Currently For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies By Pauline Kael see related

Hello, old friends.

Currently Listening Man I Hate Your Band By Little Man Tate see related

Packing it in...

So (and some of this is double-posted), I'm gonna fold this blog into my regular one, Bailey's Big Ass Blog. I started this one in order to keep my reviews seperate, but since the City Paper folded and I started working full-time (instead of trying to pick up writing work), it has kind of stopped serving any purpose and become a bit of a pain to maintain. Plus, I don't get a lot of hits.

So, if you're not already tuned in to it, boomark and/or subscribe to the other blog. I'll start throwing reviews up there, along with my uninteresting musings and 7th-grade-diary-like ramblings and pictures of our cats.

-bailey

Theatre Hopping: "Lake of Fire" and "My Kid Could Paint That"

Let’s get this out of the way, right up front: Tony Kaye’s epic documentary on abortion, Lake Of Fire (*****) is hard, hard, hard to watch. It runs over two and a half hours and is an utterly unflinching look at the abortion debate—including the depiction, twice, of the abortion procedure itself. It is also an incredibly accomplished documentary, even-handed and unbiased, beautifully shot and masterfully constructed.

In its (mostly) lack of bias, Kaye’s film has been compared favorably to the works of Michael Moore, but it did, in fact, remind me of Bowling For Columbine—not in its point of view, but in its stream-of-consciousness approach to examining a complicated issue for which there are no easy answers and understandable points of view on all sides. Make no mistake, there are plenty of foaming fanatics shooting off their mouths (and some cringe-worthy moments of blatant hypocrisy), but there are moments of astonishing humanity—particularly the extended closing sequence, following a young woman though the entire process. Lake of Fire is a difficult film, but it must be seen and digested.

Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That (*****) is a considerably lighter undertaking for filmgoers (it runs about half as long and concerns the world of modern art), but it is no less riveting and thought-provoking. It tells the story of little Marla Olmstead, a four-year old girl who made national news when her paintings were taken up by modern art connoisseurs, who began paying thousands of dollars for her work. Alas, a profile on 60 Minutes espoused the theory that Marla was not the artist (or sole artist, at least) of her paintings, and the walls came tumbling down.

Director Bar-Lev was there throughout the entirety of the story, and his extensive access to the entire family gives a near-voyeur quality to much of the footage. As the filmmaker begins to have his own doubts about the story, the film generates genuine suspense and real pathos. My Kid Could Paint That is mesmerizing filmmaking.

Currently Watching You Kill Me By Ben Kingsley, Mario Ballantyne, Warren Louis Wiltshire, Brian Kawakami, Darren Wall (II) see related

This Week on DVD: "Evan Almighty", "Reign Over Me", and "You Kill Me"

Evan Almighty **
I laughed (and more than once) at Evan Almighty, but to be honest, I wasn’t really laughing at the dialogue or situations supplied by Steve Oedekerk’s thin screenplay; I was laughing at the pre-existing personalities brought to the piece by Steve Carell or Wanda Sykes or Jonah Hill. Lauren Graham is wasted, Morgan Freeman spins his wheels, and the whole thing ends with a nausea-inducing "dance sequence". All in all, a mighty underwhelming picture.

Reign Over Me ****
Virtuoso performances by Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler help spackle over the flaws in writer/director Mike Binder’s sloppy script.  It is mostly about a performer’s film, and their work is skillful and memorable. Reign Over Me has got some real problems, but it’s got some real power too.

You Kill Me ****
You Kill Me is darkly funny and has a unique voice in spite of its obvious Sopranos leanings and some obvious gags; The love story is warm and sweet, the leading performances by Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, and Luke Wilson are engaging, there are fine turns from terrific character actors like Philip Baker Hall and Dennis Farina, and the climax is a beut. You Kill Me is well-crafted and fun, which is exactly what I’ve come to expect from director John Dahl (The Last Seduction, Rounders).

Currently Watching Lust Caution (Se Jie) By Johnson Yuen, Chih-ying Chu, Lee-Hom Wang, Anupam Kher, Tony Leung Chiu Wai see related

Short Review: "Lust, Caution"

Bad buzz is starting to circle Ang Lee’s new film Lust, Caution (****), which is a shame, because it is a flawed movie but still a pretty goddamned good one, difficult and slowly paced and too damn long but fascinating all the same. The buzz going around (particularly in the less enlightened New York papers) is that it’s long and slow and (here’s the killer) boring—the buzzword which, in today’s movie-going climate, can most effectively kill a picture (people will see a movie that they hear is stupid—witness the killer box office for Transformers—before they’ll see one that they hear is boring). The “long and boring” buzz is also circling the brilliant Assassination of Jesse James, which deserves the label even less than this film does.

The film has also gained some notoriety for its graphic sex scenes, which earned it an NC-17 rating that Focus Features has admirably stuck with. Indeed, if there were ever a solid argument for that rating’s existence (why it should be there, and why it should be practical for Hollywood’s use—which it unfortunately isn’t), it would be this film, which in its best moments recalls Last Tango In Paris—insofar as the sexuality is neither gratuitous nor intended (solely, anyway) for titillation, but is a vital component in understanding its leading characters and their relationship with each other. Things are said in their sex scenes that can’t be stated in dialogue; they enrich the story, instead of taking us outside of it.

Performances are strong across the board, from the always-reliable Tony Leung and Joan Chen to an astonishing newcomer named Wei Tang, whose work as the film’s heroine is legitimately Oscar-worthy. So is the gorgeous cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Alejandro González Iñárritu's regular DP, who also shot 25^th Hour and Lee’s previous film, Brokeback Mountain). But the screenplay by Hui-Ling Wang and Lee’s frequent collaborator James Schamus takes entirely too long to get going (its first act is noticeably flabby), and Lee occasionally lets the pace slack a bit too much. Which is not to say Lust, Caution isn’t worthwhile; Lee’s made plenty of masterpieces (Brokeback, Crouching Tiger, The Ice Storm), so I think we can let him get by, once in a while, with one that’s merely very good.