FilmRoar

While on a Jean Reno (La Femme Nikita (1990), Les Visiteurs (1993), The Professional (1994), Ronin (1998), The Crimson Rivers (2000), Film Roar: Rollerball (2002)) movie watching binge I realized that I had never seen the recent release Wasabi (2001) and even better that the local library had a copy of it. As much as I enjoy the movies of both Reno and Luc Besson (who wrote Wasabi) I am very glad that I did not pay any money to watch this rather pointless bit of action-comedy fluff. In the movie Reno plays (common, take a guess.. which will it be this time, a French policeman or a French assassin?), yes you guessed it, a French policeman who is surprised to find out that his relationship with a Japanese secret police agent produced a child. The 19 year old girl, played by Ryoko Hirosue seems to have inherited her father’s rebelliousness as well as a whole lot of money. What follows is a sequence of fistfights, gunfights, car chases and. of course, heart warming moments as father and child learn to trust and love each other. The Killer / young girl with spunk dynamic felt like a poor attempt to cash in on the success of the earlier hit The Professional where Reno is successfully paired with a twelve year old Natalie Portman and the action is unsatisfying throughout. If you should feel the need to watch most of Jean Reno’s movies, I suggest you skip Wasabi. You won’t miss much.

How do you keep an audience engaged for over two hours of a single character stranded on a desert island without anyone to interact with? Good writing and a damned good actor, that’s how (throwing in a volleyball for the protagonist to talk to helps as well). What makes Cast Away (2000) not just a good, but a great movie is the nuance with which William Broyles Jr., the writer, and Tom Hanks play the story on more than one level. Cast Away is not just a story of hardship and survival, but takes the audience to another level in forcing us to look at the frantic work-oriented lives most of us live and to re-examine what at the lowest level is really important to us.
Read the rest of this entry »

Much has been written about Federico Fellini’s Neo-Realistic classic 8½ (1963) by better men than me. Rather than bore you with another pseudo-intellectual analysis of the surrealistic film I will direct you to some of the plethora of professional reviews and share some of my personal impressions.

I remember the first time I saw this movie. I must have been about 12 years old and got it a video store with my dad who loves Italian Cinema. I had a hard time concentrating on the movie and was at numerous times tempted to fall asleep. I remember that even though the black and white movie seemed boring and hard to follow it also had an undeniable charm that made me wish I knew more about the codex so I could understand it better. Now, almost twenty years later seeing the movie again (this time in a film class with the benefit of a great introduction from a film professor) I found myself re-living the experience of my childhood. With the benefit of more maturity, a year of film studies and a lot more movies under my belt I think I ‘got’ a lot more of what Fellini was trying to convey but still had a hard time keeping my attention on the screen, and thinking through the layer of what is being presented down to the meaning.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the movie greatly. Marcello Mastroianni is a masterful actor and fills his character with life and complexity. I have great regard for any director with the moxy to intersperse his narrative with fantasy and dream sequences and get away with it. I specially enjoy the Harem fantasy, which lightly pokes fun at the desire of men to be loved and in control, not by any means of exaggeration but through a brutal honesty that is at times disturbing. I definitely recommend 8½ to anyone interested in the art of cinema. After you watch it though, you may want to do some reading to help you figure out what just happened.

Charlie Chaplin made almost a hundred movies in his career, but is probably best known for the baggy clothed Tramp character that got in and out of trouble in deliciously funny ways. Along with Modern Times (1936) and Gold Rush, The (1925), City Lights (1931) is probably one of the best opportunities to see Chaplin at his best. There are great scenes including a drunk Chaplin picking fights at a restaurant and a boxing match where Chaplin beffudles his opponent by dancing around the ring. The most surprising part of City Lights though was how even after numerous viewings the sappy story of a good hearted tramp trying to help a blind flower girl still gets to me. I don’t just mean gets to me, but makes me cry, as in tears coming down at the end of the movie.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was recommended to me as one of the top action films in history. I would like to find the person that made that recommendation and ask what the hell they were thinking. Aside for from a couple of surprisingly well-done scenes Assault is a B flick shoot-em-up on a shoestring budget. The plot of the movie is that urban gangs besiege a decommissioned police station. That’s it. Sure there is some conflict, a convicted felon (played by Darwin Joston who reminded me of Rowdy Roddy Piper) shows his nobility as he is handed a gun to help defend the building and Austin Stoker shows off his leadership skills as he protects ‘the girl’ from the bad guys, but the action is all formulaic, predictable and honestly not very interesting.

A great example of French New Wave cinema gone right, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows [Les Quatre cents coups (1959)] is charming and touching. The story follows Antoine Doinel (flawlessly played by young Jean-Pierre Léaud) as he struggles to find his place in the restrictive society of 1950s Paris. Neither of Antoine’s parents (played by Claire Maurier and Albert Rémy) really wants the child leaving him lost and unsure of himself. Antoine struggles with how to conform to the structure of his school and tries escape by running away from home. When he is caught stealing a typewriter Antoine is sent to a home for juvenile delinquents making possible an incredibly beautiful scene where we barely see a tear come down the kid’s face as he peers out to the Paris night from behind the bars of a police paddy wagon.

It might be hard for a viewer accustomed to American commercial film making to think they would enjoy a movie as raw as those produced during the New Wave with it’s lack of constructed frames and enchanting editing. The 400 Blows, however, proves how effective real setting and raw emotion can be in engaging the viewer’s mind to the intent of the author. There is no attempt at deriving complacency from the audience, instead jarring cuts and long takes force the watcher to accept each scene simply for what it is.

According to Dark Horizons, the writer / producer team of Neil Marshall and Keith Bell, who last year brought us the fantastically fun Dog Soldiers (2002), are at it again:

The have a film entitled ‘The Dark’ that goes into production next year. Marshall described it as a throwback to the horror movies of the 70s, really scary stuff more concerned with scaring the shit out of the audience than being tongue in cheek. They were quite tight-lipped, but did say its kind of like a combo of Deliverance and Alien, about a group of five women trapped in a network of caves.