Wonderful brief look back over at The A.V. Club at Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, still one of my favorite movies of all time. Whimsical, gorgeously shoot, this is essential 90s cinema that many overlooked in favor of Kar-Wai’s later In the Mood for Love. In the Mood is still wonderful, but it never quite connected with me tonally like Chungking Express did.
The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias:
French-Tunisian director Mabrouk El Mechri, working from a script he wrote with Frédéric Benudis and Christophe Turpin, pours these biographical details into a scenario that’s half hostage thriller, half Irma Vep-style meta-movie. And though the latter part is more compelling than the former, JCVD never forgets that Van Damme’s image is the focal point. El Mechri opens with the best shot of Van Damme’s career (and really, a legitimate candidate for any list of all-time great opening shots), a single take of the 47-year-old kicking, punching, shooting, and stabbing his way through a gauntlet of attackers, who come after him with guns, knives, grenades, even a flamethrower. The shot is ruined when the cheap set collapses at the end, but the young Chinese director has no sympathy for his exhausted middle-aged star: “Just because he brought John Woo to Hollywood doesn’t mean he can rub my dick with sandpaper.”
The movie has its weak points, but overall JCVD is very compelling (especially for someone like me who grew up loving Van Damme’s earlier work like Kickboxer and Bloodsport), both for that aforementioned opening fight scene and a legitimately moving six minute monologue Van Damme delivers partway through the film. There’s something about his presence that makes me root for a comeback out of direct to VOD purgatory.
One of my favorite films of the year gets the film study treatment in this informative video.
Look over De Niro’s best work in that 70s to 80s period; staggering output. But my how the mighty have fallen in recent years.
Sam Adams, writing for Indiewire:
In [Verge writer] Pierce’s rationale — or, more to the point, rationalization — downloading the movie in advance is like peeking at a band’s setlist before the concert…”The Expendables 3,” you see, “is meant not to be watched but to be experienced. As art becomes commoditized experience becomes the only thing worth paying for, and there’s evidence everywhere that we’ll pay for it when it’s worth it. We don’t want to pay for access, but we’ll gladly pay for experience.”
Of course, commodities are things you pay for. What Pierce really means by “commoditized” is “devalued,” and what he means by that is that since ‘The Expendables 3’ isn’t worth anything in the first place, there’s nothing wrong with taking a copy for yourself.
Working as a web developer/designer myself, I tend to support policies that push technology forward. But there’s no justification behind David Pierce flat out stealing a movie with the justification that it’s “access” over “experience”. Technology has limits; it’s worrisome to see Pierce, a senior writer at what’s normally a pretty solid tech news site, adopt this sort of blind “techno libertarianism” bent.
An informative video by Tony Zhou that outlines the techniques director Michael Bay resorts to again and again throughout his filmography. As Zhou illustrates, it’s distinctive, at times visually impressive, but overblown and overused to the point of exhaustion for the audience.
Grantland’s Wesley Morris on the 1994 summer movie season:
A couple of weeks after the release of Gump, James Cameron would deliver a more alarming battery of effects with True Lies, as well as a woman who’s treated almost as badly as Jenny. But Zemeckis’s movie was speaking to a generation of people out of both sides of its mouth. Baby Boomers needed their history and nostalgia served to them like baby food. Gump’s centrism could please everybody.
Peter Frase, writing for Jacobin on Bong Joon-Ho’s leftist political critique embedded within his Snowpiercer screenplay:
But the story Bong tells goes beyond that. It’s about the limitations of a revolution which merely takes over the existing social machinery rather than attempting to transcend it. And it’s all the more effective because the heart of that critique comes as a late surprise, from a character we might not expect.
The allegory is perhaps too general to root in any specific theory. But it evokes a tradition of critiques that grappled with the limitations of both reformist social democracy and Soviet Communism, which attempted to seize power and to ameliorate exploitation without really challenging capitalist labor as a system of alienation and domination.
Tasha Robinson at The Dissolve:
So maybe all the questions can boil down to this: Looking at a so-called Strong Female Character, would you—the writer, the director, the actor, the viewer—want to be her? Not want to prove you’re better than her, or to have her praise you or acknowledge your superiority. Action movies are all about wish-fulfillment. Does she fulfill any wishes for herself, rather than for other characters? When female characters are routinely “strong” enough to manage that, maybe they’ll make the “Strong Female Characters” term meaningful enough that it isn’t so often said sarcastically.
The prolific, brainy director has been profiled and interviewed in countless magazines. He’s a good subject, but the quality, usually due to the publication and questions asked, has run all over the place. That’s why I was a bit surprised that Esquire, of all magazines, had a knockout of a a Soderbergh interview. Smart, profane and frank. One example:
Esquire: After you won an Academy Award for Traffic, did you wrestle to keep your ego in check?
Soderbergh: No… What’s hilarious about it, ironically, and nobody will ever believe this… I was in the middle of shooting Ocean’s Eleven, which for me, as a director, was much harder. I just had to laugh. Best door prize ever. But I was literally set up to work the next morning. Sunday night was the Oscars. I flew to Vegas that night and I’m on set first thing Monday morning confronting a scene that I couldn’t figure out how to shoot. At the end of the day, the quote I use is “In the land of ideas, you are always renting.” The landlord can always go “Bye!” If you’re not humbled by that then you’re an idiot and you will fail. You will fail. The process of discovery or coming up with an idea is so resistant to formula.