The current cinema

12 Comments

• AdenDreamsOf says:

  September 6, 2011 at 3:45 pm

  I really enjoyed your review of “Warrior”. Everyone I know who has seen the film has been very sur­prised by how mov­ing, detailed, and excit­ing the story is. “Warrior” is both a sol­id sports movie, and a very astute look at a broken family.

• jbryant says:

  September 6, 2011 at 4:38 pm

  Just saw Huston’s FAT CITY for the first time, and I think it’s anoth­er fight film whose story line isn’t a “wel­ter of clichés.” However, this may be because the film does­n’t exactly HAVE a story line.
  I sus­pect BURKE AND HARE won’t come to my neck of the woods, but I’ll keep an eye out. Sounds like great fun.

• Russ H says:

  September 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm

  I don’t have much interest in this film, even with GK’s intriguing review, though I DO think Hardy is a real tal­ent and I’d be excited should he find his way to bet­ter, more com­plic­ated mater­i­al. Dude’s got chops.

• lipranzer says:

  September 6, 2011 at 9:57 pm

  I have to say, O’Connor’s got a pretty good track record as far as mak­ing straight­for­ward dra­mas that may seem cliched on the sur­face but still work, includ­ing, as you say, MIRACLE (once you got past, unfor­tu­nately, just how little Patricia Clarkson had to work with. On the oth­er hand, Kurt Russell was ter­rif­ic, and it was nice to see a Disney sports movie for once where the oppon­ents wer­en’t some vil­lain­ous Other), so I def­in­itely will see WARRIOR.

• Andy says:

  September 6, 2011 at 10:02 pm

  The embed­ded trail­er for Burke seemed to put the lie to your praise, Glenn…could it really be so mis­lead­ing? I mean,a 19^th cen­tury shart joke? Ugh…

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 6, 2011 at 10:22 pm

  Not my favor­ite joke in the pic­ture, Andy. But the ana­chron­ist­ic stuff, from the way the hang­man breaks the fourth wall in the first minutes of the pic­ture, and bey­ond, is what made me think of the Hope/Crosby pic­tures, “Road To Utopia” in par­tic­u­lar, so…

• Andy says:

  September 6, 2011 at 10:38 pm

  Well, I guess it would have been more to my point to say “shart joke,” peri­od. But you could­n’t have Trading Places without black­face and “jac­uzzi” jokes, and I sup­pose I would­n’t throw that baby out with the jac­uzzi water…I guess I was just hop­ing to hear that the easy, puerile jokes in the trail­er rep­res­ent a minor­ity por­tion of the film. The trail­er was pretty unap­peal­ing, some­where between the trail­ers for Zookeeper and the upcom­ing Hysteria.
  On anoth­er top­ic, speak­ing of Landis’s doc­work, props for Slasher…

• Lex says:

  September 7, 2011 at 3:52 am

  I liked but did­n’t LOVE “Warrior.” Seemed to be woe­fully miss­ing a second act– After all this nice buildup with Edgerton and his fin­an­cial woes, his Steven Bauer-esque buddy, his teach­ing job, etc, and all the Nolte/Hardy stuff, it seems to skip right ahead to the MMA con­test. Even the one sure­fire thing in this kind of movie– a rous­ing train­ing mont­age– was sort of bungled with that four-pane throwaway; Is there even one frame of Nolte actu­ally train­ing Hardy? My king­dom for a Stallone Climbing the Mountain “Hearts on Fire” sequence.
  Also Hardy is get­ting vaguely annoy­ing. He’s like a ‘roid­ed up Simon Rex try­ing to out-mug 2006 Ben Foster. I don’t know, I liked Edgerton a lot better.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 7, 2011 at 6:10 am

  I have to admit that part of what won me over about “Warrior” was that it took me by surprise—wasn’t expect­ing much from it at all. So what mater­i­al is actu­ally there—and there’s a good deal of stuff, the movie’s almost two hours twenty minutes—compensated for its ostens­ible sins of omis­sion, which I don’t think Lex is entirely off-base about. The point con­cern­ing Edgerton is well-taken too; without giv­ing too much away, his is the less showy, more demand­ing role (as great as Hardy is, half of his work is just show­ing up LOOKING like that), and he is really great in it. Also, “roided-up Simon Rex”=classic, and alas not entirely inaccurate!

• Jon Hastings says:

  September 7, 2011 at 9:17 am

  I think “Burke & Hare” is really some­thing: not just “Oh, isn’t it nice that John Landis made a fea­ture again”-special, but “John Landis may have just made his best feature”-special. I took it as a com­ic ver­sion of Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s “From Hell” (not to be con­fused w/ the movie ver­sion): where the ana­chron­isms and mix­ture of fact with (mostly) fic­tion serve to give us a “secret ori­gin” of “right now”. This is espe­cially true in terms of the movie’s take on cap­it­al­ism: Adam Smith is nev­er men­tioned, but his ghost haunts the movie. (It also seems apt to recast the birth of photography/cinema as a way to get a bet­ter look at the inside of human bod­ies – although I’m a bit wary of fol­low­ing that line of thought too far.)

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  September 8, 2011 at 3:26 pm

  Andy’s com­ment very much seconded—“Slasher” is as good as any­thing Landis has ever made.

• lipranzer says:

  September 9, 2011 at 7:35 pm

  I ended up lik­ing WARRIOR a lot, though I don’t think it’s without cliches (I would once, just once, like to see a guy-dominated “sports movie” where the woman char­ac­ter was more than just The Wife or The Girlfriend). And I also think Edgerton is the bet­ter of the two act­ors play­ing the brother.