The Final Take with Parker Mott

3 Stars out of 4
(101 minutes)

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon are infested in "Bug".

Bug reveals its mysteries sooner than you think. Agnes White (Ashley Judd) is hiding in a run-down Oklahoma motel from her abusive husband Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.) who is just fresh out of prison. Agnes picks up the phone only to be welcomed by silence. The phone rings several times again. Same thing. Agnes assumes it is Goss and, through a succession of jump cuts, she spits out three unrelated threats. We’ve been told everything we need to know about Agnes there. But we just don’t know it yet. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(103 minutes)

Randall Adams is one of the interviewees in Errol Morris's extraordinary "The Thin Blue Line".

“But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.”
– Tommy by Rudyard Kipling

In The Thin Blue Line, its title is not spoken until we are deep inside its mysteries. It comes from a prosecutor, who says bluntly that the police are “the thin blue line separating society and anarchy”. It’s an outrageous statement, but it’s said in a film that would require a stoic to not get a little outraged. The documentary is an intensely sprawling, complex, untidy, and ambiguous thread that coils around a murder case that’s answers could never be ensnared. The murder was so cold and abrupt no one could make sense of it, or maybe didn’t want to. (continue reading…)

2 Stars out of 4
(98 minutes)

A Better Life.

A Better Life is inspired from the sincere, bleak yet enchanting neorealist film Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica. In a way, I was setting myself up for disappointment going into a film that was not neorealist but Hollywood-produced and directed by Chris Weitz who strays far from De Sica’s unsurpassable humanism. Weitz is best-known for his 2002 movie About A Boy, which was touching but, nevertheless, slight sitcom. Another disadvantage: Bicycle Thieves is one of my favorite films of all time. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(105 minutes)

Kevin Spacey inspires his team during tough times in "Margin Call".

Margin Call is a splendid one-night drama in the difficult affairs of a large investment bank on the verge of going belly-up. It is directed by first-timer J.C. Chandor who takes limited dramatic pull (financial collapse, yawn) and uncoils its every thread to great effect. The film is driven entirely by snappy, portentous, and testosterone-filled dialogue with actors – mostly all well-known – piling in after the other. As far as boardroom conversations go, this ain’t no proxy. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(102 minutes)

Warming up to the media in "The Ides of March".

The politico-historical undertones of a title like The Ides of March scream allegory. Perplexing it is that director George Clooney commemorates the assassination of Julius Caesar when there are no Roman complexes, nothing of March, and little talk of that tragic day in 44 BC. That leaves the Senate as its focus, because it was Mark Antony and Octavian who wanted Caesar off his throne and six-feet under way back then. The Ides of March’s time – the contemporary – is less exacting, sparing daggers for a cloak-and-dagger plot that ends up folding back on disillusionment. (continue reading…)

"God, I feel like I've been through some kind of thing" – Dylan's incidentally self-conscious last lines.

In D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, Bob Dylan is both an active participant and a victim of judgment. This statement means that Dylan role-plays as both commentator and subject. The former involves him scolding the press as distorters of truth, which supports Jeanne Hall’s case that Don’t Look Back “mounts a critique of the dominant media informed by a liberal view” (224). Pennebaker’s camera embodies the “liberal view”: the “social watchdog” mediating judgment on Dylan with “quiet reserve” (235). From this viewpoint, Dylan is a subject. His harsh critique of the media strays from commentary and reveals his own conceited personality. The film is as much about critiquing “the media’s propensity to label” (236) as it is about critiquing Dylan through similar judgmental means. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(91 minutes)

The wise journalist David Carr enjoys it while he lasts in Page One: Inside the New York Times.

Print media: bygone or cutting edge? This is the argument, or more the apprehension, that lingers within Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary about the urgent crisis in print media. It seems to no longer have a place in the hustle-and-bustle of television and online journalism now. Why? Because we are in the age when it’s out with the print in with the Youtube. There are an abundance of sources to gather information today, but Page One hopes print media is important, and will be here to stay. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(85 minutes)

Paranormal Activity 3: I spy a ghost!

Here we are a year later with Paranormal Activity 3. It does what it can considering it is no longer an original phenomenon. By now we know the demon is hostile, it wants the family’s first born son, and has a knack for jump scares. In a way, the monster is everywhere but nowhere; stairs creak, doors slam, and lights flicker all to produce a scream from the audience and then some ensuing laughter. Oops, the monster did it again. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(91 minutes)

Miranda July and Hamish Linklater are convincing in "The Future".

Miranda July looks like a character who would live in The Future – a film unlike any others about its title. She does. In the film – a drama of magic realism, not sci-fi – she plays Sophie, a dancer living a life of listlessness, where time and space are hence at a standstill. She sits in her cluttered apartment with boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater), where they pretend that they can control time. That’s easy to do when there’s no time to handle. (continue reading…)

My first Holocaust film: "The Twilight Zone: The Movie", starring Vic Morrow.

Believe it or not, my first encounter with the Holocaust in cinema was The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1982). The segment was called “Time Out”, starring Vic Morrow as an outspoken racist and anti-Semite who gets the ultimate poetic justice: he descends The Twilight Zone’s rabbit hole and ends up in Nazi-occupied France – as Jewish. I remember my befuddlement towards this scene. I wondered: who were these cruel, foreign-speaking soldiers? What was a “Jew”? Why weren’t any citizens helping Bill? My mother, who was watching the film with me, replied: “You have to understand, Parker, the Germans were awful people then.” I didn’t think much of that reasoning at the time, so I just went on enjoying the scares and escapism of the adventure. (continue reading…)