Zander’s Weblog

I had never seen it–all the reviews are raves but I don’t get it. It’s stupid people doing stupid things. And Joe Pesci is, as always, the epitome of annoying.

Heard about it several times but had no idea what it was about. Take one part Back to the Future and one part Girl, Interrupted, stir with a bit of Rushmore, a young-ish Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, and made-for-television production values, and viola–an introspective teen tragedy. Whatever.

Too much and not nearly enough, I should have shot this Jackal at 3 kilometers.

Yes, Adrien Brody did a fine job. And yes, the film was technically excellent. And yes, the holocaust did happen and was horrific. However this film’s portrayal of that reality was a Hollywood comic book version. Here we are in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, and everyone is California clean and speaking English. And the Germans are, almost to a man, truncheon-wielding monsters. Oy, weh.

Another quirky knockout from Pedro Almodóvar. Where else can you see a miniature man crawl into the vagina of a monstrously large woman and “live there forever”?

This movie pissed me off. Just as I was about to decide that I liked it, in spite of Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, both of whom give me the cooties, the film totally jumped the shark. As soon as Susan Orlean (Meryl) said “We have to kill him” the deal was off. From there the film instantly and irrevocably decended into Hollywood film hell, the only (partial) rescue from which would have been to pull the whole ending sequence back as a paranoid flashback and do something more worthy of the rest of the film. They didn’t.

Cormac McCarthy cuts close to the bone, slicing away our convenient fantasies of control. The ending sequence is nonpareil–it will stick in your soul. Kudos to the Coen brothers, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, et al., who render the story to perfection. If you can tolerate a bit of violence and don’t mind peering into the abyss, this film should be at the top of your list.

An early Quentin Tarantino effort. Picture this: all the usual thugs having breakfast in a greasy spoon as the camera paces around and around at face level as the thugs tell tall tales. Or this: the camera mounted on the front passenger window looking in to the car as the thugs drive around telling tall tales. Or this: lots of blood and gore. When the film was done I was Mr. Black and Blue all over.

Won lots of awards, mostly for the screenplay, which was very creative. The story can be parsed in any number of ways–like the tale of the blind men and the elephant–and the picture of what one thinks might have happened emerges slowly, like the Polaroid snaps ubiquitous in the film. However that same creative script made for a mentally fatiguing viewing experience. And although Guy Pearce did a creditable job as Leonard, coming across as a Clint Eastwood/Matt Damon chimera, I found the characters difficult to like. The film was cool, but I didn’t care and was glad when it was over.

Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic. With a keen performance by Sam Riley (as Ian Curtis) and luscious B&W widescreen cinematography this film’s a winner. Larded with the band’s music, it conjures up an entire era for those of us who lived through it. It is unfortunate that Ian ignored his own admonishment in the song Atmosphere: “Don’t walk away in silence.”