Goon: A filthier, nastier "Slapshot"

Fans with affectionate memories of the 1977 Paul Newman hockey film, Slapshot, will no doubt embrace the rude and crude antics of Goon, a similarly ribald foray into the skeezy world of semi-pro skaters, now playing in local theaters and on-demand.  I happen to be one of those who consider Slapshot not only an all-time guilty pleasure but also Paul Newman’s most underrated performance.  The movie was brash and vulgar and, as directed by George Roy Hill, who also made Newman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, it had an astute eye for the grit and grime of the midsize industrial towns where these hockey teams play in obscurity.  Goon may skimp a bit on the atmospherics, but it has clicked “update” on the randy, foul-mouthed ‘tude.  The movie’s hardcore, horndog world of sex, booze, drugs and filthy insults is obscene, offensive and quite frequently hilarious.

Mission:Impossible-Ghost Protocol: Should you choose to accept it.

There is a sleek abstraction to the action scenes in Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol, the latest installment in the franchise, that is no doubt the result of the animator Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) making his first live-action film.  He has combined his eye for color, line and fluid motion with green screen explosions and other bits of mechanical violence into a large canvas expression of modernist mayhem.  This film is often quite beautiful to look at, but that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise isn’t a propaganda film for actor/producer Tom Cruise’s shoulder muscles.  Honestly, there were many moments when my mind drifted from the movie’s plot–whatever it was–and focussed on the actor’s 26-hour-a-day workout routine.  I even wondered if, in order to spend any time with his family, Cruise must resort to bench pressing Suri, with Katie Holmes gazing admiringly from her locked garret.  Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, ablaze with an excess matched only by Cruise’s ego, is the kind of vehicle in which being constantly distracted is a pre-requisite for sitting through the whole movie.

Marley: Bob Marley's conscious life gets the semi-conscious treatment

I knew going into Marley, the documentary about the life of the late reggae superstar,  that there was no way this or any film would be able to match the transportive allure and muscular power of the man’s music.  So there was already a benefit-of-the-doubt halo around the project that almost demands an uncritical embrace of its approach to the subject matter.  But I was not prepared for how conventional and bland Marley is.  Clocking in at 144 minutes, this stuffed fatty of a documentary carries the heavy gloss of an American Masters hagiography on steroids.

Jump Cuts– May 5th, 2012

Most recently watched and re-watched:

* poor   **nothing remarkable   ***worth noting    ****memorable     *****excellent

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocal  (Brad Bird)    ***
Shame  (Steve McQueen)    **
Marley  (Kevin Macdonald)    ***
Haywire  (Steven Soderberg)    ****
The Snowtown Murders  (Justin Kurzel)    ****
4:44 Last Day on Earth  (Abel Ferrra)    ***
Touch of Evil  (Orson Welles)    *****
The Reckless Moment  (Max Ophuls)    ****
Rancho Notorious  (Fritz Lang)    ***
War Horse  (Steven Spielberg)    ****
Beginners  (Mike Mills)    ***
A Dangerous Method  (David Cronenberg)    **
Circo  (Aaron Schock)    ****
The Raid: Redemption  (Gareth Huw Evans)    ***
The Weeping Meadow  (Theo Angelopoulos)    ****

Circo: A lovely Mexican road documentary

Documentaries come and go so quickly from theaters these days, if they come at all, that it’s a good thing Google is around to help a person track them down. The little seen film Circo is a case in point.  This picaresque tale of a traveling Mexican circus made by a first time feature filmmaker, that I read about in a film magazine, has been kicking around Netflix for almost a year and will air next week on the PBS series, Independent Lens.  The movie is beautifully shot, simply told, and wonderfully immersive, the rare documentary that has no activist agenda, topical issue or political ax to grind.

War Horse: Spielberg's awesome masterpiece of overkill

Steven Spielberg’s reliance on sentimental overkill nearly smothers his WWI epic, War Horse, but there are also countless moments in this film only Spielberg could achieve.  Working with his longtime director of photography, Janusz Kaminski, and the composer John Williams, Spielberg has crafted an old-fashioned adventure story which is overshot and overscored and oversold, but also relentlessly effective. Schmaltz, blood-and-guts, and moments of quiet heroism are blended into a commercial cocktail that deliver both a rousing moviegoing experience and an exemplary lesson on film craft. War Horse is never dull and always stunning to look at, even if it is as predictable as a cash register.

A Dangerous Method: David Cronenberg goes all anal

After the first few opening scenes of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, it’s hard to shake the sinking realization that this movie is dead-on-arrival.  But, like anything that dies young, it leaves behind a beautiful corpse.  Cronenberg’s true-to-life tale of the relationship between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein, a woman who first was a patient of Jung’s and then, with his and Freud’s urging, became one of the first female psychoanalysts, offers intriguing possibilities.  But the director, working in a style that can best be described as embalmed, drains the blood, the lust and the passion from the sexual and analytical confrontations that drive the story.