There are two distinct Terrence Malicks--the genius, and the GoPro enthusiast. Likewise, there are three David Gordon Greenes--the arthouse guy, the stoner comedy dudebro, and the mainstream nondescript filmmaker. There are also multiple Gus Van Sants. And, of course here we have one of the better Richard Linklaters'. I'll never forget the utter disappointment I felt after The Newton Boys. How could the director of Slackers do this? Last Flag Flying is an excellent film. It's pretty mainstream. It's certainly not Slackers, the Before trilogy, or even Dazed and Confused. Nor is it School of Rock. Whatever it is, it's a really solid movie with some excellent movie stars by an excellent movie director. Last Flag Flying is a buddy dramedy road movie adapted from the novel considered the spiritual sequel to The Last Detail, and takes place in 2002. It stars Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne as three men reunited after 30 years (since they served in Vietnam). This was a 4 tissue film for me. I laughed and I cried. This film balances its lightness with its darkness. I kept forgetting this was a Linklater film, but no matter, go see it. It's superb. 5/5 |
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Sonita is a very powerful documentary about a teenage girl living illegally as an Afghan refugee in Iran who is facing being sold into marriage. Instead, she breaks the law (women cannot sing) and she becomes a Hip Hop artist. Sonita's bravery is astonishing. I'm a big fan of Iranian cinema and this is no different. I'm a fan. This is an excellent documentary. Show your sons and daughters. 5/5 By no means am I reviewing Apocalypse Now after seeing it for the first time. I've seen the film many times, but I'm revisiting it once again. If I space it out right, by the time I rewatch this next time, it'll be like new all over again. I'm really surprised at how much seems new to me today. Strange. In any case, this film is genius. It's an absolute masterpiece, and if you've never seen it you should fix that immediately. If you don't know anything about Apocalypse Now, I guess I could at least say that it's essentially Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness retold as a Vietnam War picture. This is an important piece of American cinema. Do it. 5/5 I was very fortunate to see the Premiere of He Named Me Malala introduced by Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai. The love, total awe, and admiration that he expressed that he has for his daughter was extremely moving. This is a documentary film about Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for speaking out for girls' and womens' right to education. After the failed murder attempt, Malala was not silenced. Rather, she became, and is now, a leading advocate for children's rights and she recently was named the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. This is an inspirational documentary. If you have kids, check it out with them. 5/5 Beasts of No Nation is a new feature from Cary Fukunaga (True Detective), starring the always stellar Idris Elba. Beasts is an adaptation of a book by the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. Beasts follows an orphaned child soldier fighting with guerilla soldiers in an unnamed African country. This film was acquired by Netflix and was released this October simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix. Beasts premiered at the Venice Film Festival and the Telluride Film Festival. You can stream it on Netflix now! Make no mistake, Beasts is a brutal film. I highly recommend it, but it's no picnic. If you can, see it on the big screen. It's absolutely worth it. 5/5 Here's a curious little film. This Must Be the Place is about a Robert Smith style, Goth/Emo, retired American rock star living in Ireland. He's married but pretty depressed and needs a distraction so he sets out on a sprawling mission to find his deceased father's Nazi torturer. This film is very quiet and peculiar. Sean Penn is solid as an almost timid, carefully patient retiree. Penn adopts a very slow cadence, but in the end I think if you can get past the speech and the hair/make up it's worth it. It felt pretty slow to me, so it will undoubtedly crawl for the average viewer. I do like quiet and slow, and this was weird enough to keep my attention. 3/5 Son of Saul is a Hungarian film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. It is absolutely incredible. First of all this is a Holocaust film about 36 hours in the life of a Sonderkmmando at Auschwitz working in the gas chambers, and disposing of the dead. Yes, it's completely brutal. That said, it was not the most gruelling 100 minutes. This is achieved primarily in terms of its technical brilliance. This is a very quiet film, with little dialogue so you really are just watching this man go through this one particular day and you can't look away. The film stays with Saul the whole film, and makes ample use of moving camera with very long takes. The audience only sees and hears what Saul sees and hears. He is held in a medium close-up for the majority of the film. There are very few reverse shots, accomplished simply by falling behind Saul keeping both him and what he is seeing both in the same frame without cutting away. Likewise, the film lacks establishing shots. The effect is disorienting and claustrophobic. Son of Saul is simply not your typical Holocaust film. I tend to cringe when a new one comes out, not because the subject matter but because of my personal assumptions about Holocaust films being often exceptionally long and very brutal. While everyone should see at least a few, and I can certainly recommend some really excellent ones, it's a pretty vast sub-genre of the War Genre. I guess I'm trying to say that I am certainly not opposed to War or Holocaust films, I have to be in a certain mood and frame of mind before committing to something that I know will be so emotionally gruelling. When I walked into the projection booth and saw 6 absolutely pristine, perfect, brand new reels, it ceased to matter what kind of film it was. I was over the moon that the Telluride Film Festival was once again able to bring in a few prints to screen--most of the festival program is now digital, and most festivals are now strictly digital. Géza Röhrig (Saul) is riveting. He's not an actor actually, he's a poet and musician. He's VERY interesting, I recommend that you look him up on Wikipedia. 5/5 I had the good fortune of seeing David Holbrooke present his new HBO documentary film, The Diplomat, to a Telluride hometown audience this evening. The Diplomat works on several levels, but primarily as the history of five decades of US foreign policy through the lens of the impressive career of the US Diplomat, Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke's long career began in Vietnam, took him to the Balkans, and later to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served as Assistant Secretary of State and while he never held a cabinet position and never became Secretary of State, he is considered one of the most influential US diplomats. Holbrooke famously helped negotiate peace in the Balkans for Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s under President Clinton. This documentary has clout, and Holbrooke's life and legacy is fascinating. 4/5 The Imitation Game is about mathematician Alan Turing who, with a team of mathematicians, cracked the enigma code and helped Britain win the war against the Nazis in WWII. Cumberbatch was good and all, so was Mathew Goode and even Kiera Knightley. Turing was gay, which was against the law in the UK. He committed suicide in 1954 after a year of court mandated chemical castration following a sexual indecency charge. The film, while it mentions his sexuality several times, it does little more than mention it. Normally, this might bother me. However, I thought that the way it was handled allowed the focus to be on his amazing work and not on his sexuality. This film was under 2 hours, and yes, it is interesting, but it could have been longer. 4/5 |
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