Day: March 6, 2015

Superhero movies had a certain punch or value in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but they don’t mean nearly as much to the culture today. They’re basically opiates for losers. I’m not saying that only losers are into them, but losers certainly are. Is that putting it too harshly? Okay, I’ll tone it down. The more emotionally invested you are in superhero dreams, the less mature, interesting and formidable you are as a person. I know that if I walk into a home and there are four or five people on the couch who have nothing but contempt for superhero films and four or five in the kitchen who live for them, I’m on the couch.

Alex Gibney doesn’t pull punches. His reputation as our country’s leading documentarian rests upon that notion, so it’s unlikely that Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), a two-part, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra, will take a softball approach. Meaning, I presume, that Gibney won’t brush aside Frank’s wise-guy connections or the thing with Jack Kennedy (Peter Lawford once reportedly commented that Sinatra “was Jack’s pimp”) or the mob wanting Sinatra to get the Kennedy administration to go easy. Well, the trailer alludes to this stuff but how deeply will Gibney get into it?

The only thing that scares me is a claim on the website that the doc is “told in [Sinatra’s] own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him.” So all the quotes except Sinatra’s are from people who had won his favor or friendship and were otherwise invested in the legend?

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In the view of Chris Ashton, “the 20 greatest, or most powerful, uses of slow-motion in film” can be found in Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs, Chariots of Fire, Watchmen, Hurt Locker, Matrix, Zombieland, The Untouchables, Thelma & Louise, The Darjeeling Limited, Ferris Bueller’s Day off, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raging Bull, Matrix Reloaded, Inception, Spider Man, 300 and a bullshit boxing sequence in Robert Downey‘s Sherlock Holmes. The list excludes two landmark ’60s films that put slow-mo on the map and pretty much revolutionized the aesthetic by turning rifle-fire death into strangely beautiful ballet — Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch. Ashton presumably omitted these two because he’s youngish (late 20s, early 30s) and considers films made in the ’80s to be ancient history and anything earlier to be prehistoric. Or he’s under-educated. Or he just forgot.

I always feel suspicion and hostility toward films in which an Average-Joe father is desperately trying to protect his family from (a) intruders, (b) kidnappers or (c) anti-American revolutionaries and terrorists. The Taken films have really poisoned this particular well. Nor do I like films about average American families having to deal with bad people in a foreign country. The underlying message is “you don’t want to venture outside the safety of your American shopping-mall lifestyle…you’re just asking for trouble if you go overseas and particularly to unstable Asian or third-world countries…stay home, go to the mall, enjoy a backyard barbecue or watch an old movie on Netflix or Vudu from the safety of your basement den.” On top of which this kind of thing is way outside Owen Wilson‘s safety zone.

Legendary fly-on-the-wall documentarian Albert Maysles, who with his brother David cranked out classics such as Salesman (’68), Gimme Shelter (’70) and Grey Gardens (’76), has passed at age 88. For years I mispronounced his last name as MayZELLES when the proper pronunication was MAYzuls. My three favorite Maysles brothers docs, to be perfectly honest, weren’t the above three but their ’64 doc about the Beatles’ first visit to the States, Meet Marlon Brando (’65) and With Love From Truman (’66). These guys wrote the manual on grainy, neutral-minded, you-are-there docs in the ’60s and ’70s, but eventually grabby docs that were more cinematic and opinionated (“this is how I see a situation so fuck ‘fair and balanced'”) took over. Maysles-styled docs are still being made, of course, but they don’t seem to be punchy enough.

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An allegedly riveting period crime flick, Cedric Jimenez‘s The Connection (Drafthouse, 5.12) seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered for the March-April doldrums. If it were opening this weekend I’d bolt right out of the house. Naturally Drafthouse has decided to release it in mid May. Of course!

Stretching from ’75 to ’81, the French-produced drama “pits Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche against each other as a real-life Marseille judge and an elusive kingpin, distilling actual events into a procedural epic whose complicated narrative is propelled by visceral action sequences and an unusually thrilling soundtrack,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic John DeFore.

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