Newbie Wednesdays - The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender (2010, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

M. Night and I have a long history together. The first film I saw my freshman year of college was The Sixth Sense. It terrified me. Now, with a decade of film obsession behind me, it takes a lot to creep me out that badly, and I look at The Sixth Sense as a very sad atmospheric film, still good though. His next film, Unbreakable, is still one of my favorite comic book films, in that is captures a certain idea of superheroes that I've never seen another film come close to. About there is where my love for the director ended. I've seen every film he's made in the theater, the only other director who I have done that with is Christopher Nolan, sort of the antithesis of Shyamalan. While Nolan produces better and better films, Shyamalan only gives diminishing returns. This latest, his first foray into adapting an already established property, is an utter disaster.

Wild Card Tuesdays - Right At Your Door

Right At Your Door (2005, dir. Chris Gorak)
Starring Mary McKormack, Rory Cochrane

The concept of Right At Your Door has the makings of an amazing movie. The story is relegated to single home with a small number of cast (2 lead, 2 supporting) and brings up topics and themes very relevant to modern America. With all of these elements present, you would expect the film to be good. Sadly, it never really becomes about anything. It touches on a lot of ideas briefly, then abandons them, then collapses as film that never really goes anywhere. Its definitely working hard to be important but the substance isn't there. It's truly disappointing though, because it could have been one of the best films about post-9/11 America.

DocuMondays - Prodigal Sons

Prodigal Sons (2008, dir. Kimberly Reed)

It is impossible to watch this film and not be affected in someway. It is one of the most inside looks at a family and their struggles, particularly with mental illness. I can't say I have ever seen a documentary that captured such intensely intimate and violent moments on film. While the details of this particular family may seem drastically different from your own, when looking at the core nature of the relationships it is like any other: there is a lot of emotional pain and little done to resolve it for years. It's one of those documentaries that is bound to ignite arguments about what is incited by the director and what is the natural progression of these people in this situation.

Character Actor Month - Part 1

What is a Character Actor, you ask? Think of a Coen Brothers film, O Brother Where Art Thou? for example. George Clooney is the lead. Clooney will always be the lead of almost whatever film he is in. You can say the same about Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts and so on. These actors have been categorized as "lead actors" meaning its general accepted that they are relatable enough to carry a film on their own. Yawn. Lead actors are incredibly boring, in my opinion. The most interesting roles are those of the character actor; an actor who has so captured a certain type or one who has taken the role of supporting characters in films. In O Brother Where Art Thou? John Tutturo and John Goodman are the character actors. These are the Ned Beatties, the Luis Guzmans, the Amy Sedarises. And many times, its the character actors who can make a terrible film actually watchable.

Stephen Tobolowsky (IMDB credits: 200 roles; Groundhog Day, Memento, Deadwood, Glee)

"That first step is a doooozy." For most of this is the line that cemented Stephen Tobolowsky into our psyches, I know it was for me. It was Ned Ryerson, the annoying insurance salesman and former high school classmate of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In that role, Tobolowsky was able to repeat the same performance again and again, and somehow made Ned increasingly more annoying with each iteration. Tobolowsky is a Dallas native and made his film debut in 1976. It wasn't until later pictures, like Spaceballs, that audiences really took notice of his face. Beyond simply being an actor, Tobolowsky has become a well known personality in Hollywood due to his skilled abilities as a storyteller. He co-wrote True Stories with David Byrne after, according to Mr. Tobolowsky, staring at Byrne worldlessly for two hours and making pencil drawings related to plot ideas. If you can track it down, and I never have been able to, there is a documentary featuring his storytelling titled Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party.

Director in Focus: Brian De Palma - Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale (2002)
Starring Rebecca Romijn, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney

De Palma came off of Snake Eyes and went in a total 180 to make Mission to Mars. I don't think any one could have really predicted that film from him: A science fiction film set in the future involving a rescue mission to Mars with aliens and special effects and so on. It was definitely a risky move on his part, and ultimately it failed. There were moments that worked, in particular a planetfall sequence involving risky maneuvers using a deep knowledge of gravity and physics. It had a lot of tension in and drew me in, but overall the film was a mess. So for his second film of the 21st century, De Palma revisited some Hitchcock elements, but more he dipped fulling into the Noir genre, something he had skirted his entire career but never gone full bore into.

Criterion Fridays - Close-Up

Close-Up (1990, dir. Abbas Kiraostami)

In America, its not uncommon to see a film "based on a true story". The audience has come to expect that while names and events are real, screenwriters have "punched up" the script with dramatic tropes and formulas designed to add drama to what they see as dull, uninteresting reality. On the opposite end of things, you have documentaries like Capturing the Friedmans where the reality of the situation is so horrific and dramatic we have to wonder how much is exaggerated and manipulated by the director. In Abbas Kiraostami's film Close-Up he takes an approach to the "based on a real story" movie that is some sort of amalgamation of narrative film and documentary. This is one of few times I have watched a film unable to figure out what was reality and was staged.

Hypothetical Film Festival - Unreliable Narrators

There's a very interesting plot device called the Unreliable Narrator, wherein the point of view you are getting the story from comes from a person who is possibly skewing the facts in their favor, creating a story that is not quite true. Here's some films that use that idea to great effect.

Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
Rashomon was the introduction of Kurosawa and post-war Japanese cinema to the world. The framing of the story was unlike anything that had really been seen in cinema, but had roots in older literature, particularly Shakespeare (whose works would be a major influence on Kurosawa throughout his career). A woodcutter and priest are seeking shelter in the husk of an old building while it storms outside. A passerby enters and they explain a strange murder of a samurai and the court case in which his wife, the bandit being accused, and the spirit of the samurai himself all testify. Through the three differing viewpoints we get three different pictures, with the added framing of these figures telling us the story. It's a like a hedge maze of narrative.