Liz Trotta in 1991, pre-Internet
“[News] won't have to be packaged within 22 minutes anymore by seven or eight guys who think this is what your civics lesson should be for the day.“
And on Madame Nhu:
“The Dragon Lady, yes. She represented a sort of female Eastern viciousness and mystery and chicanery and betrayal and all the rest of it and they kind of focused all the animosity towards our allies in Madame Nhu.“
100 minute running time so the perfect length, but it was so grim and sleazy (Guy Lodge calls it “gutter realism”) that I had to watch at 1.5x fast forward in order to bear it. It’s about a deaf, semi-retarded guy and his criminal brother … they rob a bank and everything goes wrong … the deaf brother is captured but the the criminal one is still on the run and it’s all about the chaotic hours of his life that follow. Super depressing. Jennifer Jason Leigh (who is getting old, unlike me) briefly plays a girlfriend character.
I don’t know how to rate this … it’s super low budget, best represented by the cheapie techno soundtrack, but it isn’t badly made … it’s just awful to watch these lowlifes doing awful, violent things in ugly places (like Queens). Yellow rating, I guess.
Ann Hornaday writes: “… a pulp thrill ride that turns out to be as petty as Connie’s crimes.“
Ben Sachs writes: “… the film encourages delight at the adventures of an amoral dirtbag content to exploit people who are poor, black, or disabled. Not since Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009) have I been so mesmerized by a film I found morally repugnant.“
Rex hated it: “Vile and repulsive, Good Time is just under two hours of pointless toxicity.“
A.O. Scott hated it: “… a rickety genre thrill ride [that tries to] feel like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.“
Alison Willmore calls it a “masterfully scuzzy feel-bad.“
You ever do time before?
In Italian and German. 110 minute running time but felt much longer… at least 20 minutes too long. (I’m catching up on the last few movies I missed from 2015.) I wasn’t too thrilled with this. Beekeeping family in Italy living on the margins … grumpy German Dad with Italian wife and four young daughters … you feel bad for all the kids, especially the oldest girl, Gelsomina (they all have lovely names). You should be glad that this rural life of drudgery disappeared, no need to be wistful. Yellow rating.
Gelso confronting Dad’s whacky expression of love
In Sign Language. 130 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long. See screencap below.
SPOILERS: School for the deaf in the Ukraine… new kid comes … there’s a gang of boys who run things … new kid joins them … they mug people, but their main source of income is from pimping out two female classmates at a truck stop … kid falls in love with one of the girls … quite a bit of graphic sex … gets her pregnant … what former Soviet republic movie doesn’t include a gruesome home abortion? … the girl is going to be sent to Italy for the larger crime syndicate’s prostitution operation … kid objects, tries to destroy her precious passport, other gang members beat him and leave him for dead. Somehow he survives and comes back and murders them all in their sleep.
Not a feel-good pic. Not cheerful. A lot of the scenes reminded me of China, but this was much grimmer. Sort of interesting, the whole sign language thing, but I can’t recommend it … too gruesome, too depressing. Yellow rating.
Tirdad Derakhshani correctly writes: “Embrace it as a great work of political critique, or reject it as a form of aesthetic bullying; there's no denying The Tribe is a powerful provocation. “
Now you tell me!
106 minutes so only about ten minutes too long. I recently saw and liked Berlin Syndrome, which was directed by Cate Shortland. This movie was written and directed by Cate Shortland (W.D. By), so I thought I’d give it a watch … no subtitles on my DVD, so I missed at least 30% of the dialogue … just couldn’t understand a lot of the Australian English.
There’s no story here … it’s very thin … I wasn’t thrilled. A beautiful teenage girl, a perfect Lolita type, gets busted fooling around with her mother’s boyfriend, so she runs away to a ski area (Australia has ski areas?), and is living this sort of marginal life alone … sleeping with random guys, or trying to … she clearly lacked a strong father figure.
She tries to be the girlfriend of this guy who is also sort of a mess, though in a different way. But who cares, I just couldn’t get into it. May appeal more to blonde teenage runaway girls than old bald homebound guys. Yellow rating at best.
Underneath, people are... are different
110 minutes long but felt much longer … at least 20 minutes too long. A period piece (WW2), a love story, a movie about movies, and a feel-good pic. Best thing about it was Gemma Arterton, who is both beautiful and stacked.
Wasn’t thrilled though, yellow rating.
Not confusing facts with truth
In Hebrew and French. 115 minute running time, so way over the sacred 100 minute mark, but I liked this one. Who knew that divorce in a rabbinical court could be so thrilling? The absurdity of it all is just so great that it plays like a comedy at times… but of course it’s a tragedy. The cast of characters who come through the court … it’s hilarious (and terrible). Really well done. Recommended. Green rating.
The movies I can recommend from 2015 are:
45 Years
GETT: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
Mad Max: Fury Road
Shaun the Sheep Movie
Son of Saul
Tangerine
The Diary Of A Teenage Girl
The Revenant
Wild Tales
Unending Trial
115 minute running time so at least 15 to 20 minutes too long. There were quite a few scenes that I could have cut to get it closer to the sacred 100 minute mark, but I liked this one. It’s a thriller that borders on horror … really well made, but not easy to watch.
It was not on the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 list, so I just stumbled across it, and I’m glad that I did. Again, this proves that the Rotten Tomatoes list is deeply flawed.
Abduction and sexual captivity movies aren’t for the faint of heart, but if you’re a tough guy or girl who enjoys a well-crafted, well-acted thriller, you’ll like it. I just wish it had been tighter, cut 15 minutes out and it would be near perfect. Teresa Palmer is another super talented Australian actress (like Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman).
Recommended. Green rating. This is the fifth movie I can recommend from 2017 … the others are Thelma, Land of Mine, Graduation, and Wind River.
(I see now that the director of this movie also made Lore, which had one of the best endings I’ve seen.)
Why do you always throw yourself at me?
86 minutes so well within the sacred 100 minute mark. Not just a W.D. By movie (written and directed by the same person), but a W.D.S. movie — written, directed, and starring the same person, in this case a young woman named Desiree Akhavan.
It’s mainly a homosexual love story, but it’s more complicated than that — she can’t reveal to her Persian parents that she’s gay, so there’s a cultural barrier thing going on too. It’s about educated rich kids living the hipster life in Brooklyn. “Shirin” is an Iranian-American … her family has money and she went to Smith. She’s attractive, but sometimes looks like a transgender man, her body type is manly — it’s weird. She has a deep, sexy voice and she’s smart and not conventional — all attractive qualities.
The movie is very funny in parts … I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t like it enough to recommend it. If you’re interested in privileged hipsters in Brooklyn, and the sexual experimentation that some young people engage in, you might like it. Yellow rating.
Stephen Holden titled his excellent review Aimless Adventures of a Hip Narcissist, which is spot-on.
Mom, I’m a little bit gay.
94 minute running time so well within the sacred 100 minute limit. A coming-of-age story set in 1992 … the trouble I had with it is Saoirse Ronan couldn’t pass for a seventeen-year-old in my mind. In every scene, I thought why is this woman in her twenties going to Catholic high school?
There are a lot of cute scenes (the discouraging guidance counselor made me laugh out loud), it’s quirky, but it’s sort of overly precious throughout (though it doesn’t descend into Wes Anderson or Little Miss Sunshine or, god forbid, Noah Baumbach territory.) The class element interested me (east Sacramento versus west Sacramento), going to state college versus some private school in NYC, etc. But I wasn’t that thrilled in the end. Yellow rating.
Hottie from Haifa closer to seventeen than the lass from Dublin
