I feel like I'm suffocating the air out of both ongoing lists. Yikes.
A Walk Among the Tombstones
Liam Neeson's transition into action hero is such an obvious move that it breeds excessive frustration that the move has largely been wasted on poor movies. Fortunately
Out of Sight writer Scott Frank knows exactly what makes Neeson the perfect heavy. In what's the best use of this persona since
The Grey Neeson is a giant physical threat who towers over everyone, but is brought back to earth through a slouch and hang dog eyes which are reminiscent of nobody short of late Robert Mitchum. As an actor's showcase this hits the spot. Unfortunately it's attached to a lame rendering of tired noir cliches fused onto a too clean '70s aesthetic. The film remains a mild pleasure, but would probably be more enjoyable at a leaner pace ala The Limey. The most obvious thing to cut would be the stereotypical black sidekick who is included I suppose to humanize Neeson, but he isn't even necessary with Neeson's eyes and brow doing it perfectly already.
The Special Relationship
This is a handsome sequel that severely fumbles on the main thing that made the earlier film such a joy. Quaid and Davis are great as the Americans and Loncraine doesn't mess up his end instead giving this a nice and occasionally moody feel. The main issue is that the film is too expansive and buys into itself a little too much. The first thirty or so minutes are unnecessary and Morgan should have shrunk the scope of the film to just one or two instances of the affair rather then every note of their relationship. The same amount of time given to Lewinsky or preferably Kosovo would have been a better use of the film's time and would give a greater sense of forward movement from
The Queen. Also a reduction of character would have helped. The tension between the queen and Blair allowed for some effective musings on the purpose of relics in contemporary political life to be thoroughly explored, but the theme here of legacy building comes across too blunt and an afterthought because of how thin spread things are. It really is a major waste of some great talent doing such great work when it is clear how easy it is to raise this to an excellent film.
Willow Creek
This is a meandering, overlong, and repetitive entry in a genre that was dead with the Bush administration. The characters are CW non-entities and the plot follows on
The Blair Witch Project way too closely without understanding the payoff. There's one good shot in the film, admittedly it takes up about an eighth of the movie, which is professionally photographed by the low standards of the genre, and some of that
World's Greatest Dad wit comes through, but that's stretching an okay 30 minute short to 80 boring minutes.
The World of Kanako
Kamikaze Girls was one of the first films I saw that really caused me to get into film in a serious way so I'm coming into this with a bit of undue nostalgia and overly high expectations leaving my reaction anything but objective. This is a lot more typical of the sort of Japanese films which get imported stateside with the very extreme violence and sex (though Nakashima gives a cleaner, higher budget sheen compared to the usual Miike looks). A lot of the themes too are fairly generic hitting the typical fears of youth, confused sexuality, and the failings of patriarchy that you get in a lot of Japanese films from the past two decades or so. Fortunately Nakashima fully commits delivering a film that is as aesthetically unique as it is mad in its story telling. The pre-credits sequence stuffing the next 100 minutes into an elliptical Russ Meyer inspired seven minutes is the highlight giving something genuinely unseen in recent years where four (at least) timlines are squished together at a rapid pace just barely giving the sense of one story. The rest of the film is a little more typical with the horribleness of who Kanako is being the one novelty though it would have had a greater effect had the father not been so much worse. It's easy to conceive of a better version of this film with just a few minor tweaks, but this variation all the same i pretty excellent. It would have been easy to just let it be a series of quirks with the lollipop sucking cop and the schizophrenia of the lead just being icing on the quirk cake, but everyone works really hard to imbue the proceedings with a genuine emotional honesty which gives a little relief to the aesthetic overload. Also the quirks don't really pileup until the last half hour allowing for something like a naturalistic relationship to develop between the characters and for the themes.
Passion
This is De Palma on a complete lark with some disengagement from the material turning fun into the key word and boy is it ever. For the most part the original film is tossed to the side in favour of an old fashioned actor off. Aside from one key scene De Palma shoots in a relaxed and semi-conventional manner instead refocusing everything in the film so as to better serve the actors. There's still some capitalism critique going on here, but DePalma makes the subtext such literal text here that the film seems more concerned about sexuality then money. Even this is subservient to the actors though as it is used primarily to contrast them while also developing a strange sort of mimesis down to McAdams only wanting sex with her partner wearing a death mask of her.
Finally getting to them McAdams definitely hasn't been better with this easily being her juiciest role so far. I can't think of an actor so underutilized today and it's nice just getting her to display all of her talent. I'm less familiar with Rapace, but she too gets an incredible opportunity here. The way they're contrasted is pretty interesting too with McAdams having her long angularity emphasized while Rapace comes across as soft and short. Her bangs cover her head shrinking her even further compared to McAdams, yet it's McAdams who gets work within a traditional femininity not only in dress, but even in movement where the camera does the walking for her in a lot of scenes while Rapace is much more active flailing all around the place. This isn't De Palma at his best, but it's impressive all the same.
As an aside I'm curious what is so off putting about this film (which all things considered is fairly conventional) that IMDB people have it rated so tremendously low?
Life Itself
This is a pretty average borderline hagiography that I can see the appeal of if you care about Ebert, but James is too close to the material and so jokingly passes over anything compelling or flawed about Ebert's life in exchange for lame heart string tugging or comedic antagonism. Perhaps the film would have been better as a direct cinema thing at the hospital which are the only parts that threaten to be a movie and not an elevated making of extra
Bastards
That definite article that's dropped in the english title is absolutely necessary since the force of this movie and the fact it is almost all emotionally driven is lost without those three little letters. The film is fairly incoherent due to the ellipses and I would have never pieced together the plot as much as I did or as soon as I did with the summary and the incoherence was only further compounded by the fact that I simply could not tell about the actors playing the sister and lover to the point I'm a little surprised they were played by different people. I reserve the right for a rewatch to improve my feelings on this, but even the difficult story telling fits with the singular anger of the film which 'the' really conveys. At times it almost doesn't matter that Denis gives no clue, for example, why half way through the film the lead is in a brawl. Emotionally that makes total sense both because of the sadness of the previous scene and because of the red soaked anger of the film. It's surprising how accurate the poster presents the colour tone of this movie as if the camera's eye had gone totally red with anger.
At the same time it might be a little ironic. I can't entirely tell if Marco was having sex with his sister or not, but there is a lot of morally problematic stuff from all of the characters which opens the film up from all of the character's pointed anger into an almost comical, "well you all are bastards," tone that contrasts fantastically with everything. It's perhaps a little too nihilistic, but sometimes its great if totally exhausting fun to revel in such an attitude.
