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(01/20/10 6:00am)
Madison's cinema scene is excellent, relatively speaking. On any
given weekend, no fewer than four local venues are playing films
worth watching. Four Star Video Heaven (on North Henry Street) is
the most inexhaustible movie rental joint I've ever patronized. For
the outrageous price of $0.00, the Cinematheque continually
provides us with opportunities to see films we'll probably never
again be able to see. The Wisconsin Film Festival begins on April
15 and it promises to be as stacked with must-sees as it is every
year. If you've got an insatiable appetite for cinema, Madison is
one of the better places you could be living at the moment. But in
the interest of combating complacency, the following ought to be
said: We can do better.
(01/10/10 6:00am)
Why a period film set in rural Germany
just prior to World War I, and why now? ""The White Ribbon,"" the
latest from Austrian director Michael Haneke, has loomed large in
the film community's collective consciousness for many months now
(it won the Palme d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival). The film
recently kicked off its first theatrical run here in the U.S.,
where Haneke is already something of an established entity—you
might know him as the director of 2005's ""Caché"" or 2008's
""Funny Games."" Haneke, whose three favored vibes are grim, bleak
and stern, can finally wear the crown as contemporary cinema's king
of the über-serious: ""The White Ribbon"" is his most
intellectually satisfying work to date.
(12/28/09 6:00am)
It's always a pleasure to watch a Hollywood film that doesn't
try to beat the viewer upside the head with 3-D explosions or
overwhelm with more cuts than the viewer's mind knows what to do
with. However, it's always a displeasure to watch a Hollywood film
that flaunts an inflated sense of its own cuteness. The second of
these two unwritten laws is what made director Jason Reitman's last
film, ""Juno,"" so unapologetically dreadful: That movie was 95%
prefab swagger and 5% self-congratulation. My intensely negative
response to ""Juno"" is partly responsible for my comparatively
positive response to Reitman's latest, the highly acclaimed ""Up in
the Air.""
(12/28/09 6:00am)
Pedro Almodóvar is one of contemporary cinema's most polarized
figures—note that I said ""polarized"" and not ""polarizing."" He's
a two-gear performer: a director working 60 years too late to
flourish in the mythical Hollywood to which he so often alludes and
40 years too late to be an art-house bad boy like the transgressive
European filmmakers to whom he so frequently nods. The last decade
of Almodóvar's 30-year career has been marked by Oscar-friendly
melodramas (2002's underwhelming ""Talk to Her"") and
attention-starved attempts at provocative profundity (2004's
secretly gun-shy ""Bad Education""). I'm no great fan of either of
Almodóvar's two recent modes, so I was quite surprised to find that
his latest film, ""Broken Embraces,"" is 2009's last-gasp
masterpiece.
(12/16/09 6:00am)
Von Trier's track record of coaxing intense
performances from his actresses—such as Emily Watson, Bjork and
Nicole Kidman—is justly revered. This makes the charge of misogyny
that von Trier often receives all the more curious. The philosophy
expounded in ""Antichrist"" is relatively unambiguous but by no
means straightforward: Woman causes Man's fall, but Woman is also
Man's salvation. ""Antichrist"" never quite reconciles this
dialectic, and perhaps a feminist film scholar will someday
interpret the movie so as to prove that von Trier literally
believes the ideas advanced by Gainsbourg's character regarding the
essential evil of women. For now, it's enough to praise von Trier
for making a profoundly problematic film; however, we should also
let him know that alienation is most effective when it wakes the
viewer up, not when it distracts her from the real meat of the
work.
(11/29/09 6:00am)
""Fantastic Mr. Fox"" is a movie that most ""in-the-know""
viewers will likely approach with a considerable degree of
apprehension. The film's director, Wes Anderson, has long been
preceded by his reputation for churning out overly cute tributes to
an idealized version of the history of cinema. But while Anderson
and his sensibility have seemingly been sentenced by the brutally
hip to the trendiness gulag, I propose that now's as good a time as
any to re-evaluate his mark as a film artist. After all, this task
is hardly a daunting one: Anderson himself has already done most of
the legwork for us in ""Mr. Fox.""
(11/02/09 6:00am)
Remember that issue of the Alcohol License Review Committee
student voting member? That thing The Daily Cardinal has been
harping on for over a week now?
(10/25/09 6:00am)
Joel and Ethan Coen enjoy a fairly ambivalent standing amongst
today's audiences: Their films are widely beloved by the mainstream
(to name a few: ""Fargo,"" ""The Big Lebowski"" and ""No Country
for Old Men""), while the more self-consciously film-savvy crowd is
deeply suspicious of their artistic motives. Indeed, the Coens are
accused of being postmodern misanthropes just as often as they're
called a great directorial duo. Their latest film, ""A Serious
Man,"" will do little to convince either of these two opposed camps
that the other has been right all along. Nevertheless, ""A Serious
Man"" is a slick 105 minutes that presents quite a bit to chew on;
the question is, what exactly does it taste like?
(10/14/09 6:00am)
In his 1971 novel ""Rabbit Redux,"" John Updike thrusts his
estranged hero, Rabbit, into the climax of the space race. Rabbit
finds himself, like many other Americans, observing the first steps
on the moon. Stuck on the ground, Rabbit ruminates, ""I know it's
happened, but I don't feel anything yet."" The monumental space
race defined a generation, spurring imaginations to move beyond the
previous boundaries of reality into an unknown. But how do we
define and categorize such an accomplishment in human terms?
(10/08/09 6:00am)
Sometimes it takes an especially clever film to make one
appreciate life's inoffensive banalities, its simple pleasures and
the sheer wonder of being alive in the modern era. This is
particularly true when the film in question simply refuses to take
itself seriously. Luckily, for everyone who attended the
Cinematheque's screening of ""The Band Wagon"" last Friday night,
director Vincente Minnelli is an artist who repeatedly demonstrated
he could take aspects of the world as ostensibly frivolous as the
color of a room, the girth of a grin or the ineffable glee of
performance and present them in such a way that they burst off the
screen.
(09/27/09 6:00am)
Even the most renowned filmmakers are still trying to figure out
how to make cinema do and say things that no other artistic medium
is capable of doing or saying. Particularly puzzling is the
question of whether cinema is better at producing poetic truths or
documentary truths. ""Sin Nombre,"" which screened this past
weekend at the Play Circle Theater in Memorial Union, seems to
suggest that you can't have both poetic and documentary elements in
the same film—which, truth be told, is hardly the case.
(09/13/09 6:00am)
After the film left a considerable impression at the Wisconsin
Film Festival this past April, the Orpheum has unsurprisingly
brought back Austrian director Götz Spielmann's 2008 drama
""Revanche"" for a return engagement. Aside from winning over
Madison audiences last spring, ""Revanche"" was also nominated for
the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—which isn't
to say that being nominated for that particular award at all
verifies a movie's alleged quality or effectiveness.
(09/10/09 6:00am)
The UW Cinematheque kicked off its schedule for the fall
semester this past weekend with two films generally regarded as
cinematic masterpieces, though of very different species: Vincente
Minnelli's iconic musical ""Meet Me in St. Louis"" (1944) and the
Harold Lloyd silent comedy ""The Kid Brother"" (1927).
(09/01/09 6:00am)
""Inglourious Basterds,"" the latest film directed by Quentin
Tarantino, is obviously designed to provoke strong responses; so
far, it has certainly made good on this objective. Depending on who
you ask, the film is either morally reprehensible or an
idiosyncratic tribute to the power of cinema. But perhaps it's most
useful to think of the film as a stage in the development of
Tarantino's style: ""Basterds"" is highly allusive, remarkably
unsubtle, formally bold and insanely well-written.
(08/26/09 6:00am)
""Inglourious Basterds,"" the latest film directed by Quentin
Tarantino, is obviously designed to provoke strong responses; so
far, it has certainly made good on this objective. Depending on who
you ask, the film is either morally reprehensible or an
idiosyncratic tribute to the power of cinema. But perhaps it's most
useful to think of the film as a stage in the development of
Tarantino's style: ""Basterds"" is highly allusive, remarkably
unsubtle, formally bold and insanely well-written.
(08/08/09 6:00am)
Eras of comedy are hardly ever defined by the work of a single
actor, director or screenwriter. Instead, comedy is usually defined
by regimes - frequent collaborations between specific actors,
directors and screenwriters, collaborations that not only yield
distinctive brands of humor but that also influence our notions of
what's funny outside the theater. A great comedy often imprints a
certain hilarious image in our consciousness, an image that we can
recall whenever and wherever and at which we always find ourselves
chuckling. Such moments are surprisingly absent from a film
entitled Funny People"" - good thing, too.
(08/08/09 6:00am)
Eras of comedy are hardly ever defined by the
work of a single actor, director or screenwriter. Instead, comedy
is usually defined by regimes—frequent collaborations between
specific actors, directors and screenwriters, collaborations that
not only yield distinctive brands of humor but that also influence
our notions of what's funny outside the theater. A great comedy
often imprints a certain hilarious image in our consciousness, an
image that we can recall whenever and wherever and at which we
always find ourselves chuckling. Such moments are surprisingly
absent from a film entitled ""Funny People""—good thing,
too.
(08/02/09 6:00am)
The UW Cinematheque concluded its annual Pan-African Film
Festival on July 30 with Juju Factory,"" a Congolese/Belgian film
originally released in 2007. The Cinematheque's summer schedule,
while much too brief, provides us with the invaluable opportunity
to catch international films we may never again be able to see. Yet
""Juju Factory,"" which isn't currently available on DVD or on the
Internet, proved that it warranted screening for reasons beyond its
relative obscurity.
(07/26/09 6:00am)
The Hurt Locker,"" the eighth feature directed by Kathryn
Bigelow, opened July 17 at the Sundance and Marcus Point Cinemas
here in Madison. It's almost certainly the most horrifying film
released thus far in 2009, a coarse meditation on war and
militaristic occupation, so encrusted with dust and dried blood
that you can't help but walk away feeling like you ought to take a
shower with your clothes on. The film is one of 2009's truly
remarkable works, and this is coming from someone who typically
can't stand war films (with a handful of exceptions, of
course).
(07/16/09 6:00am)
A white male on a moped was struck by an oncoming car at the
corner of Park Street and Dayton Street at approximately 7:31 p.m.
Thursday.