Feb 1
Based on Etgar Keret’s short story titled Kneller’s Happy Campers, Wristcutters: A Love Story is a tedious and strange exercise in film. Goran Dukić, a Croatian filmmaker, directed this 2006 comedy-romance-fantasy-whatever. Despite only clocking in at around 88 minutes, this movie feels like a long, disappointing bus ride to an uninteresting destination. And the bus has no bathroom.
Letters from Iwo Jima is a perceptive, passionate war film that depicts the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese side. It is the companion to Flags of Our Fathers. Clint Eastwood’s film was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a greater success in Japan than it was in the United States. Based on the books Picture letters from the Commander in Chief by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and So Sad To Fall In Battle: An Account of War by Kumiko Kakehashi, this movie is one of the best of 2006.
Like with Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood’s interests lie with the human aspects of war. He isn’t interested in enemies or heroes, flags or symbols. He concerns himself with the commonalities of the combatants, reminding us of similarities that have been ground down thanks to propaganda and government officials demanding final surrender to political will.
Apr 16
Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is a careful, human war movie that digs deep to tell the truth about war. The people involved in armed conflict, human beings all regardless of political colouring, are fighting for one another. Country, affiliation, political strands, or beliefs don’t matter when weighed against the bonds set in the stone of violence, bloodshed and carnage.
Flags of Our Fathers is based on the book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers. With a screenplay written by William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis, Eastwood’s picture carries the American viewpoint of events related to Iwo Jima. A companion piece, Letters from Iwo Jima, was also directed by Eastwood. Flags of Our Fathers spans the events and the aftermath of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima to create the famed photograph.
Mar 29
Every so often I get the opportunity to go back and retrace my steps through movies I’ve seen and reviewed before. Sometimes my opinion changes and sometimes it doesn’t. In the cases where my views do change, I like to reassess and rewrite my reviews. In some cases, as is the case with 300, I scrap the old and bring in the new.
300 is based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. It’s directed by Zack Snyder, whose work I loved in Watchmen and despised in the recent Legend of the Guardians. His tricks are front and centre, as expected, with gallons of stylized slow motion and rapid zooms. Snyder tends to overdo the flashier elements. Because of this overwrought approach, the action scenes are cheesy and laughable.
Oct 13
Cars, directed by John Lasseter and Joe Ranft, is a marketing monster of a movie in theory, but this 2006 offering from Pixar heads in a completely unique direction and almost alienates the toy-buying audience that would have flocked to it. Lasseter and Ranft do so many things right with this picture that it’s almost hypnotic, yet Cars consistently ranks as one of the “lesser” works from Pixar. I don’t think that’s true.
One of the first things that sets Cars apart from where it might have landed is that the universe of the picture is entirely inhabited by vehicles. There are no humans. Nobody drives these cars or trucks; they operate on their own, cruising around for pleasure or racing for accolades. The motivations of these vehicles are many, too, and their existences reflect a wide variety of life goals and purposes, some of which prove ultimately surprising.
