Every year, an esteemed awards ceremony is held to honor the best achievements in film, but we’re not talking about the Oscars. No, this ceremony takes place in a huge-ish circus tent, outdoors on Santa Monica Beach, with decidedly slightly bent activities.
The 1936 Olympic Games, held in Nazi Germany, were almost boycotted by the United States. If Jewish athletes weren’t allowed to compete, our Olympic masterminds would have to come up with an alternative, one that would unleash a real shock to the German system.
In 1766, the well-read, 15-year-old Princess Caroline Matilda of Wales (Alicia Vikander) is married off to her cousin, the 17-year-old newly crowned King of Denmark (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). She’s sweet and willing, he’s been psychologically manipulated and debauched by cynical court regents–if he lived today, his sex tape with Kim Kardashian would be legend.
What is the measure of a great horror film? Is it how high it makes you jump out of your theater seat (as with John Carpenter’s Halloween) or how many sleepless nights it causes you long after seeing it (as with The Haunting)?
Chicken with Plums, an Iranian and French film with English subtitles, is a surprisingly witty comedy-drama with visual flair. Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, the folks who gave us Persepolis, this tale of a moody violinist nursing a broken heart skips melancholy and goes for whimsy, big time.
This week might have shown us what a short film is capable of–the gamut of styles, genres and visions. But Movie 43–a regular-sized movie in wide release made up of 12 terrible shorts–instead makes you hate all of your favorite famous people and doubt your entire life.
Fairy tales employ recurring motifs and plot devices for a reason: They work. In fact they work so well that a scholarly index of tale types was compiled by folklorist Antti Aarne more than a century ago.
“Cuisine is for people who aren’t hungry,” said my wife as we watched Entre les Bras. Indeed, this French film, part of the “Eat the Screen” series at the Doris Duke Theatre, starts with a highly decorative but hardly appetizing time-lapse construction of the weirdest salad I’ve ever seen.
The smug and manipulative Django Unchained manages to rouse itself for its spatter-filled climax–not that it matters much. In his latest goo-fest, a “western” set in l858, aging Bad Boy writer-director Quentin Tarantino, the eternal sophomore, gives us more or less what we’ve come to expect: revisionist history, smart-assed dialogue, blood out the old wazoo and loose ends.
Television / Perhaps it truly was an accident. But something real intruded on the third season premiere of the PBS hit mini-series Downton Abbey two weeks ago.
Maya has been a CIA operative for l2 years, and from the beginning she has been involved in the Find bin Laden industry. It’s a job that has proved exasperating, full of lies and blind alleys.
Call me a cynic, but I am so over the romcom–the will-he-get-her-in-the-last-shot kiss. Also, I am done tearing up.
Sneaking in under the wire to qualify for the Oscar nominations, one or two of which it might get, Promised Land–written by its stars, Matt Damon and John Krasinski–might just get patronized by Hollywood types watching its screener at the Polo Lounge. Its lazy publicity gives off an aromatic mixture of predictable Americana, but don’t you believe it: This is a B-plus movie beautifully acted–again credit Damon and Krasinski, with Frances McDormand–with a story by the great Dave Eggers.
The New Year holiday always brings out confusing emotions in me: bittersweet and nostalgic regret for the year just passed, unadulterated stress for what might lie ahead, the constant reminder that I’m one year closer to being dead. I may need to talk to someone, especially since we’ve just come through the other end of 2012, a year in which we were forced to confront our mortality in more ways than were comfortable.
Move over, Meryl. Helen Mirren is crowding you again–this time as Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant wife, Alma, who participated in more than a half-century’s worth of Sir Alfred’s movies as secret writer and producer .
Film Reviews / By now, we’re all familiar with Peter Jackson’s long, drawn-out, expositional style of filmmaking, in which the first hour–the so-called “popcorn hour”–amps up to a majestic battle of good versus evil, or in one case, a giant primate going berserk in Manhattan. At best, the long lead-in creates suspense and excitement, but when the droll fluff begins to cloy, we moviegoers suffer.
Film Reviews / What follows immediately is a list of those movies, studio and independent, that this writer thinks comprise the “best” of the year. The Best?
“Gotta dance, gotta dance!” is the musical refrain Gene Kelly repeats over and over again throughout “Broadway Rhythm” in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a good thing Kelly let himself and others he was directing dance in continuous, flowing, single-camera takes of mesmerizing movement.
Nothing can save us from shopping at this time of year, but at least there’s a chance of ducking inside a multiplex while the mallrats we love most go wild. In desperate times, almost any movie will do, but if you’re a sensitive soul you pray for one of those rare Christmas-movies-for-grownups.
“America’s not a country. It’s a business.
Before we get to Film of the Year . .
For a kids’ movie, Wreck-It Ralph tackles some pretty heavy issues. There are the usual storylines of an outcast just trying to fit in (whom we’re basically programmed to love), a hero’s journey to defeat evil and the quest to do what’s right at whatever cost.
Oscar-bound, and for all the right reasons, the cunning true-life story in The Sessions is based on the writings of Mark O’Brien, iron-lung-encased polio victim, who, at age 38, decided to seek out a sex therapist to help him lose his virginity. He does, finding a compatible spirit in the form of Cheryl Greene, as played by Helen Hunt, returning triumphantly here to the screen in a starring role.
The drama of a prisoner and the long-suffering woman/mother/child who waits for him was a cornerstone of the Depression–and Depression-era movies–when life was lived on the margins and the system created miscreants (see: Criminal, They Made Me A). Indeed, my great-uncle, Robert Tasker, a convict at San Quentin in the early ‘30s, wrote chain-gang and jailhouse movies upon his release.
You can be flooded with admiration by the superb achievement of Life of Pi, helmed by that most versatile of our filmmakers, Ang Lee, who has translated an allegedly unfilmable eccentric novel into one of the most beautiful and–dare I say it?–spiritual movies in years. And years.
For as long as we can remember, Chinatown has been notorious for drugs, homelessness and filthy streets. Some claim nothing has changed–and that it never will.
Bicyclists have long been overlooked by four-wheel riders on Honolulu’s congested streets. In the gleaming, armored pecking order of the road, cyclists are too often dismissed as lane hogs, hand-signaling nuisances and unfortunates who can’t afford cars.
The fate of some 1,525 acres of land at Hoopili in ‘Ewa may have been decided last Wednesday in Hawaii’s First Circuit Court. The decision might have gone differently, but the appellant attorneys’ strategy seemed to collapse as Judge Rhonda Nishimura picked it apart based on technical errors.
Last Thursday, May 9, the Caldwell administration revealed its action plan for solving Honolulu’s homeless problem. But at the City Council’s budget meeting the same day, Budget chair Ann Kobayashi wanted to know where the money for “Housing First” (see Cover Story, pg.
The Mayor Wright Housing project has been slated for major redevelopment by the Hawaii State Housing Authority (HSHA); requests for qualifications will be going out to developers in three to six months. Nonprofit group Faith Action for Community Equity (FACE) wants to make sure the project’s tenants have a say in the redevelopment process, which could include major renovations or a total rebuild.
The Honolulu City Council held a special Committee on Transportation meeting on Tuesday, May 7, to go over its Complete Streets initiative with input from the department directors of Design and Construction (DDC), Planning and Permitting (DPP) and Transportation Services (DTS). At prior meetings, including the Moiliili workshop, community members pressed the idea of combining Complete Streets with Caldwell’s repaving projects, which Dan Burden of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and some councilmembers have said makes sense.
Not much to agree with my friend Doc Berry (“Limits of Growth,” April 17). None of the scenarios he posits will ever materialize.
In your Diary of May 8 (“End of the 27th)” you reported on SB 1214, passed by the Legislature. In their nimble way, the Legislature tacked the wheel boot prohibition on a bill that was intended to abolish the Commission on Transportation.
On Friday, May 3, at 3:45 p.m., I was driving town bound through the Wilson tunnel on the Likelike. I was parallel to another car, and there were several other cars following closely behind me.
Congratulations Honolulu Weekly on the recent Pai award for investigative reporting (“Boss GMO,” Jan. 4, 2012).
When the biofuel guys say that costs are “confidential” (“Big-foot Biofuel,” May 8), I reply that since I am the one who is going to end up paying the cost, I have a right to know. Frankly, when everybody tries to hide the costs, I smell rat …
The Foster Botanical Garden never ceases to inspire for an urban setting it is like a step back in time (“See the Flora,” May 8). If Koko Crater Botanical Garden contains the world’s largest plumeria collection as suggested, it may be thanks in part to the Prussian born Dr.
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