In recent years, a number of small, modest, mostly comic works, many of them dealing with the lives of working-class people in dreary provincial towns, typify the current minor renaissance in British cinema. Within their narrative process and despite their humorous treatment, films like The Full Monty, Little Voice, Brassed Off, and even Trainspotting address […]
George Grella
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Back from the future again
In its progress from a surprise hit made on a relatively modest budget back in the 1980s to its current status as yet another mammoth summer spectacular, The Terminator has undergone the familiar transformation from innovative and influential work with some genuine intellectual implications to yet another ho-hum blockbuster. It now seems to have ascended […]
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Birds of a feather
Appearing quietly amid the multiple explosions rattling the walls of the cineplexes, the new movie Winged Migration represents a phenomenon considerably more astonishing than Bruce Banner mutating into a raging green giant or Arnold Schwarzenegger remaining, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in all his granitic stolidity. The motion picture shows exactly what its title implies, the travels […]
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An old-fashioned movie
The cinema exerts so powerful and personal an effect on the senses and the spirit that viewers often feel an intense emotional connection with particular movies, especially from their own pasts, far exceeding their reactions to other kinds of art and perhaps even to life itself. In part because of the sheer physical act of […]
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Big and green and mad as hell
Now and then a motion picture comes along that actually deserves all those superlatives that clog the daily prose of most reviewers, that sends them digging through their thesauruses for bouquets of compliments, that inspires them to deploy all the artillery in their sadly depleted arsenals of praise. The Hulk, alas and alack, is undoubtedly […]
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The cop formula as before
Although probably best known for a series of gritty, authentic sports flicks often laced with considerable quantities of irony and humor — White Men Can’t Jump, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Cobb, Play It to the Bone — Ron Shelton has also worked in some of the popular action genres. Most recently, in fact, he directed […]
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Crime, isolation, and redemption
The customary patterns in contemporary independent filmmaking involve a constellation of familiar elements, forming an inspiring saga that regularly enlivens the goosed-up press releases that pass for entertainment journalism. The stories follow a familiar model of aspiration and struggle, detailing the adventures of impoverished film school graduates with grand dreams. They beg loans from affluent […]
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Transatlantic translation of the caper flick
As the history of the form demonstrates, and The Italian Job nicely illustrates, the big caper flick, depending which side of the Atlantic it hails from, generally moves in one of two different cinematic directions. In Europe, the film about some carefully planned, immensely complicated, and highly lucrative theft usually takes on comic overtones, with […]
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A load of recycled junk
Warner Bros. Pictures The first movie in the Matrix trilogy derived in part from Emerson’s “noble doubt” of the existence of nature itself — the ancient intuition that the universe consists merely of our own perceptions; a private dream, rather than an external reality. In the sequel, The Matrix: Reloaded, that doubt persists, combined with […]
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A Christopher Guest folkumentary
The historic success of This is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner way back in 1984, demonstrates the curious position of parody in a culture that now seems to have lost any sense of irony. The film so precisely nailed its ostensible subject, a horrible British rock band (though neither discernibly better or worse than […]
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Playing a game, putting on a play
Always an important and popular character in American literature (and no doubt drawn from observed reality), the confidence man, that occasionally lovable rogue, fleeces his victims by exploiting not only their gullibility, but also their greed. Most con men don’t simply steal the money from their marks. Just like the average legitimate Wall Street hustler, […]
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It was a dark and stormy night…
As the numerous contemporary adaptations of Agatha Christie’s works demonstrate, cinematic translations of the classic detective novel must employ a certain amount of extraneous material to succeed on the big screen. These include a cast of recognizable stars in small roles, period costumes and music, dazzling sets, a glittering sense of style, and, frequently, a […]
