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Kamis, 18 Juli 2013

THE NUMBERS STATION (2013)

Tanggal Rilis : 26 April 2013 (USA)
Jenis Film : Action | Thriller
Diperankan Oleh : Malin Akerman, John Cusack, Liam Cunningham

Ringkasan Cerita THE NUMBERS STATION (2013) :

When the moral values of a longtime wetwork black ops agent is tested during his last operation, he receives an unfavorable psych evaluation. Now he is given a break and a seemingly uncomplicated assignment of simply protecting the security of a young female code announcer, code resources and remote station they are assigned to. After an ambush and one phone call later, it becomes a complicated fight for their survival.

[IMDb rating : 5.3/10]
[Awards : 1 nomination]
[Production Co : ContentFilm International, Echo Lake Productions, Piccadilly Pictures]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1659338]

[Quality : WEB-DL 720p]
[File Size : 525 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 1280x532]
[Source : 720p.WEB-DL.H264-HDWinG]
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Rabu, 17 Juli 2013

HACHI: A DOG’S TALE (2009)

Tanggal Rilis :16 March 2010 (Indonesia)
Jenis Film : Drama | Family
Diperankan Oleh : Richard Gere, Joan Allen and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

Ringkasan Cerita HACHI: A DOG’S TALE (2009) :

Diangkat dari kisah nyata kehidupan Hachiko, seekor anjing ras Akita asli Jepang. Hachiko lahir bulan November 1923 di Odate, Jepang. Tahun 1924, Profesor Hidesaburo Ueno yang mengajar di bidang pertanian membawanya ke Tokyo dan memelihara Hachiko. Setiap hari mereka selalu pergi bersama-sama. Hachiko selalu menemani Profesor Ueno ke stasiun kereta Shibuya untuk pergi mengajar di kampus, dan pada sore hari Hachiko kembali datang ke sana untuk menanti majikannya pulang.

Pada bulan Mei 1925, Profesor Ueno terserang stroke fatal saat mengajar, ia pun meninggal dunia. Hachiko yang tidak mengetahui hal itu tetap datang menjemput majikannya di stasiun Shibuya dan menunggu dengan sabar meskipun Profesor Ueno tidak akan datang lagi.

Akhirnya istri Profesor Ueno memberikan Hachiko ke saudara untuk dirawat, tetapi Hachiko selalu melarikan diri dan datang kembali menunggu kehadiran Profesor di depan stasiun Shibuya setiap sore. Lama-kelamaan, pengguna kereta yang lain mulai memperhatikan kehadiran Hachiko yang selalu ada di sana pada jam yang sama, yaitu jam kedatangan kereta sore. Mereka sebelumnya sudah sering melihat Hachiko, mereka tahu bahwa Hachiko adalah anjing milik Profesor Ueno. Akhirnya mereka pun merasa kasihan dan memberikan makanan dan minuman bagi Hachiko selama ia menunggu.

Hachiko terus menunggu kedatangan Profesor Ueno setiap sore sampai 10 tahun kemudian. Akhirnya pada tahun 1935, Hachiko pun meninggal di depan stasiun Shibuya, tepat saat kedatangan kereta sore, di tempat di mana ia selalu setia menunggu Profesor Ueno untuk pulang bersama.

Pada bulan April 1934, Pemerintah Jepang mendirikan patung Hachiko yang terbuat dari bahan perunggu tepat di depan stasiun Shibuya sebagai perlambangan kesetiaan seekor anjing kepada majikannya. Namun pada masa PD II, patung tersebut dilebur untuk keperluan perang. Akhirnya pada tahun 1948, Takeshi Ando, yang merupakan anak dari seniman pembuat patung Hachiko yang pertama, kembali membuat patung tersebut.

Selain itu, patung yang sama juga didirikan di Odate, kota kelahiran Hachiko. Patung/boneka berisi kapas yang identik dengan Hachiko pun dibuat dan sekarang berada di Japan’s National Nature and Science Museum. Pemerintah dan rakyat Jepang sangat menghargai dan sering kali mengambil contoh loyalitas Hachiko dalam segala perbuatan mereka sehari-hari.

Pada bulan Mei 1994, Japan’s Culture Broadcasting Network memutarkan rekaman yang berisi suara gonggongan Hachiko yang dahulu sempat terekam. Mereka menggunakan teknologi laser untuk memperbaiki rekaman yang sudah parah kondisinya tersebut. Rakyat Jepang akhirnya dapat mendengar suara Hachiko setelah 59 tahun kematiannya.

Saat ini, setiap tanggal 8 April, rakyat Jepang selalu memperingatinya sebagai Hari Hachiko, hari di mana manusia bisa mencontoh sikap setia seekor anjing dalam kehidupan sehari-hari.

[IMDb rating : 8.1/10]
[Awards : - ]
[Production Co : Stage 6 Films, Inferno Distribution, Hachiko]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1028532]

[Quality : BRRip 720p]
[File Size : 600 MB]
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[Resolution : 1280x690]
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Senin, 15 Juli 2013

10 Movies that Honestly Depict the Horror of Gun Violence

Francois Truffaut said it was impossible to make an antiwar film, because every representation is an act of romanticization and therefore an act of recruitment. In the gun debate, one often hears a similar argument: the movies make guns look unduly romantic and cool, transforming them into fetish objects to celebrated with mindless glee, contributing to a culture of acceptability and the naturalization of violence. Whether representation, even if flattering or romanticized, actively influences the behaviour of an impressionable audience is hard to say, but in any case it seems obvious that the cinema—and the American cinema in particular—has a fascination with gun violence so extreme and unrelenting that it borders on irresponsible. The problem isn’t so much that movies explicitly valorize guns as it is that they do nothing to suppress their appeal. It’s a tacit sort of endorsement, all the more insidious because, as with war movies, the advocacy remains only implied.

In the immediate wake of the Senate’s most recent failure to pass more comprehensive gun legislation, we’ve compiled ten films that make a point of doing the opposite: these are films for which guns are made to look deliberately unappealing, the violence that comes in their wake represented honestly as brutal, horrifying and something that we as a people can no longer abide.

1. “Elephant”

Gus Van Sant’s misunderstood Palme D’or winner has high aspirations and an unenviable task: this is film that attempts to make sense of a school shooting in order to suggest that one ultimately can’t. In “Elephant”, gun violence plays out as unqualified atrocity, its consequences as incomprehensible as the reason it occurred at all. The crowning touch is a moment of unbearable defeat: we follow a student as heads cautiously toward the sounds of gunshots, hopeful that he might save the day, only to watch helplessly as he is shot down the second he makes a move.

2. “A Bittersweet Life”

Handguns, of course, are considerably less hard to come by in Korea than they are the United States, which is why in this Korean crime film a mobster in exile just can’t seem to get his hands on one. A backroom deal for a single weapon becomes an arduous exercise in politics and negotiation, culminating in a quick-draw shootout that leaves the dealers shot dead. The irony is that, once his gun is acquired, the hero is closer than ever to meeting his fate, brought about rather than avoided by making the purchase.

3. “The Tin Star”

One of Anthony Mann’s superlative black and white Westerns, “The Tin Star” stars Anthony Perkins as a small-town Sheriff forced to learn to shoot in order to survive the mistrust and dissent of his constituents. Here Mann depicts the gun as a crude instrument, a terrifying source of power that must be wielded with caution and fear. Far from confirming its importance, “The Tin Star” suggests we’d better off—or in the very least much safer—without the weapons on which we rely.

4. “Full Metal Jacket”

If ever there could be a successfully anti-war war movie, Stanley Kubrick’s hostile, seethingly angry “Full Metal Jacket” must be it. What distinguishes this particular representation of war—and, by extension, the attendant gun violence—is that Kubrick never feels the need to pay his respects to those bravely fighting, opting against the romance and valor of duty and instead lambasting the soldiers as much as the institution to which they belong. Where a film like “Saving Private Ryan” self-consciously makes heroes of its protagonists, “Full Metal Jacket” depicts them as idiots and buffoons, contributing to the repulsiveness of warfare rather than trying to avoid it. When even Private Joker eventually succumbs to the brutality around him, the point seems clear: in war, everybody gets dragged into the muck eventually.

5. “Bowling for Columbine”

Michael Moore’s admittedly simplistic and reductive documentary might seem an obvious choice when discussing anti-gun movies, but it nevertheless remains an important one, broadening the conversation about American gun culture to the national stage and illuminating dimensions of a subject traditionally kept shrouded in mistruth. Where Moore fails as a rigorous documentarian, he succeeds as a populist voice, and it’s worth recognizing the value of his influence on an underdiscussed issue.

6. “Blood Simple”

The Coen brothers probably aren’t the first names that come to mind when one thinks of filmmakers averse to glamorizing violence—“Miller’s Crossing” is nothing if not in love with the look and feel of its tommy guns, and “No Country For Old Men” practically invented a new weapon—but their startling debut, the darkly comic noir “Blood Simple”, treats its guns as instigators of a sick cosmic joke, one which sees murders committed strictly in the name of misunderstanding. Guns go off, lives change, and nobody can walk away clean from the consequences.

7. “Taxi Driver”

“Taxi Driver” is the rare case of a movie that, like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Scarface”, is so commonly misperceived as endorsing the violent acts of its protagonist that one wonders how effective its true message could possibly be. De Niro’s iconic bedroom posturing made drawing a gun—or, y’know, mounting one to a custom arm rig—an act of movie-star cool, but the point is precisely that it’s all an act. It’s telling that the point at which he finally buys a gun from a black market dealer’s suitcase is also the point at which Travis Bickle makes the leap from on-edge to off the deep end, and one would be hard-pressed to describe the fallout from this purchase as anything but grotesque.

8. “Point Blank”

John Boorman’s postmodern crime film tells a decidedly oblique sort of revenge story. Lee Marvin plays Walker, a man on a mission for vengeance after a betrayal during a robbery-gone-wrong leaves him shot and left for dead. Boorman makes Walker out to be a veritable precursor to the Terminator, crashing through downtown Los Angeles on a hunt for the $93,000 he feels he’s owed by his former partners. Guns become a fixture of the skyline: snipers hide from sight, men fall without warning, and shots rip through the sky like claps of thunder. “Point Blank” reinstills guns with a sense of actual power, making them a force to be reckoned with and an object to fear.

9. “Starship Troopers”

Paul Verhoeven’s strategy for making the case against gun violence has always been to rub our faces in it, forcing us to recognize the repulsiveness of the spectacle we desire. “Starship Troopers” takes this approach into the realm of satirical science fiction, taking the American military-industrial complex to task for its continued exploitation of its own populace and the wars it draws them into arbitrarily. It’s a searing critique, one as much about the abhorrent excessive of on-screen violence as it is about the real world stuff that inspires it, though it so successfully adopts the look and feel of the pulp material it’s satirizing that many mistook it, rather ironically, for an earnest piece of schlock cinema.

10. “A History of Violence”

David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” tackles the representation of violence in two very different ways: on the one hand, this is a movie about inherited traditions of violent behavior, drawing explicit connections between violent acts and their long-term repercussions for both the people who commit them and those they commit them upon. But on the other hand, “A History of Violence” engages with the issue through its very form, growing increasingly violent—and increasingly absurd—as its running time continues and the body count rises. By the end of the picture, the film has evolved (or devolved) from naturalistic drama into what is essentially a live-action comic book or cartoon, in the process critiquing our tendency to conflate violence and heroics.

Do any other films make a compelling case against guns and gun violence? Let us know in the comments.

Categories: Lists

Tags: A Bittersweet Life, A history of violence, Blood Simple, Elephant, Guns, List, Point Blank, Politics

Sabtu, 13 Juli 2013

JACK REACHER (2012)

Tanggal Rilis : 21 December 2012 (USA)
Jenis Film : Action | Crime | Thriller
Diperankan Oleh : Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike and Richard Jenkins

Ringkasan Cerita JACK REACHER (2012) :

In an innocent heartland city, five are shot dead by an expert sniper. The police quickly identify and arrest the culprit, and build a slam-dunk case. But the accused man claims he’s innocent and says “Get Jack Reacher.” Reacher himself sees the news report and turns up in the city. The defense is immensely relieved, but Reacher has come to bury the guy. Shocked at the accused’s request, Reacher sets out to confirm for himself the absolute certainty of the man’s guilt, but comes up with more than he bargained for.

[IMDb rating : 7.1/10]
[Awards : 3 nominations]
[Production Co : Mutual Film Company, Paramount Pictures, Skydance Productions]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790724]

[Quality : BRRip 720p]
[File Size : 800 MB]
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Jumat, 12 Juli 2013

Review: ‘In the House’

There are only seven basic stories, or at least that’s what TV Tropes says, and high school lit teacher Germain (at Lycee Gustave Flaubert, no less) is certain he knows them all backwards and forwards. As portrayed by Fabrice Luchini in Francois Ozon’s “In The House,” Germain may appear, at first, as a caricature. His Woody Allen-esque glasses and fine guage sweaters exude a put-upon bookworm, forced by circumstance to hang up his own creative dreams and waste his hours trying to bang some sense into the dull youth of today.

“In The House” opens, after Germain is spied rolling his eyes at a faculty meeting, with him bemoaning the lack of creativity from his creative writing class. Echoing Max Von Sydow’s soliloquy at the television from “Hannah and His Sisters,” Germain trudges through his papers until he finds one that is sharp and witty, with elegant phrases and a unique point of view.

It is the first section in an ongoing story written by Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a handsome, blonde, slightly devilish kid who sits in the back watching everything. (Dane DeHaan for the Hollywood remake, to be sure.) After reading the piece aloud to his wife (Francophone Kristin Scott Thomas) Germain’s first instinct to force the story to stop. This degree of nonconformity is dangerous, and besides, what if the other student should find out about it?

The other student is Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), a student with poor math skills on the receiving end of Claude’s tutorials. These lessons, however, are just an excuse for Claude to get a firsthand look at the interior of a typical, middle class home.

Rapha’s family’s house is situated on the perimeter of a park, and has therefore been a longtime object of speculation for the dangerously curious Claude. Once “in the house,” Claude’s impressions of Rapha’s father as a frustrated middle-manager and sports-happy Sinophile and Rapha’s mother as “the most bored woman in the world” become the focus of his serialized tale.

In time, Germain becomes obsessed with the story, demanding changes be made. This starts out as professorial guidance, making suggestions about tone and voice (all cleverly visualized in replayed dramatizations) but soon he is appearing as an actual character in the tale with a full-throated interest in its outcome.

With its wheels-within-wheels structure and ubiquitous jibber-jabber between neophyte and guide “In the House” is something of a lit major’s “Inception.” Ozon’s screenplay (based on a play by Juan Mayorga) makes great use of ambiguity not only in what is “really” happening, but whether what we are seeing is the actual fictional story as written or a potential version of the written story.

If this sounds all heady and meta, that’s because it is (it’s about a lit prof for heaven’s sake!) but it is also very droll and even just a little bit sinister. A wonderful B-story concerns Kristen Scott Thomas’ declining career as a gallerist, and there are some cleverly nuanced japes at the modern art scene – a subject that’s usually offered up for blunt ridicule.

As is normally the case when one gets “in too deep” there are are some scandalous turns, and “In The House” is no different. Our underage boy and bored housewife (played by a very dressed-down Emmanuelle Seigner, I should add) do, eventually, strike up a physical relationship – or at least they do in one of the layers of the story. Whether or not it actually happens is something only the two of them will know for sure.

“In the House” is crafty and juicy and ought to delight anyone whose ever thumped their chest about being a storyteller. I must confess, however, that somewhere in the third act the air started to leak from the balloon. The tongue-clucking from all the adults feels out of sync with the agreeable tone of the rest of the picture. Yes, Claude and Germain engage in hubris, but the bulk of the movie is basically cheering them on.

By the time we get to the end of the picture, after some discussion on how a perfect ending must somehow be both unexpected and inevitable, “In the House,” in my opinion, chokes. It gets over-dramatic, even a tad preposterous, though not so much as to ruin the whole film. I mean, bookish Germain getting knocked unconscious by a hardcover Celine is hard to fully snub. Considering the truly lame nature of Ozon’s last picture (“Potiche”) this is, despite the humor, more in line with the director’s quite good thriller “Swimming Pool.”

SCORE: 7.8 /10

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Francois Ozon, In the House, Review

Kamis, 11 Juli 2013

Your Daily Short: Alexander Payne’s ’14e Arrondissement’

Welcome to Your Daily Short, a new feature on Film.com that will highlight and stream a short film at high noon. Every weekday. Every week.

TODAY’S SHORT: “14e Arrondissement” (Alexander Payne)

RUNNING TIME: 6:46

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT: Well, chances are that you already have. “14e Arrondissement” was the concluding segment of the wildly uneven omnibus film “Paris, je t’aime,” and as far as I’m concerned, it towers over the other contributions. Alexander Payne is one of the most rightfully revered filmmakers around, but I was nevertheless surprised by his success in the short form. His films never go for the cheap thrill or the easy connection – the bountiful rewards of a film like “Sideways” are not derived from blasts of self-contained sentiment, but from a delicate latticework of love, loss and self-loathing. Anyone who has seen “The Descendants could tell you that Payne’s work takes a little time to find its rhythm, but the details just dig so deep.

Having said that, “14e arrondissement” condenses the immensely satisfying experience of Payne’s features into a tight little reverie that clocks in at just under seven minutes. The story of a Denver mail courier’s trip to The City of Lights, the film is as warm and wistful as anything Payne has ever made (and Margo Martindale absolutely nails the filmmaker’s delicate balance between strident hope and tender resignation.

Watch Yesterday’s Daily Short: “Family Photo”

Do you have a favorite short film that you would like us to feature as Your Daily Short? Whether it’s something you love, something you made, or both, send it along to Filmdotcomshorts@Gmail.com and you might see it on the site!

Categories: Columns

Tags: Alexander payne, Margo martindale, Paris, Paris J'Taime, Short Film, Your Daily Short

Selasa, 09 Juli 2013

WHAT RICHARD DID (2012)

Tanggal Rilis : 5 October 2012 (Ireland)
Jenis Film : Drama
Diperankan Oleh : Jack Reynor, Roisin Murphy, Sam Keeley

Ringkasan Cerita WHAT RICHARD DID (2012) :

What Richard Did follows Richard Karlsen, golden-boy athlete and undisputed alpha-male of his privileged set of South Dublin teenagers, through the summer between the end of school and the beginning of university. The world is bright and everything seems possible, until in one summer night Richard does something that destroys it all and shatters the lives of the people closest to him. Featuring extraordinary performances from its mainly young cast, What Richard Did is a quietly devastating study of a boy confronting the gap between who he thought he was and who he proves to be.

[IMDb rating : 6.4/10]
[Awards : 7 wins & 7 nominations]
[Production Co : Element Pictures, Irish Film Board]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2092011]

[Quality : BRRip 720p]
[File Size : 525 MB]
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Senin, 08 Juli 2013

A Product of their Time: The Danger of Disrespecting Science Fiction

oblivionTN

Few genres better lend themselves to metaphor than science fiction. Like the horror film—atop which all manner of symbolism has been traditionally projected—sci-fi often resembles a kind of empty vessel readily filled with keen insights, which makes the practice of extrapolating social and political allegories from such films, especially from a historical remove, all the more satisfying intellectually. This is not to imply that heady metaphorical readings of science fiction films are anything less than compelling or valid, both of which they very often are. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that our tendency to seek (largely unintended) subtextual depth from horror and sci-fi in particular is founded on some fairly problematic assumptions about the genres themselves, both in terms of their shared history and the implied value of their form.

The roots of cinematic sci-fi, of course, can be traced all the way back to the inception of the cinema itself, a genre born in the magic of Georges Melies and “A Trip to the Moon”. But despite its legacy, the reputation of science fiction as an essentially frivolous genre has more or less endured since the halcyon days of the sci-fi B-movie, a period which for better or worse has long defined our overriding perception of the ambitions and limitations of the style. Which is to say that with the exception of self-consciously major works from outlying auteurs—Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” remains the preeminent example—science fiction continues to be regarded, in a general way, as fundamentally less serious than other genres. Though not quite as overtly ghettoized as horror, it’s nevertheless regarded in the popular imagination as somehow inherently trivial, a breeding ground for little more than shallow spectacle and superficial special effects.

This line of thinking leads many to the rather misleading conclusion that a sci-fi film, and in particular a low-budget or B-movie sci-fi film, isn’t likely to have been deliberately imbued with meaning or import of any significance, which makes it the job of the critic to read the film as a product of its time and place. This accounts for why, when we talk about, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we tend to describe it as indirectly responding to rather than actively commenting on Red Scare paranoia. We find it easier to accept that a B-movie was subconsciously playing into cold war anxieties rather than thoughtfully articulating them: you can see similar rhetoric cropping up in discussions of the social or political climate and films like “Godzilla” or “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in most cases denying the artist responsible for the work in question responsibility for serious metaphor and allegory.

war-of-the-worlds911

It’s true that many of these films, especially during the 1950s, were not necessarily aware of the depth of their own conception, and were any of the artists behind such films to retroactively deny their intention to work in symbolism, readings about cold war fear or implicit propaganda would remain no less valid or interesting. But that’s true of all films—readings can always be compelling whether they do or do not cohere with an artist’s original vision—and yet it’s only sci-fi and horror that continue to be relegated to the status of permanently unintentional meaning, each film a perpetual “product of its time” to be regarded as blank texts made without thought. And this still happens: even Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” made by one of the American cinema’s most prominent auteurs, was rarely discussed as a film deliberately engaging with post-9/11 anxieties, leaving such readings to lofty afterthought.

The exception to this tendency, for whatever reason, is satire. Our fascination with science fiction as cautionary tale obviously goes back a long way—it has a basis in literature as much as in film—and we’re still happy to accept a sci-fi film as self-consciously expressing a coherent idea so long as that idea is readily understandable as political critique. The template is veritable cliche: a film is set in some dystopian future world of overt surveillance and oppression, the film a terrifying vision of a place where freedom has been eclipsed by state power and whatever magical drug/incredible technology/televised battle royale. But this kind of artist-admitted “meaning”, which usually begins and ends with a base social fear exaggerated to the point of unquestionable awfulness, very rarely engages with the world in any intelligent or significant way, and it only qualifies as symbolic only insofar as some tenuous connection may be drawn between this future world and our own. A discerning viewer would be hard-pressed to call The Hunger Games a functional “satire”, if only because, if it is indeed satirical, what is its target? A contemporary culture obsessed with the spectacle of violence? The fear that government power will continue growing until we live in a brutal world dictatorship? This isn’t exactly revelatory.

This weekend sees the American release of the new Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle “Oblivion,” another film in which the only intended meaning one can extrapolate sits right on the surface. The film is essentially post-apocalyptic—it’s set on an uninhabitable earth, not unlike “Wall-E”—but if the point is to suggest that we are on the verge of rendering our planet unlivable, we’ll hardly be amazed or devastated by the critique. It’s more likely that, many years down the line, we’ll look back on “Oblivion” as (probably unintentionally) responding to our current social and political climate, tapping into anxieties regarding, say, burgeoning drone warfare, which the film in fact includes. Perhaps that’s the point of our tendency to extrapolate hidden meanings from sci-fi films: we want to find the message that’s there without yet knowing it, the import only apparent from at least a minor historical remove.

Categories: Features

Tags: Godzilla, Oblivion, Sci-Fi, The Hunger Games, Wall-e

Sabtu, 06 Juli 2013

Tribeca Film Festival Review: ‘The English Teacher’

There’s a market for everything. I’m sure they teach that at Harvard Business School, but it’s also just common sense. As hard as it might be for me to believe, the fact of the matter is that, somewhere out there, a moviegoer is wishing they could see a film just like the 2008 Steve Coogan vehicle “Hamlet 2,” but with none of the bite or incisive wit. For that person, and that person alone, there’s “The English Teacher.”

“The English Teacher,” from TV vet Craig Zisk (“Parks and Recreation,” “Scrubs,” “Grounded For Life,” “Brooklyn Bridge” and many others,) is a tone-deaf comedy flipping like a gasping fish between silly and maudlin. Despite a lead performance by the always welcome Julianne Moore it is rudderless in its presentation and outright stupid in its central conceits. To make matters worse it is 100 percent predictable, so there aren’t even shocks to wake your from the unfunny torpor. I pride myself on giving each movie a chance, but I wasn’t 45 seconds into this film the first of many red flags popped up. (That would be the annoying fake storybook voiceover.) By minute 85 I was simply moaning “ennnnd, ennnnd, pleeeeease ennnnnd.”

Moore plays a 45 year old unwed English teacher in Picket Fence, USA who believes herself to be happy merely living single and introducing kids to literature. (How condescending is it that this movie just takes it on faith that we the audience know how much she desperately wants a man?) An opening montage of bad dates – taken from three hundred thousand sitcoms – is the best part of the movie.

One night she happens upon an old student played by Michael Angarano, who was quite amusing in “The Brass Teapot.” (Actually, she pepper sprays him, thinking him a burglar, one of the few funny gags in the picture.) He’s living at home having washed out in New York after graduating from NYU’s dramatic writing program. His dad (Greg Kinnear, natch) is helping him prep for law school, but Moore takes a look at his unproduced play and falls in love.

She’s quick to enthrall the theater teacher (Nathan Lane on autopilot) and next thing you know they’re putting on a show. Suddenly, everyone is taking this very seriously (like refusing to make story adjustments, spending all kinds of money) as if a high school play in the middle of nowhere means anything.

Alexandre Payne’s “Election” is a marvelous movie because it offers up student government as an allegory for politics while still getting to play with the conventions of the high school film. “The English Teacher” does none of this. “The English Teacher” goes through the motions of allegedly dramatic romantic misunderstandings and overblown backstage hijinks. Zisk’s sitcom roots show to an embarrassing degree with kids hiding behind cars with cellphone cams and goofy sound effects cues that seem ripped from an episode of “Scooby Doo.”

At the heart of it, though, is poor Julianne Moore, acting her heart out. In every scene there are instances of her making “good choices.” Unexpected actorly tics and line readings that would go over really well . . . on a show like “Parks and Recreation.” But “The English Teacher” it’s an avalanche of these moments. Zisk has no idea how to pace a feature film (to be fair, he isn’t given much of a chance with Dan and Stacy Chariton’s abysmal script) so he simply goes all-in on Moore’s natural talent. Sometimes there is a pastry that is just too sweet.

Jessica Hecht and Norbert Leo Butz play the Principal and Vice Principal and they’re very funny because they pop in for quick, snack-sized scenes at an arm’s length from the uninteresting central drama. There are times when you come away from a bad movie liking the side characters saying “boy, if they only made a movie about THEM!” My gut suspicion, however, is that you’d also need a new writing and directing team to make that work.

SCORE: 2.0 / 10

“The English Teacher” is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it is also available on iTunes and VOD.

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Craig Zisk, Greg kinnear, Julianne moore, Lily collins, Michael angarano, The English Teacher, Tribeca film festival

Kamis, 04 Juli 2013

Review: ‘The Lords of Salem’

Sheri-Moon-Zombie-in-The-Lords-of-Salem-2012-Movie-Image-2

A distinctly original effort in the wake of two misshapen and much-maligned “Halloween” remakes (well, one remake and its own f**k-off sequel), Rob Zombie’s “The Lords of Salem” is a more restrained kind of grungy horror throwback than the rocker-turned-filmmaker has offered to date, at least marking a step in a different direction, if not necessarily the right one.

The director gives wife Sheri Moon Zombie her most prominent role in his films yet as Heidi Hawthorne, a DJ in Salem, Mass. who receives an unsolicited album at the local radio station from a band identified only as “The Lords.” She proceeds to give their atonal tracks some airplay, unaware that the deep thumps and low chants therein aren’t avant-garde rock so much as the result of legit black magic, casting a vague spell over every woman in earshot and causing Heidi to slowly, steadily lose her mind.

Arriving as it does in a wooden box, that mysterious LP serves as a canny metaphor for the way that Mr. Zombie, like any good auteur, pilfers from past nightmares in order to keep them alive today. Having already had his way with the deep-fried schlock of “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” “Lords” carries instead the moody slow-burn residue of Polanski, Fulci, Argento and Kubrick, and with the help of cinematographer Brandon Trost (of the classic “MacGruber”), Rob captures with perfectly grimy care the gray chill of a New England fall and the more sinister shadows that lurk within Heidi’s various haunts.

Also check out: Why Horror Films Love Pop Music

To her credit, Mrs. Zombie is asked to be far less shrill than ever before, and she does succeed at conveying a particular degree of feminine vulnerability by greater measure than simply flaunting her bare ass (which still makes its requisite appearance here). Due to her increasingly wan appearance, Heidi’s shock-jock colleagues (Jeff Daniel Phillips and Ken Foree) become worried that she might have relapsed into drug abuse, and yes, “Lords” technically beat this month’s “Evil Dead” remake to the punch in this regard, but what really counts is that Sheri sells the entirety of her living nightmare. Before she gets too far gone, though, Heidi reaches out to an occult scholar (Bruce Davison), and while she is subsequently subjected to all manner of strikingly gothic imagery, he is left to the predictable investigation into the cause of all this madness (SPOILER: Salem is a town best known for its past persecution of witches).

The scenes that make the most sense stem from your usual horror-movie B-plot, while those sequences which don’t dare resemble conventional logic volley from eerie to laughable — sometimes within the same scene. The absence of an abandoned subplot involving the other possessed women in town (among them a briefly-glimpsed Barbara Crampton) is especially felt by the film’s finale, and the catty fun with which Dee Wallace, Patricia Quinn and Judy Geeson play a coven lurking in plain sight leaves one wishing that they’d had more scenes to call their own.

“Lords” builds all the same to a reliably gonzo climax, where Zombie’s music-video roots finally come out to play with understandable abandon. However, the film’s final shot ranks among its least graphic and yet most puzzling, a slap-in-the-face piece of punctuation that reminds the most accommodating viewers that, even on his good days, Mr. Zombie is really only making movies for an audience of one.

SCORE: 6.3

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Horror, Review, Rob zombie, The Lords of Salem, William goss

Rabu, 03 Juli 2013

13 of the Most Misleading Trailers Ever Made

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The preponderance of excitement which greets the arrival of even nine-second microteasers makes it needlessly difficult to remember that, in the most basic sense, movie trailers are nothing more than advertisements. They’re enormously successful advertisements, of course—ingratiating themselves so deeply into the fanboy market that their rapid dissemination more or less takes care of itself—but they’re nevertheless created with the exclusive intention of convincing you to spend money.

That we should be skeptical of movie trailers, particularly those promoting multi-million dollar blockbuster entertainments, really ought to be a given for everyone, which is why it’s always disconcerting to see the internet foam at its collective mouth any time we’re handed down, say, a spot for some new Superman nonsense or the nineteenth twenty-minute preview clip for “Star Trek Into Lens Flair” or whatever. It’s not contentious to suggest that the quality of a given trailer has no real bearing on the ultimate quality of the film it’s advertising, especially since, as we all know, the entire purpose of an ad is to make a product seem appealing. To that end we surely expect some deceit.

But one can only tolerate so much deception before what’s being marketed seems like a different product altogether. Hollywood has long had a tendency—ever increasing in frequency—to exaggerate a film’s more saleable qualities while suppressing the presence of what might be off-putting, but sometimes canny misdirection starts to look like blatant misrepresentation. Below we’ve gathered some of the worst offenders.

The Film: “Drive”

The Pitch: “Fast and the Furious” meets the sexy dude from “Breaker High”. It has it all: high-octane thrills, explosive action, 80s fonts, etc.

The Truth: A contemplative slice of cinema-loving nostalgia from a pretty haughty hipster auteur. Though hardly hardcore arthouse, “Drive” wasn’t the action thrill-ride it was sold as, and those looking for a feelgood blockbuster surely felt ripped off.

Ed. Note: So we accidentally embedded a clip from the opening of the film instead of the trailer, but the screen-grab is so good that I just can’t bring myself to change it. Here’s a link to the actual trailer.

The Film: “Like Someone In Love”

The Pitch: Sort of a Japanese “Harold and Maude”, only more silent.

The Truth: It seems as though the distributor simply didn’t know how to present the new film from Abbas Kiarostami, but in case they didn’t make it out to be the thoughtful, oblique drama it is. For a good laugh, compare the trailer above with the international spot cut for the film’s Cannes debut.

The Film: “Jack Reacher”

The Pitch: An action-packed blockbuster full of explosions and car chases.

The Truth: Basically just that, except without the explosion. A man even filed a lawsuit after learning that a half-second clip of a giant rock formation exploding was in the trailer without being in the final cut of the film. Because the absence of a wall blowing up was obviously the only disappointing thing about this.

The Film: “A Good Day To Die Hard”

The Pitch: Sex! Explosions! An aging movie star!

The Truth: Just an aging movie star. There’s actually more partial nudity in the trailer for “A Good Day to Die Hard” than there is in the film itself, improbably, and we all know the only thing that gets teenagers and middle-aged dudes into the theater is the promise of beautiful women showing a bit of skin.

The Film: “Lost In Translation”

The Pitch: A lighthearted romp in which Bill Murray has zany adventures abroad, and also maybe sleeps with Scarlett Johansson.

The Truth: A serious film about ennui and disenchantment, more dreamy than zany, with some of the driest humor and most understated punchlines this side of a Jim Jarmusch movie.

The Film: “In Bruges”

The Pitch: More zaniness abroad, only this time it’s two British hitmen and their action-packed follies.

The Truth: “Waiting for Godot” with guns, which go off with decidedly non-zany consequences. Come for the antics, stay for the existentialism.

The Film: “The Rules Of Attraction”

The Pitch: “American Pie” with the kid from “Dawson’s Creek”, and please disregard the names “Roger Avary” and “Bret Easton Ellis”.

The Truth: Well, a film by Roger Avary and Bret Easton Ellis, with about as much gleeful misanthropy as you’d expect from guys like that. What is it with trailers making dark comedies look light?

The Film: “Baby’s Day Out”

The Pitch: Fun for the whole family.

The Truth: Fun for nobody. “Adorable pratfalls” are, in practice, scenes of surprisingly brutal violence, made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that they’re carried out by a baby.

The Film: “Certified Copy“

The Pitch: A slightly more adult (but still poppy!) version of “Dan in Real Life,” accentuated by European flair.

The Truth: “Dan Doesn’t Even Know What Real Life is, Anymore.” Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece is hardly a light rom-com, but rather a decidedly cerebral meta-drama that questions the very nature of personal identity. Instead of a flimsy Ed Burns whatever that Miramax might have put out in the late 90s, you get one of the best films ever made. There have been worse surprises.

The Film: “The New World”

The Pitch: A historical epic featuring swashbuckling and exploring and valiant adventure.

The Truth: A tone poem about nature and grace and two entwined souls discovering one another’s secrets—in other words a Terrence Malick movie. A great film, to be sure, but a far cry from the one they were selling.

The Film: “Miami Vice”

The Pitch: “Bad Boys II” with one white dude.

The Truth: Uh, the best movie ever? But seriously, a much headier formal exercise and exploration of the digital image than anybody could have been anticipating, especially given how amped-up and overblown the trailer made this thing out to be.

The Film: “The Blair Witch Project”

The Pitch: “One of the creepiest films since ‘The Exorcist.’”Three (real) morons go camping in the woods of Maryland and then very bad things happen to them. Presumably, these (real) people were never seen again.

The Truth: “One of several hundred films that is creepier than ‘The Exorcist II: Heretic.’” Dogme 95 in hell. Three bad actors walk in circles while one of them suffers from an unstoppable nasal discharge.

The Film: “Contempt”

The Pitch: A sexy romantic drama that finds wickedly dry auteur Jean-Luc Godard returning to a more “traditional” mode of filmmaking.

The Truth: A thrillingly modernist examination of love and industry that subverts the narcissistic opulence of the film industry – “Contempt” doesn’t just bite the hand that feeds, it chews it right off. In a way, this trailer is as blunt and honest as they come, but any preview that simply refers to Fritz Lang as “the old man” is probably having some fun at your expense.

Categories: Lists

Tags: Calum Marsh, Drive, Jack Reacher, Like Someone in Love, List, Trailers

Selasa, 02 Juli 2013

Review: ‘Trance’

The problem with psychological thrillers is that they so often fail to appreciate the ways in which psychology is inherently thrilling, and how all thrillers are inherently psychological. To sidestep this problem by way of confronting it directly, a sub-genre of films naturally emerged in which psychology is not only used as a means of driving the plot, but also as its vehicle, exploring the mind by way of actually setting a film in one. This, naturally, is a demented challenge unto itself, as even those notable movies which were successfully able to conflate the inner-workings of the human brain with the demands of narrative storytelling (“Inception” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” being the two most obvious examples from recent years), work because they expound upon how we feel by having fun with how we think, which is the opposite tact of most narrative fiction.

Unfortunately, when movies that literally delve into the folds of the human brain forget either part of the equation, they often prove that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and it can be an even worse place to visit. With that in mind (lame pun pathetically intended), Danny Boyle’s “Trance” finds this strange sub-genre at its worst. An insufferable cross between “Inception” and the twisty heist noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville, “Trance” is a shapelessly propulsive mess of pop psychology and poor drama, as laughably pseudo-scientific as Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” but with none of that film’s clear human charm.

“If memory serves,” is how the saying goes, and “Trance” is a movie about identifying its master. We begin with a Goya painting (“Witches in the Air,” to be precise), which will inevitably prove to be the height of the film’s artistry (talk about setting a needlessly high bar for yourself; it’s like Jay Leno using Richard Pryor as a warmup comic). Goya’s eerie imagery is a too-perfect fit for this muddled story of psychic manipulation, more evocatively articulating a haunted sense of suggestion in one still image than Boyle does in the 101 restless minutes that he has at his disposal. Perhaps, then, it’s appropriate that the “Witches in the Air” is stolen during the film’s overcomplicated opening sequence, in which a fine art auctioneer named Simon (James McAvoy, whose smarmy voiceover channels the horrors of “Wanted”), lays out the procedures by which he and his coworkers are to protect their enormously valuable paintings in the event of an attempted robbery.

Naturally, Simon’s auction house is promptly robbed. Franck (Vincent Cassel, and yes, it’s spelled “Franck”) and his merry gang of thugs bust in under cover of smoke grenades, and Simon immediately rolls up the canvas and tries to shove it down the emergency chute. Franck catches up with Simon at the last possible moment, conks him on the head with the butt of his giant shotgun and then makes off with the masterwork (valued at nearly $30 million). Except, we soon learn that Franck only thought he had the painting in his possession, and Simon – who’s in cahoots with the thieves – can’t remember where he hid it, on account of the fact that he was conked in the head with a giant shotgun.

Desperate to locate the information that he’s convinced still resides somewhere within Simon’s thick skull, Franck forces his stooge to visit Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), the sexiest hypnotherapist in all of London, and perhaps the only person qualified to plumb the depths of Simon’s subconscious and retrieve the vital information. And that’s when things go off the rails of this narrative that’s ultimately as much about a painting as “The Maltese Falcon” is about a statue.

Elizabeth’s motives for becoming involved are as unclear as her techniques, and Boyle is so eager to play around in Simon’s mind that he fails to provide an adequate foundation for the fun he has once he begins the brain-dive. Working from a script by Joe Ahearne and John Hodge (a second attempt at a story that originally aired as a British TV movie), Boyle is enabled to indulge in all of his most frenetic tics and tendencies, unencumbered by the insidious forces of “logic” and “location” that prevented “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours” from entirely submitting to the banality of Boyle’s hyper-maximalist aesthetic hedonism. Boyle’s unwillingness to become stagnant is admirable, but his digital frenzy found its ideal home right off the bat in 2002’s “28 Days Later,” in which the rudimentary technology perfectly complimented the film’s end times unease.

Here – re-teaming with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who rose to prominence in the world of Dogme 95 and has worked on all of Boyle’s features since the digital revolution except for “Sunshine” – it seems like Boyle is more interested in how he can mess with the image than he is in what it’s revealing, an approach that capably (if obviously) illustrates the fragmentation of Simon’s mind, but fatally fails to articulate the shifting power dynamics at the throbbing heart of this plot mash.

Ultimately, amidst all of the shot refractions, strange asides about Elizabeths’ pubic hair, and the iPad that’s found in someone’s mind (I don’t even know), “Trance” is at its best when calms itself enough to focus on the psychic manipulations that steer drive the bizarre love triangle between Simon, Franck and Elizabeth. Simon is a hopelessly dull protagonist, but the film’s greatest coup is in how it plays with the idea that this might not actually be his story. Franck and Elizabeth aren’t trying to find a painting so much as they’re vying for the lead role in a picture, and the various means by which they try and play one another would be interesting if they weren’t muddled into sensationalistic nonsense, climaxing with an action sequence that’s only legitimate bearing on human psychology is how it reflects Danny Boyle’s desire to drive a flaming car off a pier.

Forgettably scored by Underworld’s Rick Smith (“Beaucoup Fish” for life, y’all), “Trance” doesn’t just share the name of a musical genre, but also its defining qualities; the highly suggestible (a percentage of the population that Boyle refers to as “virtuosos”) are seduced by its rhythms, while the rest of us are forced to endure an endless drone of flashing lights and thumping bass. This time, the synapses just didn’t click. No piece of art is worth a human life,” Simon tells us. “Trance” isn’t even worth 101 minutes of one. Danny Boyle will be back, but here’s hoping the song doesn’t remain the same.

SCORE: 3.5 / 10

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Danny boyle, Inception, James mcavoy, Review, Rosario dawson, Trance, Vincent Cassel

Minggu, 30 Juni 2013

THE LAST SUPPER (2012)

Tanggal Rilis :29 November 2012
Jenis Film :Action | History
Diperankan Oleh :Ye Liu, Daniel Wu, Chen Chang

Ringkasan Cerita THE LAST SUPPER (2012) :

Kisah ini diceritakan dalam kilas balik dari sudut pandang dari 61 tahun Liu Bang, kaisar pendiri Dinasti Han. Liu Bang telah mengalami mimpi buruk & hidup dalam ketakutan dan kekhawatiran, karena ia selalu mencurigai bahwa seseorang sedang mencoba untuk membunuhnya. Dalam seluruh hidupnya, ia hanya takut dari dua orang yaitu Xiang Yu, yang berjuang dengan dia untuk supremasi atas China setelah jatuhnya Dinasti Qin, Han Xin, seorang pria yang sebelumnya menjabat Xiang Yu, tetapi kemudian menjadi umum di bawah dia, dan membantunya mengalahkan Xiang Yu. Liu Bang kemudian mencerminkan peristiwa penting dalam hidupnya, seperti Pesta di Hong Gerbang dan Pertempuran Gaixia. Di antara semua rakyatnya, Liu Bang menganggap Han Xin, Xiao He dan Zhang Liang sebagai tiga orang yang paling penting yang dapat membantu dia dalam mengatasi Xiang Yu di Contention Chu-Han.

Namun, ia percaya bahwa Han Xin ingin memberontak untuk melawan dia, dan dia telah dipenjara oleh Han selama enam tahun terakhir. Liu Bang enggan melepaskan Han Xin dan memungkinkan dia tinggal di kediaman Zhang Liang. Istri Liu Bang, permaisuri Lu Zhi, akhirnya pasukan Xiao He untuk memikat Han Xin masuk perangkap di bawah kedok Han mengundang untuk menghadiri perjamuan. Han Xin ditangkap, dengan tuduhan makar dan dieksekusi, dan mayatnya diskors dalam bel. Xiao He memotong kepala Han Xin & menyajikan kepada Liu Bang. Liu Bang juga meninggal tak lama setelah itu, dan dikatakan bahwa ia akhirnya menemukan kedamaian dalam kematian karena ia telah hidup dalam kehidupan yg penuh ketegangan dan ketidakpastian.

[IMDb rating : 5.3/10]
[Production Co : China Film Group, Emperor Motion Pictures, Stellar Megamedia]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1919137/]

[Quality : BluRay 720p]
[File Size : 799.1 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Source : BluRay 720p DTS x264-CHD]

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Sabtu, 29 Juni 2013

GAME OF THRONES (2011) SEASON 03 [AIRING]

Tanggal Rilis : TV Series (2011– )
Jenis Film : Adventure | Drama | Fantasy
Diperankan Oleh : Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Fairley

Ringkasan Cerita GAME OF THRONES (2011) SEASON 03 [AIRING] :

The series roughly follows the multiple storylines of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Set in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, Game of Thrones chronicles the violent dynastic struggles among the realm’s noble families for control of the Iron Throne. As the series opens, additional threats are beginning to rise in the icy North and in the eastern continent of Essos.

[IMDb rating : 9.4/10]
[Awards : Won 1 Golden Globe. Another 31 wins & 70 nominations]
[Production Co : Home Box Office (HBO), Television 360, Grok!]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947]

EPISODE 1: VALAR DOHAERIS
Synopsis

Jon meets the King-Beyond-the-Wall while his Night Watch Brothers flee south towards the Wall. In King’s Landing, Tyrion wants a reward, Cersei arranges a dinner party, and Littlefinger offers to help Sansa. Across the Narrow Sea, Dany starts her journey west while in the Riverlands, Arya meets a band of outlaws.

[Quality : HDTV 720p]
[File Size : 375 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 1280x720]
[Source : REPACK.720p.HDTV.x264-EVOLVE]
[Encoder : nItRo]

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