‘Milk’ – It neither over-simplifies nor beatifies, but in a largely glowing portrait, Harvey Milk remains a mystery. Still, a great pleasure
‘Quantum of Solace’: Uniformly incoherent action but a surprising emotional pull. Craig’s Bond remains a magnetic force but is too cloaked.
She dreams of them. She fills her computer screen with digital drawings of them. One is left on a swing at her house. Snow White is poisoned by one in her daughter’s play just before the abduction. In her kitchen are dozens of them that she chucks into the kitchen sink, which then explodes with brown muck. She cannot escape them, but she also surrounds herself with them. Claire is torturing herself with the fucking apples. Overripe and finally fetid, Neil Jordan’s In Dreams goes very, very wrong as a thriller in its final act (and even wronger in its epilogue), but if you fall asleep the first time you see Robert Downey Jr.’s face, you might think you’ve seen something weirdly special. Actually, it is pretty special, but you need to dive below the silly surface.
How do we evaluate Watchmen’s box-office performance, given that most of the assessments so far are based on unrealistic expectations that it would do Batman or Spider-Man business? Fear not: I am watching those watching the Watchmen. Even though I haven’t watched Watchmen.
‘Let the Right One in’ – Tonally coy, it expands on Romero’s ‘Martin,’ crosses it with Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ and haunts retrospectively.
‘Rachel Getting Married’ – Contrivances of setup and situation are, by the end, obliterated by unerring emotional authenticity. Truth-filled
‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ – Pretty, obvious, tiresome, and cynical, Allen’s latest starts literally golden and fades to a trite ‘reality.’
Up to six times the resolution of DVD! Perfect picture and sound! Sparkling high definition! The marketing push for Blu-ray players and discs has been full of these and similar pronouncements, trying in a shitty economy to get you to upgrade your DVD player and (ideally) replace your current movie collection with this relatively new format. Concurrent with that has been the debate about whether Blu-ray will “survive” after winning the “format war” with HD DVD in February 2008. Concurrent with that have been silly partisan arguments using adoption rates and sales figures to show that Blu-ray reigns victorious! or that Blu-ray is already dead!
I’ve often pointed out in the Box Office Power Rankings when I’ve thought a movie had a poor release strategy, and in that spirit I have to wonder why Tyler Perry’s movies are still only being released at 2,000 sites. His last five movies have opened in about that many theaters, and their first-weekend grosses have ranged from $17 million to $41 million. The worst performer among those movies earned nearly $8,400 per theater in its opening weekend, which is just a hair shy of what The Day the Earth Stood Still did in its debut. The new Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail topped $20,000 per theater, better than anything since Milk the last weekend of November and barely eclipsed by Twilight in its first three days. Give Tyler Perry some damned screens!
‘Diving Bell & the Butterfly’ – Aggressive direction overcompensates for decidedly uncinematic material, but it doesn’t matter. Still lovely
