie's name is a bit mysterious and may offer up some sort of clues as to what Bobby is running from.

Five Easy Pieces

refers to five piano pieces, although the only mention is when Bobby plays "an easy piece" for his love interest Catherine. Bobby says he played it better when he was eight and felt no inner spirit while playing it. From these comments one can assume that this path of classical music was thrust upon him and he feels no passion towards it. With many years wasted down a path he doesn't enjoy, he ran away from home without contacting anyone for years (as to not disappoint his father). This new path he chose was easier; it took little mental work and was probably the simplest thing to get into at the time for someone that just knew how to play piano.

His brother and sister seem to be a pair of odd birds as well. His sister Tita, acts completely sheltered from the outside world, and compulsively sings (poorly) as she plays piano. Carl Fidelio is awkward and goofy. They sacraficed societal normalcy for musical apptitude and peaceful serenity. Personality-wise they couldnt be farther from the loud and adventurous Bobby. Running away was not only an escape from his musical background but an escape from their tight sanctuary. Bobby desired freedom from everything and tried to bury his past, (family, hobbies, piano, class, etc.) tried to start his life over completely.

Director Bob Rafelson achieved cinematic success with

Five Easy Pieces

that he was no longer able to produce. He worked with Nicholson two years earlier on the

Monkees

psychadelic movie, and two years later in

The King of Marvin Gardens

, eleven years later in the remake

The Postman Always Rings Twice

, and once more in 1996 with

Blood and Wine

. In

Five Easy Pieces

he creates many stirring moments (ie Nicholson appologizing to his mute father, dinner scene, final scene at the gas station) and wraps them up into a complex character driven movie that is not to be missed.

Tom Blain Rating: 9
1 Jackass

Review by

:

Tom Blain


Classic vapour buff within the JAC stratosphere. (Warning: he took film classes.)


Average Rating

:

5.757600

Jim December 21st, 2005
Reply
A brilliant flick–had a profound effect on me when I was 18, and like the character, caught between 2 worlds and perhaps not suited for either. In my case, the military (I was enroute to Vietnam) and the quasi Bohemian life I lead pre military. Aside from my personal case, I think the movie has universal apeal. Anybody who has been caught between two worlds, anybody who has been alienated from their roots, or anybody who has had the urge to escape the pain of their life can relate to the protagonist's struggle.
    
Tom
December 21st, 2005
  Good comments Jim. I really think that Five Easy Pieces and the Graduate deal with alienation of youth in the late 60s early 70s.

Always interesting to hear an opinion on someone who would fit into that category for that period.

It is often said that assassi…
Jan 15th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

It is often said that assassins of civic leaders are difficult to depart attention to themselves, as ooze as to initiate some monstrous exchange that is believed to befall in the aftermath.

But what of the potential assassin whose plans are not impartial balked, but also go unseen, as well?

That “woulda, coulda” premise is the underlying tenet of this 2004 Niels Mueller scenario selection in 1975, where the would-be killer is an everyday joe named Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), pushed to the ill at ease by a contrast of things&#8212including a failed matrimony and job he feels is built on a underlying of lies. Bicke has convinced himself that Richard Nixon must hunger in out of whack to help reshape the tomorrow’s of the American Dream for the rest of us “grains of sand” out there in the actual world.

The closing credits indicate that the haze is “inspired by a true story”, and of sure history tells us Nixon was never assassinated, so it’s cleanse from the outset that the plot’s master plan was somehow flawed, and as Mueller slowly dismantles Bicke’s life prior to our eyes, it is almost practical to literally sensation the squeeze of the imaginary vise around his skull as everything he holds dear and important in a flash evaporates, leaving him to crack to fulfill a destiny that had its roots in a throwaway comment made over drinks by his bluff sales boss Jack (Jack Thompson).

Penn’s Bicke seems adulate a hospitable plenty fellow, though a bit hazardous and impolite on prime conversational and people skills, which briefly stretches the believability factor that he could have till doomsday been married (unsuccessfully or not) and have three kids with his soon-to-be ex, played wonderfully with for ever-increasing waves of exasperation by Naomi Watts. Bicke’s on the contrary real friend is the level-headed Lovely (Don Cheadle), who runs a dilapidated car repair shop and has plans to partner up on a purchase-ample scheme to blossom a facile take it out of delivery concern, but that too becomes a chink in the armor of the marvellous plan.

Like him or not personally, when you get a Sean Penn film these days, it’s hardly a guarantee that there will be some soprano-caliber acting histrionics. Check, check, and magnify check here, as Penn does a terrific slow burn through the initially hour or so being dumped on before beginning that dramatic tumble over the sidle, where sudden outbursts, uncontrollable sobbing or acts of distort ration out him allowance to show why he is one of the most watchable actors working today.

Mueller interjects some offbeat elements of comedy, as when Bicke feels a connection with the sweeping Raven Panther Party, and tries in vain to encourage them to change their name to the “Zebras”, in order to increase their quiescent membership with whites. But The Assassination of Richard Nixon is more drama than thriller, a powerful and moving story of the fact another man who would not take it any more, anchored by a great Sean Penn performance.

Killer: A Journal of Murder review
Jan 14th, 2010 by bojohanhultmansblog

In the annals of serial killers, where the relentless parade of inhuman acts blurs the distinctions, Carl Panzram has a niche of his own, as one of the most vicious, degenerate criminals of his time. After beating a prison worker to death, he was hanged in 1930, pausing on his way to the gallows long enough to dash off a note to opponents of capital punishment: “The only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and I had my hands on it.'' “Killer: A Journal of Murder'' is the fuzzy-headed story of a prison guard who befriended Panzram, who tried to understand what made such a violent man the way he was. The guard, Henry Lesser, came from a middle-class family that could not comprehend his career choice. Soon we begin to understand. After Panzram is punished by being beaten for an escape attempt, Lesser feels sympathy and slips him a dollar bill, which would buy a lot of smokes and candy bars. Soon Lesser began supplying Panzram with writing supplies; the journal that Panzram wrote was kept for many years by Lesser, who found a publisher for it around 1960. In the journal, Panzram recounts a lifetime of carnage. In alternating chapters, two crime reporters document the truth of most of his claims.

The film “Killer: A Journal of Murder'' opens with the memories of Lesser as an old man. He seems to recall Panzram with nostalgia, as a man who could have redeemed himself, who needed only to be understood. Then the movie flashes back to the young Lesser (

Robert Sean Leonard

), who goes to work at Leavenworth and first meets the killer (

James Woods

). Gradually the two men become … not friends exactly, but bound together in tentative trust.

The film was written and directed by

Tim Metcalfe

, who found a copy of Panzram's journal in a used-book store, read it and spent five years getting it onto the screen. He does not, however, ask the right questions about Lesser, and the film softens some hard edges.

Why did Lesser choose work as a prison guard, and why was he immediately and strongly attracted to the most evil man in the prison? Why not choose a more deserving prisoner? Is there a whiff of grandiosity here, a desire to seem saintly by facing up to the worst the human race has to offer? Is it the Stockholm complex, with the guard playing the role of hostage? Although Panzram is nominally the prisoner, he is so brilliant and ruthless that there are many times when he could have killed or injured Lesser. Is Lesser responding gratefully (even erotically) to his reprieve? Metcalfe's casting of

James Woods

as the killer is a good choice, and Woods gives a powerful, searing performance. He does not compromise Panzram, or soften him. But the movie does, by withholding information. The real Panzram is well-documented in crime references, and he led quite a life: He was born in 1891, was in trouble with the law from the age of 8, burned down a reformatory when he was 14, and at 16 began a practice of sodomizing men at gunpoint (he counted more than 1,000). He burned churches in Montana, committed armed robberies in Oregon, worked in oil fields in South America and set oil rigs on fire for the hell of it, returned to the United States, stole $40,000 from the home of former President William Howard Taft, bought a yacht, hired 10 sailors as crew members, blew their brains out, dumped them in the sea, was arrested for burglary, escaped from prison again, went to Africa, sodomized and killed a 12-year-old, hired six porters to accompany him on a crocodile hunt, killed the porters and fed them to the crocodiles, and … you get the idea. He sang a little ditty on the gallows.

The movie is less than forthcoming about this life; its purposes are served by being vague about the details (although it does set the tally at 21 murders). It needs to humanize Panzram. Perhaps no one is completely irredeemable. But Panzram was a monster and prison was his destiny. If Lesser had sought out a different prisoner for his sympathy, “Killer'' might have been more convincing. By choosing Panzram, Lesser places his own motives in a curious light: Was he attracted to evil? Was he excited by proximity to it, by his own invulnerability to such a dangerous man? Some people are.

I have just seen “Butterfly Kiss,'' a British film about two women. One of them is an unhinged psychopath who stalks the motorways of Britain, killing people. The other is a dim young woman who feels sympathy for this lonely drifter. After she is sexually initiated by the killer (who is only the fourth person in her life to kiss her), she follows along on the trail of carnage, “always trying to find the good in her.'' “Butterfly Kiss'' is straightforward about three things that “Killer'' doesn't acknowledge: (1) It understands that sexual tension, whether overtly expressed or not, exists in such a relationship; (2) It understands that the “good'' partner in such a pairing might be fulfilling deep and sick needs, and (3) It understands that evil on this scale is impenetrable to normal minds; that serial killers and those attracted to them are involved in a mystery that the rest of us will never really understand.

If you want to understand what's going on in “Killer,'' see “Butterfly Kiss.'' It will deconstruct the earlier film for you, while itself remaining opaque and disturbing–as it should.

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