Mathieu Demy has made a vanity piece about nothing, except what a charmless pompous and humorless man looks like brooding and boring an audience for hours. This guy leaves his beautiful girlfriend, about whom he is oddly, babyishly equivocal, for a mindless senseless and deeply ugly excursion into SoCal and Mexico, where he makes all the wrong solipsistic empty-headed moves of a spoiled rich reckless and cowardly dope. The director is obviously a rich kid, spoiled, with cinema bloodlines that allow him to shoot self-indulgent nonsense with truly great co-stars. I was embarrassed for them. The film is to self-serious to be hilariously bad, it is just inept and annoying. Sad.
Reviews
7 Reviews
The Cold Light of Day
(2012)
Great Film, Too Good For Average IMDb "Reviewers"
1 August 2013
The film starts fast with an ominous, eerie sense of family tensions and unease in a glorious setting, worth the price of admission alone. It writes its own cinematic language, with camera placements and framing slightly off and camera movements kinetic and unexpected. There are surprises, switchbacks, shocks, and fine acting from everyone. As for this pre-teen obsession with spotting "product placement," nothing is spotlighted in a way to garner sponsor backing, trust me. Spain and the actors look great--hot and sophisticated and summery and tense--and the young actors are attractive, the bad guys complex, the relationships original and refreshing. If your only reference for cinema is the Bourne series, stay away. If you know about movies and the syntax of cinema, a must see.
Psych:9
(2010)
Mindless Amateurish Awful Film
7 July 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Neither the director nor writer has any idea what they are doing in this dismal,draggy, soporific endless mess. Every cliché in horror filmdom is given a shot: empty creepy hospital, all night job, scratchy video security monitors, "it was all a dream," the psychiatrist friend " isn't really there," the focus character was sexually abused, bilious toxic green light, confusions,time leaps, comically awful dialog. This is the worst film I've seen in decades. What did they spend five million dollars on? Elwes and Bein walk through their parts. The film was so obviously made in Eastern Europe that I was taking bets with my wife, Czech or the Ukraine? Avoid this film!
Attack the Block
(2011)
Old-fashioned Pandering Piffle
16 March 2012
A ghastly aberration: unique because I craved all the characters' deaths after only ten minutes, AND wished the same for the actors,director and writer. The movie is old fashioned,(seems like something from the early 90's),un-credible (a vast grow-house on the 19th floor of a U.K. estates project? Pull the other one, Mate) witless, humorless, charmless and had me cheering for the alien invaders. If Cornish thinks he's got down what kids sound like or how they behave in life, he's not only wrong, but dangerously so. The actor playing Moses is awful and the movie depends on him.Sad,too,because the Edgar Wright imprimatur (and the Shaun of the Dead references on the box)has become unstable.The films from this quarter are either terrific or bombs. Avoid. This. Film.
Identification of a Woman
(1982)
An Overlooked Masterpiece
15 December 2011
Negative reviews or remarks about this masterwork should be ignored. If you follow the director's career from his first films forward, this investigation places among his greatest works. His concerns, (with the impossibility of a personal identity, with a default identity in/as landscape, cityscapes, with ravishing interiors and an exterior world that is terrifyingly beautiful, fraught with allure and menace in equal parts), are fully realized here. There are no "howlers," the dialog is never precious nor pompous nor pretentious, and when heard in Italian, is, like every element of Antonioni's works, determined, controlled, but completely natural, credible. No movie ever made has been less "misogynistic," and the fictional director in the film and the director of the film speak with such candor it's exhilarating. A must-see.
Tenderness
(2009)
Ponderous, Prententious, Drab
13 October 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Dreary and slow. What passes for thoughtful in indie land,its lesson seems to be this: some people are literally dying to get killed by really boring and charmless sociopaths.Everything fails, from the embarrassingly quanky music (two artsy-folksy songs under action made me blush and cringe) to the pedestrian camera work and editing to the WTF year-is-this?-costumes-and-hair to the casting of good actors in tiny parts,(better no Laura Dern than shooting with her for one day), to poor Crowe, looking puffy and depressed in sweater vest, 70s polyester, given absolutely nothing to do. Aside from moping and delivering a teen diaryish VO, this physical and vibrant actor is given nothing for his character. Sophie Traub is valiant in her efforts to give this heartless rust belt film some spark--but Jon Foster is a dead space on the screen and drowns everything around him in a kind of insidious averageness.
Gamer
(2009)
Pure Film
9 July 2010
Reading IMDb reviews in 2010 reminds me of reading reviews of Welles, Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, Sirk and others by American and English "experts" before the French came along. Or reviews of 70s films before Tarantino rescued them. A film isn't plot, words, characterization, a linear original narrative. That stuff comes in your How-to script books and makes me shudder. A film is images, sounds,colors, and the syntax of a film has no relation to "what happened" but HOW things happen. Kane is a masterwork because of how it's made, not because it addresses the life of a newspaper fascist. Gamer is shot so that it occurs viscerally, with great speed, sometimes beauty, often wit, and its intentions are never overswamped by an impulse to preach or teach. It's appeal is a bit like that or Richard Prince's billboard reproductions.
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