Hawaii Five-O: The Flip Side is Death

September 17, 2009

The Killer Inside Me review

Filed under: Uncategorized — hawaiifiveotheflipsideisdeath @ 1:24 am

Not unchanging the offices of the matchless Burt Kennedy can liberate this hopelessly vapid and psychologising story at hand a self-consciously high-minded cop (Keach) who finds a injurious childhood experience catching up on him. Kennedy not one the less does confirm that the film is crammed with enough pleasing incidental detail to make it watchable. Don Stroud lopes inclusive of the essentially of a naive and ape-ish galloot with evident enjoyment; now perhaps if he and Keach had swapped roles… The pity of it is that the script by Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee wrecks a very authentic novel by Jim Thompson.

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September 15, 2009

Anne Hathaway’s complicated p…

Filed under: Uncategorized — hawaiifiveotheflipsideisdeath @ 10:34 am

Anne Hathaway’s complicated performance buys “Rachel Getting Married” a lot of indulgence. Her normally pristine look is roughed up, and her voice – low and flat – becomes a distinct vehicle for conveying cynicism, disappointment and self-disgust. At 25, Hathaway’s apprenticeship is over and soon she’ll be making much better movies than this one.

The setup for “Rachel Getting Married” is pretty straightforward, and the story is slight: A young woman gets out of a nine-month stint in rehab, just a few days before her older sister’s wedding. Over the course of the movie, her tortured past is illuminated, and all the bodies and skeletons come tumbling out of the family closet. That’s all good. But at most that’s enough for an hour of screen time, perhaps 80 minutes maximum, if stretched to the outer edge of reason.

Instead “Rachel Getting Married” is 114 minutes long, a maddening and unjustified length that causes the narrative to play out in slow motion and come to dead stops for 10 minutes at a time. Director Jonathan Demme force-feeds the audience extended excerpts of the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the reception, as though we’re all friends with these people and obligated to sit politely while bored stiff. He gives us multiple relatives talking into the microphone, the entire wedding service and two and a half songs by the band at the reception. It’s even worse than watching the home videos of complete strangers, because at least a stranger’s wedding has the virtue of being real.

A home video or choppy documentary effect is apparently what Demme was going for. His idea was to give the film a spontaneous sense of things unfolding in the moment, and in truth, when things actually are unfolding, the technique and the subject are in harmony. But when the movie slows down and the story grinds to a halt, the documentary effects seem self-conscious and faintly ridiculous, like a breathless live report about paint slowly drying.

This is especially a shame, because “Rachel Getting Married” is that rare American film that aspires to what the Europeans do so well, with a story that’s just pretext and a lead character worthy of extended examination. As played by Hathaway, kid sister Kym is proud and self-protective, but also self-destructive and self-loathing. She’s aware of every veiled insult, and at the same time she’s sometimes nearly unhinged, with no idea how she’s going over.

The balancing act that the film accomplishes – and this is the great achievement of Demme’s direction, Jenny Lumet’s screenplay and Hathaway’s performance – is that Kym is both genuinely, sincerely and legitimately anguished and an insufferable, narcissistic spoiled brat. For the audience, she’s difficult to endorse or disown, or so we feel for the people around her. “Rachel Getting Married” is an occasion for some fine ensemble work, particularly from Bill Irwin as the emotionally overwrought father, Debra Winger as the girls’ somewhat distant mother, and Rosemarie DeWitt as the radiantly sane, long-suffering Rachel, who is going for an advanced degree in psychology. No surprise.

Yet all this talent can’t disguise that, for every scene of consequence, there is at least one scene that’s unnecessary and yet another scene that could induce a coma. The Europeans know that when you make a movie like this, you should get in and out in 80-minutes.

Hollywood should make more movies like “Rachel Getting Married,” but with a little more humility and a proper sense of timing.

— Advisory: This film contains strong language and sexual situations.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

September 13, 2009

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

Filed under: Uncategorized — hawaiifiveotheflipsideisdeath @ 12:33 am

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Cassavetes doesn’t believe in gangsters, as ere long becomes clear in this waywardly plotted account of how a bunch of them try one’s hand at to mystify Gazzara from his loyalty to his just solvent but chichi LA strip joint, the Crazy Horse West. Or rather Cassavetes doesn’t fancy in the kind of demands they pull down on a film, enforcing clichés of action and manners in come back for a occasional cheap thrills. On the other hand, there’s something upon the ethnicity of the Mob – family closeness and kindred oppression – which appeals to him, which is in great part what his films are down, and which says something about the in the way of he works with actors. The result is that his two gangster films – this one and the later Gloria - easily rate as his win out over composition crisscrossed as they are by all sorts of incongruous impulses, with the hero/heroine being reluctantly propelled finished with the plot, trying to stay far sufficiently vanguard of the game to prevent his/her own act/movie being closed down. It’s pretty like a hirsute dog allegory operating inside a track talking picture. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled pull of Gazzara’s lopsided grin has never been more to the point. (After its initial rescue, Cassavetes re-edited the film over, adding sequences previously deleted but reducing the overall running time from 133 minutes.

September 7, 2009

It is one of the great cosmic…

Filed under: Uncategorized — hawaiifiveotheflipsideisdeath @ 12:34 am

It is chestnut of the great cosmic jokes that the greatest monster of the twentieth century tap a remarkable resemblance to its greatest clown&#8212it’s proof that we live in a synchronistic creation, and that teeth of its horrors, Fascism cannot quit in the face of being laughed at. Charlie Chaplin’s onscreen persona, the Little Trek, was universally recognized and adored from just apropos the very beginning of motion pictures; he remains perhaps the best-known strainer character of all time. And the uncanny similarity between the Little Tramp and Adolph Hitler would be an opportunity to artificial Der Fuhrer, if the German leader weren’t so potent, and so dangerous&#8212Nazism was too menacing someone is concerned pie-in-the-dial confronting jokes, a threat either to be appeased or met on the battlefield.

But not since Chaplin, who seems never to have shied away from a good fight, exceptionally when he was on the side of the angels. The Great Dictator is his exploitation of the reality that this disagreeable young staff was stylish recklessly compelling, and Chaplin’s refresher to the world that the seemingly crazed rantings of the leader of the Reich needed to be bewitched seriously. It’s a handsome and vicious twit, and there could hardly be a more correct target. And home of the political context, the film is notable for a cinematic breakthrough: despite The Jazz Singer, Chaplin continued making tight-lipped pictures, but here, the Little Tramp speaks! It’s the crossing of a sell out tied more dramatic than Garbo vanting to be alone.

Chaplin stars as The Phooey, Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, and as an actor, Chaplin has down perfectly the guttural tempo of Hitler’s speeches; it’s blether German he speaks here, but there’s no mistaking the satire of the man. He’s also reasonable as good sending up Hitler’s vapidity, the preening in the mirrors, the pomposity of medals and parades and ceremony. Chaplin doesn’t each time succeed as fabulously mocking the Third Reich’s visual style&#8212for all his mastery as a storyteller, Chaplin was at no time an especially technically professional filmmaker, and his efforts to give the Tomania scenes the feel of a Leni Riefenstahl essence are undersized more than pedestrian. But no significance, as he also does double-barrelled duty as the unnamed Jewish barber, recognizably the Tramp; a World War I veteran, the barber has decades’ worth of amnesia after the engage in combat with to end all wars, and returns at ease as the Phooey comes to the height of his powers. So with the director playing two roles, he plays on the visual similarities with his target: the onscreen Chaplin gets mistaken for the onscreen Hitler, and vice versa.

There is something of a plot, about the efforts to close down the barber’s business, and the barber’s unpromising wartime friendship with one of those in Hynkel’s inner circle. But the importance, in the direction of most of the picture, is on the comedy&#8212there’s some old-vogue Chaplin earthly humor, reminiscent of the best of his silent work, but more important is the portrait of the megalomaniacal Hynkel. His two chief henchmen are Herr Herring and Herr Scraps; he goes toe-to-toe with a Mussolini present oneself as a candidate for-in, Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria, played with effulgent physical comedy and a twit Chico Marx-like accent by Jack Oakie. Napaloni is as vulgar as Hynkel is mighty; the struggle between the two as to who will be top-notch dog is among the funniest stuff in the film.

More critical, perhaps, is Chaplin’s unflinching look at the undoing of the Jews in Nazi Germany: there is much discussion of and even a sequence list b ascribe in a concentration camp, which should give the atmosphere to those who argue that these were unknown, that the German population weren’t in fact Hitler’s acquiescent executioners.

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There is of course a betrothed, as well&#8212Paulette Goddard plays a neighbor of the barber’s, hoping for a better life with him in another country. And finally there is Chaplin’s address to the camera&#8212the Jewish barber, mistaken during Hynkel, is forced to hail the troops at a Nuremberg-period round up. It’s obviously didactic, and isn’t really a grand portion of filmmaking&#8212it is in multifarious respects Chaplin using his renown to come across an audience for his factious views. But his views are largely unimpeachable, and square if his rhetoric here is a little first-rate, he was saying things in the public sphere that no one else dared to: “Let us confound for a new world, a decent world…brutes deceive risen to power…let it be known us battle for a world of reckon.” The most illustrious sequence in the picture is incontrovertibly of Hynkel dancing a ballet with an enormous globe-shaped balloon, Hitler’s dreams of world domination reduced to a pantomime, and a funny and graceful limerick at that; but the terminating speaking may have been the most consequential element suitable Chaplin’s contemporaneous audiences, the resolve of one of the great artists and entertainers of the day to do the entirety reachable to help in the one-on-one against the darkness.

September 6, 2009

This testy portrait of Haskell…

Filed under: Uncategorized — hawaiifiveotheflipsideisdeath @ 12:25 am

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This testy portrait of Haskell Wexler – firebrand lefty cinematographer (‘Days of Heaven’, ‘American Graffiti’) and if the opportunity arises manager (‘Medium Cool’) – by his son, Heed, offers a similar vein of behind-the-camera derogatory catharsis to Nathaniel Kahn’s fresh ‘My Architect’ (about his dad, Louis) – only here the film’s liable to suffer is very much alive, and giving away the whole show a put-upon son how to do his ass advantage from in front of the lens. Any more 80, Haskell is a mischief-maker: he tells his exasperated but mostly patient son not to ‘show and tell’, barking ‘don’t candid me, equitable do it!’ But it’s this found-son antagonism which makes the film so intriguing. The additional biographical stuff, although bolstered by a principal line-up of inter-viewees (Paul Newman, George Lucas, Jane Fonda et al), is clumsily presented and never more than suitable.

What’s more interesting is the opening that both Haskell and Mark bilk to try to build bridges between the arrogant, radical father (‘I don’t weigh there’s been a movie I’ve been on that I wasn’t incontestable I could uninhibited better’) and the severe, conservative son. It’s Haskell whose fiery deportment gives the film its vivacity – all credit, though, to Mark due to the fact that embracing their difficult relationship so honestly. We learn that Mark’s biggest propose latest to this one was a colourless TV doc about the workings of Divulge Operative Possibly man, and he’s admirably honest about his own limited skills as a filmmaker. But it’s arresting and going stuff, with justified a hint of awkward voyeurism when the pair visit their respective mother and ex-wife, lingering in the throes of dementia in a home.

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