BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Still catching up on many of the event films as the Philadelphia Film Festival moves into its second week. I caught Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, and as a fan was a little underwhelmed, particularly by the underwritten second half. The first half was a treat for the director’s fans, bringing together another stellar cast including, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Udo Kier, John Hurt, Alexander and Stellan Skarsgard as father and son and the sad-eyed Kirstin Dunst for a wedding scene to rival The Deer Hunter. The second post-wedding act may have seemed short on incident but the […]
CINEMA: Philadelphia Film Festival Opening Weekend
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Philadelphia Film Festival is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with a festival of over 150 films running through November 3rd. This is the first weekend of the festival and there will be screenings Saturday and Sunday of major new works from The Duplas Brothers, (Jeff, Who Lives at Home with Jason Siegel and Susan Sarandon), the Dardenne Brothers (The Kid with the Bike), David Cronenberg (Viggo Mortensen as Freud in A Dangerous Method), Lar von Trier’s sci-fi apocalypse film Melancholia (with Kirsten Dunst), and Wim Wenders’ new 3-D dance documentary (Pima), plus revivals of the […]
CINEMA: Et Tu Clooney?
THE IDES OF MARCH (2011, directed by George Clooney, 101 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC George Clooney has been quite public about his interest in politics and with 2006’s network news drama Good Night and Good Luck, he has already directed one of the best political films in the last decade. Sure, he directed the scoreless football comedy Leatherheads since then, but a full-on political drama from the actor/director sounds like a sure thing. Yet while The Ides of March, co-written by Clooney and his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov, is dependably diverting, it is also a sadly […]
CINEMA: Highway 61 Revisited
BY ALEX POTTER Two-Lane Blacktop, starring a pre-fame James Taylor and a post-fame Dennis Wilson, has been called the quintessential road movie. The mysterious, stoic and taciturn Driver (the progenitor of Ryan Gosling’s The Driver character in Drive?) is played by Taylor and his equally mysterious and stoic sidekick, The Mechanic, is played by Wilson. Director Monte Hellman, who went on to co-produce such celebrated indie films such as Reservoir Dogs and Buffalo ’66, deliberately selected non-actors to portray the Driver and the Mechanic. Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and James Caan were all interested in the role that the […]
CINEMA: The Young And The Restless
RESTLESS (2011, directed by Gus Van Sant, 91 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this whimsical drama about teens whose lives are touched by death should be given the generic title Restless but it perfectly describes my anxiousness as I slowly accepted that this teen weepie wasn’t going to veer away from its simplistic, melodramatic course. It is only the name of director Gus Van Sant that stirred any optimism for a premise that sounds like a Lifetime Network weeper, but by the halfway mark it became obvious that […]
CINEMA: Over Drive
DRIVE (2011, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, 100 minutes, U.S.) BELLFLOWER (2011, directed by Evan Glodell, 106 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC After the breathtaking car chase that kicks off director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the soundtrack plays some very 80s retro synth pop as the opening credits glide by in hot pink. The shade of pink brings to mind cotton candy as the summer fades, and like the fluorescent, feathery confection, Drive hits the sweet spot with a sugary rush, a dazzling mask disguising the fact that its nutritional value is near zero. But what kind of […]
RIP: Vaya Con Dios Jose Vento
From our partners in media crime over at Scrapple TV.
CINEMA: Destination Further
Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s MAGIC TRIP is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to […]
CINEMA: Too Much Monkey Business
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011, directed by Rupert Wyatt, 105 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Rise of the Planet of the Apes brings another apocalypse to our late summer, taking a new twist on the still-kicking 43 year-old franchise. A predictable techno-thriller, Rise is aggressively conventional, which is a shame, not just because the original remains such a weird piece of work but because there’s some intriguingly dark details in this new script that never quite get teased out. Written by the team of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (who haven’t seen a script produced since 1997’s […]
CINEMA: When Worlds Collide
ANOTHER EARTH (2011, directed by Mike Cahill, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Another Earth is an under-baked, overly-somber indie drama that attempts to enliven its paper-thin premise with an overlay of spiritual sci-fi. While both the drama and the fantastical elements are under-developed and poorly-executed, this independently-produced Sundance award winner has a deep well of earnestness that gives the film its own unique cock-eyed passion. Like the low-budget Christian-themed films that played the church circuit in the 70s and 80s, Another Earth‘s soggy storytelling may skirt believability yet it casts an odd spell because it believes […]
CINEMA: Space Oddity
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976, directed by Nicholas Roeg, 139 minutes, U.K.) * BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC True to its title, The Man Who Fell To Earth begins with David Bowie’s alien Newton crashing down from the sky in his alien vessel. It isn’t just Newton, Nicholas Roeg’s experimental sci-fi epic also seems like an alien document sent from a far-off place, that place being the mid-1970s. Before Star Wars‘ arrival, mid-70s sci-fi was still heavily influenced by the mystical vagaries of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Roeg’s film, which brought rock phenomenon David Bowie to the […]
CINEMA: Meat The Press
TABLOID (2010, directed by Errol Morris, 88 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Documentary master Errol Morris’ last couple features were such dark tales that the timing seems right for the good-natured naughtiness of his new film, Tabloid. The still-evolving scandal around Rupert Murdoch and the News of the World threatens to give this film a contemporary resonance but no, Tabloid‘s tale of true love gone criminally awry doesn’t reflect on the the doings of the rabid press. Instead, Morris uses his all-powerful Interrotron to examine Joyce McKinney, the one-time sex pot at the center of the 1977 sex […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Blood
BY ALEX POTTER Terrence Malick averages about one film every seven years, but it’s always worth the wait — he is widely regarded as a director’s director and A-List actors wait in line to work with him. He has not made a film that critics don’t consider great. His new one, Tree Of Life is no exception. If you like that, you’ll like Badlands, Malik’s bleak, beautiful 1973 directorial debut, starring a young and very James Dean-esque Martin Sheen and the always-great Sissy Spacek as young lovers on a killing spree across the American prairie. Set in the Badlands of […]