Movie Reviews of New Releases and Classic Films by Brian Welk
In “Broadway Danny Rose,” Woody Allen cheekily riffs on the character he created in “Manhattan.”
Most of the characters Woody Allen plays are really just himself, but Danny Rose is the kind of character that riffs on the one he created in “Manhattan.”
“Broadway Danny Rose” has the black and white veneer of his early masterpiece set in New York, but it’s irreverent, light and notoriously silly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Broadway Danny Rose”
“The Tree of Life” leads my picks for who should win at the 2012 Oscars.
When critics write columns detailing who should win at the Oscars, they can be very self-serving.
Mostly, the articles act as a way for bloggers to draw a line in the sand and pick a side, rallying readers who will stand behind them. And in the process we weave an increasingly complex narrative for what a win at the Oscars will mean for our favorite.
It wasn’t enough to have a favorite; we had to be on Team Sandra or Team Meryl. It wasn’t enough to call “The Hurt Locker” the best movie of the year; it had to be a benchmark for 21st Century war films and a victory for female directors.
But none of that matters because the Oscars will act the way they always do and disappoint someone in the way they always have and always will.
My better column on the Oscars focused on the films and actors that were completely forgotten and lost in the shuffle of the Oscar madness. Those Anti-Oscars served as a reminder that there were other good movies this year.
The Oscars themselves are a reminder too, and even if I default to some of the clichés I’ve already mentioned, I plant my flag to recognize quality where it’s due. Most of the nominees are quite good (although some aren’t) and to pick just one is harder than you know.
Best Picture – The Tree of Life
It took seeing “The Tree of Life” only once to recognize it was an important film but twice to see it as a masterpiece. And rarely is a film, least of all an American film this significant, cemented in cinematic history, hotly debated and with this magnificent of a theme, this close to being recognized as such. “The Tree of Life” is not just a work of art that innovates on what cinema can be and make you feel, but it challenged those norms to a wide audience that both embraced and rejected it. Such controversy is always a sign of greatness. Continue reading “Oscars 2012: Should Win”
If Woody Allen were 40 years younger, I can sense him itching to get in front of the camera again for his latest film “Midnight in Paris.”
This time around, he seems to address his critics’ pleas over the last 20 years for him to simply return to the golden age of film making he had in the ‘70s and ‘80s and responds by quelling his own neuroses of nostalgia by optimistically looking towards the future.
He does so in a film dripping with love for his own nostalgic influences and styles. “Midnight in Paris” is classic Allen from the first title card. The opening shots recall “Manhattan” in every detail but the black and white. It stars Owen Wilson as a spot-on Woody Allen surrogate and Michael Sheen (sporting a convincing American accent) in the Alan Alda or Max von Sydow pompous intellectual role common throughout all of his classics. Continue reading “Midnight in Paris”
Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is one of his finest, yet darkest comedies he’s made. It brings up themes of human morality and meaning in life by dabbling in adultery and other sin, in this case a murder/assassination, which are familiar traits that can be found in one of his other masterpieces, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
Martin Landau plays a respected ophthalmologist who has been seeing another woman for two years behind his wife’s back. She can’t live without him and wants to reveal herself to his wife, and he can’t deal with her neuroses and threats, so he has his brother, a sketchy con artist, arrange to have her killed.
These scenes are played strictly seriously, and Landau is excellent (he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1989) as he reflects on the religious ideas he sacrificed and forgot, only to have them now gnaw on his conscience as he questions how God judges sinners and what that has to do with his life on Earth in the present. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Crimes and Misdemeanors”