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Film
of the Week: Tabu.
Miguel Gomes' third feature Tabu
is as different from his first two (as yet, he has no recurring
stylistic tics) as it is from any other film this year. What it shares
with 2004's severely patience-testing The
Face You Deserve (which prompted
one interviewer to ask,
verbatim, "what the fuck") and 2008's delightful Our
Beloved Month of August is
severe structural separation. Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Looper, The Words.
- What
We're Watching: Cosmopolis.
- Explore:
RETRO ACTIVE: Krull, FILM
OF THE WEEK: Consuming
Spirits.
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Listed
in Steve
Dollar's "Best of 2012: Lo-Fi
Sci-Fi" list, Looper
draws inspiration from two titans who passed this year, Chris
Marker (La
jetée)
and the stories and novels of Ray
Bradbury, "and was as
surpassingly adroit a tribute to both men as anyone could ever expect
to encounter in Multiplex America." A critic favorite this year, Joe
Morgenstern praises its
"pounding action, elegant style, steady-state suspense, marvelous
acting and, despite that droll pooh-poohing every now and then,
haunting explorations of youth, age and personal destiny. It's a lot to
claim for a sci-fi thriller, but I was blown away." Also available for
rent on Blu-Ray.
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Inhabiting
a similar role from 2011's Limitless,
Bradley Cooper plays a struggling writer who chooses to plagiarise an
old manuscript in this romantic drama also starring Zoe Saldana, Jeremy
Irons and Olivia Wilde."Bradley Cooper...has never been so good, so
compelling. Zoe Saldana, shedding her blue epidermis of Avatar, is
grounded in the real world, in a relationship that has its ups, its
downs, its desperation. And Jeremy Irons, aged-up perhaps too much to
play, yes, 'the Old Man,' is riveting nonetheless - and devilishly
mischievous," writes Steven
Rea. |
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One afternoon in the late '00s, when I was sitting in Tom &
Jerry's bar on Elizabeth Street waiting to talk to a director about his
apocalyptic rat-zombie movie, the bartender brought up the subject of Robert
Pattinson. The Twilight
star had been in New York City, just trying to take it easy, and
wandered in for a few beers one day. Tom & Jerry's isn't
exactly on the Twihard radar, after all. It's a place where directors
of apocalyptic rat-zombie movies hang out. Therefore, a safe haven for
the actor, who could hardly go anywhere without being recognized. "He's
a good guy," the bartender said, then lamented that his customer was
only good for a couple of pints. It wasn't long before the phone rang.
Someone had tweeted a Pattinson sighting at Tom & Jerry's. "I
told him he better make a run for it." Read
more >> |
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Cruise-in'
for a Bruisin'. When Tom
Cruise wants to make things
interesting for himself, he usually goes in for disfigurement. The
cocksure top gun he embodied as a younger man often has yielded to an
ugly underbelly in the latter half of his career. I don't mean only his
movie-stealing cameo as the corpulent, hip-hopping Hollywood suit Lev
Grossman in Tropic
Thunder.
Read
more >>
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[This
week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the based-on-real-life
tsunami disaster drama The Impossible.] A Roger
Corman-produced disaster film
buried by its own clichéd cheesiness, Avalanche
is ludicrous to the point of playing like a parody. As its title makes
bluntly clear, Corey
Allen's film is fixated on
delivering terror via a massive snow slide... Read
more >>
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FILM
OF THE WEEK:
Barbara. Christian
Petzold's last film Dreileben:
Beats Being Dead centered on a
nurse who takes up with a girl after he's seen her performing fellatio
in a forest; sex, surveillance and shrubbery again intersect in Barbara.
The title character ( Nina
Hoss, in her fifth Petzold film)
is a doctor who's been sent down from Berlin to an unnamed provincial
area near the Baltic Sea, her punishment for applying for a visa to
exit the country. Read
more >>
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Happy
New Year!
Podcasts!
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