Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****½

In 1968, director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell teamed up for If..., about an old, rigid English boys school attempting to mold young minds with strict control, obedience and punishment. The film had moments of absurd comedy and of drama, moments of stark realism and of blatant non-realism. Flipping back and forth from black-and-white to color footage doesn't make it any easier to pinpoint. But when it opened in that turbulent year, it tapped directly into the mood of the time and became a phenomenon, a cultural landmark. McDowell played Mick Travis, a free spirit who slowly realizes that he can't quite fit in. In the end, he and his cohorts attempt to take over the school with firearms. McDowell became a star in his first movie role, with his James Dean-type physicality, fearless and entrancing. If his confident stride didn't hypnotize you, his gleaming dagger-sharp eyes will. (Just check out his memorable entrance, swathed in black with a black hat and scarf around his face.)

After a stop to play the lead role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), McDowell approached Anderson about working together again. Anderson told him that good scripts don't grow on trees and that he needed to write his own, so McDowell concocted a yarn out of his own life story (even though he was only thirty). The screenwriter David Sherwin wrote the final script, and O Lucky Man! (1973) was born. It's as audacious as anything made in the 1970s, running three hours without much of a plot; it divided audiences to the same degree that If... united them.

Continue reading "O Lucky Man!" »

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Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Like all great love stories, Wristcutters starts out with a suicide. Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, Saved!) plays Zia, a young man so devastated from a recent break up he wakes up one morning, tidies his apartment, climbs into the tub and slashes his wrists. While drifting into death he fantasizes about his ex-girlfriend living the rest of her life in total devastation. Unfortunately, instead of being left to rest in peace, Zia wakes up in a Purgatory, a colorless wasteland inhabited by the entire population of people who ever committed suicide. Each of them is forced to live out what would have been the term of their natural life in a place described as "just like life, but crappier."

Zia then gets a minimum wage job at a pizzeria (called "Kamikaze Pizza" natch), constantly bickering with his aggressive roommate and spending most of his time staving off boredom too scared to off himself again for fear he'll wind up some place even worse. And in keeping with Croatian writer/director Goran Dukic's dark sense of humor, a disproportionate number of Russians are in residence.

Continue reading "Wristcutters: A Love Story" »

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Reviewer: Diana Slampyak
Rating (out of 5): ****

This funny, irreverent film by Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen (The Green Butchers, Flickering Lights, screenwriter of Mifune) will keep you laughing from its start, as soon as Adam (Ulrich Tomsen) steps off a bus, keys it as it passes by, and then meets Ivan (After the Wedding's Mads Mikkelsen). We immediately know Adam is a bad-ass con fresh out of prison, sent to Ivan's care for 'rehabilitation,' and that things will quickly go awry. Adam, you see, is a Neo-Nazi while Ivan, a devout reverend, is as Christian as they come.

Add to the mix the two other ex-cons, Gunner and Khalid, and a host of comedic clashes come to pass. Gunner is an alcoholic who's supposedly on the wagon, but who drinks every moment on screen. He steals Adam's mobile phone repeatedly, and gets a beating each time. Meanwhile, Khalid is a would-be reformed terrorist who nevertheless goes hunting for humans every chance he gets. Ivan turns a blind eye and claims success in his program of reform because of a past trauma he can't get over.

Continue reading "Adam's Apples: A tart treat" »

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Christian Slater has always been a likable actor, ever so slightly nutty and cool and the star of several bona-fide cult classics, but unfairly relegated to a career just below the "A"-list. Lately, it has been painful to see him suffer through so much junk (Who Is Cletis Tout?, Hard Cash, etc.). So watching this "comeback" performance was a real pleasure. Sadly, 2007's He Was a Quiet Man -- great title, that -- went straight to DVD following a few film festival dates; it deserves a lot more.

Continue reading "He Was a Quiet Man" »

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Ireland was in vogue in the early 1990's. The Troubles were continuing on their troubled course, epic films about the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland — In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother's Son — were all the rage, and heretofore flat, Midwestern-sounding Hollywood stars were trying on a wee Irish brogue. Chortles could be heard as Brad Pitt (in The Devil's Own), Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones (both in the execrable Blown Away) and Julia Roberts (in Mary Reilly) strained their vocal cords and their credibility all to pin a shamrock on their resumes, and there followed a series of glorified Irish Spring ads like the treacly Circle of Friends.

Then the woefully underappreciated Neil Jordan dropped in with the tart little gem The Butcher Boy (1997). I'd like to say that it put the nail in the coffin of those sorts of films, but no one saw the thing. It did mark the end of that era, however, with an off-kilter almost-masterpiece about a boy from a small town in 1960's Ireland who goes from merely troubled to completely unhinged.

Continue reading "The Butcher Boy: Bloody brilliant" »

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Comedy of Power seems to me a departure for Claude Chabrol, and probably a welcome one, so far as he and his audience are concerned. He works this time not from any dark fictional Ruth Rendell-ish source but from a real case of corporate "sleazery" at the top of the French totem pole. (Watch the DVD extras for an interesting look into this subject and how the filmmaker addresses it.) He has also left behind his oft-used small-town bourgeoisie for those in national political, judicial and corporate control. Everything is fictionalized, of course, but the screenplay offers us a thoughtful look at haute bourgeois family life and work environment--in the process giving two of France's finest actors an opportunity to shine. Isabelle Huppert is superb, as usual, as the prosecuting judge (the French system certainly differs from ours) and François Berléand (The Chorus) is funny, nasty and finally sad as her initial prey. The rest of the spot-on cast includes a wonderful Robin Renucci as Huppert's lonely husband and the director's son Thomas (this may be Chabrol's most "family" movie) as the husband’s nephew who moves in with the couple temporarily and becomes a kind of sounding board for Huppert.

Continue reading "Comedy of Power: And the joke's on us" »

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Like slapstick and belly laughs along with your bloody political assassinations?

Well, Im Sang-Soo's The President's Last Bang, a pitch-black political comedy about the unlikely bumbling murder of South Korean President Park Chung-hee, should suit your particular predilections.

Last Bang is, in turns, a queasy, confusing and riveting thing as it goes about its darkly funny business. It's a lean film, working quickly and cleanly through the narrative. Sang-Soo lays it all out a bit like a chamber piece, with the events mostly playing out at one location over the course of a single night. The first half echoes The Rules of the Game or Gosford Park, sketching the social station of those involved before leading us to the proverbial Main Event - the dinner party where President Chung-hee will be killed by the director of his own Korean CIA.

Continue reading "The President's Last Bang" »

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The shock of Sleeping Dogs Lie comes early on. If you’ve heard about the movie, you're likely to be "in" on its singular event. But what will surprise--nay, flabbergast--is that the film was written and directed by stand-up comic Bobcat Goldthwait. That's right: the director of Shakes the Clown. Given that exceptionally screechy, over-the-top movie and the subject matter of this new one, you could be forgiven for expecting something witless, ugly and unappetizing in the extreme. And if you are one who gives points to filmmakers who handle tricky subjects tastefully, forget it. Goldthwait isn't tasteful here, either. Better than that, he gives you everything you need to see, hear and consequently feel without going one step too far--or not far enough. It's been sixteen years between Shakes and Dogs, and while Goldthwait has directed only a handful of entertainments--all for television--he's managed to learn quite a lot. Maybe it's the ton of acting jobs he's essayed (more than 70 of them in his 22-year career) that's led him to this point.

Continue reading "Sleeping Dogs Lie: When's the truth too much?" »

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GreenCine is giving away copies of the new-to-DVD film Apartment Zero to five lucky winners of our new trivia contest. The 1988 black comedy/erotic thriller, directed by Argentinian Martin Donovan (no, not that one), is set in Buenos Aires and centers around two disturbed roommates (played by Brit Colin Firth and Canadian Hart Bochner). "Creepy and original," wrote Christopher Null on Filmcritic.com. "Donovan's direction recalls Polanski and his and [David] Koepp's script exudes Hitchcock. A better combo I couldn't give you."

To be eligible for the prize, send an email with the correct answer to contest@greencine.com, including your name, email address and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Apartment Zero" in the subject header. Winners will be selected at random from all correct entries. The deadline is Friday, February 23, at 12PM PST. Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter, and right here on this space.

The Question: What epic 80s mini-series did Hart Bochner star in?

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Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

When the president of a floundering Madison Avenue advertising agency keels over and dies on the conference table during a meeting, the board calls for a vote to designate a new president. Each of the men are so disappointed that the bylaws prohibit voting for themselves that they all abstain by voting for the only black man on the board. And this is how Putney Swope becomes the president of the advertising agency. He decides that since the company is already doomed he might as well go down in flames. "Rockin' the boat's a drag," he says, "Whatcha do is sink the boat!" He immediately fires all the white people, renames the agency "Truth and Soul, Inc.", and puts all the clients who make war toys and cigarettes on notice.

The satire Putney Swope is a bit less cutting than it undoubtedly was in the late sixties but the film's earnest weirdness rewards multiple viewings and perhaps demonstrates that LSD was not all bad. The television spots created by the new agency include: a psychedelic montage of topless girls jumping on a trampoline before deciding to have an orgy with a random passerby (to sell Lucky Airline travel, of course), a redneck beauty queen getting pied in the face with chicken pot pies, and a double amputee hocking life insurance by proclaiming "they charge an arm and a leg, but it's worth every penny!" And then there's director Robert Downey's decision to dub in all of Swope's dialogue with his own gravelley, white voice - a decision necessitated by the actor's inability to remember his lines and the low-budget shooting schedule - that now reads like a brilliant stylistic choice.

Continue reading "Putney Swope" »

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Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

I find it hard to believe that any movie buff out there has not yet seen Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, the late Russ Meyer's jaw-dropping non-sequel to the equally jaw-dropping (for different reasons) Valley of the Dolls, Mark Robson's "go" at the Jacqueline Susann novel. Erin Donovan's review captures the camp of the earlier film, but Meyer's movie (made three years later) is camp of a very different order. Although classy dames like Dorothy Kingsley and Helen Deutsch did the screenplay for the original Valley (hoping somehow to have their cake and eat it, too), the Beyond script comes from Roger Ebert (yes, him), and he wants to stuff the entire meal down our throat. This was his first attempt at a screenplay and, though by decade's close he'd written two more for Meyer, nothing - from him or anybody else, before or since - has ever come close to the entertaining lunacy of this wild film. Here is the world of 1970 in all its garish colors, costumes, hairstyles and expanding sexual habits plus "Gee, kids, let's put on a rock band," transgender, decapitation, lesbian allure, crossing the color barrier and finally - I kid you not - a denouement in which Ebert and Meyer try to take us all to church.

Continue reading "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" »

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Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

Rian Johnson's Brick is a super debut, a bravura film that pulls off the pretentious set-up: a Raymond Chandler-esque mystery, updated, and set in an adolescent world. While it stumbles here and there (comes close to going on too long somewhere in Act III), and it is occasionally hard to catch all the hyper-teen-noir slang (a glossary is provided on the official web site), the film is nonetheless a treat.

It's also, dare I say it, the best film set and shot in California's Orange County that I can recall. It certainly captures that overdeveloped, under-souled landscape perfect. Why did no one think of an OC-noir before?

Joseph Gordon Levitt - getting farther and farther away from 3rd Rock from the Sun with each time out - follows up on his fine work in Mysterious Skin with another sharp, if occasionally mumbled, performance, as the nosy teen gumshoe mixed up in some very bad stuff. His character takes a licking and keeps on ticking. And Lukas Haas, in a bit of spot-on casting, is terrific as the young drug kingpin (who does business in his cheerful mom's basement), hobbling on a cane like a Sydney Greenstreet character, while Noah Fleiss is memorably creepy as hell as his disturbed right-hand man. In fact, like any good pulp detective story, the whole film is full of indellible characters who are remembered long after the lights go back up - while also helping to keep your eyes on the screen even as the plot itself sometimes loses momentum.

Continue reading "Brick" »

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