TIFF: More Than a Head Rush

David reporting from TIFF in spirit though I'm an ocean away in person. Ron Howard's Rush premiered at the festival last night, but I got a sneak peek on my own shores so Nat didn't have to. Turns out, he might want to anyway...

Motor racing is a peculiar sport. Dangerous (formerly deadly even), impulsive and isolated, it’s often more about the beauty of the machines than the drivers for fans. Seeing the flash of the sleek cars go past is about all spectators actually present will do – the whole picture can only come across on screen. It’s less a sport than a spectacle.

Brühl & Howard on the setThis is what makes it, perhaps, an ideal subject for cinema, although it’s been far less exploited than most sports have over the past sixty years. Senna, Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary, thrillingly reproduced the story of its eponymous driver from archive footage, focusing particularly on his rivalry with fellow driver Alain Prost. It’s a similar competitive rivalry that drives Ron Howard’s latest blockbuster, the rather obviously titled Rush, which rewinds the F1 clock a little further to the 1970s. [more...]

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Review: The Spectacular Now

Hey everybody. Serious Film's Michael C here to take advantage of the late-Summer doldrums (Getaway, anybody?) as an excuse to draw attention to a terrific movie currently passing through theaters with insufficient critical fanfare.

The genre of high school romance is so moribund by cliché that most savvy film watchers probably feel like they could outline an entire film just from hearing the premise. If, for example, I were to tell you that The Spectacular Now begins with Miles Teller’s Sutter asking out a shy bookworm (Shailene Woodley) in an attempt to make the prettiest girl in school (Brie Larson) regret dumping him, you would probably contend, with understandable certainty, that the film would hold few surprises for you. [more...]

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Review: The Grandmaster

Dancin' Dan here with my take on one of my most anticipated films of the year.

It's often easy to forget that the martial arts indeed are art, despite the fact that the word is right there in their given name. Practioners of kung fu, or karate, or judo hone their craft just as intensely (if not more so) as any painter, dancer, musician, actor, or filmmaker practices theirs. And to watch martial artists perform (that is, to fight) is quite often just as much of an awe-inspiring spectacle as it is to, say, watch Cate Blanchett navigate the course of Jasmine's unraveling. Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, far more than any martial arts movie in recent memory, understands this.

One might expect no less from a film directed by Kar-Wai, cinema's premiere sensualist. And on this point, at least, he doesn't disappoint. [more...]

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Review: Short Term 12

An abridged version of this review was previously published in my column at Towleroad

The movies that hit us hardest can be the toughest to talk about. Sometimes that's because they're personal, striking you right where you live. Sometimes it's more intangible than that, showing you something you needed to see about a less familiar world just to the side of your own, while never forgetting to move and entertain you. Short Term 12 will surely be one of those movies for many, either way.

This rich drama from the Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Cretton, is based on his short film of the same name and concerns a very private young woman named Grace (Brie Larson) the supervisor at a Foster Care facility. Grace is an expert at navigating the emotional chaos of the kids she watches over but less adept at meeting her own emotional needs or opening up to her friends and co-workers about her own secrets. She's got at least two of them weighing her down. Short Term 12 refers to the setting, a temporary shelter for troubled or abandoned kids as they await their next foster home assignment.

I have no personal experience with the foster care system or abusive birth parents or mentoring kids -- Hell, I was never even a babysitter (Youngest Child Escape Clause) -- but within minutes the foreignness of it all slips away. [more...]

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Review: White House. Golden Oprah. Lee Daniels' The Butler

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad

Somewhere in the vast middle of LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER, a movie about a White House butler who served US Presidents from the Eisenhowers through the Reagans, there's a terrific agitated scene in which we leave the butler behind to check in on his wife Gloria. Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and Howard (Terrence Howard), the neighbor she's turned to from loneliness, argue on a couch. Howard is trying to sweet-talk his way back into her bed. Gloria, guilt-ridden, distracts herself with chain smoking, occasionally side-eyeing him as if he were a buzzing nuisance and, damn, where is her fly swatter? Slick Howard begins spinning two of her clothes hangers in the air to visualize their parallel worlds. Gloria reacts with extreme annoyance to the comic pleasure of the audience -- Oprah gets one laugh after another, all of them blessedly intentional, in her rousing return to the big screen. 

It's a weird but lively domestic hothouse scene that feels, at first, largely divorced from the movie containing it, a somewhat duller "greatest hits" tour of America's civil rights journey. But in its own peculiar way it's also the movie's key scene. [more...]

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