Cinemanic Reviews

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Archive for the month “August, 2012”

30 Aug 2012
18 Comments

Fight Club

Bottom Line: Stylish, preposterously original black comedy.

Directed by: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christina Cabot, David Andrews, Edward Norton, Eugenie Bondurant, George Maguire Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf Aday, Richmond Arquette, Zach Grenier

1st RULE: You do not talk about Fight Club.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about Fight Club.
3rd RULE: If someone says “stop” or goes limp, taps out the fight is over.
4th RULE: Only two guys to a fight.
5th RULE: One fight at a time.
6th RULE: No shirts, no shoes.
7th RULE: Fights will go on as long as they have to.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you HAVE to fight.

By definition, I’ve already headed myself in the direction of heavily fracturing the first and second “rules of Fight Club”, as famously spoken by actor Brad Pitt as Tyler Darden. But what do I care? Moreover, why should I care? In the modern age, especially, we could take a walk around any given city and perhaps spot out a couple hundred people whom present themselves as reminders of the psychosocial, nihilistic main character. If there was one person living on this earth who had a story this bizarre to tell–and actually lived to tell it–I’d actually be a bit more scared than impressed. Fight Club opens with a following of a bored, stressed man (Edward Norton) who would give anything to be just about anyone at a higher status than him. He works at an office by day, and by night, he spends his spare time in a necrophobic state, attending group therapy for just about every imaginable disease that he doesn’t have–only to find himself back at home losing another night of sleep to his chronic state of insomnia. Everything changes when this man, whose name beyond “Narrator” is not once revealed, meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on an airplane he has boarded for a business trip. The word “carefree” in no way begins to describe Tyler; “reckless” is only slightly better. It’s fairly ironic that even though he works as a retailer for soap bars, his lifestyle, domicile, and speech are all filthy in their own rights. To look up to someone as disgusting as Tyler would dig our Narrator, whose condominium has now been burned down, out of his almost bottomless pit. After being taken under Tyler’s wing, and into his dilapidated house, he is hesitantly brought into a world of reckless behavior, self-destruction, ignorance, and–above all–the co-foundation of Fight Club.

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Posted in Comedy, Cult, Drama, Sports, [Film Reviews] and tagged
29 Aug 2012
9 Comments

Another Editor’s Note

Hit the jump to read my note.

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Posted in [Miscellaneous]
26 Aug 2012
6 Comments

The War of the Roses

Bottom Line: If parodied on a Simpsons episode, this would be called Itchy and Scratchy Get Married.

“So how am I supposed to respond? You to tell me you wished I was dead?!” –Michael Douglas as Oliver Rose
“I thought it was important.” –Kathleen Turner as Barbara Rose

Directed by: Danny DeVito
Starring: Dan Castellaneta, Danny DeVito, G.D. Spradlin, Gloria Cromwell, Heather Fairfield, Kathleen Turner, Marianne Sagebrecht, Michael Douglas, Peter Donat, Sean Astin

For those unfamiliar with The War of the Roses, it most certainly is not a historical account of the identically titled European wars fought from the mid to late 15th century. The title does, however, exaggerate sublimely on a tale that could have simply been released as The Continuing Quarrels of Mr. and Mrs. Rose. Written by Michael Leeson, a scribe perhaps otherwise known for his occasional contributions to far tamer family comedies such as TV’s Happy Days and The Partridge Family, the tale is narrated by a lawyer by the name of Gavin d’Amato (Danny DeVito, who also provided an impressive direction). One of his former clients, Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas), is a wealthy, busy student at Harvard Law School. Only to change his life–in the way he least expects–is a woman named Barbara (Kathleen Turner), whom he meets at an auction. After some friendly chatting, Barbara realizes she has missed the ferry she was going to take back home, and decides to spend the night with Oliver. It’s likely that the pace at which the events unfold almost as quickly as they actually happen, with the two of them wedding and having two children. We can admit it wasn’t really a good choice to begin with before chaos begins, and that they would have been far better as only friends, and eventually, Barbara grows sick of Oliver and pleads him for divorce. Let’s put the rest in the simplest of terms: this starts as a marital issue; evolves into a legal issue; which then culminates in a violent, catastrophic, destructive…financial and vital issue, so to speak.

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Posted in Comedy, Romance, [Film Reviews] and tagged
26 Aug 2012
17 Comments

Wall Street

Bottom Line: An engaging, well-made drama.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” –Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko

Directed by: Oliver Stone
Starring: Charlie Sheen, Chuck Pfeifer, Franklin Cover, Hal Holbrook, James Karen, John C. McGinley, Leslie Lyles, Martin Sheen, Michael Douglas, Tamara Tunie

For at least eight months, I’ve been severely on the fence as far as my thoughts of director Oliver Stone.  When I watched his extended, three-and-a-half-hour cut of 1991′s JFK early last year, I was stunned.  I’ve seen dozens of great films since then, but that picture still remains in the higher portion of my top 100.  I finally got around to revisiting the director this past December with another presidential study, W.  Most of the reviews I read for that one were fairly middling, but I personally found it to be insulting and dare I say a bit difficult to sit through.  I’ve finally given in to watching another Oliver Stone film after seeing two polar opposites in quality.  Wall Street changed my mind about the director.  Not completely, especially after reading poor reception to his most recent, Tarantino-esque affair Savages, but the film is quite possibly one of the most commendable dramas of the 1980s.

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Posted in Crime, Drama, [Film Reviews] and tagged
25 Aug 2012
4 Comments

Hannibal Rising

Bottom Line: More like Hannibal Chastising a classic villain.

“I don’t believe it!” –Dez (Aidan Quinn) in Desperately Seeking Susan

Directed by: Peter Webber
Starring: Aaran Thomas, Dominic West, Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Helena-Lia Tachovska, Martin Hub, Michele Wade, Rhys Ifans, Richard Brake, Richard Leaf

The above quote, supposing it was an omen set off twenty years premature, is very well said. I might go even further: I don’t believe it, nor do I want to, nor do I wish I ever had to. Novelist Thomas Harris, the man responsible for the creation of perhaps one of the most classic villains ever presented, must have suddenly become very bored with his career–for whatever reason. In early December 2006, Harris published the fourth entry in his series of “Hannibal Lecter” novels, a prequel simply titled Hannibal Rising. Shortly after, he adapted that novel himself into his first screenplay, which was then turned into a film of the same title; the adaptation was released barely two months after the printed tale itself. It’s actually more sad than ironic that such an author’s adaptation of his own work comes nowhere close to meeting the quality of how others scripted his words for the screen. I have an overwhelming desire to conclude that Hannibal Rising is a useless addition to the series, but that would equally imply that its written source, a novel I have yet to read and therefore may not speak for, is something we could all do without. When Hannibal last appeared, his roots were slightly traced back. A further trip back into the character’s past would be desirable, as well, but not when presented this nonsensically, let alone laughably. If I had known Hannibal had such a dumbed-down story to tell, I guess I wouldn’t have wondered why he was so laconic about his earlier life in the series’s previous entries.

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Posted in Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, War, [Film Reviews] and tagged
25 Aug 2012
4 Comments

Grading Scale Update

Hello followers!

Within the past few hours, I have made an update to my grading scale: I added a B+, a C+, and a D+.  As my letter grades, is essentially based on the generic five-star scale, I’ve decided to keep it simple and have the new grades convert in the same way as the slightly higher grade.  For example, B+ is equal to four stars, just like A-; C+ is equal to three stars, just like B-; and D+ is equal to two stars, just like C-.  Now that I have made this change, I will not only be using it in the future, but I will go back through my two indexes and round down the films I felt didn’t quite deserve an A-, B-, or C-.

Peace wherever and whenever possible.

–Alexander “The Cinemaniac” Diminiano

Posted in [Miscellaneous]
24 Aug 2012
11 Comments

Following

Bottom Line: An overlooked debut from the director of The Dark Knight.

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Alex Haw, Darren Ormandy, Dick Bradsell, Gillian El-Kadi, Jennifer Angel, Jeremy Theobald, John Nolan, Lucy Russell, Nicolas Carlotti

Now that countless unforgettable names such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick are no longer alive to produce modern classics, and several others such as Rob Reiner and Tim Burton have foreshadowed–if not confirmed–a significant drop in their careers, we’re left with only a handful or two of filmmakers that we can consistently rely on to direct just as successfully as when they had just begun. Christopher Nolan is one of such figures. Nolan always enjoys experimenting with his cinematic techniques and presenting them far less traditionally, but I have yet to witness a resulting failure. Although the vast majority of his films have been widely praised and recognized (i.e. Inception, The Dark Knight), it seems rather disappointing that 1999′s Following–his debut film, nonetheless–is by far his most overlooked.

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Posted in Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery, [Film Reviews] and tagged
24 Aug 2012
8 Comments

Per un pugno di dollari

Bottom Line: A heavily influential, landmark “spaghetti Western”.

Directed by: Sergio Leone
Starring: Antonio Prieto, Carol Brown, Clint Eastwood, Joe Edger, Johnny Wels, Jose Calvo, Marianne Koch, Richard Stuyvesant, S. Rupp, W. Lukschy

Despite having been long since established as its own, official genre, the Western genre always strikes me as something with more distinct, specific qualities than a drama or a thriller. Like superhero and spy films, the genre typically keeps itself within the same constraints, as far as themes, settings, and characters.  Per un pugno di dollari, known in the US as A Fistful of Dollars, is perhaps the very most important Italian film of the 1960s.  It’s difficult to compare it to any other similar film, but there are several non-Westerns that created a similar legacy.  Take America’s late-’70s horror film Halloween, for instance.  That film single-handledly invented the “slasher” genre, made a star out of actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and had filmmakers charging frenetically to clone it.  Similarly, Per un pugno di dolllari was the one film to devise the “spaghetti Western”, made Clint Eastwood a widely recognizable name, and had practically every filmmaker in Italy rushing to make a film just as laudable.

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Posted in Action, Adventure, Crime, Western, [Film Reviews] and tagged
23 Aug 2012
21 Comments

Leonard Maltin’s 2013 Movie Guide: The Modern Era

It rarely happens: I was overjoyed when I brought in the mail today. Why? My long-awaited copy of critic Leonard Maltin’s quintessential Movie Guide, revised and up-to-date with every review for just about every movie imaginable (save for those made after mid-2012, of course, as well as TV movies and direct-to-video releases, which aren’t even movies in my opinion), had finally come in from Barnes & Noble. It also appears that I had the glory of receiving it a few days earlier than most would: the Plume-published paperback doesn’t hit stores until August 29th (six days from now); furthermore, the Signet-published mass market paperback (my copy) doesn’t hit stores until September 4th (twelve days from now), except at Barnes & Noble, where it appears to be already available, despite displaying a September 4th publication date in the information section. Interesting.

Read on to find out more about the book (and Maltin himself), where you can find it, and what other books are in my collection.

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Posted in [Miscellaneous]
23 Aug 2012
15 Comments

Bernie

Bottom Line: Bernie is Jack Black’s best work yet.

Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Brandon Smith, Jack Black, Juli Erickson, Larry Jack Dotson, Matthew McConaughey, Mona Lee Fultz, Rick Dial, Shirley MacLaine, Sonny Davis, Tommy G. Kendrick

It’s easy to admit that Jack Black has not crafted himself an all too commendable career. To name just one of his roles would get me spewing a barrage of films that would have quite simply been more memorable without him, so I will refrain from doing so. Bernie is the second collaboration in nine years between director Richard Linklater and Jack Black, following School of Rock. Knowing such, it’s automatic that most of our expectations are high. Yes, School of Rock featured Jack Black playing not much more than, well, Jack Black, but that performance stands out as by far the best comedic delivery in his entire career. Bernie does not star Mr. Black as his usual character, though. This is a far more dramatic role. Ironically, it’s handled in a straightforward, contained manner that makes any mark of stupid behavior or silly humor in the actor’s career utterly untraceable. I dare say he often appears to exceed the abilities of more generally talented performers such as Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey, and is therefore the least of reasons to dismiss the film.

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Posted in Comedy, Crime, Drama, [Film Reviews] and tagged

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