I'm a huge fan of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World comic book series written by Bryan Lee O'Malley (he's sort of Asian, much like myself). I was handed one on a recommendation from Berman Bothers himself, Loni Berman, and spent several of the next few subway rides rolling through each volume (they take about an hour to read through, very quick, like cheetah). Scott Pilgrim and his merry cohorts in their band Sex Bob-omb inhabit a hilarious, anime/gamer infused world that's a highly stylish, boy-dream setting for a charming and breezy romantic comedy. Mr. Pilgrim has the hots for Ramona Flowers, is being chased by Knives Chau, and is forced to fight Ramona's 7 evil ex-boyfriends (well one of them is well read it! Or watch the movie).
You have Michael Cera (not my first choice to play Scott) and all sorts of fun supporting cast members. What's great about the comic and hopefully what's great about the movie, which comes out tomorrow, is that even if you're not into the references and style, you understand the manic nature suits the story well and gives it a wacky bravado. I'm excited as any, and it's a great way to end the summer in my opinion. If it disappoints, I'll have to hadouken the theater usher.
In celebration of this film adaptation, I have two t-shirts to give away courtesy of Universal Pictures! You can see what they look like below. One is for guys (red). One is for girls (black). Both are size large. You want to go to there.
Guy Shirt: Red Scott Pilgrim T-shirt with full Scott Pilgrim logo on front and “An epic of epic epicness” tagline on back. Girl Shirt: Black ladies t-shirt with lighting Bomb logo on the front and Scott Pilgrim logo on back nape of neck.
(I'll get pictures up tomorrow)
Now, for those of you who know our very own resident film critic, Roger Ebert's absolute favorite (from FilmCritic.com no less, featured on the homepage) Chris Cabin, you know he wishes he were Scott Pilgrim. Michael Cera too, but I'd rather be Chris Evans. He also owes me a beer from my birthday, so we'll as usual set him up with a Chris Cab-tion contest. You know the drill; comment to enter to win:
"I'll extinguish you"
For more, visit the pretty sweet official website. Or, just do like I do and play Scott Pilgrim Punchout until your head explodes. Basically there's a ton of cool things to check out and I would expect nothing less from an Edgar Wright directed film.
I'll consider all entries through Monday August 16th. Maybe a day after. Who knows?
Cheryl! Congrats on one copy of Brooklyn's Finest on DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment, please don't assume that it's realistic by any stretch of the imagination, because well, Wesley Snipes ain't from this world at all.
Flynn, you took yourself out of the competition because it's MI-6, not MI-16. MI-16 is probably where they keep the real messed up shit.
Our resident film critic Chris Cabin probably frowns on Brooklyn's Finest. Then again, he don't live in Brooklyn, so he don't know squat.
Anywho, since this is Brooklyn based blog, I'm giving away one (1) copy of Brooklyn's Finest on DVD, standard, because we're old school. The movie concerns the 65th precinct of Brooklyn and follows 3 police officers in the usual Antoine Fuqua fashion. Now, the 65th precinct does not exist anymore in real Brooklyn, but there is a reference to it in the 73rd precinct which is located in Brownsville, which is fittingly the kind of Brooklyn that a lot of people think about when they think Brooklyn.
Anywho, it's got a killer cast (Wesley Snipes hasn't been in a theatrically released movie since WHEN) and I was just next to Lili Taylor on the train the other week. I also remember when Ethan Hawke was all over the projectionist union dispute at IFC Center when we first opened. I've never met Richard Gere, but if he has anything against the Chinese after Red Corner, I probably should stay away, no?
Here's the theatrical trailer:
We have our resident film critic Chris Cabin once again the subject of a caption contest, all you have to do is comment below for a chance to win the DVD. It doesn't even have to be that funny. Because Chris Cabin's film reviews are far from funny. Look at this picture and give it your best shot: Yes, you can also purchase this shirt. Captions after Sunday will not be considered. For more on Brooklyn's Finest, check out their Facebook and Twitter pages.
Thanks again to the folks at Live Nation (or do I call it Ticketmaster? Or Livemaster? NationTicket? Ticket Nation? Nationmaster? Large Company? Ron Delsener?) the KCB is running a wonderful giveaway for a lucky person and a guest to attend The Soundtrack of Our Lives concert on February 16th. Besides having some old school looks and being from Sweden and totally understandable (unlike Ikea's directions), and cool looking promotional photos, and a nice looking official blog/site, I'm not too familiar with their stuff.
I looked up all those things about 5 minutes ago. What I can tell you is that their patient brand of straight up spacey rock, an oddity considering they aren't vapid like mainstream rock bands or something and almost feel kind of, post-rock version of, well early 70s rock? Even if I don't normally listen to them I definitely give them respect for doing their own thing and not sounding trendy. The Swedes just seem to always get it right stylistically. I mean they feel like they are still playing with the earnestness of when they started years ago, influenced by when rock was expanding in the mid-90s who in turn were influenced by the 70's base and 80's experimentation. I mean, you have to give TSOOL credit just for having awesome album covers. I kind of get this weird feeling of oak-y, woodsy, old PBS educational shows from the 70s. As you can tell, I just like typing the word "70s" in here.
Anywho, what ticket giveaway would be complete without a Chris Cab-tion Contest? Oh yeah that's right none. Just comment on the photo below in the comments section for a chance to win two will call tickets. If you're a tall Swedish blonde, your chances are probably even better.
Check The Soundtrack of Our Lives out on MySpace here. For more info on the Feb. 16th concert, go here. Here's their recent music video for "Flipside", Stone Temple Pilots "Plush" style.
Our very own resident film critic, Chris Cabin, of AMC's Filmcritic.com, gives his take on a whole planet full of Blue Man Group. As always, his opinions are his own and not necessarily reflective of the KCB, but I know I'll probably think this movie is gonna score a win in my book.
In his new film Avatar, James Cameron sets upon doing something monumental and, one would think, overwhelmingly tedious: Creating a new world. Which is to say where so many "massive" filmmakers have developed alternate realities or adapted the strange wilderness of lands found in literature, Cameron has both envisioned an entirely original ecosystem of flora and fauna, and given new emphasis to what it means to its inhabitants. Trees grow incandescent lines of communication to the dead and may house entire civilizations if let be. Appendages connect and bind through small hairs, allowing all manner of animal -- whether web-winged or heavy of hoof -- to download the moral and spiritual compass of one another. Everything is connected and everything burns radiant, even in the daytime.
Gestating in the day-glo terrarium of Cameron's frontal lobe for something like fifteen years, Avatar is the most enveloping and (no two ways about it) beautiful spectacle to find home at the multiplex since Peter Jackson's stroll to Mordor, and clocks in, thankfully, in only a third of the runtime. And like the warring tribes at its center, it is a film of two worlds with its seamless, brilliantly colorful mix of digital animation and live-action colliding, clashing and finally flowing with the power and thrill of a raging river. Giving newfound cred to the motion-capture technique so absurdly misspent trying to make human beings look just slightly less human in The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, Cameron's alien western likewise lends defense to that other over-used marketing tool: 3D not only gives the imagery lift but highlights the depth of Cameron's worlds, evident from an opening shot of soldiers, scientists and missionaries floating upwards out of rows of sleep cells.
Set-up as a last-ditch replacement for his twin brother, Jake (Sam Worthington of Terminator: Salvation) pauses to glimpse at two floating pebbles of water before he is ejected into the same weightless space. His destination is Pandora, Cameron's ostensibly peaceful planet ruled by the Na'vi, a species of 10-foot-tall blue-monkey cat-people who ride reptilian horses with ant-eater noses. Crippled while serving in the Marines, Pandora offers Jake a working body in the form of one of the blue-monkey cat-people -- an avatar. His payment is the surgery to reconstruct his own dilapidated form. Jake works under a chain-smoking, green-as-can-be scientist (Sigourney Weaver) and chums it up with an eco-dweeb (Joel Moore) and later reports his findings to tough-as-coffin-nails Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang of The Men Who Stare at Goats) and a Fortune-500 architect of doom (Giovanni Ribisi, one-upping Paul Reiser's greedy brat from Aliens).
Saved by warrior princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the conflicted marine now finds himself a prophet-in-training to the warrior princess's father (Wes Studi) and her psychic earth-mother (CCH Pounder) and in rivalry with her betrothed (Laz Alonso). Streaming intel back to the Colonel, Jake is too busy learning to ride oversized neon-orange pterodactyls and tenderly mating with Neyteri -- the film's cheesiest moment -- to realize that the military and the corporate goons are planning to decimate Pandora in the hopes of mining it for a valuable mineral known as Unobtainium. Climactic war is waged with Jake and his pack of eco-friends backing the Na'vi and the brutish troops sporting their own types of avatars -- heavily-armed supped-up robo-bodies upgraded from Ripley's alien-fighting cargo-mover.
Replete with soggy allegories to every racial conflict in human history, though Native Americans are given the most blatant treatment, Avatar is essentially a film about the progress of film technology in a similar way that Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds confronted how we see the past through film. Cameron has conceptualized the act of motion-capture on-screen and given it immense visual muscle, making the Na'vi tribes not only the trippiest civil-rights advocates of the decade but the first convincing case of visual effects as a sincere conductor of human emotion not to involve the name Pixar. The humans are portrayed, primarily, as unreasonable creatures driven only by a selfish agenda and who see the Na'vi as nothing but a paltry nuisance; an opinion similar if not identical to cinematic purists who dismiss the advancement of technology as a threat to "real" filmmaking.
Of course, Avatar borrows heavily from cinema's past through a bevy of American westerns and, just maybe, the nature-themed animation of Hayao Miyazaki; the story is most obviously contrived from Kevin Costner's ludicrous Dances with Wolves. But even as Cameron uses these genre stereotypes and benchmarks to root viewers among the ruby-red mushrooms and dragon hounds, the director uses Avatar to cannibalize his own oeuvre: Elements from Titanic, The Abyss, True Lies and, most prominently, Aliens are redeployed under the canopy of his new technological frontier. It would be easy to cast off Avatar as a leftist parable aimed towards reckless red-staters but sweet love for mother earth is far from Papa Cameron's endgame. Assured and confident in his status as the preeminent living director of the motion-picture spectacle, Cameron's latest offers an olive branch between those who think that cinema is dead and those who think it's just rediscovering its own form.
Editor's Note (who am I kidding): Avatar made 73 million at the box office this past weekend. I went in the snowstorm to Astoria to watch in 3-D. While not without it's faults, namely being the cheesiest Cameron movie in certain parts, it is overall a fantastic adventure film with a universally appealing and uplifting message.
We have a winner for the Yo La Tengo ticket giveaway, Chris Cab-tion contest stylie. The concert is on Friday 9/25 at Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, and again, NO Hanukkah shows this year for YLT so get going to this one.
Patrick said: The ass-distraction tactic backfired when Chris' ensuing erection proved far more distracting.
Runner up, who will receive a DVD prize pack is Ed-G, with this ditty: As Tommy bent over to retrieve his fallen cup, Bill decided to give the name "Bowling for Colon-bine" new meaning.
Thanks to Live Nation for providing tickets. If you couldn't think of anything at the time but want to re-live the Chris Cabin magic, go to the original post.
Today's Chris Cab-tion contest brings extra joy, because I have a pair of Yo La Tengo tickets to give away for their show on Friday 9/25 at Roseland Ballroom courtesy of Live Nation. The tickets will be at will call, so no worries about needed the stub to hold on to your memories. The concert starts at 8pm but make sure to always call beforehand to get set times, so you can arrive when you want to arrive, which is almost always fashionably late, right? There are NO Hanukkah shows this year for YLT so you're going to want to celebrate early, not late this time.
The concert includes:
Yo La Tengo with The Black Lips (always get them and The Black Keys mixed up)
And Visuals by JOSHUA WHITE AND GARY PANTER LIGHT SHOW
Hosted By THE DAILY SHOW’S JOHN OLIVER
Yo La Tengo has been around for a loooong time and with such a large catalog you won't be disappointed. Although I'm not a Mets fan per se, I can dig it. There has been contemporary dance set to their music. That's how awesome. If you can't appreciate contemporary dance, well then you go right out there and get to a BAM performance. I'm not sure why I'm sounding so indignant, but a little energy never hurts. Newest video here (from The Music Slut):
If you don't think you're going to win because you're not witty enough, AND you like Yo La Tengo that much (and don't visit Hoboken often) you might want to pick up tickets here.
Here is your time to shine folks. Comment below and I will choose a winner next Tuesday Sept. 22nd (sorry folks, a couple of late entries extended the contest) from the entries:
The opening of Judd Apatow's third film Funny People sees Adam Sandler when he was still young, making a prank phone call to a local deli. It was shot by Mr. Apatow while Sandler and he were living together in LA and though it is a real video that pre-dates Sandler's salad days on SNL, it is also meant to be a video tape of George Simmons, the absurdly wealthy comedy kingpin Mr. Sandler plays in Apatow's latest two-hour-plus comedy.
Unlike the protagonist of Apatow's last two films, it is not maturity that is weighing on George but rather mortality; though, it could be argued that the latter informed the hesitancy towards the former. George has recently been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and has taken on an experimental regiment to attempt to beat it. A box-office tyrant, George has starred in such films as Merman, My Best Friend is a Robot and Re-Do, in which a wizard turns him into a baby with the brain and face of an adult; he shows nothing but disdain for all his films as he contemplates oblivion.
George exists in a dream world where comedians are so rich they don't even have to bother with being funny. Ira (Seth Rogen) has just begun a hopeful ascent to such a world. After working days at a deli counter, Ira goes home and writes stand-up material with roommates Leo (the invaluable Jonah Hill) and Mark (Jason Schwartzman) that he hopefully gets to peddle at the legendary Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach.
Here, Apatow sets up an immediately intriguing dynamic. Mark acts in a cheesy sitcom called Yo Teach! and makes more money in a week than Ira makes in a year; Leo gets more notoriety at the clubs and is a more popular performer in general. Apatow never attempt to justify why Leo and Mark are more successful than Ira past the fact that Mark knows how to sell himself and Leo is, quite simply, funnier than him at this specific interval. It gives both Ira and his struggles (on and off-stage) more definition.
After a grimly narcissistic set at the club, George asks both Ira and Leo to come write jokes for him. Feeling he's owed one, Ira takes the job for himself and neither Rogen nor Apatow slink away from the cordial backstabbing that many Hollywood careers are based on. Soon enough, Ira is writing for George and becoming his sole confidant, pressuring him to make peace with family, friends and colleagues before it's too late. "I think I played it all wrong" says George before he is informed by his Swedish doctor (Torsten Voges) that the leukemia has apparently been cleared from his system.
Life as he knew it can now continue but, after seeing death, George wants a crack at the normal life. This is where Laura (Leslie Mann, the off-screen Mrs. Apatow) comes in with her high-pitched voice and waves of dirty-blonde hair; "the one who got away" as George puts it. Now married to an Australian businessman (Eric Bana) with two kids (played by Apatow and Mann's daughters, Iris and Maude), Laura divulged that she still was in love with George when she found out he was dying. His rebirth seems the perfect platform for them to reunite, with Ira playing chaperone.
Like any celebrity, George wants for a normal life but never stops to think if he's capable of one. For him, death was his one brutal glance at the one thing that all humans, private jet or not, have to face eventually. He regresses in character to who he was before fame but when it comes surging back into his bloodstream, he can't ignore his given nature. Ira cries when Laura puts on a tape of her daughter singing "Memory" from the Broadway show CATS but all George can do is look at updates for a possible sequel to Re-Do and remark how his druggie friends might get a kick out of the "Memory performance. He is an entertainer and cannot help but see the funny side of things; he is not programmed naturally for compassion. The populous is the only thing he could ever commit to.
Apatow's apparent touchstone here is the early work of James L. Brooks, especially the excellent Broadcast News. Similarly, that film dealt with the moral highs-and-lows of modern television; entertainment versus insight and information. Funny People is less biting than that film but the interplay is similar. The way Holly Hunter softens her blow when William Hurt brings her a human interest story mirrors Rogen's hesitation to let George really have it when he realizes he's breaking up Laura's marriage. There's also the communal nature of the comedy world that gives the film a very distinct flavor of insider drama; Paul Reiser, Sarah Silverman, Eminem and Ray Romano all make great cameos.
Apatow softens his blow at the very end but I found myself overwhelmed by the ambition and overall craftsmanship of Funny People. Even the transitions seemed less bumpy after a second viewing. Sandler is playing a fascinating version of himself here and part of the pull of the film is considering just how much of George is Sandler. And despite the fact that Rogen's character is prominent throughout, there is no question that this is George's film, deeply affected by the throws of humor and fame. Early on in the film, George refers to humor as a necessary defense he developed to please and quell his father and at the heart of Apatow's film is the question of rehabilitation even from the most basic parts of our character. In the end, George finds a healthy way to channel his need for laughs with Ira but the bug is still there and it seems clear that it always will be.
Chris Cabin is THE resident film critic and his opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the Kings County Bop. You can find his reviews at AMC's Filmcritic.com as well as linked from Rotten Tomatoes, complete with several comments, none about his facial hair.
Our resident film critic Chris Cabin weighs in on his top 10 films of the year thus far (since we’re a little over half way, and because awards season seems like it never ends with all that patting on the backing and what not). Here it is, complete with trailers for each. Never heard of these films? Find out more at IMDb and get crackin'! The KCB is particularly interested in Hunger fo sho.
01. The Headless Woman: A work of concentrated discombobulation and exacting mood. A woman runs over something in the road, hits her head and for the rest of the film she doesn't know what's going on. Neither do we really, thanks to the young Argentinean master Lucretia Martel's lean, focused formalism but that's what makes it one of the best films of the year. It's a mystery film where the questions posed by the narrative are engulfed by the provocations made by the filmmaking.
02. Silent Light: Like Martel, Mexican troublemaker Carlos Reygadas holds nothing back on his third masterfully crafted film. An agrarian staging of Dreyer's Ordet? Or just a Mennonite ethnographic study with a script? Reygadas has been cast-off as pretentious but what else would you expect from a filmmaker bold enough to attempt greatness?
03. Hunger: The debut of the year by a country mile. British video artist Steve McQueen's highly photographic retelling of the last weeks of IRA martyr Bobby Sands is brilliantly fragmented, awake with inciting clamor and at war with the clarion beauty of its compositions. A step forward from Paul Greengrass' excellent Bloody Sunday, McQueen has located the fight rather than the folklore of the IRA.
04. Summer Hours: Long past prolific, Olivier Assayas' latest is arguably his most refined and clearly his most personal film to date. Globalization hits home when three siblings decide to sell the family house following the death of the family's matriarch. French to the bone, this surpassingly delicate tale finds Assayas cozy at home after years in techno-espionage and turning his camera into a fluidly expanding family tree.
05. The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow's monumental Iraq Occupation film has its roots in both action and war but it is devout to both in ways few directors could stomach. For a triptych of bomb-disposal specialists, headed by Jeremy Renner's devastating William James, war may be an addiction, an anesthetic to the complacency of real life or just something they're good at. Crafted in terms of time and clarity of motion rather than spectacle, this is Bigelow's most triumphant moment and, by a wide margin, the best film about the current mental state of our soldiers I've seen.
06. The Limits of Control: Bad-mouthed and labeled monotonous by nearly every critic around, Jim Jarmusch's latest film could be renamed Variations on a Scene. Space is a key factor in Jarmusch's entire oeuvre but here, the movement and position of actors and camera become the focus itself, accompanied by a sea storm of chrome ambience courtesy of Japanese psych-metal outfit Boris. Jarmusch has called his film Point Blank remade by Rivette but his disregard for the constraints of storytelling and devotion to the medium places him in ranks with the greats, if he wasn't there already.
07. Still Walking: The most delicate and lovely of Ozu tributes since Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere. Two families converge on the house of their grandparents, played magnificently by Kirin Kiki and Yoshio Harada, for a 24-hour lunch and dinner and all manner of cultural and traditional tectonic plates begin to shift. Very few films have touched so fearlessly on the resentments of age and the ignorance of youth without pandering to either side. The immensely talented Hirokazu Koreeda, who we last saw directing a household of children in the superb Nobody Knows, may now be the most fascinating modern director working in Japan and Still Walking is his most refined film to date.
08. Tulpan: Buster Keaton moves to Kazakhstan? Not really but Sergei Dvortsevoy's astounding, original comedy certainly has invested itself in silence and the physicality of its actors. It's a simple story really: Boy meets girl, gets rejected by girl, falls for girl, gets rejected again and then helps deliver a newborn lamb. Ethnographic immersion played as minimalist romantic comedy, Dvortsevoy has made an exception first narrative feature coming from a life of documentary filmmaking. Life on the steppe becomes tradition's last stand while the titular tulip dreams of life at college, away from her alien birthplace.
09. Beeswax: Far from the portentous expectations of the Mumblecore movement, Bujalski now seems one of the strongest of American indie filmmakers, rightly in the same wheelhouse as Kelly Reichardt, So Yong Kim and other erstwhile Mumbler Aaron Katz. Set in suburban Texas, his latest is about early, sticky fumblings towards adulthood, typified by the social, romantic and economic hamstrings encountered by a pair of twins. Refined and more at ease with its habitats than his last two features, Bujalski's film still enjoys a good awkward moment but the scenes feel less fetishized. Neither softened nor unfocused, Bujalski is maturing while many of his compatriots are stuck in adolescence.
10. 35 Shots of Rum: Has Claire Denis given in and made something resembling a conventional narrative? You bet, but this is in no way a bad thing. In fact, it illuminates the director's most evocative gifts -- compositions of echoing desperation, her precise sense of movement and tone -- and places them in the context of artful melodrama. In this case, it's the story of a father and daughter living in the same rise as his ex-lover and her smoldering, wandering love interest. Feelings are hurt and hearts are broken but there's a harrowing mortality to Denis' world that belies the poetic lilt of the imagery. It is the director's most outwardly inviting film but it also may lay claim as her most transfixing.
Michael Mann's Public Enemies is an honest depiction of a life that could only be true in film. John Dillinger is played by Johnny Depp, another public figure whose inner life is ostensibly unknowable, and his foil, the budding G-man Melvin Purvis, is played by Christian Bale. As Depp plays him, he is a romantic, disciplined figure of the public's mythic conscience; Robin Hood in a three-piece suit with a Tommy gun at his side. Above him, around him and to him, Mann emphasizes not only the birth of organized, capitalist-driven crime but the sheer thrill of being romanced by such a public figure.
At a drab Midwest prison circa 1933, Mann begins with a breathless prison break orchestrated by Dillinger and compatriot John "Red" Hamilton (Jason Clarke) to release the bulk of their Chicago gang, which included mentor Harry Pierpont (David Wenham) and Homer Van Peter (Stephen Dorff). His return to Chicago is marked by a robbery and a meeting with his counterpart Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) but is sent into overdrive by the appearance of sassy coat-check girl Billie Frechette, played by the excellent Marion Cotillard. They fall madly in love and stay together even as he is sent to prison again and narrowly escapes capture until his infamous death in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago in June 1934.
Public Enemies is set during the depression but nothing on the screen suggests the depleted environs, save for the public's love for the concept of simply taking the government's money whenever they please. Mann's film is not a chronicle of American history as much as it is a chronicle of a pivotal point in America's love for crime and their need to know that a life of crime is always possible and that it does indeed pay. A recent New York Times article recounted the production of Public Enemies, which began as a film about Jewish mastermind Karpis, as a hope of chronicling the half-decade or so when Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson were celebrities of high prestige, hidden in plain sight.
In Mann's film, Nelson is played by the great British character actor Stephen Graham, a force to be reckoned with in Shane Meadows' This is England. He is, along with Karpis and Dillinger, the reason that J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup in fine form) is seeking to turn his Bureau of Investigation into a Federal body, with Purvis as his lead G-man. As fatalistic as the man he chases, Purvis is introduced as he guns down Pretty Boy Floyd (a brief Channing Tatum) in an orchard and exits as the smallest cog in Dillinger's death. Betrayed by father figure Hoover when he is asked to "take off the white gloves," Purvis is, as the film consistently points out, just as disillusioned with the embryonic FBI as Dillinger is with the initial steps of the Chicago mafia's clandestine agreements with law enforcement to cut the chord with Dillinger and his lot.
As with his last film, the nocturnal free-flow Miami Vice, Public Enemies at once works to concrete Mann's immense talents while further pointing out his minor but telling weaknesses. Soundtracked mainly by Mort Dixon's "Bye Bye Blackbird" and other depression-era lullabies, there is still that indulgence in steely electric guitars to emphasize action and pace, less prominent and much preferred over the swells of Audioslave that dogged both Miami Vice and Collateral.
Like The Dark Knight, Enemies is an unlikely summer entry; one that must accept certain conventions to ensure its box office yet consistently upends and reevaluates the very parts of its DNA that make it a hopeful box office titan. Paced smartly and fitted with solid ensemble performers, which also includes the stage actor Stephen Lang and Rory Cochrane as Purvis' partners, Public Enemies enlists digital cinematography in the most provocative commercial form to date, adding looseness and clarity to a genre usually noted for its tight framing. Wielded by Mann's staple lenser, the crafty and deft Dante Spinotti, Mann's camera peers into the film's nighttime siege of Nelson and Dillinger's woodland hideout with an uncanny ease and thrilling precision; the film's aesthetic feels as if it's on the lam along with its central figure.
Depp's performance, calibrated and deployed with a leopard-like charm, doesn't outshine Bale nor does it work to tower above prominent screen partner Cotillard. Mann has always been an expert at harmonious acting: You may remember the scene between Pacino and DeNiro in Heat but it is not the film's most memorable scene. The film, written by Irish scribe Ronan Bennett along with Mann and Southland creator Ann Biderman, is based on Bryan Burrough's astute study of the crime waves prominent in the early 1930s and the subsequent birth of Hoover's FBI; the film's relation to movement and the chase rather than the national reflection speaks to the gone-tomorrow mentality of the era more than the vision of a thousand breadlines. Like its two lead characters, Public Enemies has certain nostalgia for the flash of early crime, the simplicity of it; it has an open distaste for procedure and concentrates on the swiftness and cunning of these jailhouse playboys. Obviously relating to Dillinger and Purvis, Mann chooses innovation over security, a Tommy gun over a ledger.
Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. You can find other reviews at AMC's Filmcritic.com. His opinions are not necessarily those of The KCB.
The KCB: Here is a featurette on the crew and staging of a bank robbery in the film; it echoes all of Michael Mann's crime film work, he loves the idea of a crew:
We've got 3 pictures for the Chris Cab-tion contest this time. Yes, three glorious mugshots of our hero attempting against all odds and succeeding....at something. Winner of the last edition? ID: Justin (please email to claim random prize) for a ridiculous Michelle Pfeiffer reference. Although Flynn wasn't far behind...
Without further ado, here comes greatness:
I'm looking at these pictures set to Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and I'm having a giggle fit. Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. He contributes to The KCB around his main gig as a critic for AMC's Filmcritic.com.
Oh and before I forget, prizing is quite the "Shitty Movie Night" candidate...
In the same decade that asked the question "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" and birthed a top 20 hit that begged "Don't Phunk with My Heart", something very strange happened to the horror movie: It got cruel. Blood got darker, the separate organs that made up "guts" became more discernable and everything got louder. It was no longer appropriate to creep someone out or induce unthinkable perversity; you had to make them jump out of their seats by any means necessary.A viewer could no longer watch in terror as a killer slowly came up behind his victim; one had a cynical, methodical template of when said killer was to pounce, accompanied by an entire string section.
In his new film, Drag Me to Hell, the versatile Sam Raimi uses a similar template but something is different. First of all, there's very little blood and there are no guts whatsoever. There's plenty of saliva, vomit, bugs, rodents, worms, puss and mud but that's hardly cause for concern. He likes color, uses color and stages many of his set-pieces in the daylight. Films by contemporaries the likes of Eli Roth or Marcus Nispel would ascertain, quite literally, that one shouldn't trust women, foreigners, southern folk and most breeds of canine; they also seem to unfold in perpetual night. Mr. Raimi's blind distrust is far more precise and has been blatant fact since well before the director was born: Don't fuck with gypsies.
Such is the mistake made by loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) when she kindly dismisses and "shames" Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver, part hoot, entirely creepy), an elderly gypsy witch who is denied an extension for her mortgage. Ms. Brown, gunning for an assistant manager position under Mr. Jacks (David Paymer, playing scuzz like a pro), denies the extension in hopes of getting the edge over brown-nosed co-worker Stu (Reggie Lee) but ends up getting in one ugly cat fight with Ganush before the old lady lays the Curse of the Lamia on her.
What's the Lamia you ask? Oh, just a seven-foot goat-beast from the stomach-acid depths of Hell who commands a legion of doomed souls who, after three days of torture, embarrassment and personal desecration, drag you screaming and burning into the underworld to live in darkness and agony until the end of time.
Under a less adept hand, such things would be handled with gothic tiling and Exorcist-brand clichés but Mr. Raimi has mastered a lightness of tone that punctuates Drag Me to Hell with a vital, often vile humor and a sense of (grab your crosses!) fun. At 22, Raimi directed The Evil Dead, the lively cult classic that single-handedly made Bruce Campbell an icon and made Raimi the harbinger for the new paradigm of midnight movies. Since then, the Michigan-born Coen bros. collaborator has directed two sequels to Dead and become a genre-meister, trying his hand at everything from neo-westerns (The Quick and the Dead) and classy thrillers (A Simple Plan) to nostalgic weepies (For Love of the Game) and blockbusters (the Spider-Man franchise). Only Plan and, at moments, the latter series have seemed to harness his plentiful talents into a similar redefining of genre conventions and tone.
Drag Me to Hell is less a return to form than a loving reconsideration of where he's come from, where his strike-zone is. Over 15 years after the last Evil Dead film, he now casts a similar gaze on economics and the people behind it but the tone here is not satirical but true-to-form oversaturated lunacy. Helped by a fortune-teller (Dileep Rao) and her skeptical but devoted philosophy professor boyfriend (Justin Long), Ms. Brown's attempts at satiating the beast include decapitating a possessed billygoat, sacrificing her kitten and two separate instances of defiling a corpse.
That Raimi enlists the same brutal sound design that most modern horror/thrillers use ad-nauseum feels like a choice made out of necessity. One of a handful of solid major-studio-backed horror films to be released in the last decade, Drag Me to Hell's design is one made for humor and shocks rather than legitimate fright but Raimi never indulges in the crypto-tragic archetypes that have become industry-standard in the 28 years since The Evil Dead. The graphics have improved but Raimi's fantastical scares are still all the better for being loony and unpredictable where his compatriots have sought to make horror into a matter of life and death.
- Chris Cabin
KCB note: Drag Me To Hell opened with 16.6 million to take 3rd place this past weekend. Also, The KCB enjoyed this film thoroughly as well. That is all.
Cabin and I, plotting something at a Brooklyn girl's birthday party only to be foiled by several beverages at what was formerly New Gate Bar and turned into Society.
So yes, I've been putting up Chris Cab-tion contests (and believe me, they'll still run until I run out of funny pictures of Chris Cabin, there's a beaut coming) and being all over the poor guy, but soon we're going to have an extra hand to massage the KCB audience with. Chris, our very own resident film critic, will be giving us his thoughts on current and past movies including the small stuff playing in the New York market (we have to have some sort of foot there don't we) that will test your brain as well as your penchant for artistic value. Y'know, all that Lincoln Center, Cinema Village, Quad/IFC/Angelika fare that is home to some really great movies and some really crappy ones, but it's all indie. Of course, Cabin enjoys the mainstream as well, so you'll get his round up of those.
In the end, his opinions are his own and not necessarily of mine. Maybe I'll even chime in....
More Bar Spotlights and the u-ge to come people, it's almost summer weather!
Congrats to a one Szyzska for the winner of the last contest, and will receive a DVD. Good luck on your film shoot sir.
So our old friend Patrick got hitched over the weekend at The Riviera by Coney Island and of course you all are wondering, what is going through Chris Cabin's mind?
"What if this is the most handsome I'm going to get?" Winner this time may receive a Best Buy gift certificate. But only if they can get past the next Cab-tion contest, which will also be wedding themed....
Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. You can see his reviews on Filmcritic.com.
Congrats to Mike for winning the first Chris Cab-tion contest. Here's this week's edition. The winner receives...a free DVD of Encounters At The End Of The World either on standard or Blu-ray. Oh and a free beer from Trader Joe's: Simpler Times Lager.
Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. You can read his reviews here.
We're going to try to start a new tradition here at the KCB (I should have some special fundraiser at KGB Bar or something...the KCB @ KGB....anywho).
It's called the Chris Cab-tion caption contest, after our very own resident film critic/man about town/possible necrophiliac, Chris "Christobel/Sledge/Stabs/Goddammit Chris/Jesus Mary & Joseph" Cabin. Here's our first one, take a look and comment!
"I'll extinguish you"
