That's My Dad.

Chromatics - Kill For Love

Like all the qualities of a classic art-house film, post-punk gone synth-pop quartet Chromatics quietly make their mark with one of this year’s more ambitious, subtle and captivating records, the 90-minute “Kill For Love”: a thematic and ethereal sonic canvas not unlike last year’s M83 with “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”, only done right this time. (8/10)

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Top 20 Films of 2011 (1-10)

1. The Tree of Life

2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

3. Drive

4. Beginners

5. Moneyball

6. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

7. A Separation 

8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

9. 50/50

10. The Artist

The Help - 

A fascinating, engaging and unexpectedly masterful feminist tale and examination of 1960’s women’s dynamics and relationships, still relevant and well worth celebrating even today. (9/10) 

Filmmakers should never attempt to stereotype their films as intelligent.

The Ides of March is the next George Clooney project designed as a contemporary film that delivers an inventive and culturally-relevant impact (i.e. Up In the Air, Syriana). This time, Clooney takes on the directorial role along with the supporting lead in his political thriller The Ides of March.

The Ides of March tells a very clever and classic story. Set up in a ficticous political world, we watch a web of deception and double-faced characters unfold into a controlled and well-managed thriller. It’s not something we haven’t seen, but the care given to the core story shows itself in spades and gives the film a poetic touch. The film lets that channel through its most prominent vehicle: Ryan Gosling.

Ryan Gosling is one of this generation’s most hard-working and equally talented actors. Unfortunately, his good looks overshadow his true talents, leaving the masses to undermine his raw versatility. With this film, Gosling allow his classic straight-edged/well-rounded persona to seep into his character. The film then dishes out as much pain and conflict on him to see much his pretty face can really take. In these moments does Gosling show some bold moments of remarkable and livid acting.

The shame is, I didn’t enjoy this film or find it particularly necessary to well, exist. It seems very timely for a political thriller to come out, especially with the Clooney label. But all this film really does is carry a loose facade of the notion of being “politically relevant” and mimic recent downfalls in U.S. politics. It doesn’t prove anything, shed light on something new or has any commentary to provide. It’s a quality film that tainted itself with this unnecessary and overbearing notion of trying to be intelligent. Don’t wrap yourself around in it, its really not.
This film not my dad, but a lousy politican. (2/5)

Ten Films You Need to See This Year. 

Contagion

Drive

Moneyball

50/50

The Ides of March

The Rum Diary

Like Crazy

My Week With Marilyn

Take Shelter

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Drive is a two-toned poem. Cool, calm and collected. Disturbing, psychotic and heartless. There is a major split personality component to this film, a bizarre and an unforeseen mixture of elements; like drinking Mexican Coke in an American bottle. Drive is a 50/50 blend of pure art-house and grind-house; both film styles constantly given homage to by current film-makers, but never combined so dreamily like this before.

We have our unnamed protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling. Serving as a humanistic and heartless bastard, Gosling’s character is the vehicle of the film’s ultimate purpose and Gosling couldn’t have been a better driver; not literally. The biggest rush that Drive produces comes from the shifts it takes on multiple levels. With the delicate care to its characters and their relationships, primary characters allow themselves to show, not tell their psychological state. The cast make it a point to pour idiosyncratic humanism in their performances, offering a stripped-down, minimalist style of acting; common art-house stylization. The film’s approach to action is where we see the player flip the table over. When Drive comes off as a highly sensitive, quiet and sweet tale, we get bashed on the head with a load of out-of-place violence with such gore and heartlessness that we can only be astounded. It’s the only film that manages to capture the swing and psychotic nature of a ruthlessness in a protagonist. The only reason why Drive’s action comes off so disturbing is in its dense and intricate context. Blood and gore are aspects to violence that are usually given in overdoses in order to establish a tone, but with Drive, we’re completely thrown off our feet with progressive attacks of violence serving a grand purpose to create an unconventional thrill. 

Aside from shift, Drive covers its bases with a rich amount of thought. The film manages to capture glimpses of abstract existentialism all while blurring the line between realism and fantasy. Technically superior in all aspects to the point where everything comes off as dangerous, sexy and slick. Drive tips its hat to many old works, ranging from the classic style of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt to Gosling’s uncompromisingly cutthroat performance that echoes the likes of Eastwood and Bronson. It’s an inventive rework on the heist genre that always seems to get successfully remodeled. 

Drive is not a people’s film. This is strictly a work to and from art-house/film-obsessed folk. Its cast will befuddle many and please very few; director Nicolas Winding Refn is one of many directors who deliberately undermine their cast in order to carve out raw and rough performances that contrast their usual work. This always sheds light on entire layers of actors who never had the opportunity to expose. Yet on all terms and conditions, Drive is sincerely a challenging work to take in and appreciate. As a work of colorful inspiration, I cannot deny Drive the title of the slickest, meanest and finest art-house work in recent years. 

This film was my dad.   

Director Steven Soderbergh has no definitive style of his own. He meticulously obsesses over style, but always let his subject matter do the job. He’s cautious, inventive and determined. 

Contagion is an action-thriller film that feels more as a work of brilliant non-fiction horror. With this film, Soderbergh fixated his gaze and planned his artistic expose on our world’s ubiquitous paranoia, tapping into our cerebral cortexes. He’s invented a pure possibility and let it disturb our consciences, leaving it to linger amongst all of our senses. Stealthy is the disease and so are the scares. Without doubt, Contagion is the most powerful and relevant film to come from Soderbergh since Traffic. Albeit contemporary, the deadly feeling of claustrophobia the film drowns you into is immersive and horrifying. It’s like being forced into a doorless padded room and having the walls set on fire. Soderbergh suffocates all of us on our own planet and instills a fear within human contact.

What makes this film so exhilarating is it’s bleak cutoff from pure, developed emotion. Darren Aronofsky did this with Black Swan, allowing a scene of pure conflict, joy or grief to present itself in a terse manner. It devoids the pure emotion, leaving it to mold into the film’s dark nature.

The majority of criticism developed for Contagion is for lack of proper development in all involved subplots. We are given minimal amount of material to color these characters in with, which was a deliberate approach. Soderbergh comments on the current state of our world’s society and how rare strands of humanity are. It’s an insulting self-portrait of our moral digression as a people. You wouldn’t care about these people in reality, why should you in a film? 

Contagion is a superb work of modern horror. Shake your hands for the last time and drown yourself in fear.

This film was my dad.

Face the polarizing question: Did you like The Notebook? 

While we have naysayers and fans alike, the response majorly comes inspired from personal taste. I was looking forward and rather excited to my first viewing of The Notebook and to break down this infamous king of romance films from the past decade. 

Very few elements can be tended to with a film of this nature, and so it limits itself to engaging with the characters. Shamefully enough, characterization of lovers Noah and Allie was managed horribly, which grew to be the fatal flaw of the film. We start with first love, the youthful stage, an area of the film that proceeded to be a shameless and gleeful montage of cute highlights and romantic gimmicks that didn’t really shape a unique human couple, but a picturesque pair that we all can fawn over and relate to on some relative degree. Initially, things were so briskly paced that these people didn’t have time to catch a moment’s breath to show us who they really are. Even classic fairy tales have more character study values than this. And that’s what it tried being; an adult fairy tale. All throughout, the film relies on its heavy event and time based story to flesh out these characters, and that approach just doesn’t work for a story like this. We aren’t experiencing these events alongside these lovers, we are being told a story and the foundation laid out for it was poor. Even if we start to see these people on a deeper level, it still never comes full circle. Nor does it even bother to give us something to cling on to, aside from the universal similarities of love; that is cheap film making. It’s certainly not as bad as many other films of the genre, but for the lack of time and care the writers and director gives the characters, it only gives room for the cheap trick of winning your hearts over through a collection of fanciful moments and that isn’t fair to the viewer.

Thankfully, the cast supplied an array of performances that colored in the story beautifully to the proper satisfaction a story of this caliber required. Not to mention strikingly rich and mesmerizing photography that illuminates this love story better than most. Looking at the film as a whole, The Notebook sincerely needed more time to breathe and simmer for it to cross through three different eras of a love and to properly let us in on the flesh and bones of this story, because this adaptation is ripping viewers off. It’s a film too small to be an epic and too grand to be an ordinary romance.

On the core story, however, The Notebook is a well deserved tale of iconic romance, quintessential and heartbreaking, enough to linger in our generation’s hearts.

It’s like Nicholas Sparks is showing us this beautiful black and white photograph of couple from a past generation perfectly in love. He bring us in touch with our core human emotions as he explains them and then lets us watch him burn away the photograph; slowly watching the fumes and ash pile up, taking the place of what once was beauty.  

This film wasn’t my dad, but a giddy teenage girl too excited to articulate her thoughts.

Kind-hearted people bring out the best in us. It’s a social tendency. 

Through a handful of romance-based scenarios, we are told a combination of stories that hold their weight in importance before us and tickle our hearts, just not as well as they should. Our primary focus on this film retains on Steve Carell’s character and the ripples of his divorce that effect the people both related and unrelated around him. It’s a domino effect through a continuous string of events, an angle taken on rom-coms many times, soon to be exhausted. This is where many of the film’s flaws seep in; plot structures feel all too mechanical and slightly rushed beyond its comfort zone. Few of the independent story-lines between duos in this film, of which they are many, are slightly spoiled and hopelessly attempt to win us over with its absolutely relentless passion over the traditional qualities on love. This is where the film begins to shine.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a film with a heart of pure gold that truly wants you to appreciate and embrace the ultimately positive core of romance. It certainly explores its dark sides, tastefully and bluntly, then offers the light out of the tunnel; leaving a sweeter impact that provides humor on both ends of the stick. Not only internally, but much of the humor comes from the well written and delivered dialogue dished out from the best: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei and the new Analeigh Tipton. Plenty of weak links are found in the cast as well: Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon give another round of poorly executed performances as well as some rather irritating performances from the younger members of the cast; the weight of this film’s success was majorly on the cast and it was a shame to see it dip with Moore and Bacon. Plenty of moments also fell flat by some juvenile direction that neglected potential moments where its darker qualities should have been fleshed out further for a more authentic and realer feel.

By and by, its flaws are made up for by plenty of humanistic comedy through a handful of whole-hearted characters and a sincere approach towards all forms of affection lost in a post-modern society.

This film was my mom.