Were he still alive today, I can't help thinking that Black Swan would've been the late Japanese playwright, melodramatist and exhibitionist Yukio Mishima's all-time favorite movie...and I also recall how the costume designer Eiko Ishioka once mentioned Mishima's aesthetics were "in very poor taste."
The shots of Venice were dazzlingly beautiful in The Tourist. I would really love to visit that city some day. That's not much of a compliment for the film, though, is it?
Funny thing, though, once the film exonerates Lomborg from the mutually exclusive charges that he is a feckless idiot providing ammunition for those who would fiddle while the world burns and a knowing hypocrite who lies for a living, it actually settles down into an interesting, thought-provoking, and useful examination of the pros and cons of various approaches for dealing with global climate change.
“You know, you can’t make a movie about war and occupation without it being about other wars and other occupations."
Fresh on the heels of winning the Cadillac People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is set to be a gala presentation at AFI Fest. My write up of the film for AFI FEST NOW is now up at that site.
The pitch sounds like a “can’t miss” movie, and Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis, and Melissa Leo combine with Swank and Rockwell to give the film a cast that is truly impressive. That the film is not more engaging can be attributed to two script and direction problems.
Director John Curran made two perhaps inadvertently telling comments to the Toronto Film Festival audience following the festival screening of Stone. He said that when Edward Norton originally read the script, he passed on playing the title character with the comment that he “just didn’t see it.”
So The Illusionist himself could be seen as a symbol of the traditional animator seeing his (or her) craft become a lost art.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed has all the ingredients of a horror-porn exploitation film, but its genius lies in withholding enough information from us that while we think we know what we are watching, we aren't entirely sure.
No pretentious film critic ever made himself look smarter than everyone else (or ahead of the curve) by walking out of a major film festival shouting, “Campion! Hornby! Kore-eda!” or “me too!”
