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(Source for the above photo.)
During the Friday, Feb. 24 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast:
Bobby’s “Pokemon” theory regarding Kurt Russell’s career; how Gene Hackman became such a tough guy; why Method acting rubs Mike and David Mamet the wrong way; even though it obviously gets results; the bundle of straw men that “Act of Valor” seems to be inspiring; and speculation as to why “John Carter” seems to be inspiring nothing but apathy, and why that might be unfair to the movie itself, even as it's fair to the crappy marketing. Other topics include: Olmos’ birthday, Pixar’s "Brave," "Star Trek: Angry Cumberbatch," and "Twin Peaks" at the Hollywood Theatre.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 24, 2012) [ iTunes feed ]
Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of Week 3 of the Portland International Film Festival:
In his second feature, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo ("Timecrimes") once again gets clever with a no-budget sci-fi conceit. The morning after a one-night stand, it's the usual brand of awkward for the participants (Julián Villagrán, Michelle Jenner). But before the man can embark on a walk of shame right out of the woman's life, they learn that dozens of four-mile-wide spaceships are hovering silently over Spain.
The ensuing comedy comes from the duo being more concerned with relationship issues than a likely alien invasion -- even lying about the possibility of alien infiltrators masking as humans to cover up their infidelities when stalkers and semi-ex-boyfriends start showing up at the woman's apartment.
Vigalondo makes the most of a handful of locations while bouncing romantic farce off a (largely unseen) world-changing event. I loved how Vigalondo applied all of the space-invader genre's editing tricks and tropes to trivial events. Offscreen suspense is generated by the sound of a woman making coffee, for example, and an apartment siege comes not from aliens, but from a jilted wannabe suitor lobbing tennis balls through a window.
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B; Spain; 90 minutes. PIFF showtimes:
Portland International Film Festival reviews: Week 3 (The Oregonian, Feb. 24, 2012)
Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of Week 2 of the Portland International Film Festival:
"The Island President"
Jon Shenk's documentary on climate change and its awkward intersection with politics is itself in an awkward position: It could use a new postscript before it officially hits theaters. Its subject -- Maldives political prisoner turned Maldives president turned environmental activist Mohamed Nasheed -- resigned his office this month under reported duress, his country wracked by protests and conflict between its military and police.
Shenk follows (and frankly sort of worships) the charismatic Nasheed in his 2009 salad days -- shortly after he won the presidency of his island nation from 30-year autocrat Maumoon Abdul Gayoom as a democratic reform candidate. The doc's first 20 minutes, detailing Nasheed's journey from prison to power, are by far its most compelling.
The doc turns into a less-compelling, medicinal rallying cry after Nasheed launches an initiative to make Maldives carbon-neutral to draw attention to the risk of rising sea levels swallowing his country, then fights superpower bureaucrats for consensus at the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen.
Radiohead contributes to the soundtrack.
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B-minus; United States; 101 minutes. Showtimes:
Portland International Film Festival reviews: Week 2 (The Oregonian, Feb. 16, 2012)
A "Firefly" webcomic Mark Bourne, Bill Mudron and I made back in 2010 to help Dark Horse promote its new "Serenity" comics. Backstory here. Click images to enlarge.
(You can find more of this sort of thing at www.SerenityTales.com, by the way.)
During the oddly smooth-grooves Friday, Feb. 10 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, I reviewed "Safe House" and revealed my enduring love of Ultra-Lounge and Mel Torme. Meanwhile, Fatboy revealed his unnervingly good Jar-Jar Binks impression.
Also: PIFF. PIFF After Dark. Our desire to be Ryan Fleming at all hours of the day. CGI Daffy. "Cheers." The Rock riding a giant bee. And a discussion of memory loss and the change in post-Internet cognition that made me feel really, really old.
Oh, and we also recorded a commentary track for our Feb. 10 "Midnight Movie," "The Breakfast Club." (I'm a cranky Bender-hatin' sourpuss on this one, sorry.) Featuring Cort Webber, Bobby Roberts, Ted Douglass, David Walker and yrs. truly.
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Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 10 Oregonian....
It's been a while since I watched a movie that felt as nakedly reverse-engineered as "Safe House." The film's a passable B-grade spy-flick divertissement -- but its script, look, editing, music, action choreography, grim tone, and cynical view of the bureaucrats who run the espionage game seem so blatantly lifted (intentionally or not) from the last two "Bourne" movies, you wonder if they had DVDs on set for reference.
(Fun, no-doubt-totally-coincidental facts: Universal Pictures produced both "Safe House" and the "Bourne" series -- which recently lost its star Matt Damon and will try to continue with Jeremy Renner this August. Also, "Safe House" employs "Bourne" series cinematographer Oliver Wood.)
Anyway. There's one major deviation in "Safe House" from the "Bourne" template: The filmmakers team the rogue-superspy character up with someone who's hunting him. That someone is Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a bored CIA "housekeeper" who's manned a South African "safe house" for a year and desperately wants a transfer to Paris so he can follow his girlfriend (Nora Arnezeder). The Agency disrupts his boredom by bringing in notorious ex-agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) -- who went "off the reservation" years ago and now carries a damning data chip somewhere on his person.
Just as Tobin's interrogators are about to go all Jack Bauer on him, a mysterious strike team raids the safe house, sending Weston and Frost on the lam. Loyalties are tested, motives are questioned, Frost gets inside Weston's head, people really regret becoming spies, &tc. There is a remarkable amount of chasing, all of it filmed in shaky-cam -- intercut with the scenes in which surly CIA administrators (Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard) grouse in a situation room full of screens and say everything short of "Let's get to work, people!"
There are several things to enjoy here. The use of motel service-industry code words by the safe-house staff is dryly funny. I like how the phrase "We'll take it from here" gets twisted into a threat. Denzel holds down the fort about as well as you'd expect, and has a lot of fun staying perfectly calm and still and maybe even a little sad while everyone violently flips out around him. Reynolds avoids his usual wisecracking routine and gives a grim, conflicted performance as a guy who really wants to prove himself. And director Daniel Espinosa makes good use of the South African locations -- particularly during a brutal chase through (and above) the patchwork slums of the Langa township.
That said, there's a hard-to-pin-down finesse that's required to keep hyper-edited shakycam action filmmaking from lending a movie a feeling of dull, vaguely confusing sameness -- to keep it from feeling like someone is shaking something in front of your face for two hours, basically -- and I'm not sure "Safe House" pulls that off. (A good example of that finesse is the third "Bourne" flick; a bad example is the second.)
I was invested in the Frost/Weston relationship by the end -- though the amount of time it takes before Matt asks Tobin "What are you carrying that's so important?" is frankly ridiculous. But there's a chase-driven stretch in the middle where the movie takes on a generic, shallow freneticism that undermines that character drama -- a sort of action oatmeal whose chief ingredient seems to be shots of our heroes and/or anonymous thugs run-walking through crowds and hallways. Putting it another way: During this stretch, one character reluctantly shoots a policeman in self-defense and it barely registers emotionally amid the busy-ness.
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(115 min., rated R, multiple locations) Grade: C-plus
'Safe House' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 10, 2012)
Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of Week 1 of the Portland International Film Festival:
"The Extraordinary Voyage"
If this documentary isn't a special feature on the eventual "Hugo" Special Edition Blu-Ray, well, it should be.
Co-directors Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange recount the real-life rise, fall and rediscovery of silent-film and special-effects pioneer Georges Méliès -- liberally seasoning their biography with clips from his surviving films (and the films of contemporaries who aped his style) -- along with fascinating turn-of-the-century footage and talking-head praise from the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Gondry and Costa-Gavras. The filmmakers then make a stirring case for film preservation as they recount their painstaking decade-and-change struggle to restore a hand-tinted print of Méliès' masterwork, "A Trip to the Moon."
The doc ends, triumphantly, with a presentation of the complete resurrected "Trip" with an odd new soundtrack by the French music group Air (which, fear not, does not make the whole thing come off like Giorgio Moroder’s pop-song-choked edit of "Metropolis").
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B-plus; France; 79 minutes. Plays at PIFF at:
Portland International Film Festival reviews: Week 1 (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 10, 2011)
Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of Week 1 of the Portland International Film Festival:
"Snows of Kilimanjaro"
Cowriter/director Robert Guédiguian's modest social drama is inspired, the credits tell us, by Victor Hugo's poem "How Good Are The Poor" -- and the movie grabs your attention by suddenly shifting its own.
It starts out sweetly melancholic, as an aging Marseilles dockworker and union organizer (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) loses his job and tries to settle into semi-retirement with his wife (Ariane Ascaride), surrounded by friends and loved ones. There's a lurch into menace as the couple is robbed at gunpoint of their anniversary-party gifts. But then Guédiguian makes a fascinating choice to stay with one of the robbers as he uses stolen money to desperately pay rent and provide for his younger brothers. Soon the film has Darroussin and Ascaride worrying they've become compromised old lefties who didn't show enough compassion to their downtrodden assailant.
"Kilimanjaro"'s soulful performances lend a gentle humanity to Guédiguian's earnest, politically charged exploration of the limits of charity -- though it's a mild shame Guédiguian does a bit too much thematic deck-stacking by having the young robber speak to Darroussin in perfectly phrased Voice of the Underclass rejoinders.
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B-minus; France; 107 minutes. Plays at PIFF at:
Portland International Film Festival reviews: Week 1 (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 10, 2011)
Above: Two panels from MAD Magazine's spoof of "Watchmen," as reposted by ComicsAlliance.com.
During the Friday, Feb. 3 "Cort & Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "The Woman in Black," "Chronicle," Hollywood's finest mustaches, the brand-building "Watchmen" prequel, and why we find the brand-building "Watchmen" prequel kind of appalling.
I may have snuck kind of a fun professional announcement in there somewhere, too.
Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 3, 2012) [ iTunes feed ]
