The Final Take with Parker Mott

2.5 Stars out of 4
(120 minutes)

Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) types and drinks away in "The Rum Diary."

When Hunter S. Thompson wrote his (many unpublished) novels, I don’t think a movie adaptation was on his mind. Only booze, women, cocaine, and menthols. Maybe that is why Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was so profoundly unwatchable. His stories are snake-like, as they writhe episodically across the desert of his existential jaunts. His words are terse and venomously cynical. His characters are sociopaths, who probably put rum in their cornflakes. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(91 minutes)

Rutger Hauer is the famous renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in "The Mill and the Cross."

Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross is a film that will either absorb or repel you. Either way, there is no doubting the film’s quiet, uncompromising, and meditative style that brings art – quite literally – to life. It lives within the cruel yet gracefully alive Flanders in Pieter Bruegel’s famous renaissance painting “The Procession to Cavalry.” If you did not understand the nouns of that last sentence, this art piece will not make room for clarifications. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(124 minutes)

"I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I ... am ... a ... man!"

I am constantly fascinated by films that personify the inhuman. Not to say John Merrick (John Hurt), or the Terrible Elephant Man as the epithet goes, is not a man. He is, but his face is like no man. It takes true conviction to feel sympathy for a character you almost immediately recoil at. But you do. The Elephant Man thus is a film both audio as it is visual, sad as it is hopeful, and frightening as it is inviting. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(92 minutes)

These clowns will make you laugh and cry.

The Clowns is a film meant for Fellini. His films were, in their own right, parades casted through a lively cinematic technique. All his characters were colourful, and put on wide smiles and dewy-eyed gazes. All they were missing were red rubber noses. The year 1970 was when Fellini would reflect on his obsession, not with film, but with clowns. He admired clowns the way Chaplin marvelled at the city lights. Both subjects would turn into a title of their later works. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(121 minutes)

Mitchell Haven (or Monte Hellman?) is the director of Road To Nowhere, the film within a film.

Monte Hellman’s Road To Nowhere is what postmodernists call “complex narrative.” Boy, is it complex. Think of Road To Nowhere like a ruffled ball of string that, since it is only one string, will lead to one end. The question is how well is it wounded up to make it a disorienting yet coherent yarn? It’s the classic film within a film within a film that is part making-of featurette beclouded in a dream state. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(92 minutes)

Earth 2 poised in the sky in Another Earth.

An impossible discovery – quite literally – collides with the crash and burn of chaos to open Another Earth, where MIT student Rhoda (Brit Marling) smashes her car into John’s (William Mapother), killing his wife and child. At this moment, two phantasmagorical events bind together: the discovery of another Earth (called Earth 2) and the daunting, unearthly loss of loved ones. This sets the tone for Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, an exercise in existentialism and what ifs, regarding whether we are living a slow, monotonous existence that could be a carbon copy to another. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(139 minutes)

Expect feeling over truth in The Tree of Life.

In The Tree of Life we have a director – Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line) – who creates his own Film of Genesis. He describes the profound and paradoxical ways of life through an ineffable cinematic meditation. It’s a cosmic film that could mean so much, and then more. It’s a lovely, riveting meander through time exploring the cosmos in relation to a small and ordinary life of the O’Brien family. They live in suburban Texas in the 1950s, a common time and milieu in Malick’s films as this was where and when he was raised. It is the family, in particular one of the sons, who we follow as they endure life’s ways of nature and grace. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(99 minutes)

Two lives unite: a rare moment of bliss and love in Mysterious Skin.

Gregg Araki’s films are known to be personal endeavours. Though Mysterious Skin is based on the 1996 novel by Scott Heim, Araki directs it with familiarity. Yes the movie is surreal but it is conventionally drawn where characters tie together, clash, recollect, and act as if they’ve known each other for eons. They are constantly thinking about dreams of the past, and the uncanny effect it envelops in their lives. It is important to note these are haunted dreams. It’s a pretty beautiful film. But also a tough one. (continue reading…)

1.5 Stars out of 4
(100 minutes)

Red Riding Hood: the Twilight redux.

Red Riding Hood is a hooting attempt at Freudian folk tales. So lacklustre it is at emitting poignancy that even the tweens hormones won’t even be simmering. Its love triangle, surely an arrangement of id, ego, and superego is the same deadpan blah as Twilight, plus the red hood.

These films should not be bad; they should be good because they’re so bad. Twilight: Eclipse was pushing itself to that territory, but Red Riding Hood becomes so joyless and murky that self-parody seems nonexistent. Why make fun of the juvenile content when you’ve already bored us with it? (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(114 minutes)

A hairy apparition in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Wow. It’s a full-bore absurdist, surrealist, minimalistic film of a man’s reconciliation with himself and recollection of a fading life. It is directed by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes And A Century, Blissfully Yours) and he is very good at telling stories through his own pace, tone, conventions, and abstract art. Past Lives adds to this array, but it is another Weerasethakul film that will polarize the lot of you.

It takes place and around the dying days of Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), who is living in a tiny abode in a forest area. He is welcomed by his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and nephew Thong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). They have small bits of conversation and are then introduced to family apparitions: Boonmee’s wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwong) and son (Jeerasak Kulhong) who are not exactly human. This is an odd film. (continue reading…)