missybluesblog

MPAA rating:

R, for brief nudity

Times guidelines:

Some nudity, language, mature themes but otherwise suitable for older teens.
Henry Thomas … Simon
Marc Blucas … Neil
Rose Byrne … Rose
Romola Garai … Cassandra
Bill Nighy … Mortmain
Tara Fitzgerald … Topaz
Henry Cavill … Stephen
A Trademark Films/BBC Films production, released by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Director Tim Fywell. Producer David Parfitt. Executive producers Mike Newell, Mark Shivas, Steve Christian, Keith Evans. Screenplay Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith. Cinematographer Richard Greatrex. Editor Roy Sharman. Costumes Charlotte Walter. Music Dario Marianelli. Production create John-Paul Kelly. Art directors Leigh Walker, Mike Stallion. Race loiter again and again: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

This comment on was corrected on June 29, 2003.

The 26-year-old actor Scott Caan likely grew up watching films his father James made during the late-1960s/early-1970s, and the influence shows in his debut as writer-director, "Dallas 362." Set and shot, like last year's "Spun" and "The Salton Sea," in grimy flophouses and back alleys of Los Angeles, Caan's picture refreshingly refrains from borrowing from those films' stylistic handbook. Rather, it has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan). The recipient of the critics' jury prize at Cinevegas, this low-key but accomplished pic definitely has a future as a festival item and a specialized theatrical release.

The story of two longtime friends, Rusty (Hatosy) and Dallas (Caan), who ramble aimlessly from bar fight to bar fight, always getting bailed out by Rusty's understanding mom (Kelly Lynch), "Dallas 362" has a first-time-filmmaker's tendency to overplay its hand. At times, Caan (like Hemingway or Sam Shepard at their worst) gets a bit too seduced by the notion of angry young men working out their frustrations physically when that's exactly the thing pic purports to be rallying against. (There's one scene, in which Dallas stares at his split-open and bleeding head in the mirror and seems turned-on by it.) Rusty, who's supposed to be the one with the bright future in this doomed, "Scarecrow"-esque friendship, occasionally smacks of bad Will Hunting-isms. He's a loner-rebel caricature: the toughest, most sensitive and most misunderstood kid on the block.

But this shaggy dog of a movie (decked out in work boots and blasted blue jeans), is also involving and surprisingly mature. There's something sweetly appealing about Caan's near-fetishization of adolescent angst. Despite his indulgence in cliches, Caan connects to his characters on a deep, meaningful level; auds will care about Rusty and Dallas, even if they don't quite believe they exist. Caan lets their situations — Rusty is looking for a way back to the Texas of his youth; Dallas is plotting a robbery to set him up for life — play out in unpredictable ways, even if too much time is spent on the Dallas subplot.

Caan stages some lovely scenes, like one early on where a beautiful girl (Marley Shelton) walks into the diner where Rusty is eating and he tells her, without batting an eye, that he loves her, that instinctively he ought to sweep her off her feet and "rescue" her, but that he can't at the moment, because "it's a thing."

Caan also gives ample chunks of the movie over to the very honest relationship between Rusty and his mom. Lynch is very good as the mother — it's the biggest mother role in recent memory in a movie ostensibly aimed at Generation Y — and she even gets her own tender, unhurried romance with a shrink played by an enjoyably goofy Jeff Goldblum.

But the movie belongs to Hatosy, in his best role to date, whose Rusty is by turns child-like and wise-beyond-his-years, imploding with sadness and rage.

"Dallas 362" overstays its welcome by a bit, but keeps introducing new characters along the way to keep things fresh. (Freddy Rodriguez's turn as a Cuban shyster with a "Scarface" accent is particularly memorable.) And in pic's final moments, there's an unexpected emotional pull.

Widescreen cinematography by Phil Parmet has a day-dreamy haze that captures L.A. very well. The superb opening titles (by Howie Nourmand) are further proof that such sequences are the true renaissance art at the movies nowadays.

Dragged through the mud with Che Guevara and his smelly comrades

By Tim Robey

Published: 11:37AM GMT 01 Jan 2009

Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara

As movie-making endeavours go, Steven Soderbergh's Che is up there with the
boldest, and possibly most perverse, in recent memory.

This $58 million production was made entirely without American financing, and
its eschewal of Hollywood formulae is quite startling. Soderbergh isn't
interested in grand revelations about the Latin revolutionary hero Che
Guevara, in potted psychology, in Che's controversial stature, or even in
fitting his life into a two-part, four-hour-plus viewing marathon (in fact
it covers only the last decade or so).

It's clear what Che is not, then, and one thing's for sure – it has absolutely
no chance at the Oscars. But what is it?

The best I can do is "guerrilla biopic", but even that gives the
impression of a portrait, and this film is a landscape, in its very bones.
It's rangy and contemplative, a war picture about attrition, made with a
painstaking fidelity to the factual record of Che's achievements, or those
it chooses to tackle.

If it sounds like something of an ordeal, that's fair comment: Soderbergh is
nothing if not fascinated by the arduous trudge and scramble of
revolutionary warfare. If you feel you're being dragged through the mud with
a bunch of smelly men in combat fatigues, that's entirely the idea – but
whether you come away enlightened or perplexed will be a matter of taste.

This half of Soderbergh's project captures Che during the Cuban campaign, from
his earliest discussions with Fidel Castro (vividly played by Demián Bichir)
to the crucial assault on the Batista stronghold of Santa Clara in 1958. The
history is taken as read – Soderbergh is almost high-handed in his refusal
to put a gloss on it.

What we might hope for are revealing human moments in the fray, and physical
demonstrations of the way this relentless campaign worked. What we get is
almost purely the latter.

Soderbergh directs like a tactician at the map-table, ever assessing the
importance of the next ridge. This is of some interest, but he has
overthought it, and muddled the importance of Che himself, who cuts an aloof
and reproving figure rather than an inspirational one.

It might have been the role of Benicio Del Toro's career 10 years ago, when
the actor's danger and charisma could have illuminated Che the radical
pin-up and given the film its focus. Here, he is too often studied and
remote, head down in a book, while Soderbergh's egghead war simulation
rumbles all around him.

Rating: ***

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In 1760, complete of the first reviews of Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ – in which Shandy struggles to recount the fairy tale of his own individual but is constantly distracted into thematic digressions and formal trickery such as blank pages and illustrative squiggles – described it as ‘a farcical performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinguished ideas to our readers’. One of the many measures of the success of Michael Winterbottom’s modified adaptation of the novel is that it’s equally baffling to describe.

After a prologue in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon – playing ‘Steve Coogan’ and ‘Rob Brydon’ – sit in a make-up trailer getting on each other’s wick, the covering presents a relishably chaotic account of the novel’s first two books, in which Shandy tackles his conception and birth. Coogan’s Tristram is as chatty as Sterne’s narrator, addressing the camera (‘that is a child actor pretending to disport oneself me… the most of a painful bunch’) and playing Tristram’s self-superior father Walter in flashback; Brydon is Walter’s meek, militarily-obsessed fellow-creature Toby. Then, 30 or 40 minutes in, ‘Cut!’ is called, wigs are tugged far-off and we drive reject to sight the trappings of a contemporary film production at the end of a day’s shooting, before spending a sustained dusk with ‘Steve’, negotiating his various roles as actor, celebrity, young father and helpless flirt, and the team as they grapple with the logistics of order changes, micro-budget battle scenes and luring Gillian Anderson into a supporting function.

Fellow its fountain-head, ‘A Cock and Bull Story’ shows a astute but forbearing eye for the necessary absurdities of procreation, the idealism and folly that bustle commingled around the bringing-forth of both life and art. Sterne set Walter Shandy’s fussing around his son’s birth against that son’s struggle to pronounce his own story (a prang crystallised in Tristram’s refrain: ‘I am getting ahead of myself. I am not until now born’). The film’s coup is to organically extend this spirited to its own product and beyond – into fantasy sequences and jokes based around Coogan’s public persona – making you be agog that such a film should absolutely approve it to the screen. Ingenious interplay between form and content is a constant: the prologue ends with ‘Rob’ insisting that alphabetical order is ‘the only fair way’ as a replacement for the credits to surpass; the credits instantaneously initiate, ‘Starring (in order of appearance) Steve Coogan…’ It’s the rivalrous rapport between these two that lends the film its real kindliness, that makes it fun as well as clever. Whether needling each other about the size of ‘Rob’s’ part, the height of ‘Steve’s’ heels or who does the better Pacino impression, their edgy banter is both make a mockery of-unconscious-loud ridiculous and wonderfully sympathetic. Along with the sarky confidences of Shandy’s narration, it ensures that what might have on dippy as a chill, formal experiment is also emotionally agreeable, making the film an apt homage to the novel’s warmth as well as its inventiveness. There capability be self-delusion, insecurity and hubris in spades but there are no villains here.

Although its playful compare with to narrative and the creative modify has up to date cinematic precedents – in ‘Adaptation’ and Winterbottom’s own ‘24 Hour Party People’ (in which Coogan took a similarly overarching narratorial role as Tony Wilson, who pops up here to conversation ‘Steve’) – the frank national of ‘Cock and Bull…’ is the small screen. The project was initially conceived as a soap or sitcom and shares some of its effects with fresh TV comedies in which the opus process becomes part of the subject matter: Coogan’s Alan Partridge, Brydon’s ‘Marion and Geoff’ and ‘Director’s Commentary’, ‘Brass Eye’, ‘The Occupation, ‘Extras’. ‘Cock and Bull…’ would also benefit from viewing on DVD, where the knack to pause, skim or rewind has as much in common with reading as cinemagoing.

Making-of featurettes and filmmakers’ commentaries are also strikingly close to the supporting textual apparatus with which ‘Tristram Shandy’ groans; ‘Cock and Bull…’s narrative explicitly mentions the DVD extras ‘which on exploit as footnotes to the main story’. In finding low-class cause between one of the earliest novels and a film poised on the cusp of interactivity, ‘Cock and Bull…’ rejects the realist approach that has flourished in between, boldly embracing the act of authorship rather than trying to keep quiet about it. Instead of hoping to dupe us that we’re watching life itself, they constantly remind us that tattling a story is a fragile, halfwit, hopeless approach, and an imperative love.

Robert Greenwald is the Roger Corman of documentary producers. In combining to producing "Outfoxed", he also made his "Un-" series - "Uncovered: The War on Iraq", "Unprecedented: the 2000 Election", and "Unconstitutional: The Joust with on Our Civil Liberties". He makes these documentaries with political donations (the progressive organization moveon.org is inseparable of his explanation supporters, as well as MediaChannel.org, Free Press, and Working Assets), churning the films off in log unceasingly a once, and completely reversing the ´normal´ mode of deployment by handing completed up to 100,000 copies on DVDs for manumitted to members of moveon.org, selling the DVDs in stores notwithstanding less than $10 apiece, then broadcasting them on notorious small screen and after that customary payment theatrical releases in faculty houses all over the country.

"Outfoxed" brought to television the question of corporate ownership of the media and the controversy of interests it entails. It aims to show that the Fox Pass Newscast is "less about news and more at hand punditry" and in truthfully is a mouthpiece to go to the Bush administration.

The ´making of´ featurette shows the deal with Greenwald and his team followed to arrive at their conclusions: a small army of monitors, all women, from all ended the surroundings, volunteered to look at Fox News fitted five months straight, keeping detailed records of what they watched. Meantime Greenwald´s team recorded Fox News every day. At the end of the five months the records were used as guides to select moments from Fox Good copy to highlight in the documentary. These highlights were habituated to to embellish the latchkey points made by the grouping of media experts, including Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen from (FAIR), Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center as a remedy for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) and numerous former employees of Fox News, some of whom kept their identities concealed out of tremble of reprisals.

Watching the documentary only confirms what tranquil a casual viewer of Fox Dirt can declare proper for themselves: Fox Info is heavily biased in favor of the current Republican administration and George W. Bush in particular. The journalists at Fox News, flush those who want to, are not allowed to do the job that journalists should be doing in this country, but rather than are carefully directed to delete portions of Kerry campaigns speeches that behave with the war in Iraq, to turn non-events into events, such as a Reagan birthday party at the Reagan library that wasn´t, and to create a savoir vivre of reverence (fear of terrorism for example) at every chance. O´Reilly comes under particular be shelved for frequently and loudly too revealing his interviewees to fence in up, for cutting off their mikes or ending an sound out when he doesn´t allied to what his guest is saying, and for humiliating those he really disagrees with, not just when they are on the air with him but suitable months afterwards, to the point where ditty guest (a young man whose father died at the The world at large Profession Towers on 9-11 who then signed a plea against the war) wanted to sue him for defamation, as O´Reilly went out of his less to depict him as a traitor.