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Pop Culture OCD

Wild Card Tuesdays - The Dinner Game

The Dinner Game (1998, dir. Francis Veber)

You've no doubt seen the trailer or commercials for the upcoming Paul Rudd/Steve Carrell film Dinner for Schmucks. This is its source material, a very small and wry French comedy that, unlike the American version never makes it to the titular dinner. Instead, we get a very clever farce from the same director that brought us La Cage Aux Follies and many other French comedies brutally remade by American studios. I'm beginning to think studios simply wait around for him to release a film so they can rush to produce a butchered remake. While not the kind of funny the American remake is shooting for, The Dinner Game will make you laugh through clever wordplay and increasingly convoluted misunderstandings

Character Actor Month - Part 3

Keith David (IMDB credits: 180 credits, The Thing, Platoon, They Live, Gargoyles, Princess Mononoke, There's Something About Mary, Pitch Black, Requiem for a Dream, Coraline)

Keith David is an actor known just as well for both his on screen performances as well as voice over work. When I see his face I immediately think of Childs in John Carpenter's The Thing. When I hear his voice I think of Goliath from Disney's Gargoyles, one of the best children's animated shows from the 1990s. David was born in Harlem, New York in 1956 and first found himself moving towards acting as a career when playing the Cowardly Lion for a school production of The Wizard of Oz. He entered into New York's High School for the Performing Arts and attended Julliard afterwards. You can definitely hear the classical Shakespearean training in his voice, particularly as the Celtic Goliath. David has become a frequent collaborator with John Carpenter and provided the voice-overs for three Ken Burns documentaries ("The War", "Unforgivable Blackness", "Jazz") and won Emmys for the first two. He is one of those actors more and more directors are using and his IMDB boasts 12 projects in various stages of production.

Director in Focus: Brian De Palma - Redacted

Redacted (2007)

So we have caught up with Brian De Palma's body of work. Redacted goes back to a lot of the same territory as 1989's Casualties of War. We have American troops in a foreign land and the sexual violation of a native girl is the crux of the conflict. There's one soldier who above all the rest is still virtuous. This was one was written by De Palma as well and really shows off his weakness as a writer. However, there are some interesting technical elements to the picture, and it really easy very experimental for De Palma, both in its making and the distribution.

Criterion Fridays - Summer Hours

Summer Hours (2008, dir. Oliver Assayas)
Starring Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jeremie Renier

It's always refreshing to see a film made for grown ups. Too often American dramas dumb things down, maybe out of a lack of talent in the writer or maybe a lack of confidence in the audience's intelligence. Here director Assayas looks at the strange dynamic of being both the adult child of a parent and a parent to your own children. In one position you are still looked on as an infant or adolescent and in the other you are the supreme authority. This difficult place is used to examine how we deal with death and responsibilities placed on us by the dead. The whole thing is a very naturalistic, quiet piece of cinema that is rewarding and ambiguous. The answers we receive will be as open ended as the characters in the film, and like them, we have to learn to happy with that.

Hypothetical Film Festival - Brothers

It's as simple as the title, films that have very prominent brother relationships at their core.

American History X (1998, dir. Tony Kaye)

Everyone remembers Edward Norton as the terrifying, swastika tattooed skinhead. The scene where he curbs a young black man who had broken into his house is gut wrenching. What's interesting is how he so embodies evil in the flashbacks during the film, yet is an incredibly sympathetic character when reformed. His younger brother, played by Edward Furlong, is high school student struggling to understand how his older brother has turned his back on their family's white power ways. In many ways the film is a race against time picture, Norton is desperately trying to get his little brother to stop being motivated through hate before something terrible happens to him.

Newbie Wednesdays - Greenberg

Greenberg (2010, dir. Noah Baumbach)
Starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Mark Duplass, Jennifer Jason Leigh

Hey, you know what isn't an interesting topic for contemporary cinema right now? Angst ridden white people who live comfortably and don't have to worry about any necessities. Especially when they aren't in some sort of hyper-realistic universe (i.e. James Bond, comic book movies). When the films are meant to be set in reality and feature characters whose biggest problems are that their band when they were in their twenties didn't work out, yet are still rich through other endeavors, then I don't really have much empathy towards them. This is yet another hugely pretentious piece of cinema from the grating Noam Baumbach. If you're interested in navel gazing claptrap you've found your film.