"Anna Karenina" Trailer

Can I be perfectly honest in saying that "Anna Karenina" sounds particularly all over the place, even if it does have the potential to be wildly gorgeous thanks to cinematography by Seamus McGarvey and Joe Wright's natural sensibilities? I have a tendency to distrust films with Jude Law in the cast, which is no mark against him. It's just that they often don't know what to do with him. This seems like similar terrain, since Aaron Johnton is given more focus than Law. Johnston is an odd actor, and tends to feel rather too timid in all his performances. I know it sounds like I'm declaring war against "Anna Karenina" from the start, but this could be the boring period spectacle that the Academy just fawns over. In fact, I'm certain it will be.

Film Review: "The Avengers"

"And then Shawarma after."

There is a juncture about 90 minutes into Joss Whedon's superhero extravaganza "The Avengers" that states my feelings towards the film better than any words could. Mark Ruffalo's newly tuned Bruce Banner awakens in a pile of rubble to the company of a janitor played by none other than Harry Dean Stanton. It's a short scene played almost entirely for humor, with the hilarious delivery of the words, "I think you have a condition". That may very well be my absolute favorite moment of the film's two hour and twenty minute running time, filled enterprisingly with bombastic action, interpersonal conflict, and character articulation. A random cameo talking to a nude guy who just got busy breaking apart an air fortress.

It's that moment where I realize that this could easily have never happened, just as this film could have gone awry at any juncture. They had five films to build up to this one, and if one of them had been entirely horrible, this one would have fallen apart entirely. Against any possibility, this geek pipe dream has become a reality, and for nearly everyone else who sees it, it will be received as miraculous. Indeed, ignoring the film entirely, we have to spend a moment to acknowledge just how difficult it has been to bring us to this point, where a film like this is not only possible, but absolutely fluent. But if I'm building it up as a disappointment, it surely isn't.

TOP 10 SHOTS from "Atonement"

Welcome to "Top 10 Shots", our weekly column to get together, look at some gorgeous visuals, and reminisce about great cinematic gems past and present, so if you haven't seen this week's central film, I warn of SPOILERS and urge you to come back once you've seen the film. "The Avengers" is out today, coming out to much anticipation from the geek and normal community of cinemagoers. It's rather firmly in position to become a juggernaut at the box office, so it's a no-brainer to do something that mindfully attaches. For quite some time, I believed that to ideally be the previous Marvel installments. But I ran into something of a roadblock while going back into the Marvel canon. This may come as no surprise to anybody, but the Marvel superhero films aren't all the brilliantly shot in terms of singular visual wonders.

Despite having such a great cinematographer as Matthew Libatique on "Iron Man" and "Iron Man 2", Jon Favreau simply didn't have any direction for what the films were about. They looked good, but nothing stuck out as expressionist as "Black Swan". "The Incredible Hulk" was quite obviously a dull action fest with no visual inclinations. "Thor" is an absolute visual feast, but mostly in terms of concept art. Some shots stuck out, but it would be too greatly in that film's favor. And "Captain America" was a damn good time and all, but Joe Johnston has never been one to inflect major strokes of intelligence into his films.

Film Review: "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (****)

 

I was in a noticeably uncomfortable position in the earliest hours of Sunday morning in Portsmouth, NH. Waiting by a harshly lit streetlamp for a solid two hours after "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a position I'd not wish amongst many, if any at all. To say that Lynne Ramsay has made her return with a vengeance would be a gross understatement. In that mystified delirium where the experiences I had been made witness to were drunkenly shooting straight through my mind, the only response I could relate to twitter was this: "I was not prepared for what was beyond the curtain."

That statement was perhaps not the most informative to send out to the uninformed masses of twitter, but I doubt I could have formed anything more coherent for my mindset in that moment. The first image we see of the film is this ethereal white curtain wavering aside an open window. It's a relatively tame image at the time, and the immediate decoder in me is dumbly thinking, "Oh, they're pulling back the curtain to show us what it's veiling." As simple as that sounds, it is in a way true. It's significance is not wholly known at the start, but once you're past it, there's absolutely no going back. You're there to the grim end. It's the only warning the audience is going to get.