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KevynKnox
Member since 3/28/2009, last signed in awhile ago.
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Movies
Peter and Vandy
Easy Virtue
Summer Hours
Died Young Stayed Pretty
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Taking Woodstock
TAKING WOODSTOCK a film review
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"(This review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 08/30/09) Perhaps Ang Lee’s new film is quite the idealized look at its Woodstock subject. A dream of what it was instead of what it really was. An almost too-perfect look back at the seminal rock concert event of forty years ago. And perhaps too, Lee’s film is riddled with cliched caricatures. Emile Hirsch’s flash-backing Vietnam vet. Imelda Staunton’s Ukrainian battalion of a mother. The tough-as-nails ex-marine drag queen played with a nudge and a smirk by Liev Schreiber. The gaggle of flower children actors living in the barn and all those acid-eating hippies a half a million strong. But none of these flaws, mostly of the superficial variety, manage to change the fact that Taking Woodstock is a fun movie to watch. Perhaps Lee’s choice of far-off idealization was a conscious choice. After all, this is not the story of Woodstock itself (for that go and rent the 1970 documentary on the co ... "
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Easy Virtue
EASY VIRTUE a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 09/01/09) Pretentious, acerbic English wit Noel Coward has always been known as a diva of sorts - the first pop star if you will - so the quite frivolous air of Stephan Elliott's cover version of the playwright's Easy Virtue should come as no surprise indeed. Playing as some sort of strange melange of sit-com, music video and heady satire of the rich, Elliott's film, though a bit too obvious and fluffy at times (too many problems are left unresolved or resolved without explanation) is wracked with fun, flippant frivolity. And at the heart of all this biting burlesque are a trio of performances that run the spectrum from hilariously vitriolic to delightfully unexpected to surprisingly endearing. First up is Jessica Biel as Larita, an American racecar driver and adventuress who is running from a shady past into the arms of a well-to-do young Brit named John Whitaker. Their quickie surprise marriage is sure to upset John's ... "
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Summer Hours
SUMMER HOURS a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/22/09) There is a moment in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours when a father is showing his teenage son a pair of paintings hanging in his mother's country home. To the father's chagrin, the boy reacts by saying they are from another time. This too can be said of Assayas' new film. It is of another time. Away from the maddening present, Summer Hours is of another age, and it could be argued that the film is also of another director than Assayas. At least of what we know of Assayas. Starring the intense triumvirate of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier, Summer Hours is an almost complete departure of sorts for the director. Usually delving deep in the quite claustrophobic industrial urban techno-thriller of the modern Parisian underground, both of its outcasts and of its artists, he hands us instead a beautifully and elegantly shot, lushly panoramic vista of a family, already disheveled by ... "
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Died Young Stayed Pretty
DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY a fil ...
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/21/09) Eileen Yaghoobian's doc about the underground art movement that surrounds a group of unknown graphic artists who create rock posters for unknown (or at least once unknown) bands is scattershot, disorderly and a wholly erratic clusterfuck of a movie. And that is exactly what it should be. The interestingly titled Died Young, Stayed Pretty is the story of a very loose band of underground rock poster artists throughout the continent - in places like Seattle, Austin, Chicago, North Carolina, Minneapolis, Canada - and their ideas on not just the rock world (or the death of it as some will rant on about) but also society, politics and the theory that Elvis was a raging queen who wanted to be Captain Marvel. The film is an array of misfit talking heads telling their stories to Yaghoobian - and anyone else who will listen. The lines of communication work like a stream-of-consciousness rave and Yaghoobian uses this di ... "
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The Hurt Locker
THE HURT LOCKER a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/19/09) There has been a veritable onslaught of Iraq war movies over the past few years. Both of the dramatic variety (Jarhead, The Kingdom, Redacted, Stop-Loss) and the documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11, Voices of Iraq, No End in Sight). Some have been pro-America. Most have been anti-war. Some gung-ho chest-thumping, some thought-inducing and philosophical. The one thing they all have in common is their attempt to document, from a non-fiction or fictionalized viewpoint, an event so fresh in moviegoers minds that it is still actually going on to this very day. What Kathryn Bigelow's new film, The Hurt Locker does, is take a completely different stand on the subject. Without seeming to be pro or anti anything, The Hurt Locker acts as a completely apolitical war film. What Bigelow shows is a group of three men, a bomb disposal crew, going through their daily routine in the craggled streets and bombed-out countryside o ... "
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Cheri
CHERI a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/18/09) There is a shot at the very end of Stephen Frears' Chéri, where Michelle Pfeiffer stares into the camera, not a discernible speck of make-up on the 50 year old actress's face. This final shot, before the credits roll, sums up all that this film could have been, if only Frears' wasn't afraid to take his characters to the brink and back - just as Colette had done almost 90 years ago. The film's poster tagline asks us to engage in a wicked game of seduction. If only Frears had the nerve to allow us to do so. Based on the Colette novels, Chéri & The Last of Chéri and set in pre-World War I Paris, Frears has the great opportunity to delve into the biting, acerbic mannerisms of said Parisian society just as he and screenwriter Christopher Hampton had done so shrewdly with their eighteenth century-set Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons some 20 years ago. Unfortunately for us and for the actors ... "
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Teeth
TEETH a film review
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"(this review was first published at Plume-Noire on 03/02/09) Teeth is a mish-mash of genre monikers, from female empowerment movie to coming-of-age saga to black comedy-horror to rape & revenge drama to Lynchian suburban melodrama. Pop artist fil Mitchell Lichtenstein gives us the story of Dawn, a white picket fence pretty young girl coping with growing up "pure and virginal" in a world obsessed with sexual innuendo around each and every corner. This includes her own house as her lecherous big bad wolf epitome'd stepbrother sniffs after her with tongue a-flicking. After a date gone horribly, horribly awry, Dawn finds out that she is cursed with the mythical mutation known as "vaginal dentata" - aka she's got razor sharp teeth in her pussy, yo! The result is that Teeth ends up being a quirky (how could it not be?), sunnily macabre work of neo-candy pop horror that can in no way whatsoever be watched by anyone of the male gender without constant squirming and shuffling about in w ... "
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Revanche
REVANCHE a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 06/21/09) With its moody temperament and (almost) Eastern European roots, Austrian filmmaker Gotz Spielmann's Revanche plays out as high tragedy worthy of Chekhov or Turgenev, or perhaps Tarkovsky or Bresson (or Cassavetes in an American turn) but always with a seeming oblivious wink toward its audience. This wink (intentional or not) works both in the film's favor for a while and as the ultimate let down when all is said and done. Though the story of two low rent lovers (played superbly by Johannas Krisch and Irina Potapenko) trying to escape the mundane humiliations of their urban lives by robbing a bank and heading for the proverbial hills, Revanche, as its title suggests, is essentially a tale of inevitable revenge after the aforementioned robbery goes tragically awry. This revenge theme works throughout most of the film, and through the glassy eyes of its antagonist, in perpetual foreshadowing motion, we see the ug ... "
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28 Weeks Later
28 WEEKS LATER a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 05/13/07) Many have queried "Why even make 28 Weeks Later?", comparing it to the original 28 Days Later, these naysayers have called the film exploitive and pandering. Well, duh?! What else is a good flesh-eating zombie flick other than exploitive and pandering? Hell, the very genre itself could be parenthetically subtitle (Exploitive & Pandering). So I don't know what they are talking about with their criticisms, because exploitive and pander, well that's what it's all about kiddies. Taking up the story line of the first film, where, while attempting to liberate a lab full of test monkeys from man's oppression, a group of animal rights activists unwittingly unleash the experimental Rage virus upon the island of Great Britain and 28 days later, a coma patient awakes in an abandoned hospital ward only to find himself running from gangs of flesh-devouring monstrosities who are really really really fucking hungry, 28 W ... "
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Wendy and Lucy
WENDY AND LUCY a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/17/08) Kelly Reichardt's latest ode to the Pacific northwest, Wendy and Lucy, much like the filmmaker's previous work, Old Joy, is a veritable paean to the disenfranchised of America. To all those who are eaten up by the system and who never, for whatever reason (and none is ever given here) become what society expects them to be. To those on the fringe of America. Outcasts and throw-aways. Not bad people. Not lesser people. Simply people who do not know where they belong, where they fit in. This film, like Old Joy is a sad love song of sorts, sung to those for whom the idea of the American dream simply does not exist. It is one of these wayward "untouchables", a young woman named Wendy, who we follow along her path of disillusionment. With the most grotesque and quite perverse curiosity, like watching a strange exotic animal in a zoo, never daring to think, there but for the grace of God go I, we watch. We watch as ... "
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Cargo 200
CARGO 200 a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 01/06/09) Positioned somewhere between the dank environs of Tarkovsky and Michael Haneke and the torture cinema of Eli Roth and his "Splat Pack" brethren, this based-on-real-events political allegory-cum-horror story of 1984 USSR, replete with Huxley's squat gray buildings and a properly proportional festooning of decaying landscapes and milky omnipresent clouds, Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200 is at heart, an anti-communist era diatribe, showing with a matter-of-fact realism the ugly corrupt nightmare world that was the Soviet Union (Balabanov said in a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview, "I show what filth we live in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards.") but can also feel right at home, thanks to its severing second half, as some sort of Soviet Chainsaw Massacre. Not to give away to much of the plot - the gradual build-up to the terrifying final act is part of the fun (though fun is hardly the appropriate word when de ... "
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Let the Right One In
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN a film review
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 12/07/08) With a chilly Scandinavian breeze blowing across the screen, and a haunting cinematic foreshadowing rap-rap-rapping at our brain, we see a pale young boy watching from his window as two mysterious figures, an older man and a young girl about the boy's own age, exit a cab and enter his apartment building late at night. We find out later, though it comes as no surprise since the film is billed as such, that the young girl is a creature who subsists on human blood (she refuses the moniker vampire) and the older man is her father/caretaker, doomed with the dubious task of procuring "food" for his hungry daughter. This is the start of a surprisingly simple yet overtly complex little film that both charms and thrills, lulls and titillates, snugs and bugs throughout. Layered with the frosty moodiness one might expect from the cinematic northern environs of Sweden - not far from the Danish homeland of Dreyer and his v ... "
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