FILM/DVD REVIEWS:
Wolfman
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
The Golden Age of Universal Horror spanned about two decades in that studio’s history, from 1931’s Dracula to
the sci-fi horrors of the mid-’50s. This includes what are still the most familiar images of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy, The Wolfman, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. The actors are equally iconic -- Karloff, Lugosi,
Chaney. The fact that the tacky 1985 Universal monster rally The Monster Squad is now a cult classic for Gen-Xer’s is proof of their staying power. And although they didn’t have the psychological depth of Val Lewton’s 1940s thrillers for RKO, they were mythic pieces of cinema, and a ton of fun to watch on the late night creature features.
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Me and Orson Welles
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Orson Welles was a true genius of the 20th Century who hit his zenith too soon. At the incredible age of 26 he directed, cowrote and starred in the greatest American film of all time, 1941’s Citizen Kane. Had he never done anything else, the genius label would still apply for that achievement.
Yet Welles was also a brilliant actor, announcer, stage director and producer, magician...and like many brilliant people, he could be demanding, difficult, manipulative, and arrogant. He never scaled the heights of Kane again in his career, and died in 1985 with numerous unfinished projects, as much his fault as anyone else’s. By most accounts his personal skills didn’t always match his astonishing creative ones.(Read More)
Still Bill
Review By: Melody Charles
“Lovely Day.” “Grandma’s Hands.” “Use Me.” “Lean On Me.” If you’ve inhabited plane Earth for at least twenty years, have your sense of hearing and stood still long enough, you’ve heard the simple, yet stirring eloquence of a Bill Withers song. It’s fair to say, in fact, that the terrain of popular music would be more barren without him. And that’s why the upcoming documentary about his life, Still Bill, is such an essential one.
Now 71 years old, it’s probably not surprising to learn that Mr. Withers, who hasn’t toured in decades, isn’t exactly eager to perform again, but that doesn’t mean that he no longer has a passion for recognizing and creating quality music. (Read More)
Up in the Air
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Ryan Bingham, is a “career transition counselor”, which is a nice way of saying he fires people for a living, as a hired gun for corporate bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. This job requires him to spend most of his time criss-crossing the country in first class or sucking up cocktails in airport VIP lounges. When he’s not doing that, he’s a motivational speaker with a carefully rehearsed speech about our personal backpacks, and how many of our belongings, tangible and abstract, we can keep in those backpacks, or do without, to keep our lives simple, to keep ourselves up in the air, so to speak. (Read More)
Princess and the Frog
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Disney’s official Christmas release, The Princess and the Frog, is being highly promoted on two fronts, one retro and one progressive, both having to do with both meanings of the acronym “PC”. As for PC in the computer sense, the film marks the studio’s return to hand-drawn, two-dimensional cell animation. This is the style of Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Lion King and other classics the studio was built upon, not Finding Nemo, Toy Story or Wall-E, the Pixar computer-generated gems that have won Oscars and kept them in Ka-Ching-land. (Read More)
Cover
Review By: Melody Charles
Duplicity, deceit, madness and murder. These salacious scenarios occur so often that they are easily taken for granted, but what happens when the lies and the drama perch themselves on your doorstep and threaten your family? That's what unfolds in Cover, a film using a competent script, star power (Aunjanue Ellis, Vivica Fox, Leon) and laser-precise direction by Bill Duke (Deep Cover, Hoodlum) to illustrate a simple point; sometimes it's hard to know where---or who---your real enemies are. (Read More)
Rain: The Beatles Experience
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Okay, I’m seriously dating myself now, but I was watching, on February 9, 1964, along with 73 million others, when Ed Sullivan introduced those four youngsters from Liverpool who would rock the world in their first live American TV performance. Even from my viewpoint on Grandma’s carpet, watching her 1959 black-and-white, round-tube Philco, I knew I was watching history in the making. My mom and grandmother thought they were “shaggy but okay” -- they saved their harsher comments for those “scroungy” Rolling Stones, who made their debut a short time later. But like all kids at the time, I knew they were a lot more than just “okay.” (Read More)
Standard Operating Procedure: by Errol Morris
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
It would be interesting to see how “torture porn” junkies -- those who willfully plop down ten hard-earned to see young folks being gleefully dissected in movies with numbers in their titles -- would react to “Standard Operating Procedure”, avant-garde documentary director Errol Morris’ dissection of the real-life torture porn tale the world knows as Abu Ghraib, one with truly horrifying consequences.
This is Morris’ take on the so-called “prisoner abuse scandal”, in which, thanks to our multi-media age, hundreds of photos of ugly mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad were leaked to the US press, by the soldiers themselves. I say“take” because Morris, a former private detective, has his own take on the documentary genre itself -- he’s practically fashioned a new genre, combining both existing footage and images with recreations in his own distinctive style. That style hasn’t always pleased the purist peers or critics -- his breakthrough 1989 film, “The Thin Blue Line”, got a Texas man wrongly convicted of a cop killing off death row, but was declared “not a documentary”, hence ineligible, by the Academy Award folks. In fact, he wasn’t nominated or “Oscared” until 2003’s “The Fog of War.” (Read More)
THE CURE: by Jafri Pictures
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
The Cure is a striking seven-minute short film written and directed by Brooklyn-born filmmaker Ryan Jafri. Mollie Weeks stars as a spurned young woman who turns to a hit man to right some painful personal wrongs. Independent films featuring hit men, long or short, are hardly unique, but Jafri puts a punch-line twist on this familiar setup you won’t see coming, and a knockout punch it is.
Beautifully shot by Eric Govon and Marie Peze, the film is styled in black-and-white flashbacks and shades of red that compliment the incendiary mane of its stunning lead lady; Weeks could go a long way on sheer Hair Appeal, but she also shows the acting chops to do the rest.
The vivid crimsons of the costumes, art direction (and, inevitably, the blood) show that, with his first film, Jafri has already developed an understanding of visual hooks that will hopefully extend into his feature film work (a feature-length expansion of this film is foreseeable). Told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, The Cure demands multiple viewings. The DVD has a subtitle option, which is useful at a few points where Weeks’ otherwise effective noirish voiceover is drowned out by the score.
You can read more about Jafri and The Cure at www.jafripictures.com.
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