Review: Killing Them Softly

 



"A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges."

This quote, from founding father Benjamin Franklin, doesn't appear anywhere in Killing Them Softly, but I think it sums up the movie fairly succinctly.

From all outward appearances and marketing, Killing Them Softly is yet another entry in the never out of style gangster genre, a genre which is one of the most well-established perennials of American cinema. Don't fool yourself though, this film ain't Heat. It's not Donnie Brasco either, or The Untouchables, or even Goodfellas. In terms of accessibility, Killing Them Softly is a much pricklier pear than these relatively straightforward films.

By way of plot, there is very little. Not much actually happens in the movie when you break it down step by step (which may partly be due to its brisk run time of 97 minutes). There's a lot of dialogue, all superbly written and acted, but it doesn't necessarily lead to any plot revelations or narrative expansion. Instead, what we get from all this conversational back and forth is mostly tangential chatter, tangential chatter which is used in service of the film's true goal: an allegory on the current state of the good ol' US of A.

Review: Life of Pi



Even though many are proclaiming the demise of the written word, and in some cases such as print media this consternation appears to be warranted, there is still a sizable market of people who are only too eager to read the latest smash novel from the latest flavor of the month author. Particularly in the young-adult fantasy genre, with series like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, there are more than enough adolescent eyes scavenging the literary landscape to fulfill publishers' monetary wants and desires.

Somewhat surprisingly though, this trend has not been limited strictly to the youths of the world, with their abundance of free time just looking to be filled with a book, but has also extended to their busy parents, who manage to squeeze in some reading in between their numerous daily obligations that make up their lives. Adult fiction, using every connotation of the word when it comes to the Fifty Shades of Grey series, is a growing market, and one of the first books to cash in on this trend at the turn of the new millennium was Life of Pi.

Winner of multiple literary awards and a New York Times Bestseller, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood would adapt author Yann Martel's allegorical survival tale into 2-hour length cinematic adventure. As can be seen by the trio of aforementioned fantasy series in the opening paragraph of this review, Hollywood studio execs, being the unimaginative, risk-adverse buggers that they are, are always very ready and willing to adopt established intellectual property into silver screen gold. In fact, given the box office returns on best-selling literary adaptations, the biggest mystery is why this film stayed in development purgatory for such a long time, but the day has come and its time has finally arrived.

Review: Lincoln

 



For years now I've heard about Spielberg's "Lincoln project," and for years now I have been glad every time he has past it up to move on to some other movie. Why is this you ask?

It is not because of the all too chic pasttime among cinephiles to disparage the super-director of his just due. In my book, Spielberg is unarguably one of the all time greatest directors in the history of the medium, and this is one of the few arguments in film that I believe can be made on an objective level. My lack of enthusiasm then was caused by what I percieve to be the man's strenghs and weaknesses, for as great as an auteur may be, they all have things they excel at and they all have aspects they struggle with.

In skimming his filmography, delineating between his hits, misses, and in-betweens, it is clear (at least to me) that what Spielberg does best is a kind of sentimental humanism (most akin to the work of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa). Often ensconced in fantasy settings such as in films like E.T., Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Indiana Jones trilogy (I'm still in denial over Crystal Skull), what most often comes through in Spielberg's work is a joy of people and life, as well as film. Try as he might at times, Spielberg is just not a cynical person. There is too much genuine excitement and energy in the man's essence to pick up on the subtler nuances of life which are only acquired through the jaded eyes of weary travelers.

Review: Flight

If you are a rabid consumer of news in the cine-osphere, following all the latest tidbits and op-eds on all things film, then you'll likely know of the increasingly precarious state of the mid-budget drama. 

What use to be the bulk of any given year's film slate has recently become a more endangered species than the Siberian Tiger. In absence of a wide array of choices for adult cineastes, the movie going public has been left with two radically contrasting options: either see a vapid, glorified pinball machine with a bunch of guys running around in capes saving the world from its ever-present impending doom, or see a post-grad's treatise on the injustice of the current socio-economic system where the emotions are SO REAL, and the issues are SO IMPORTANT. If you feel like anything in between, such as a movie in which its characters have a semblance of real human emotions but isn't too pretentious to realize that works of cinema should engage the audience in an entertaining way, then Hollywood has basically given you the metaphorical middle-finger.

This frustration with the studio system's obstinance towards funding anything outside its narrowly imagined view of what moviegoers are willing to see is felt just as passionately (if not more so) on the creative side of things. Directors with fairly big names (people such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and David Croenberg just to name a few) have found it exceedingly difficult to find funding for their original projects, even in instances when big name actors have been attached to their work and forgo their typical star salaries. In Hollywood's mind, the demand is just not there and the risks are just not worth it, which has made cable television the last bastion of adult-oriented drama.

Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

As the movies have shown us, if not life itself, growing up is hard. In particular, that awkward pre-teen/teenager transition from middle school to high school can be especially difficult. Children, being the relative newcomers to existence that they are, tend to be socially untrained and unrefined (i.e. themselves). It doesn't take many years of communal education though before the "normalization" process begins to occur, putting extreme pressure on any personalities deemed too unique to conform, or suffer the consequences.

This awesome terror put upon the fragile psyches of blooming adolescents can have a number of different effects, but for introverted among us, the all too common occurrence is a detachment from the world that surrounds us. Like a war correspondent reporting from some exotic, savaged landscape, the name of the game becomes observation and survival. Keep your head down, keep your eyes open, and stick to the sidelines, hoping that when the day is done, you'll come out unscathed.

Review: End of Watch

 



Have you ever watched an episode of Cops and thought to yourself, "Gee, they should really turn this into a movie! That would be awesome!" Well, if these words, or somwething approximate, have flown through your television-saturated brain at somepoint, then your wait is over and your wish has been granted.

End of Watch follows the lives of two blue-collar, street-level LAPD cops, Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Pena). Using the conceit that Brian is filming his daily life as an assignment for a film class, we watch through the lens of an "amatuer" handheld video as the two cops patrol the streets, bust some baddies, shoot the breeze, uncover the nefarious dealings of a Mexican drug cartel, and live the typical lives of LAPD beat cops working in the grimy sections of the "City of Angels".

If this summation is giving you an odd sense of deja vu, that's no coincidence, because "typical" seemed to be the governing philosophy behind pretty much every aspect of this movie.

Toronto Film Festival 2012

If you have been disappointed with 2012's cinematic output thus far, keep the faith, because I come bearing good news.

The 2012 Toronto International Film Festival was held from September 6-16, and with it came premieres and sneak peaks of some of the mostly highly anticipated films releasing in the latter half of 2012. This was my first time at the festival and I have to say, it was an absolute blast. For any cinephiles who have considered attending the festival, I can't recommend it highly enough. It may have been due to the overall high quality of the film crop, but I can think of few events that would be as enjoyable for film lovers as this year's Toronto Film Festival was.

I know you don't care about my own personal experiences though and would rather hear about the movies, so let's get down to business.
Below is my ranking, from least favorite to favorite, of the ten films I saw at TIFF 2012. As you will see from my ratings, even the lowest ranks films of the lot had aspects to admire, which just speaks to the high level of talent on display at this year's festival. There were a few films, such as The Master, Seven Psychopaths, A Place Beyond the Pines, and Amour, that I had really wanted to see but was unable to. For the most part though I heard great things about all four of these films, and when you add these in conjunction with the films I saw, plus the highly anticipated films not at the festival (Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Lincoln, Life of Pi, and Zero Dark Thirty just to name a few), and regardless of your opinion on 2012's slate of movies up to this point, you can't help but feel things are shaping up nicely for the back half of the year.
Anyway, without further ado, my 2012 TIFF experience: