Cinema Mishmash

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Aside from being a kind and gracious soul (as displayed again at his appearance tonight at the film’s North American debut at the Chicago International Film Festival), John Woo is a talented filmmaker. He is well known for the visual flourish he brings to action sequences, which is tirelessly put to use is Red Cliff, [...]

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If the societal revenge flick genre didn’t exist before, it does now with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a multi-threaded re-imagining in which Hitler and the Nazis get what’s coming a lot sooner than historical truth and, as one would expect from the reining cineaste auteur, with a visual and narrative flourish that no one could [...]

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And the award for the most misguided holocaust drama goes to . . . The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This film is so misguided in its concept, it’s story, it’s motivations, and it’s message that it would have been a great consolation had the acting and production design also been poor. Sadly, though, David [...]

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Filmmaker Ari Folman had difficultly getting financing for Waltz with Bashir, in part because no one would embrace the idea of making an animated documentary. Although animation has grown far outside the confines of the children’s “cartoon,” apparently Folman’s idea of an animated memoir, exploring his mental block surrounding his military service during the Israeli [...]

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I’ve never been a great student of military history. In fact, if you asked me to explain who was fighting whom in World War I, I would inevitably get it wrong. I just looked at the Wikipedia page to get my bearings, and after the second paragraph, my brain just begins to fog up. I [...]

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Valkyrie tells the true story of Nazi army  Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) and the many men and women who formed an underground resistance movement against Hitler during World War II – from within the German armed forces.  Von Stauffenberg was the key figure in what was one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, [...]

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Now that Quentin Tarrantino is getting attention (which he so hates) for his yet-to-be-released bloody World War II revisionist tale about a band of Jewish assassins (Inglourious Basterds), there is something even more striking about the fact that Edward Zwick’s Definance is based on a true story.  A couple of ruffian brothers lead an inconceivably large Jewish [...]

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Actor/producer-turned-attorney Sig Libowitz, and director Adam Rodgers have shown a keen understanding of the one element missing from most courtroom dramas: restraint. While courtroom scenes in movies and television shows often have glaring factual inaccuracies, there is nothing more cringeworthy than when the filmmakers indulge in high-pitched drama in a forum which is governed by [...]

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W. is a strange little film. Throughout the first 15 minutes of the film, I was looking for clues as to the tone that Oliver Stone was trying to achieve, and am still confused as to where on the line between parody and earnest biopic the experience of this story is meant to reside. The opening cabinet [...]

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Japanese director Kon Ichikawa died last February at age 92 and after directing nearly 90 films. The Burmese Harp is the first of two films (followed by Fires on the Plain) which tackles the post-war Japanese ethos. In this one, a Japanese unit in Burma must submit to the allied forces after Japan officially surrenders. The [...]

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There is a scene in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers in which the young cineasts debate whether Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton was the superior filmmaker. So when I recently saw that The Auteurs had Keaton’s The General available for online viewing, I figured I might as well find out for myself. In my grandfather’s basement, we kids were treated to [...]

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No one can say that Baz Luhrmann isn’t ambitious. After a 7 year hiatus, the energetic director has returned to the cinema with a work intended to be epic in just about every way, clocking in at 2-3/4 hours of nearly non-stop largess. After being notably snubbed by the Academy, which denied him a best director [...]

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