Cassandra’s Dream

Cassandra’s Dream, which is the title of the film and the name of a boat in same, finds Woody Allen in top form but channeling a Claude Chabrol style mystery thriller rather than relying on his stock comic mayhem. At the head of the tony cast are Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as brothers who get involved in a crime when each, for either gambling or living the life of a playboy, finds himself consumed with debt.
Perhaps not oddly Cassandra’s Dream finds itself thrown out in limited venues (here CD is playing exclusively at the Angelika downtown) where audiences aware of Allen may seek it out but if you told the average bear it was an above average Euro thriller they might believe you, and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. The story also bears similarities to the dilemma of the brothers in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. The Sopranos ending aside, the Coen Brothers have been racking up acclaim for not actually showing the murder of the central protag and wrapping things up in the most ambiguous manner possible, but that’s exactly what the Woodman delivers. Only Woody is somehow more subdued and has a firm grasp on the illogic of the whole enterprise.
When Ian (McGregor) falls for an actress, her own star on the rise and high maintenance to boot, and Terry (Farrell) loses the equivalent of a couple of years salary in a high stakes card game they seek a perilous solution. Rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) wants them to kill a business associate whose testimony could ruin him. Cassandra’s Dream charts the course of the brother’s guilt, with one shining it on and the other plunging into drink to try to forget. Farrelll and McGregor are spot on with their performances, gone are the smug traces of their personality that leaks out of some of their glossier roles. The movie starts out like a cheerful journey in a small dingy only to end up being tossed on a perfect storm of human avarice.
Good stuff, don’t miss out on this thriller even though CD won’t get one-tenth the publicity as the current Oscar crop. How time moves that now Woody Allen films are treated like the dross of the art house circuit. Where are the years when lighter Allen vehicles than Cassandra's Dream were front and center at awards derbies?

Iranian films at MFA

The 15th annual Iranian Film Festival unwinds at various locales around H-town for the next month. The Aurora Picture Show, the Rice Media Center and specifically the Museum of Fine Arts hosts what will be for many a once in a lifetime chance to see most of these films. It's rare enough to see any foreign film get a theatrical berth in Houston, especially with the Landmark recently closing half their six screens.
This weekend and next the MFA presents six films. A couple of highlights include: 10 + 4, an amazing bit of feminism in the midst of an overly paternal system; Rule of the Game, aptly described as the Tehran Hillbillies; Havana File, wherein a Western-educated doctor finds the government has cancelled his scientific project. Iranian films have a marked sense of the passing of time. Where we would jump cut out all the boring parts, while say waiting in line to gain admission to a party, in a typical Iranian film you would experience the profundity of the entire wait.
Check the MFA website for exact times. Some film events include post-screening discussoins.

Cloverfield

A monster movie that literally plays to its audience. Cloverfield by the way is never seen as a title, text or dialogue, but it's just another gimmick that works in this rapid roller coaster grade 9/11 allegory, If there's any doubt that the spirit of Godzilla hoovers over Cloverfield as an inspiration consider that the closing credits theme, composed by Michael Giacchino, basically pays homage to the slow moving brass Godzilla theme of old. There's also a similar feeling to the ending that was in Miracle Mile, a bit of a more obscure film.
The entire movie comes from one perspective, a video camera that gets passed around and ends up with Hud (until someone called him Hudson I thought he was named after Paul Newman). Around midnight during a surprise going away party that Hud is shooting testimonials at, a monster of some sort attacks New York City. But the crux of Cloverfield revolves around a love story - even though there're monster loose Rob goes into the center of town to rescue Beth. But then all night Hud's camera's been paying special attention to Marlena
There's non-stop action and interesting character development, two factors that make Cloverfield compelling. Compare the character interest in the recent Alien vs. Predator movie and Cloverfield accelerates light years ahead just on that point. There's a poetic scene where a white horse pulling an empty carriage down a broken street. This monster flick has a soul.

the Fall of HD-DVD

Theatrical distribution pulls in about 10 billion a year in North America, but DVD grosses nearly two-and-a-half times that amount. Think about it, the theatrical rollout of a film is merely advertising for the eventual ancillary markets.

Another one bites the dust

The Tinseltown Westchase has closed and will be paved over for a new business complex. This less that a month after the Greenway Three closed. Actually I hate the Tinseltown chain, their whole look and feel always felt totalitarian to me, yet I cannot accept their closing without a sense of regret.
Likewise if the River Oaks 3, the sister theater to the now defunct Greenway Three, closed next week would I really care? How do you watch movies? Mainstream theaters like the Edwards or AMC play films like Juno or Kite Runner so whether a cinema is playing art films is a moot point. The employees at the River Oaks theater have a certain cavalier attitude. Yet there's a sense of identification with their rebel stance that aligns with the quirky individualistic terms of independent cinema. Blaze your own trail.
Is it possible that people in 2008 have a shorter attention span and are thus less likely to want to spend more than a couple of hours at a cinema? You wouldn't believe how many members of Houston Film Critics Society I heard asking how long There Will Be Blood was, as if it mattered how long it took to meld with greatness. Even funnier, I was talking to someone about the possible closing of the River Oaks and they said: I love that place, why I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind there. Dude, that film unreeled at that location in 2004, and it is now 2008.
That pretty much says it all: We preserve the cool things in our mind as if they happened yesterday. Long live cinema, only ask yourself when the last time you actually cheered out loud in a movie theater as if you were at a sports event was. Well partner, that was too long. Welcome to the new millennium and please deliver 3-D cinema soon so that those of us who actually enjoy going out to the movies have something to look forward to.

El Orfanato

The phrase The Haunting meets Poltergeist sums up The Orphanage but fails to do the Spanish horror film justice. This smart foreigner has a sense of foreboding but also treats its audience with respect. The scare moments in The Orphanage are earned, they come in progression to the sequence of events and aren’t like typical American PG-13 horror scares based on noise and shadow. The Orphanage bears Guillermo Del Toro’s name as executive producer and is rated R for what I can only imagine as “disturbing content” (the rating’s board) and bones sticking out of the skin (the Berg board).
A couple raising an adopted child in a large house in the country, have their lives put on hold when the house turns out to have a history. Ghosts in the house have told their young boy that he’s an orphan. When he disappears the mom eventually turns to spiritualist. Here’s where El Orfanato starts to get really creepy. As the team of – for want of a better term – ghost busters sets their equipment up the editing gets frantic, the camera starts to move. A psychic counts down in the living room to her encounter with ghosts, all the while monitored remotely by the spiritualists. This scene will have you crawling in your skin, it’s that good.
Even better The Orphanage follows that up with a tight, suspense filled third act where the mom chants the child rhyme that conjures the ghosts and a strikingly somber if fully realized conclusion. There’s no bastards in a basket here, just filmmakers with a slick sense of style to their horror.

Bloody well right

First off, let’s get one thing clear, there’s not any significant amount of bloodshed in There Will Be Blood, the fifth film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Not compared to the nearly dozen murders in No Country For Old Men. Sure there are a couple of people who get, shall we say, whacked, but the blood in There Will Be Blood also refers thematically to oil as blood in the Earth, and the blood between brothers exists as a type of loyalty bound by love. Only there are no characters on display here who love or who you’ll want to love.
Perhaps that’s one of the magical cinematic touches that Anderson brings to his idiosyncratic adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil – he makes you care about the organic substance of the story rather than the people who inhabit that world. The editing is concise to the point where you’re expecting an explosion but when it finally goes off the timing catches you by surprise. You expect to be inundated with a typical turn of the century soundtrack yet are confounded by Jonny Greenwood’s unconventional violin wailing. (There’s some Arvo Part in there too, tasty stuff.)
There Will Be Blood was shot on location around Marfa, Texas in some of the same places that No Country For Old Men was shot. Yet, there’s no similarities to the look of the two films, the landscapes in TWBB are either sun-drenched, or shot in low natural light (or so it seems) and evoke the sense of a one-street town built around the train station.
Likewise the film’s built around the character of Daniel Plainview and Daniel Day Lewis has found a cadence that suggests another age. Maybe there’s a hint of Jack Palance gravel in Plainview’s voice or a leer of John Huston’s stink-eye in Day Lewis’ mannerisms. Then again maybe it’s one of the most stunning performance given in an American film in some time. Enough time that years will elapse before it’s outdone.