NEW YORK TIMES: CASEY AFFLECK wants to come clean. His new movie, “I’m Still Here,” was performance. Almost every bit of it. Including Joaquin Phoenix’s disturbing appearance on David Letterman’s late-night show in 2009, Mr. Affleck said in a candid interview at a cafe here on Thursday morning. “It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Mr. Affleck said. He was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Mr. Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in […]
CINEMA: Whatever Happened To Joaquin Phoenix?
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The film is full of dark, sometimes graphic scenes about the Academy Award-nominated Phoenix, whose decision to go for a music career and concurrent decline was fodder for late-night comics. In one scene, Phoenix banters about the irony of his life being depicted in film, when he is trying to get away from the industry. The film follows Phoenix to his last acting and press events, where he grumbles that he “hates” acting. “I think everyone at some point in their life hates their jobs and the people they are around,” he says in opening scenes to explain […]
CINEMA: Spare Us The Cutter
MACHETE (2010, directed by Robert Rodriguez & Ethan Manquis, 105 minutes, U.S.) MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY #1 (2008, directed by Jean-François Richet, 133 minutes, France) SOUL KITCHEN (2009, directed by Fatih Akin, 99 minutes, Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC After twenty-five years of playing glowering bad guys, ex-con turned actor Danny Trejo has finally made the improbable move to leading man in Robert Rodriguez’s action film throw-back Machete. Carefully balanced between spoof and action vehicle, Machete delivers on the berserk carve-’em-up mayhem promised in the character’s original fake trailer made for the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse collaboration. Machete possesses a bullish […]
CINEMA: Happiness Is A Warm Gun
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT (2008, directed by Jean-François Richet, 113 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The first of a two-part robbing, shooting and killing jamboree, Mesrine: Killer Instinct is a dazzling vehicle for French superstar Vincent Cassel, Cassel burst into the scene in 1995 as the violent ghetto youth Vinz in the controversial La Haine and has shown himself to be surprisingly flexible in French productions and Hollywood films, appearing in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen and even providing a voice in Shrek. Like Bogart he has a face that can seem simultaneously handsome and homely and standing […]
CINEMA: Happiness Is A Warm Gun
LIFE DURING WARTIME (2009, directed by Todd Solondz, 98 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Todd Solondz returns to the unmoored characters from his 1998 film Happiness to find them further adrift in his latest feature, Life During Wartime. Resurrecting the sisters Joy, Trish and Helen from Happiness’ parade of sad sacks, Solondz again studies characters whose lives fall disappointingly short of where they imagine. It’s Joy’s journey that gives us a tour through these tortured souls’ live. Played by the meek-voiced Shirley Henderson, Joy travels down to Florida to reunite with her mother (veteran actress Renee Taylor) and […]
CINEMA: Still Tilda After All These Years
ORLANDO (1992, directed by Sally Potter, 93 minutes, U.K.) TRASH HUMPERS (2010, directed by Harmony Korine, 78 minutes, USA) BY DAN BUSKIRK Eighteen years ago, when I was a new resident of San Francisco, the date movie of the year was Sally Potter’s Orlando. Hip, literary, breezy and oozing with spectacle, it reveled in the type of feminist and gender issues on which the city built it’s reputation as the Gay Capitol of America. Orlando was released a gay lifetime ago, it originally had a lightly scandalous air which has all but dissipated now, yet as its theatrical re-release shows, […]
CINEMA: The Forever War
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Todd Solondz is a skinny guy with a shock of hair and a droning voice that’s oddly passionate. He writes deadpan comedies, the bleakest I’ve seen; his new film, Life During Wartime, is positively grueling. For better and worse, you’ll never experience anything like this movie. It’s a sequel to Solondz’s 1998 film Happiness, despite the fact that all the roles have been cast with different actors who aren’t much like their predecessors. The original focused on three disparate Jewish sisters living in New Jersey: one a mousy and miserable teacher; one the author of arty, titillating short […]
SCRAPPLE TV: Getting Lit With AP Ticker
New feature: AP Ticker does dramatic readings of song lyrics. We start off with Public Enemy’s “The Enemy Battle Hymn Of The Public.”
CINEMA: Less Than Zero
COUNTDOWN TO ZERO (2010, directed by Lucy Walker, 91 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Growing up in the seventies and eighties, primary school students were no longer ducking and covering yet the idea of nuclear annihilation from Russia still lingered as an imaginable possibility. That anxiety seemed to build to a fever pitch sometime around Reagan’s bluster and the 1983 broadcast of the ABC TV movie The Day After, then dissipated as the cold war came to a close. In recent years I’ve taught film appreciation to middle and high school students, where we’ve watched Matthew Broderick in […]
CINEMA: Tomorrow Never Knows
INCEPTION (2010, directed by Christopher Nolan, 148 minutes, U.S.) ENTER THE VOID (2009, directed by Gaspar Noé, 154 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I was maybe an hour into Inception before I found myself thinking, move over Last Airbender, this movie has got to be the biggest bomb of the summer. So convoluted the audience around me was snickering at the endless exposition, Inception’s action framework is stretched beyond all elasticity while Leonardo DiCaprio’s stroke-tempting intensity borders on parody. It was only after the movie that a fellow critic enlightened me the fact that the film had boasted […]
CINEMA: Through The Glass Darkly
AMER (2009, directed by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, 90 minutes, Belgium) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A beautiful woman alone in a spooky estate. A straight razor. The creaking sounds of black leather. All the elements of a giallo, the violent Italian crime thrillers of the seventies, are present in Amer,a homage to the form made by Belgian directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani. But it is merely the elements that are present because this experimental film leaves much of the form missing. Originally, directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento popularized the genre by featuring these foreboding elements […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With AP Ticker
AP says ‘good riddance’ to the Ducks, the Gulf spill and Mel G. Plus, the auspicious debut of our new sportscaster, Hot Carl!
CINEMA: Saints And Sinners
GONE WITH THE POPE (2010, directed by Duke Mitchell, 83 minutes, U.S.) THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY (2009, directed by Veiko Õunpuu, 110 minutes, Estonia) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Monday night’s screening of Gone With The Pope lived up to all its perverse promise. Where does one begin? The film was shot in 1976 but never assembled into a final cut by its director Duke Mitchell. Duke’s infamy began when he was the Dean Martin part of a pair of Martin and Lewis imitators known as “Mitchell and Petrillo” (their astonishing act can be seen in the 1952 film […]