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The Seventh Art: April 2010

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Friday, April 30, 2010. That Evening Sun (2009). One of the most celebrated stylistic devices in literature is the trick of the unreliable narrator, where the reader comes to learn that the character relating the story cannot be trusted. This kind of plot point has been translated to the movies in countless ways, but it’s most often employed in films like Fight Club. Might be about as far from a movie like Fight Club. The biggest pleasure of That Evening Sun. Holbrook gi...

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The Seventh Art: May 2010

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Sunday, May 30, 2010. Dennis Hopper and the "Russian Suicide Chair". Links to this post. Thursday, May 27, 2010. Gangster Theatre: 44 Inch Chest (2009). Malcolm Venville’s directorial debut 44 Inch Chest. Which, as it so happens, was written by the same duo- Louis Mellis and David Scinto), all of it delivered by an all star cast of British talent including Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane and John Hurt. Links to this post. The House Next Door.

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The Seventh Art: Collapse (2009)

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Thursday, July 1, 2010. One of the most ubiquitous types of modern documentary is the “everything you know is wrong” movie. These are films which shun any attempt at objectivity in favor of giving a very specific viewpoint, usually in the vein of explaining just how screwed we all really are. We’ve already had movies about how our government is corrupt ( No End in Sight. Our economy is broken ( IOUSA. Our food is toxic ( Food, Inc. Make no mistake— Collapse. Is really mo...

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The Seventh Art: March 2010

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Friday, March 12, 2010. We Are All Guilty": Death in the Garden (1956). The film follows that classic setup where a group of people stranded in an extreme situation come to serve as microcosm for society at large. Bunuel being Bunuel, the extreme situation is a political uprising in a South American mining camp, and the stranded cast of characters includes a prostitute and (who else? Bunuel’s camera and his blocking are pretty conventional—even stagy, at time...8220;we a...

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The Seventh Art: February 2010

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Tuesday, February 23, 2010. Willful Suspension of Disbelief. This is pretty good. An American physicist has become so annoyed by bad science in movies. Links to this post. Thursday, February 18, 2010. The House of the Devil (2009). Last year’s The House of the Devil. Plays like an unreleased Tobe Hooper flick from 1980—the kind of movie he might of made in that forgotten period between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Picks up where those old masters of the genre left off&#8...

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The Seventh Art: A Prophet (2009)

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Saturday, August 28, 2010. There’s an old argument that troubled kids only truly learn to be criminals once they’re sent to prison. Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film A Prophet. Takes this idea to its logical extreme, showing us how a French Muslim named Malik (the excellent Tahar Rahim) turns from a naïve street thug into a mafia kingpin during a seven-year stint in the joint. It’s a sprawling film (among other things, it’s been compared to both The Godfather.

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The Seventh Art: December 2009

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Monday, December 21, 2009. Crank as the Ultimate Video Game Movie. I’ve finally ended my reign as the last American male who hasn’t seen the movie Crank. I don’t remember the original or its even zanier sequel getting all that much attention when it first came out, but it seems that both have attained minor cult status on video, and it’s easy to see why: like all the best genre movies, both Crank. And Crank 2: High Voltage. Appears to be the exemplar. Directors Mark ...

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The Seventh Art: The Eclipse (2009)

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Tuesday, July 6, 2010. The theme of being haunted is pervasive in The Eclipse. A story where the terror is borne not out of violence or visceral shocks but out of character, conflict, and emotional stress. Director Conor McPherson’s background is in the theater, but there is nothing stagey or stuffy about The Eclipse. At scarcely an hour and thirty minutes long, The Eclipse. Out of your head easily—it’s the kind of film that will haunt you. The House Next Door.

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The Seventh Art: June 2010

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Tuesday, June 8, 2010. A Memory of a Memory": The Secret in Their Eyes (2009). If there’s one thing the movies have a unique capacity for conveying, it’s memory. Whether good or bad, recollections of the past tend to stress the emotional, the visual, and the visceral—often at the expense of the truth of what really happened—and what more concise summation of the cinema is there than that? The Secret in Their Eyes. The Secret in Their Eyes. Links to this post.

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The Seventh Art: Winter's Bone (2010)

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Life With The Dull Parts Cut Out. Monday, July 26, 2010. The independent film Winter’s Bone. Follows Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a destitute Ozarks teenager on the hunt for her crank-cooking, absentee father in the backwoods along the Missouri-Arkansas border. It's a film that's been praised for its realism, but this seems a bit off base. Winter’s Bone. Used a high school setting. But along with the detective story, Winter's Bone. As it does The Big Sleep. These ties serve as their own kind of currency.