Derek Jarman delves into the homoerotic subtext of Caravaggio’s paintings as well as muses on the possible romantic entanglement with one of his models and the model’s wife, in a movie that competes with the original paintings for visual splendor with superb production design. It also contains a calculated anachronistic quality that collapses past and present (electronics, magazines, and cars appearing to distort the mythic quality of the historical context, applying its same visual representations to today). And Sean Bean dies again.
Chilean director Ruiz takes on the post-impressionist painter’s biography, but he’s more interested in figures and ideas real and unreal surrounding the character of Klimt than his actual life story, resulting in a heady drama that feels more like one too many glasses of wine than cerebral. The best parts are when Ruiz keeps the camera spinning and plays with shadows and mirrors, but this is not the best example of either his skill as a director nor the genre of doppelganger/mysterious appearances narratives.
Christopher Nolan’s debut rode in with the tide of neo-noir thrillers by stylish young directors with an eye on MTV editing and an ear for ’40s dialog. What is striking about this particular project is how Nolan makes clear to make his ideas big, even though here he’s managed to shore them in to a sheer 1hr10m. Also weird to see a character named Cobb (Inception) and a Batman symbol on the door to the protagonist’s apartment, which makes you wonder what other minutia from the film will show up in other features.
Cracked.com columnist David Wong got his start with a cultastic horror comedy novel with its spoiler-mugging title that he delivered on an blog until it went viral and got published. Don Coscarelli of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep fame picked it up and fell in love with it, and got Paul Giamatti so interested that Giamatti even produced it. So if you’re wondering why everyone’s all excited, it’s because of psychedelic time traveling gore-induced profanity-laced alt-universe skipping toilet humor, essentially what would happen if The Dude got into something a little harder and from a different dimension.
The French have really been killing it with cat-based feature length hand-drawn animations recently, with this and A Cat in Paris coming out relatively close together (within a couple of years). The Rabbi’s Cat is more adult though, as a Algerian cat gifted with speech makes his sardonic and explicit opinions about sex, religion, and politics known throughout a pre-WWII picaresque journey that takes him from the multiethnic streets of his home city to the tented camps of extremist Muslims on his and his Rabbi’s search for a hidden Jerusalem.
Old mugs Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin chew geriatric scenery as three stand up guys enjoying a midnight joyride around town as they burn out their last whims. Everything goes better than expected! But it’s bittersweet, of course.
A cult classic if it ever gets past the inertia of low expectations, Dredd is a surprisingly tightly scripted and paced story with detailed backgrounds and visual effects. What pushes it into a whole new experience is the use of Slo Mo (the drug, though that affects the action as well) and an unnerving battle over mind control.
The HP Lovecraft Historical Society does a great job recreating a 20s era look and Lovecraft’s stories’ feel, though for a silent movie it is rather ‘talky’, with an abundance of dreams within flashbacks within flashbacks and intertitles drawn straight from the original texts.
Finally Bill Plympton got everything together to make a feature length, and for fans of his work it doesn’t disappoint. New people will be brought into some pretty strange territory as a listless alcoholic jerk ends up sprouting wings and a conscience he can’t physically control, which sets in order an increasingly surreal series of events as more and more characters start to vie for the power the wings bring him.
This late silent era adventure features everything from gorgeous effects straight from the tradition of Melies to massive-scale set and production design that overshadows Griffith’s Intolerance. Fairbanks’ every pantomime is a flex of his acrobatic muscles and the story briskly covers a lot of territory over its two and a half plus hours. Basically this is the type of swashbuckling movie nostalgically referred to in movies like Singin in the Rain and The Artist, but in their loving mocking they don’t accurately represent the embrace of its own phantasm that this movie has.
