The Two Escobars - 2010 - 4 Stars

Subject: The relationship between Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and murdered soccer star Andres Escobar

Director: Jeff Zimbalist, Michael Zimbalist

Athletes have it nice in the United States - their benefactors are usually corporations or the owners of corporations. But what about poorer countries? What supports big-time sports there? The answer is typically a mix of shady money or a fierce nationalistic government. Even in Russia, it's the petrochemical oligarchs and Mafia leaders who run the Russian hockey league. The Two Escobars examines what can happen when sports, nationalism, and a complete disregard for humanity collide.

The Two Escobars scores some great interviews with Pablo's and Andres's relatives, as well as Andres's teammates. It's a sports documentary in name only, as it really examines how criminals and governments interact with one another in a corrupt country, with the Andres Escobar story as the backdrop. One can only imagine how terrifying it was to live in the early 1990s version of Colombia.

Lifespan - 1974 - 2 Stars

Actors: Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont

Director: Sandy Whitelaw

None of you will ever see Lifespan, which is just fine; you probably shouldn't. Somehow a film with Klaus Kinski performing simulated cunnilingus in a Faust mask, grave robbery, Anne Frank's house, a Terry Riley soundtrack, and a conspiracy involving a method to stop the aging process adds up to way less than the sum of its parts. The film is ruined by an absurd amount of narration and the poor performance of the lead actor, not to mention the awkwardness of the writing and staging. There's a lot of elements here for a low-budget sci-fi/horror type deal like Scanners, and there's even some good Hitchcockian elements to the film (I was reminded of Rebecca), but overall it's a mess.

Kinski is supposed to have rejected a part in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark by calling the script a piece of shit - I'm not sure how he accepted this one.

Harlan County U.S.A. - 1976 - No Rating

Subject: A strike by coal miners in Eastern Kentucky

Director: Barbara Kopple

Harlan County U.S.A. could have devolved into either poverty porn or agit-prop. It barely touches on the former - we briefly see that the subjects live without power or running water - but it veers awfully close to the latter. We're treated to conflicts between picketing workers and replacement workers. We're shown how striking union laborers are able to organize even in the face of real violence. We're shown how management can lie and deceive in order to maintain the status quo. It's not exactly a two sided film, but regardless, Harlan County U.S.A. is a powerful examination of the brutality that can exist and persist between labor and management. One wonders how these people and their children live today.

In The Company Of Men - 1997 - 4 Stars

Actors: Aaron Eckhart, Stacy Edwards

Director: Neil LaBute

Red herrings and embarrassing music choices aside, In The Company of Men is a powerful film. It's not hard to see why Neil LaBute was considered talented, and also not hard to see how he ended up remaking The Wicker Man several years later, to disastrous results. I'm too lazy to look this up, but I suspect this was a play first, as it has several monologues and the camera stays static for most of the film. It leads to little things like line misreadings being left in the film because there are very long takes - I find those things can make a film more realistic.

I suspect this was Aaron Eckhart's career making performance - he absolutely nails it. Everyone knows someone like Eckhart's Chad - he's an outsized version of a certain type of person that any suburban-raised American knows. It's a brutal look at the corporate mentality and how that mindset can warp interpersonal relations.

Young Adult - 2011 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt

Director: Jason Reitman

I suppose in an age of narcissism where people write their thoughts about movies on the Internet as though anyone cared, it's only realistic that our indie film type characters have gotten more narcissistic. Charlize Theron's Mavis Gary is endlessly self-involved to the point of parody - she's constructed a fantasy world where she can liberate her ex- high school boyfriend from his outwardly happy marriage and satisfying life.

It's tempting, given that Theron's character is a writer of young adult fiction and that the writer wrote Juno, to read this as a meta-film about the difficulty of writing high school characters without being one yourself. On the one hand, this is pretty unfair, but on the other hand, it's damn hard to see other ways of looking at it.

Blow Up - 1966 - 4½ Stars

Actors: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

What if a shitty movie ended with a setpiece like Blow Up? I won't give anything away, but its ending is bizarre even by foreign film standards. I guess shitty writers and directors wouldn't have the balls to end their film that way, too.

Anyway, I'm in a giving mood, so despite the fact that Blow Up is at least 10 minutes too long, I give it a nearly perfect rating. It was the 60s, no one knew where to make their edits. The film has two unforgettable set pieces and a completely bonkers plot - it's a shame that its plot has been thrown into other movies and warped. Antonioni keeps the film Hitchcockian and thus centered on the individual.

D.O.A. - 1949 - 4 Stars

Actors: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton

Director: Rudolph Mate

I normally try to avoid all critical reaction before I write up my posts, but I did happen to catch the fact that critics of this film lauded its revolutionary plot. I had not thought it so revolutionary - I just thought, 'Oh, this is the noir version of Crank.' I have to wonder what kind of studio oversight a film like this had, because there are several scenes that feel modern: a long tracking shot to open the film, a musicless suspense scene where all we hear are footsteps, and a scene that was shot on location at a time when that seems rare (Wikipedia informs me that this is a stolen shot, and it certainly appeared that way).

D.O.A. starts out dreary and shapeless but quickly becomes a classic noir, where the hero knows more than the audience and is trying to put together the pieces before he's killed.