The Final Take with Parker Mott

2.5 Stars out of 4
(124 minutes)

Emily Blunt and Jason Segel have chemistry as they endure an overlong "Five-Year Engagement".

The opening comic episode of The Five-Year Engagement sets the pattern. Boyfriend Tommy (Jason Segel) wants to propose to girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt). His attempt is spoiled by a look of anxiety that Violet knows too well. She pressures Tommy to the point he spits out the surprise, and then Violet becomes rueful. She encourages Tommy to follow through with his proposal, with her playing unaware. This charade is briefly interrupted by coincidences, untimely brushes with supporting characters, and Tommy’s overall lack of tact. Nevertheless, the proposal is given, but we sense – in more ways than one – this is just the beginning. (continue reading…)

2 Stars out of 4
(111 minutes)

John Cusack is a surly Edgar Allan Poe in "The Raven".

Bostonian poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote lurid stories that existed within the sewers of man’s consciousness. They almost romanticized the human’s descent into madness, as his characters fought unavailingly against the plight of nature. I suspect Poe’s ability to evoke pain, darkness, and the macabre springs from his inner turmoils. A notorious drunk, Poe sipped on his absinthe while writing his garish mysteries that mostly earned only modest prestige. (continue reading…)

1.5 Stars out of 4
(95 minutes)

Guy Peace plays Snow, a "loose cannon" of an enigma, in the inept "Lockout".

If it’s lucky, Lockout has one moment of originality: The Man With No First Name “Snow” (Guy Pearce) is being interrogated by United States Secret Service for suspected espionage. Of course, he’s innocent. They always are. While blows to the face are given, Snow’s head snaps to the left of the frame to reveal the credits in the middle. His head cranes back to the centre wiping away the credits. It’s kinda neat – only in a desperately neat-free movie like this. And that’s simply the opening credits. You have yet to endure the long haul. (continue reading…)

Knock on Any Door – 2.5 stars out of 4
In a Lonely Place – 4 stars out of 4

From left: Gloria Grahame, Humphrey Bogart, and Nicholas Ray on the set of "In a Lonely Place".

While it is true that Humphrey Bogart’s career was driven by star power, this should not shortchange his assured ability to master a wide range of film roles, none which would be too far out of his reach. Most of them were channeled by a flair of bravado that ultimately helped form his enduring image as the “tough guy”. However, what makes Bogart such an interesting figure of movie maleness is, as James Neibaur notes, “not because he was particular strong and virile, but almost totally because he was not” (72). Bogart was small in stature and, unlike James Cagney, did not have the muscular frame or fighting prowess (Sklar 87). (continue reading…)

The cover to Nicholas Ray's autobiography of-a-sort "I was Interrupted".

Author: Nicholas Ray
(243 pages, 1993)

Nicholas Ray’s part-autobiography, part-workshop I was Interrupted is an eye-full of guidelines for the aspiring artist nicely poised by Ray’s modest, informal prose. Although Ray is instructive, his lessons are not rigid. He often reminds the reader: “don’t take anything I say for granted. Test everything out” (70).

I was Interrupted,thus, poses no unbendable formula or structure to be an “artist” or “master”. Ray, in great detail, presents a personal method simply as a starting avenue to explore and prepare us, the reader, to find our own – what he calls “moments of exposure” (71). (continue reading…)

Mon oncle Antoine (1971) – 3 stars out of 4

Observing Benoit as he, well, observes in "Mon oncle Antoine".

Calling Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971) merely a coming of age story of its protagonist is a choice of convenience, a way to avoid analyzing the deeper and highly complex forces within the film. Granted, Mon oncle Antoine is about the coming of age of protagonist 15 year-old Benoit as he lives with his uncle Antoine and helps him and his family run a local general store in a small Catholic town in rural Quebec in the late 1940s. Benoit’s experiences fit the coming of age mold: the loss of innocence and growing awareness of adult life. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(95 minutes)

A disturbing discovery in the horror-comedy "The Cabin in the Woods".

There have been enough horror movies about a cabin in the woods that you would think lodging would be out of fashion. Instead of the good ol’ rest and relaxation you typically end up with some death and decapitation. And it’s about five minutes into Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods when my mind starts spinning on the usual axels – “here we go again,” I’m thinking. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(101 minutes)

Rama (Iko Uwais) in a fistful of conflict and then some in "The Raid: Redemption".

The Raid: Redemption serves one function – to kick ass. In that respect it is an immaculate success. It turns fist brawling and knee-crunching kicks into a sort of hostile ballet, where the barebones story is, in every way, broken by vignettes of martial arts action poetry. Best yet, it is executed with exhausting professionalism, injecting the frame with energy and precision. That the plot doesn’t work is a harmless misgiving, considering the film clearly emphasizes combat over content. (continue reading…)

Standard Operating Procedure – 3.5 stars out of 4

Lyndie England the "talking head" in "Standard Operating Procedure".

One the most important elements of Errol Morris’s films, if not the most, is the idea of thought-process. Morris is not interested in traditionally constructing an argument or story, but what constructs one. Inevitably, he is conscious of his own filmmaking process because he knows everything is an act of creation. In Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Morris does not allude that the photos taken at Abu Ghraib were misrepresented by the public, but that the meaning of images in general, even appalling ones, are relative to the observer. (continue reading…)

Night and Fog (1955) – 3.5 stars out of 4

One of the key images of Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog".

“What hope do we have of truly capturing this reality?” asks Michel Bouquet, the narrator of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), as the camera tracks with aimless grace across the empty fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This question is not simply a lamentation, but an honest way for the filmmakers to admit they cannot directly explain the inconceivable horrors of the Holocaust. Resnais and writer Jean Cayrol, as Sandy Flitterman-Lewis mentions in her article “Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog”, “employ a strategy of indirection [since] a horror too great to be encompassed must be approached obliquely, even metaphorically” (209). (continue reading…)