Something’s Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers, is the sort of romantic comedy that owes more to production design than to mise-en-scène. It’s an enjoyable film but not a good one, and I requested to see it after Easter Sunday dinner with friends mostly to catch up with Keanu Reeves, whose Matrixing about […]
Daily Archives: July 16, 2007
I admire Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (2002), and I love his earlier Clouds of May (1999), but his latest film, Climates (Iklimler), leaves me cold. It is impersonal. Ceylan and his actual wife, Ebru Ceylan, play a couple that falls apart, prompting the man, who ended the relationship, to stalk the woman and […]
At dawn’s hazy early light, while walking home to sleep after a long night of shooting dice, a man pauses to consider his reflection in a storefront window, suggesting life lived at a remove. “A real hood,” the man says aloud, both mocking and reassuring himself, before correcting his loosened necktie. This is Bob Montagne, […]
A half-dozen years after he left Europe for the United States (he was Hungarian, born Mihály Kertész), the future director of Casablanca (1942), Michael Curtiz, made a horror film that thinly masked his culturally and emotionally discombobulating experience as an immigrant, Mystery of the Wax Museum. It would remain his most painfully personal film, the […]
Dennis Grunes 