Posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 by Angie Han
Tanya Wexler‘s Hysteria boasts the kind of premise that’s bound to make viewers sit up and take note: In Victorian-era England, the handsome young Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) invents the vibrator to help him treat his “hysterical” female patients by inducing paroxysms. (Or as we call it today, masturbating them to orgasm.) That it’s based on a true story, or a true-ish one anyway, makes it even more intriguing. So it’s a little disappointing that Hysteria is actually much tamer than that description would suggest, but it’s got so much charm I found myself enjoying the hell out of it anyway.
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Posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 by Angie Han
If you’d told me that Seth Rogen would be the pleasant surprise of a quiet indie relationship drama starring Michelle Williams, I’m not sure I’d have believed you. This is her territory, after all, if it is anyone’s. (See also: Blue Valentine.) But even as the rest of Sarah Polley‘s Take This Waltz lurches between moments of understated heartbreak and scenes of thudding obviousness, Rogen quietly proves once and for all that despite his comedy roots, he’s got some serious dramatic chops.
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Posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 by Angie Han
In 2007, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi made a splash with their acclaimed feature debut Persepolis, an adaptation of Satrapi’s autobiographical comic. For their new follow-up Chicken With Plums, the pair have drawn upon another of Satrapi’s tomes, this one the true-ish tale of Satrapi’s renowned musician uncle.
Superficially, the two projects seem like opposites. Where Persepolis was animated in stark black and white, their sophomore effort is (mostly) live-action and bursting with vivid color. What hasn’t changed, however, is Paronnaud and Satrapi’s proclivity for producing bold visuals and mixing serious emotion with playful humor.
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Posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 by Angie Han
Having tackled the fast-food industry, the war on terror, and product placement with his last several works, Morgan Spurlock takes on the less overtly political topic of male grooming in Mansome. Featuring interviews with experts, ordinary joes, oddities, and celebrities (Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, Judd Apatow, John Waters, etc.), the lighthearted film tackles the full spectrum of masculine appearance maintenance in contemporary society. It’s a very broad topic and Spurlock only manages to skim the surface, but what Mansome lacks in real insight, it makes up for in sheer entertainment.
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Posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 by Angie Han
Sometime around 2007, Juno BFFs Ellen Page and Olivia Thirlby signed themselves up to reunite as teenage lesbian werewolves on Bradley Rust Gray‘s Jack & Diane. Funding fell through, however, and after years of delays, both actresses quietly dropped out of the project. Page was then replaced by Alison Pill, who in turn was replaced by Juno Temple, while Thirlby’s part was recast with Riley Keough.
This year, Gray’s completed Jack & Diane finally made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. And while much about the film is tough to understand, what’s clear is that Page and Thirlby have dodged a bullet by leaving the project early on.
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When Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho opened in 1960 it was carried into theaters on a wave of advertising that commanded audiences to keep mum about the story’s surprising elements. Thanks in part to that ad campaign, Psycho became a hit that changed horror films even as it legitimized them. The mainstream horror genre quickly developed around a codified set of tropes, character archetypes and specific rules that, fifty years later, are tiresome in their predictability.
Marketing for The Cabin in the Woods, from director Drew Goddard and his co-writer Joss Whedon, exploits some of that same “don’t tell friends how it ends!” PR mode. But that’s just a smokescreen. Goddard and Whedon aim to demolish the archetypes born in the wake of that early popularization of horror, and in doing so bring a sense of spontaneous fun back to the genre.
The pair succeeds spectacularly. The Cabin in the Woods is a blast. It’s a film for anyone who feels the spark has gone out of horror. This movie is clever and quite self-aware, and it has very specific ideas about what caused horror to fall into rote patterns. As they get around to explaining just how horror turned into what it is today, Goddard and Whedon give the audience a chum bucket full of the thrills it wants, but also argues that playing by the rules is the wrong way to go. Read More »
Posted on Friday, April 6th, 2012 by Angie Han
As someone who was roughly the same age as the American Pie gang when the first film dropped — and who then followed the group through 2001′s American Pie 2 and 2003′s American Wedding — I’m finding it tough to separate American Reunion from the haze of nostalgia surrounding it. But that’s part of the point, of course. Much like an actual reunion, American Reunion exists for no other reason than to check back in with the East Great Falls Class of ’99. While it falls flat as a standalone film, for fans of the series, the pleasure of spending time with familiar faces once more outweighs the movie’s many flaws.
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Note: This review was first published on September 11th 2011, and the film was screened during the Toronto International Film Festival. Spurlock’s film is now available on demand, so we’re republishing the review. I’ve since seen the movie a second time and gladly recommend it to any pop culture geek I know.
When I first heard that Morgan Spurlock would be directing a documentary about San Diego Comic-Con International, I was worried that it would be a puff piece — a glorified direct to video infomercial. The fact that Spurlock chose to premiere the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival instead of in San Diego speaks towards its merits as a real film and not a Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice! prime-time tv special.
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