DVD of the Week – Review of Gran Torino (2008)
by TOM NIXON
Sixteen years after his classic anti-western Unforgiven, Clint finally grants himself some semblance of forgiveness with its more lighthearted vigilante analogue. Wisely avoiding a retread of Unforgiven’s thunder and grace, Eastwood maintains a different kind of contrast in Gran Torino, pitting his signature sentimental touch and some hilarious, oft-tacky camp against a self-represented grizzled hardass. When it works, it works in the same way all the unrelatable rubbish in The Searchers works; it gleans pathos from the man’s self-imposed alienation and repressed guilt, leading the way to a surprising grasp at redemption. Read more 
10 Best Picture Nominees?!
by HELEN GEIB
This past Wednesday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Academy Awards Best Picture category will double in size next year from five to ten nominated films. The prevailing interpretation of the thinking behind this change is that it’s a desperate attempt to improve Oscar’s ratings by packing the top category with audience favorites. Adding Best Picture nominees won’t make the awards show any shorter – excessive length being one of the most frequently cited complaints by people who have and people who haven’t been watching the broadcast the last few years – so it’s tempting to read the subsequently announced sideways move by the honorary career-achievement award to a separate event as a temporal offset. Read more
Movie Review – The Proposal (2009)
by HELEN GEIB
The Proposal is not original, but it is judicious in its selection and arrangement of familiar elements. The plot blends two classic romantic comedy situations, while the denouement borrows liberally from one of the genre’s best, While You Were Sleeping. Mix in another great performance by Sandra Bullock and an equally good one by Ryan Reynolds and you have a rare contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy that is actually romantic and funny. Read more
Thinking Outside the Multiplex
by MIKE MACCOLLUM
As if the oppressive heat wasn’t bad enough, we also have to suffer through another well-nigh inevitable consequence of summer this week, as crummy old “tentpole” movies (or whatever the trendy buzzword in these days) dominate local theater screens. Still, we do have two movies opening at the Landmark (Away We Go and Cheri), while the Bollywood film New York starts Friday at the Georgetown 14- and a number of other films (including an Oscar-nominated doc) will play in and around town this week. So it could be worse, I guess. Not a very cheery note to start on, but you take what you can get, I suppose. (And we do have the Indianapolis International Film Festival coming up in a few weeks to offer variety, quality, and relief from the likes of Michael Bay. So cheer up, already!) Read more
Movie Review – The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
by NIR SHALEV
Oscar Wilde will always be remembered as one of the wittiest playwrights in the history of the English language and we are reminded of that fact whenever we watch one of his immortal plays. For over a hundred years his plays have been performed on various stages all around the world, but they have only been turned into films a handful of times. Read more
DVD of the Week – Waltz With Bashir (2008)
by HELEN GEIB
Waltz With Bashir is a feature-length animated documentary by Israeli writer-director Ari Folman. The ostensible subject is Folman’s attempt to reconstruct his lost memories of his military service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War. The personal story is a springboard to a history lesson, political documentary, inquiry into post-traumatic stress disorder, re-creation of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon from the perspective of the teenage conscripts sent in to do the killing, and critical examination of the construction and reconstruction of memory– individual and national. Read more
Movie Review – Sonatine (1993)
by NIR SHALEV
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano is a comedian, a famous television personality and superstar in Japan, a film actor and most importantly, an auteur. His movies usually relate to gangsters or people that are influenced or affected by violence. In Sonatine, his fourth film as writer-director, Kitano plays a Yakuza boss named Murakawa. Murakawa’s underlings respect him and are loyal to him to the grave. They range from eighteen years of age to into their fifties and they bow to him whenever he enters or leaves the room. They never talk back to him and he’s happily used to that kind of service. Read more
Movie Review – Woman in the Dunes (1964)
by TOM NIXON
Sporting an existential prison before which even A Man Escaped and Last Year At Marienbad must bow, with Sisyphus re-imagined as dung beetle and all the more loaded with metaphorical weight, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes also dwells on the borders of territory Lynch and Cronenberg would later pillage in its uneasy, wormlike familiarity. Maddeningly gorgeous, it might as well be shot on Mars for the way its sands ebb and flow with endless, aimless mutability; a ghostly demonstration that sometimes the greatest metaphors are the simplest. Read more
Anime Feature Film Review – My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
by HELEN GEIB
Sisters Satsuki and Mei move to the country at the beginning of writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s anime feature film My Neighbor Totoro. Mei is four years old and Satsuki several years older. Their new home is a ramshackle, old, traditional Japanese-style house on a large undeveloped lot. They work with their father to fix the place up before their mother comes home; she is recuperating in the hospital from an undefined, but evidently protracted illness. Satsuki starts school. Mei plays in the garden and woods by their house. They spend time with the wise old woman from the neighboring farm. Singly and together, they have a few remarkable encounters with a forest spirit they call Totoro and its diminutive companions. Read more
Thinking Outside the Multiplex
by MIKE MACCOLLUM
Ed Wood Jr., Mike Tyson, Jessica Biel and Noel Coward: They may never appear together on some future version of “Meeting of the Minds,” but all four are connected in some way to films showing in and around Indianapolis in the coming week. For more, read on below… Read more
