Day: March 10, 2013

Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills has been playing in three theatres since Friday. Presumably a few HE readers have seen it by now; it would be nice to run some reactions. It’s got a very respectable 83% Rotten Tomato rating. I’ve been praising it up and down since catching it 10 months ago in Cannes. Time‘s Mary Pols said it “may be the best movie no one will want to see in 2013” I get that. But HE readers are different.

Okay, it’s a little long and perhaps too slowly paced, but that’s partly…perhaps entirely the point. Mungiu knows exactly what he’s doing, and I have to bluntly explain something. This movie is on you, man. You have to man up and sink in and study those nuns and that bearded, none-too-bright priest and those static situations and the stuff going in the background. Sometimes that’s the thing and not what’s happening in the foreground. Mungiu’s every-so-often decision not to have violent action occur front and center isn’t just brilliant — it’s historic.

You have to feel the chill wind and smell the goat’s milk and the burning wood and surrender to the grayness and the occasional snowfalls. And you definitely have to savor that final shot inside the police van. Either you get Romanian cinema or you don’t. BTH is a little bit dull at times, okay, but a major art film.

I saw Emperor two or three weeks ago. I forget when. Actually I haven’t forgotten. I saw at on Wednesday, 2.20 at the Post Group screening room on Cahuenga. And I tried to tap out a review three or four times, and every time my forearms felt like concrete and my six typing fingers felt like iron — they weighed 10 pounds each. The mere thought of reviewing Emperor made me get out the vacuum and then wash the dishes and then drive down to Gelson’s.

It’s a conservative…make that a stodgy period film. Blah blah blah blah blah. With a half-interesting…make that rote performance by Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, doing the old lazy bark and smoking the corncob pipe. The best summary I’ve read came from Newark Star Ledger critic Stephen Whitty, to wit: “This is just a dull procedural, with the bland Matthew Fox driving around in a jeep in post-World War II Tokyo and asking questions of various government figures and not having them answered (when he’s not having perfectly cliched flashbacks to a fictionalized romance with a rich Japanese girl).”

That’s it. That’s all it is. Emperor is so dull it’s not even an airplane movie. It’s not a what-the-hell-there’s-nothing-else to watch Netflix or Amazon or Hulu movie for a Monday or a Tuesday evening. Uh-oh, I’m starting to feel sleepy again. My fingers are getting heavier and heavier. Okay, that’s all.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emperor_2012/

At the end of her report about Oz The Great and Powerful‘s big box office debut ($80.3 million domestic, 25% Friday-to-Saturday increase, $69.9 million overseas, $150.2 million total), Deadline‘s Nikki Finke writes that this impressive haul “cements director Sam Raimi as the real deal when it comes to helming blockbusters.”

That‘s the take-away? Everyone is saying “whoa, that Raimi…he da man”? You’d have to be a cretin to say that with a straight face. I have to figure Finke was just being…you know, “polite” in a political sense.

Remove the black-and-white opener and Oz is a meandering and synthetic CG-mural show. It has (as that Slate subhead read) no heart, no brains and no courage. And c’mon…we all know that family audiences are simpletons who have no taste. They’ll pay to see almost anything that looks splashy and good-natured and vaguely engaging. (For whatever reason they drew the line at Jack The Giant Slayer.) How does making a relatively soul-less film that most of the smart critics hate …how does this make Raimi the champ?

I laughed at “I believe that hors d’oeuvres is pronounced orr-du-vorrays”…and that’s it. Otherwise the energy in this skit was so low (Paul Simon was sleepwalking) that it reached out of the screen and just vacuumed my soul and cleaned me out. I couldn’t move after it was over. I was forced to sit on my couch for 20 minutes after it ended, waiting for my system to recharge.

Clouds, rain, long lines, Drinking Buddies, hills, Danny Boyle and a portion of Trance (it opens April 5th and Boyle doesn’t want to show the whole thing? What’s up with that?), Al Gore, Mud, parties, Before Midnight (which everyone loves), beefalos, woolly-bully, more lines, Spring Breakers (which I’ll finally see in LA on Tuesday) and yaddah yaddah.