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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Thirst, Humpday, and oodles more.
- What We're Watching: Unmistaken Child, Proteus, Ballast.
- Explore: Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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Oldboy director Park Chan-wook's latest operatic treat does nothing to change his reputation as one of the world's most provocative filmmakers. Time's Richard Corliss wrote: "Blending plot elements of Double Indemnity and Natural Born Killers with the ripe sensuality of Coppola's take on Dracula, the film should make audiences sit up in startled pleasure, as if they'd just received the most luscious neck-bite." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it "a brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story." |
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Lynn Shelton's "Humpday carefully raises the stakes until it hits a finale loaded with humor, tenderness, and delicious ambiguity," wrote Scott Tobias, adding, "It’s like Old Joy by way of Judd Apatow." Shawn Levy wrote that the "modest Humpday capture[s] the lives of its protagonists more credibly than any Hollywood-manufactured comedy of recent vintage." GC's Aaron Hillis sat down to chat with Shelton and co-stars Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard for a podcast earlier this year. |
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You don't necessarily have to believe in reincarnation to practice Buddhism, nor to appreciate Unmistaken Child (2008), an engaging documentary on this subject by Israeli director Nati Baratz. Now out on DVD after a very brief outing in theaters, this film was shot beautifully by a small crew (often just Baratz himself) who serve as our proverbial "fly on the wall," allowing us incredible access into the inner workings of the Tibetan Buddhist system of picking reincarnated lamas... Read more >> |
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What a little gem is Proteus, which brings together a profusion of seeming opposites -- science and art, history and fantasy, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the 1872 voyage of HMS Challenger-- that in reality work in tandem toward the betterment of our globe. Writer/director David Lebrun's model documentary... read review >> |
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With Ballast, writer/director Lance Hammer tells a story about a broken African-American family in Mississippi's Delta: a man commits suicide and his surviving twin brother Lawrence ( Micheal J. Smith Sr.) finds himself alone, in charge of their little convenience store and dealing with his angry sister-in-law Marlee ( Tarra Riggs), who understandably has mixed emotions about seeing him. Lawrence's nephew James (JimMyron Ross) is possibly even more alone, having become involved with local drug dealers while his mother is away working all the time. Hammer lets us in on these details a little at a time, rather than spelling it all out. The setting is... Read more >> |
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Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's sixth feature and third to be pre-judged as a "Wes Anderson" film—a calcified pejorative often bearing little relation to what the movies are actually like. A "Wes Anderson movie," we're given to understand, is a series of candy-colored rectangular sets and frames boxing in little more than statically quirky characters. Vadim Rizov takes aim at the anti-Anderson crowd in his write-up for the Film of the Week. More >>
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