ZOO
ZOO, the controversial new documentary about stallions and the men who love them (and not in that Disney, MY FRIEND FLICKA sort of way) takes an unpalatable story and transforms it into a fable that is as pretty as it is boring.
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This week, Strange Duck was invited to be the guest blogger for the music blog of THIS AMERICAN LIFE.
Read Strange Duck's article here
THE TV SET
THE TV SET is yet another entertainment industry satire written and directed by yet another industry insider (in this case, Jake Kasdan, director of the beloved television show FREAKS AND GEEKS). But luckily for us, THE TV SET is more than just another addition to a genre that has grown staler than Sunday night’s episode of ENTOURAGE. It lands a solid triple axel: it is funny and touching without being precious.
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THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, begins innocuously: a group of young men play field hockey, slapping each on the back after a good play. The familiar green hills of Ireland roll picturesquely in the background. Nothing in the opening scene portends the violence that will shape each of these young men into revolutionaries.
But this is 1920s Ireland, a place infested by violence, and before we have even had time to distinguish between the young men, one of them is already dead, killed by British soldiers in front of his grandmother, his mother and his sister for nothing more than refusing to say his name.
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HISTORY BOYS
Playwrights are luckier than screenwriters in at least one respect: their only limits are the limits of the audience’s imagination. How they must pity the poor screenwriter, who writes knowing that if he writes about an office, his story will look like an office. In the film adaptation of the wildly successful play HISTORY BOYS, Alan Bennett the screenwriter never quite figures out how to deal with the location selected by Alan Bennett the playwright.
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FACTORY GIRL
Even though FACTORY GIRL, the new biopic about Edie Sedgwick, was made 11 years after BASQUIAT and I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, it’s hard not to compare the three films since they all purport to tell you the truth about Andy Warhol and the Factory. So, I contacted the two earlier films’ biggest fan, 14 year-old Mary Ann Casavant, to ask her what she thought of FACTORY GIRL. She wrote the following review:
I have always known that I should have been alive in the 1960s, but it’s been hard for me to figure out which part of the decade I really would have wanted to experience the most. For a while I thought I would want to be a hippy in the late 1960s, you know the long hair, Woodstock type? But after watching BASQUIAT and I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, I began to think that maybe I would want a member of the Factory instead.
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
Hollywood has never been known for its accuracy about anything, much less historical facts. Amateur historians devote websites to cataloguing movie mistakes (My personal favorite: In TITANIC, Jack tells Rose he went ice fishing in Lake Wissota, but that lake didn’t exist until 1918. Take that James Cameron! If you’d spent some of that money on a fact checker maybe the movie wouldn’t have lost the best screenplay Oscar.)
I find it curious that anybody, even those with lives to kill on the world wide web, would assume that historical films have anything other than a tangential relationship to the time periods they claim to recreate. When a writer or a director overtly acknowledges that he’s using a historical setting to talk about his own present, it’s called an allegory (classic hjgh school example: THE CRUCIBLE, that play that had all those puritans in it but was really about McCarthyism). But "realistic" historical dramas rarely manage to capture anything other than the time that dreamed them. These films may be less conscientious than their politically sensitive cousin, the allegory, but their bumbling, culturally insensitive attempts to make conversation often make more intriguing artifacts.
With this in mind, it is no surprise that SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS tells us far more about the 1960s America that swooned for it than the 1920s America it’s supposed to recreate. READ THE REST HERE
BABEL
The Old Testament God who destroyed the tower of Babel doesn’t seem so bad when he’s compared to the deux ex machina of the film named after it. At least no one in the Babylonian kingdom had a tour bus. READ THE REST HERE
David Lynch and the right wing agree on one thing: Hollywood is a sick town. Like an auteur Jerry Fallwell, Lynch has spent his career excavating all the perversions hidden inside the nooks and crannies of even the “safest” pop culture entertainments. That nice young man, Billy Ray Cyrus, who had that country song everyone liked so much? In Mullholland Drive, he’s the pool man who screws you wife when you are not home. The bright young chipper blonde whose can do attitude solves every problem just like Nancy Drew? A total lez. And that big purple blob thing that teaches children to speak? A card-carrying homosexual. Both know that perversions are hiding just beneath the surface of every product the dream factory produces. Lynch just admits to liking them.
SCOOP
"C'est merveilleux ! C'est merveilleux ! Woody Allen est le génie du cinéma américain !”
I wouldn’t swear that the above sentence is exactly what the Parisian woman behind me exclaimed at the end of Scoop, a movie I thought was barely even good, much less marvelous, but it’s pretty damn close.
Our difference of opinion was not exactly unexpected. I have never been that much of an Allen fan, and I’ve never really understood why during the past ten years most of his films have been graded on a pass/fail system, where pass equals masterpiece. READ THE REST HERE