Paddington: Paul King

Of all the things I’d imagined I’d think while watching Paul King’s Paddington (2014), one of the last things would be “that’s the most delicious orange I’ve ever seen in my life.” In one of the opening scenes, the eponymous talking bear pulls a fresh orange apart right in front of the screen and the juices spray across the screen and dribble to the ground. It was one of the best combinations of what I assume were CGI (the bear) and practical effects (the orange). The whole film is like that: seamless. CGI has rarely looked so crisp and lively; CGI characters have rarely interacted with their environments so perfectly. The film is also a pitch-perfect combination of age-appropriate humor and drama. There are many sequences made of up nothing but Paddington trying (and failing) to navigate modern life that feel inspired by classical slapstick and silent comedy. It’s such a lovely, happy, pleasant film. Although I wish that the film didn’t resort to a villain to provide pathos. I wish it could have just been a sequence of silly things happening to a silly bear.

8/10

Carmen Comes Home: Keisuke Kinoshita

My, but the post-war American censors are strong with this one, aren't they? Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home is an undeniably confused yet gentle comedy about a young woman who returns to her rural home town after running away to Tokyo and becoming a stripper. She returns with a friend who also happens to be a stripper. The two girls go about their village in their most outrageous outfits, deliberately provoking as many people as possible. When they get ostracized for their behavior, they decide the only logical conclusion is that, in order to win over the townspeople, they must do a nude striptease for the whole village. Old world morals are challenged here with Carmen's family agonizing over her decision. But finally, they decide to let her do it for reasons that don't quite make sense. Because it's her right? Because her stripping is actually art? But the general gist of the film seems to be that cultural modernity can be good: the girls donate much of their stripping earnings to their family which then uses it to pay off their debts and invest in a new school. The film ends with both sides vindicated: the modern strippers return to Tokyo feeling proud of themselves, the traditional village goes back to being...traditional...and none the worse for wear. In other news, apparently this was the first Japanese film to be made in color. And boy, you can tell they were proud of that. The film is brimming with long takes that emphasize negative space; people are constantly dwarfed by the countryside and mountains. There's a gorgeous sequence where Carmen and her friend walk through a verdant forest and the camera dollies along with them, not cutting or looking away. It's beautiful in a blasé pastoral sense: Kinoshita doesn't really do anything with the setting other than use it as a setting.

6/10

A Patch of Fog: Michael Lennox

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/movie-review-patch-fog/.

5/10

Dave Made a Maze: Bill Watterson

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/slamdance-17-movie-review-dave-made-a-maze/95716.

7/10

Spy Hard: Rick Friedberg

Whatta stinker. Rick Friedberg's Spy Hard feels like a film made entirely of the scrap pieces of footage found on The Naked Gun's editing floor. Apparently it was the first film written by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. First off, I had no idea they were making movies back in the mid 1990s. Second, you can really see the degradation of the spoof humor that made Leslie Nielsen so popular: repeated punchlines, randomness for the sake of randomness, and referential humor that feels woefully dated. The worst example was a random scene where somebody dressed like Michael Jackson gets their hair caught on fire. He yells "not again" and jumps out a window. Okay...There was one good part of Spy Hard: 'Weird Al' Yankovic's amazing opening theme song. Too bad he couldn't write and star in the whole movie...

3/10

To Catch a Thief: Alfred Hitchcock

[Revisit Review]

Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief is pure popcorn fluff in the best way imaginable. Beautiful people doing wonderful things in luscious locations aided by one of the smartest, snappiest, memorable, and clever screenplays of the era. Hitchcock's visual prowess was at its height here; you could practically watch it with the sound turned off. But why would you want to? You'd miss all the incredible dialogue!

8/10

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy: Kelly Makin

Maybe it wasn't the best idea to watch Kelly Makin's Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy without watching the original television sketch comedy show. Or familiarizing myself with its actors, reoccurring characters, and popular segments. Or looking up what the film is actually about. Yeah...I probably could have done this screening a bit better. But when push comes to shove, I did like the film. I thought it was funny, clever, and occasionally bitterly cynical (that whole "you can't truly be happy without sadness" morale really stinks of the Clinton years, doesn't it?). My favorite bit was the ongoing side-plot about the closeted gay father who comes out of the closest. Do I think it's a good film? Well, without familiarity with the show, no. But it's still good for a few laughs.

5/10

Little Men: Ira Sachs

So, my takeaway from Ira Sachs' Little Men is that gentrification is alright as long as the white people forcing the non-white people out of their homes feel really, really, really, really, really bad about it. Alright, I'm being facetious: Little Men is fine. It's got great performances all around--especially from Michael Barbieri--and there's a gentle, truthful eye for adolescent behavior. Yeah, the two boys might be little bastards for the silent treatment they give their parents, but they still seem like humans and not conveyor belt Hollywood children. My problem is that Little Men is the kind of film that attempts to view mankind as through a microscope--not judging their actions, just observing. The whole point is that everybody is selfish, everybody has the capacity to hurt others. But yeah, no. I don't buy into the film's attempts at morale ambiguity. There's a clear bad guy here: Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear). This middle-aged man would rather chase his acting pipe dreams than actually quit, get a real job, support his family, and not evict a poor immigrant family living in their building. Yeah, life's unfair. Get over it. Get a real job. Don't go ruining other people's lives, throw up your hands, and say "ah...life's so callous, ain't it?"

Ass.

6/10

Hotel Coolgardie: Pete Gleeson

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/film/slamdance-17-movie-review-hotel-coolgardie/95602.

8/10

Withdrawn: Adrian Murray

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/slamdance-17-withdrawn/95594.

8/10

Kuro: Joji Koyama, Tujiko Noriko

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/95590/slamdance-17-movie-review-kuro/.

9/10

The Long Riders: Walter Hill

For a daguerreotype, Walter Hill's The Long Riders sure is nifty. But as a movie, it's quite lacking. All of the characters move and are blocked like wax statues. What's worse, they don't introduce any of the characters--quite a sin for a film whose raison d'être involves the casting of several groups of real-life brothers to play the members of James-Younger gang. What's the point of such meticulous casting if we can't tell any of the characters apart from each other? (All except for David Carradine--you can always tell it's David Carradine.) I did appreciate how they morphed the story of Jesse James into one of familial vengeance, sort of a Hatfield/McCoy relationship between the James-Younger gang and the murderous Pinkertons who came to arrest/kill them. But much of the drama is drained of its lifeblood by its own solemnity. However, the film comes to vibrant life during action scenes. A knife fight between David Carradine and an Indian in a saloon was one of the most visceral of its kind I've ever seen. And, holy sh!t, the doomed Northfield, Minnesota raid may be one of the best movie shootouts of all time. I mean that 100% honestly. It's probably because it feels like it was guest directed by Sam Peckinpah. And no, that's not an exaggeration. I was going to give this film a 5/10, but that gun fight raised it a point.

6/10

F****** Bunnies: Teemu Niukkanen

For a film with exactly two jokes, Teemu Niukkanen's new short F****** Bunnies isn't half bad. The first joke makes up the entire film: a group of polygamous, Satan-worshipping sex maniacs move next door to a respectable Finnish couple. The Satan worshipers are led by Maki, an invariably polite patriarch who could be mistaken for Ned Flanders if not for the face paint. Of course, they end up teaching the straight-laced Finnish couple how to be kind and accepting. We've all seen variations of this joke before. But it's still done well enough to make us not care. The second joke is a punchline regarding Maki's insatiable appetite for carrots. It's admittedly a bit of a dud.

Suck It Up: Jordan Canning

Full disclosure: I'm not giving Jordan Canning's Suck It Up a rating because I watched a work-print that hadn't been completely polished yet in terms of coloring and audio tracks/levels. But even if I had seen the completed version, I doubt I would have liked it. It's a mean film about mean, unlikable people. It follows two young women--a self-destructing alcoholic, the other a young professional--who retreat to a rural cabin to get over their combined grief over the loss of a young man who was, respectively, their brother and lover. It's an interesting set-up: one's a woman who can't accept love, the other is one who can't really express love. But both try to help each other. But they spend the entire film being horrific and nasty towards each other. There's one scene about two-thirds of the way through that would have ended the friendship between any two actual human beings: the alcoholic tricks the professional into drinking lemonade laced with MDMA a mere thirty minutes before a life-changing job interview. Again, if this film had been about actual human beings, it would have ended right there, the professional driving away and cutting the alcoholic out of her life. But no, this is a film about forgiveness, so after literally fighting each other (and falling into a mud-wrestling ring in the process because this movie hates you) they make up all cheerful and happily. Bullsh!t. I don't believe their friendship. I don't believe their reconciliation. I don't believe any of it.

Peshmerga: Bernard-Henri Lévy

To read this review, go to: https://unseenfilms.blogspot.com/2017/01/peshmerga-2016-new-york-jewish-film_16.html.

5/10

The Night of the Generals: Anatole Litvak

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/the-night-of-the-generals/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=The%20Night%20of%20the%20Generals%20May%20Be%20Bloated,%20But%20Still%20Effective.

7/10

The Son of Joseph: Eugène Green

To read this, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-the-son-of-joseph/95144.

6/10

Neck and Neck: Shaun Clark

I can say with complete, unhesitating certainty that I have never in my life seen a Shakespearean adaptation quite like Shaun Clark's Neck and Neck. Boiling down the Bard's classic tragedy Othello to its barest components, the film tells the central story in about 5 minutes. Using expressive animation, title cards, and brief real-life footage of a human mouth, the film makes the Moor's internal anxieties external in a colorful, shocking phantasm. It sounds simple. But its effect is anything but.

Autohead: Rohit Mittal

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/netflix-hidden-gem-92-autohead/.

8/10

Happiness: Todd Solondz

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when Todd Solondz's Happiness first premiered at Cannes. I wonder what it was like. Were they shocked by something so nihilistic and uncomfortable that even today it seems like the most cringe-inducing movie ever made? Or did they hate it simply because it dealt frankly with issues like pedophilia? Yeesh...and I thought Solondz's Wiener-Dog (2016) was a tough sit. But I think this remains his most challenging and devastating film. Solondz's menagerie of human grotesques--child molesters, murderers, sadomasochistic perverts--all seem vividly realized and, perhaps most disturbing of all, sympathetic. The most unlikable characters in the film are, respectively, a wife-beater who entraps one of the main characters with an affair, and one of that woman's sisters who wishes she had been raped as a children so her writing could have more authenticity. I'm especially curious with this last one: she seems the progenitor of the self-satisfied and snooty film students in Wiener-Dog. I love how Solondz's biggest beef seems to be with other artists. Not that I blame him. Did you see some of the films that got passed off as great this past New York Film Festival?

9/10

The Parent Trap: David Swift

My, but isn't David Swift's The Parent Trap about 50 gallons of pure, gooey sap? It's about as harmless and inoffensive a family comedy as can be. That's not necessarily a sin, but what kills me about the film is that it's so poorly paced that the proceedings get bogged down in the sugary swamp. At over two hours long, it feels about 30 minutes too long. (How odd, considering that Nancy Meyers' 1998 remake with Lindsay Lohan was exactly as long, but for some reason I remember it feeling a lot shorter. And I watched that film a lot when I was a kid.) Hayley Mills is fine, but after a while her aw-shucks persona becomes overbearing. She had that habit a lot of child actors from the time period had: they talked and behaved like miniaturized adults, not children. No matter how comforting I find the aesthetic of 50s and 60s Disney family films--I think it has something to do with the bright, pastel colors and ubiquitous flat lighting--this film was just a snooze. By the way, did anybody else notice that the scene where Mills plays the guitar was one of the most hilariously faked I-can-totally-play-guitar scenes ever? She doesn't even make chords! She just strums an open guitar and different chords come out!

5/10

The Ardennes: Robin Pront

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-the-ardennes/94530.

7/10

Bee Movie: Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

Watching Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner's Bee Movie was like an out-of-body experience. It was like watching a movie made up entirely of the kind of stupid jokes middle schoolers make with each other while on a sugar high while at a school dance. It's nothing but stupid puns, preposterous world-building, and horrific misuses of terrific actors. (Oh John Goodman...you didn't deserve that...) It doesn't help that Jerry Seinfeld plays a twentysomething bee while being obviously in his early fifties. It would be like getting Sean Connery to voice over a schoolboy. And yet, the film is compulsively watchable, much in the same way that a car pile-up is. You just can't believe that what you're watching is real.

4/10

Extraordinary Tales: Raul Garcia

Raul Garcia's Extraordinary Tales is two things: a passion project and an animated anthology film of five different Edgar Allan Poe stories. As the former, it succeeds brilliantly. There isn't a frame in the whole film that isn't drenched with a deep, whole-hearted love of the subject matter and its creator. But as the latter, it's so-so. There's really no way to properly talk about it without discussing all five parts. So...here we go:

1) The Fall of the House of Usher, as narrated by Christopher Lee. Delicious and atmospheric. But I'm not sure if the art style fit.

2) The Tell-Tale Heart, as narrated by Bela Lugosi. This is easily the best section, partly because it re-purposes a badly degraded audio recording of Lugosi, partly because of the jaw-dropping art inspired by Alberto Breccia. Absolutely stunning.

3) The Facts in the Cast of M. Valdemar, as narrated by Julian Sands. I had never heard of this story before. But thanks to this wonderful segment, aided by old school pulp comic book art, I think I may have to read it immediately.

4) The Pit and the Pendulum, as narrated by Guillermo Del Toro. I wish this was an audiobook: Del Toro is pitch-perfect for the role, the bland 3D CGI feels phoned in.

5) The Masque of the Red Death, as narrated by...nobody. It's mostly silent although Roger Corman makes a guest voice appearance as Prince Prospero. The dark, painterly artistic style is luscious, but I fear that people unfamiliar with the story will understand what's going on.

I could take or leave the narrative segments in-between each story where the ghost of Poe in raven form, voiced by Stephen Hughes, converses with an anthropomorphization of Death.

6/10