6 posts categorized "War Fantasy"

June 26, 2013

WHITE HOUSE DOWN

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The DC Crime Ring Eats Its Own
Hollywood Can’t Help Taking Notice

ColeSmithey.comCopycat redundancies to the recent “Olympus Has Fallen” aside, “White House Down” is an unintentionally laughable action movie that wallows in involuntary cynicism about how America — or screenwriter James Vanderbilt at least — views the White House as the world’s biggest crime ring.

Buried in a shallow grave just beneath its veneer of absurdly cheesy Americana platitudes lays mocking subtext, twitching with spastic gestures and pointing awkwardly at a corrupt political system eating itself from the inside out.

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U.S. President Jack William Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) can’t wait to explain his occupational predicament to the first pair of ears that comes along. “The first term is all about getting reelected,” he tells an upstart Secret Service agent before explaining that now, during his second term, he is finally ready to do something that will make a difference. Sound familiar? You’d think he was petitioning for single-term-limits for the Presidential office.

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Interestingly, the ever-buff Channing Tatum dons the Edward Snowden mantle as John Cale [no, not the Welsh composer and musician of Velvet Underground fame, although that would have been interesting]. Like Snowden, Cale has a history of not finishing things — e.g., school. But our would-be Secret Service agent bodyguard has friends [mainly female] in high places. He went to college with White House Secret Service official Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), one of President Sawyer’s right-hand agents.

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Still, when Cale arrives at the White House for a job interview with Agent Finnerty, with his 12-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King) in tow, she quickly gives him the thumbs-down — so much for friends in high places. Cale is a perfect outlier, ready to pounce for the true cause of liberty when he gets a chance.

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On this particular day a crew of generic baddies sneak into the White House to hack into its computers, take hostages, and see how far down the line of presidential succession they can move the title of Commander-In-Chief. Naturally, Cale’s daughter falls into the hostage category while our able-bodied hero takes personal responsibility for getting the President out alive while all hell breaks out around them.

You can’t help but transpose Barak Obama into Foxx’s character during goofy action sequences, as when Cale and President Sawyer climb up through an elevator shaft. The effect is mildly comical if only because it’s so hard to imagine Obama doing anything so remotely athletic and risky.

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Although its plot gymnastics are idiotic to the point of parody, “White House Down” makes a smart point about how vicious, cunning, and vengeful America’s power-hungry politicians are. They all want to be king for a day, and don’t give a damn about how many civilians get crushed, punished, or put out of work and home in the process. The best thing this cinematic assault-on-the-senses has going for it is its title. Like Edward Snowden, America is on its own and there are very few places to hide.

Rated PG-13. 137 mins.

1 Star

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

October 30, 2012

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

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ColeSmithey.comGoth Penn
Sean Penn Goes Out On a Limb

“This Must Be the Place” is a canny model of life-affirming cinema. Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino (“Il Divo”) continues to make his mark as a unique visionary in global cinema with a provocative English-language think piece starring Sean Penn.

Taking inspiration from a Talking Heads song (see the film’s title), Sorrentino makes abstruse generational connections between such topics as the holocaust, the impact of rock music, and the importance of familial bonds.

Sorrentino’s sense of ironic displacement counterintuitively breathes with integrity. The filmmaker’s cinematic voice is copasetic to David Byrne’s distinctive style of songwriting. Byrne’s musical score for the film provides a haunting aural background.

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Penn’s character Cheyenne is a retired '80s-era Goth rocker à la Robert Smith living in a Dublin mansion with his grounded wife Jane (Frances McDormand). The neurotic Cheyenne speaks in an adenoidal childlike voice. He still wears his signature style: teased-out fright wig hair, eyeliner, lipstick, and a foundation of powder on his face.

Sean Penn’s transformation is complete. Cheyenne is at once frail yet tough. His mousey demeanor doesn’t prevent him from keeping a hardscrabble Dublin womanizer as a pal. Their discussions about women allow for a sense of their ever-growing maturity as men. Cheyenne’s outward appearance might be dated, but his development as a fully engaged person is ongoing.

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Significantly, Cheyenne’s relationship with Jane runs deep. A scene of the couple playing handball in their empty swimming pool, exhibits Cheyenne’s gawky athleticism.

With a wink, Jane discloses that she sometimes lets him win. Sorrentino justly incorporates a defining sex scene that tells more about the couple’s union than a half-dozen Hollywood lovemaking scenes put together. Like real married couples, Cheyenne and Jane talk with the act is over.

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The death of Cheyenne’s Jewish father in the States sends our man-child protagonist on an American odyssey of self-discovery. Stops in New York, Michigan, New Mexico and Utah make up Sorrentino’s unconventional road movie. Cheyenne, we learn, fell out of contact with his dad 30 years earlier as part of a standard-issue bout of rebellion and alienation.

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His success in music backfired on him when two young brothers committed suicide — an act they blamed on one of Cheyenne’s melancholy songs. As it turns out, Cheyenne’s father — a survivor of Auschwitz — spent every waking hour of his later life hunting for the guard who humiliated him when he was imprisoned. Cheyenne picks up where his father left off to track down the Nazi war criminal.

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Paolo Sorrentino works with surfaces — both human and synthetic. His eye for composition—as executed by cinematographer Luca Bigazzi—is formal, but always on the move. Cheyenne’s make-up disguise is a reflection of the artifice that makes up the public and private spaces he anachronistically inhabits.

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Sorrentino’s sincere blend of curiosity and showmanship allows the film to flow with a gentle comic tone in spite of the serious nature of Cheyenne’s mission. “This Must Be the Place” is as much a piece of carefully composed music as it is a movie. Dig the mood and let it take you away.

Not Rated. 118 mins.

4 Stars ColeSmithey.com

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

 

August 17, 2009

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 

Dirty Oscar Fodder
Tarantino Pulls Out All the Stops — Again, and Better
By Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.comQuentin Tarantino has matured as an auteur even if he's as prone as ever to creating funny-ha-ha sequences of joyous cinematic revelry just for the sport of it. Tarantino deploys virtuosic use of character, dialogue, suspense, and surprise in each of this film's five chapters.

A tense opening sequence titled "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France" sets the filmmaker's darkly comic yet heavily dramatic tone with Nazi Colonel Hans Landa's (diabolically played by the incomparable Christoph Waltz who won Best Actor at Cannes for his performance —and his small group of soldiers — visit to a remote farmhouse inhabited by dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet) and his three daughters.

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The objective is to search for Jews whom LaPadite may be hiding. A polite battle of wits and willpower between the two adversaries plays out with a savory drama that is astounding for its layers of subtext, precise execution, and originality.

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The following chapter introduces Tennessee-born Lt. Aldo Raine (played with gusto by Brad Pitt), who indoctrinates his elite squad of Nazi scalpers (Aldo is part Apache Indian) with a speech spun of richly-humored narrative gold. The remaining chapters — each reflecting a different film genre — build on one another toward a new kind of World War II fantasy climax that is cathartic as it is bittersweet for its inevitable collateral damage.

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Loosely inspired by Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 B-movie of the same title — that was itself modeled on Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen," "Inglourious Basterds" (purposely misspelled to foreshadow the film's tenor as a foreign war fantasy complete with subtitles) is a project Tarantino has kept simmering on a back burner for years.

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The movie is full of gentle nods to a collection of styles ranging from Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns (there's more than a little Ennio Morricone music on hand) to the fetishistic WWII films of Tinto Brass ("Salon Kitty"). Nonetheless, these embellishing elements of stylistic filigree are contained in an exceptionally disciplined manner that serve to pressurize every scene with a dynamic cinematic energy that is intoxicating as it is evocative.

Screen Shot 2024-03-23 at 1.55.09 PM

When David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire With Gasoline" (from "Cat People") comes up over an especially appropriate scene, the song turbo charges the movie with a rock 'n' roll aesthetic that feels so good it hurts.

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Next to Martin Scorsese, there isn't another filmmaker as eloquent and passionate about cinema as Tarantino. Like Scorsese, Tarantino involves himself with his audience on a journey about how to enjoy it in the same way he does. If, as with Sight & Sound magazine's film critic Kim Newman, you reject Tarantino's gift for sharing his filmic inspiration on the grounds that it is in some way degrading, offensive, or irresponsible (because this film "refuses to deal with the long-term consequences of the war"), then I would say you're missing the point.

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Cinema is our most interactive and vibrant art form. Its intrinsic nature is a collaborative ensemble experience where, as with jazz music, each player brings a distinctive vocabulary and approach that melds to form a particular palate that is then interpreted differently by each audience member. Tarantino's brilliant use of stylistic anachronisms is an active ingredient that defines how such material can be played with in an appropriate context, such as with a war fantasy genre film, to squeeze out the still congealed historic furor of WWII in an internationally communal forum.    

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"Inglourious Basterds" is a five-course meal created by one of the world's finest chefs. Not since Scorsese's "The Departed" has anyone made a film that's as much fun. Tarantino masterfully employs an economy of action, thought, and movement that takes you on a wartime movie excursion you never want to end. Every film that Quentin Tarantino makes is a cinematic event of mammoth proportions, and this one is no different. It lives up to the director's brilliant international reputation, and accordingly so does he. "Inglourious Basterds" is Tarantino's best work yet.

Rated R. 152 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

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