Review: Blue is the Warmest Color

Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) is voracious. We first note this when she’s devouring a huge plate of spaghetti at her family’s table. She practically hoovers it down, tomato sauce staining her mouth, before going back for seconds. She reads and writes the same way, albeit offscreen, devouring 600 page novels and writing intimate diaries. But what we see is her various oral fixations and one doesn’t eat literature. If she’s not shoving cigarettes in her mouth, it’s food (and, later, body parts). In one endearing moment she shoves a chocolate bar in her wet face during a crying jag getting a huge laugh from moviegoers who've also eaten their feelings.

Adele will eat anything but seafood. That would be a sly tongue-in-(uhhhh)cheek joke if the new lesbian drama BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR didn’t make a point of it in two separate scenes. Instead this provocative film -- already famous round the globe for its explicit sex and post-Cannes disputes between its actresses and director – risks camp by playing it straight. It shamelessly equates oysters to ladyparts and in one scene that is either comical, ridiculous, perverse or all three, Adele’s older girlfriend Emma (Léa Seydoux) teaches her how to eat them… in front of the parents!

Guess what? She likes it.

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"Gravity" and The Limits of A Perfect 10

a version of this review originally appeared in my column at Towleroad.

There's a brief scene in Nicole Holofcener's engaging indie hit ENOUGH SAID that repeats enough times that it could be the chorus if the movie were a song. A massage therapist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) arrives at the home of a fit male client who lives on the top floor of his building. Every time she arrives he pops out with a killer smile looking down to greet her. He never thinks to help her as she arduously lugs her massage table up the entire steep flight of stairs.  

Excuse the stretch but this is sometimes how it feels to write about movies. Especially the ones that are true lookers that you're still just not that into.

By any definition GRAVITY is the movie of the moment and by some measures it will come to be regarded as The Movie of the Year...

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Seven Notes on "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

It wasn't long into the pilot episode of Agents of SHIELD last night that I realized something unflattering about myself: loving Joss Whedon was so much more fun and pride-inducing when it was a subculture and not the culture. If you loved Buffy The Vampire Slayer AS IT WAS AIRING you were, in point of fact, a very awesome person. Everyone loves Buffy now so loving it is expected and the only reasonable thing to do. Yelling "first", which is stupid trolling when it happens virtually on the internet, is actually deeply pleasurable when rooted in real life. So writing about SHIELD now feels a bit lame since I know everyone will be doing the same. "It doesn't need your opinion!" you try to reason with yourself to prevent the babbling, knowing that talking about something that literally everyone is talking about is roughly the same ROI as talking about something that literally no one is talking about. In both scenarios no one notices in the din/silence. (But then you end up having one (opinion!) anyway because you always do. And it's Joss Whedon and you can't help yourself.)

Seven notes on the pilot after the jump...

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Review: Prisoners

This review originally appeared in my column at Towleroad

Thanksgiving in movies is usually overstuffed with dysfunction and hostility. Who can digest from all the bile at home? That's not the case in PRISONERS, the new dramatic thriller from undersung Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies), which is more retrograde in its approach with the family unit as something sacred and continually under attack. Despite the occassional interjection of ominous music (shut up Jóhannsson... there's plenty of time for your score later!) and an initially drab grey color palette, things seem realistically jovial at this get together.

The Dovers (Hugh Jackman + Maria Bello) are celebrating the holiday at the home of the Birches (Terrence Howard + Viola Davis) just down the street -- close enough to walk -- as they clearly do every year (or perhaps they trade off). The parents are realistically both amused and vaguely annoyed by their children, attentive but 'don't bother me' tired. It's only when the film leaves the homes of the Dovers or Birches that there's trouble brewing... somethings just off. Why did the movie open with a father/son hunting trip? Why is that strange RV parked on the road? Where did Anna's (Hugh's daughter) red emergency whistle go? Are Joy and Anna back yet? The two youngest children just went back to the Dovers to grab that red emergency whistle they wanted to p... OHMYGODwhere are Joy and Anna?

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TIFF: "Gravity" & "Eleanor Rigby: Him / Her"

Here's to grand ambition, the spiritual cousin of self-sabotage; whatever scale filmmakers are working on, it's a thin (blood)line that separates them. An noble arguable failure and an unwieldy arguable success from the Toronto International Film Festival will illustrate…

GRAVITY
The very talented multi-hypenate filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has been MIA from cinema for the past seven years. He's presumably been huddled over various computers or engulfed in endless meetings trying to work out the logistics of bringing this epic outerspace survival drama to the screen. [more...]

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