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Thursday's
the big day: Oscar Day, when the nominations for the 85th Academy
Awards will be announced. Pundits seem to agree on the obvious picks.
What about the actors who are likely to slide under the radar of the
voting body's notoriously square tastes? If any category shows a
tendency to flexibility, it's Best Performance by an Actor or Actress
in a Supporting Role. In a new "Best of 2012" list, Steve Dollar picks
this year's best, most underrated supporting performances. Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Frankenweenie, Dredd.
- What
We're Watching: Compliance. Whores' Glory.
- Explore:
FILM
OF THE WEEK:
Promised Land, RETRO
ACTIVE: Djanjo Kill...If You
Live, Shoot!
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A
black-and-white throwback to both Director Tim Burton's childhood and
Universal horror era movie making, Frankenweenie
is "a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his
undead dog," writes Boston Globe's Ty
Burr, who also notes the film's
history, starting as a 30-minute live-action short made in 1984 that
lead to Burton's dismissal from Disney. "Along with Edward Scissorhands
and Ed Wood,
it’s his most sustained, consistent work, and it builds
naturally to a climax at the local town fair that is a thing of
eldritch farce." Richard
Corliss at Time Magazine calls
it "the year's most inventive, endearing animated feature." |
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"Pitched
at the right level to please original fans, but still slick and
accessible enough to attract new ones, Dredd
feels like a smart and muscular addition to the sci-fi action genre,"
notes The
Hollywood Reporter. In a world
of sup bar reboots, Dredd is getting high marks, with WSJ's Joe
Morgenstern writing, "this
particularly violent thriller is distinguished by elegant design.
What's familiar about the film is the grunge concatenation of
firepower, body count and gross-out abuse of all-too-tender flesh.
What's exceptional is the orchestration of color, form, light and dark
(lots of dark)."
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In
April, ten Portland youths performed a quick hit-and-run clothing raid
on a Nordstrom's, collaring six jackets in under two minutes. One
employee's comment board response (recorded, unfortunately, by racist
website WND.com,
but of note despite the source) spoke volumes about minimum-wage
morale. "I have to wonder why you think that we care?" wrote
Nordstorm's employee Jacob Handleman. "Things like this make work more
interesting and I hold no ill-will toward anyone in this group. Our
security personnel spend more time concerned with employees than
clientele." Craig
Zobel's second feature Compliance
considers a particularly dire case of employees turning on each other
in a quest for status. Read more >> |
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At
this moment, Michael
Glawogger is cinema's most
talented exploitation artist. "Exploitation" doesn't mean taking
advantage of subjects who don't understand what he's filming, at least
in the usual sense: to make Whores'
Glory—a
self-proclaimed "triptych" on prostitution in Thailand, India and
Mexico—Glawogger made sure to visit
his subjects "10 times and hang out with them and stuff." This means Whores'
Glory's subjects got familiar
with Glawogger and what he was proposing to do (which included
promising not to widely distribute the film in their country).
Nonetheless, it's a strong, questionable, queasy-making movie, as
should be the case with a portrait of prostitution. Read
more >> |
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Natural Gus.
A third of the way through director Gus
Van Sant's Promised
Land,
natural gas company representative Steve Butler ( Matt
Damon) stands in front of a
gigantic American flag and tells the residents of McKinley (fictional
flyover country in an unnamed state) that fracking is basically safe
and signing over all their land for drilling is the only plausible
fiscal stop-gap to the end of agrarian America.
Read
more >>
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[This
week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Quentin Tarantino's
slavery-themed revisionist Spaghetti Western Django
Unchained.] Unrelated to Sergio
Corbucci's Django
(1966) save for its title, which was tacked on at the last second for
marketing purposes, Django
Kill... If You Live, Shoot!
takes the Spaghetti
Western into the realm of the
grotesque and surreal—and, in the process, proves to be one
of the genre's all-time unsung gems. Giulio
Questi's saga is a mishmash of
the biblical, the Shakespearean, and the outright peculiar, tracking an
unnamed Stranger ( Tomas
Milian)—ostensibly the
story's Django, though he never drags around a coffin.... Read
more >>
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