Month in Review: September 2012

Celeste & Jesse Forever, like Ruby Sparks earlier this year, is an indie romance written by its female lead. But where that earlier one succeeded in challenging the clichés of the genre, this one merely hits all the familiar notes. The performances from Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg as the title characters are charming enough, but can't overcome some of the screenplay's flaws.

I was a fan of the previous collaboration between director John Hillcoat and musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave, The Proposition. Though their latest, Lawless, might not be as good as that one (and becomes a little heavy with its throwaway print-the-legend references) it's still entertaining with a particularly keen eye in its art direction and set design.

An interesting double-feature could be made with a couple of docs I watched last month with Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated, the history and story behind the MPAA and their controversial rating system process and Elijah Drenner's American Grindhouse, about the history of exploitation cinema. Any fan of film history and the industry should seek both of these out.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I've always considered Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark a tad overrated (feel free to yell at me below). But during its brief IMAX run, I was able to revisit it and I enjoyed it much more than I had ever before, though I still probably have it in the second tier of Spielberg's films. Perhaps my biggest problem with the movie is the bludgeoning use of John Williams's score and it's overuse of the main theme. To be clear, I love it as a piece of music, but I think it goes to that well a bit too much. Still, I find that amazing car chase sequence in the desert late in the film to be as good as anything Spielberg has done and even the score makes use of its secondary themes and builds the tension in ways it for some reason doesn't in other moments.

The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson's much-discussed follow-up to his 2007 masterwork, There Will Be Blood.. It's a somewhat daunting, challenging piece that many would say (and have said, with which I would agree) reward a second viewing. My initial impressions are positive--especially the performances and the decision to shoot in beautiful 65-mm. Like TWBB, The Master simply looks like few other movies today do.

I'll hopefully have a review up at some point, but Rian Johnson's third feature, Looper, is one of the best movies I've seen this year.

I continued catching up with the movies of 1980, the best (of the movies that were new to me) was Ronald Neame's Hopscotch, a comedy of a demoted CIA agent (Walter Matthau) who disappears to write a memoir exposing the embarrassing incompetence of his superiors.

This fall marks the release of the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, but it's also the 50th anniversary of the super spy's first appearance on screen and I've been catching up on the ones I haven't seen (which are a good amount of them). I haven't been disappointed so far, having watched From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, two of the best in the series. Over at Press Play, Matt Zoller Seitz has an interesting account of a recent theatrical screening of From Russia With Love that gets at the larger issues of theater etiquette and how to engage with art of the past.