The film’s subject makes it bluntly political, yet Syriana nearly demands multiple viewings to even understand its plot, let alone its meanings. It is intended to illuminate that the business of oil is a dirty one, yet even people who pay close attention to the movie will come away from it more confused than enlightened.
It is, of course, bad form to kick M. Night Shyamalan when he’s down, but here goes.
What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer/director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie – to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?
In Calendar, writer/director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of musical minimalism, with its emphasis on long shots, repetition, and minor variation, and with just a handful of camera setups. Nothing is superfluous.
Mel Gibson’s second apology is, for the most part, a model for celebrity contrition. It does not obfuscate. It does not fail to admit the sin. It does not blame booze. Best of all, it does not implicitly fault those who were wronged (“I apologize to all those who [are so fucking stupid that they] might have been offended … ”). Instead, he owns up.
While holding his nose, Daniel Neman dares not call that which offends by its proper name. Instead, he dubs it a “flatulence joke.” And he is not amused.
Cinematical is was running a caption contest for this photo:
Alas, at the request of some evil movie studio, the photo has been replaced and the offered captions deleted.
Werner Herzog once ate his shoe, so why wouldn’t he chase the Loch Ness monster? What’s a little harder to swallow is that the famously idiosyncratic German director – who pulled a boat over a mountain for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo – would team up with Zak Penn, a Hollywood hack who has written such gems as PCU, Inspector Gadget, and Elektra. Yet that’s what happens in Incident at Loch Ness, a 2004 movie that documents their collaboration.
In a review full of great lines, here is perhaps the best from Jim Emerson’s pan of the Great and Powerful and Self-Absorbed M. Night’s The Lady in the Water: “They live in water and are desperate to communicate warnings to Man, but Man has forgotten how to listen. They are sort of like amphibious Al Gores.”
A man’s hand holds a Polaroid photograph, but who would want to commemorate such a gruesome scene? The picture shows a body lying face-down on a floor, blood everywhere. This might be a crime-scene photo, but that conclusion doesn’t feel right.
