Looking for Richard

Largely successful on the part of Al Pacino, LOOKING FOR RICHARD is a foray into the actor's ideas about Shakespeare. Overlong and uneven, the film shies away from expert opinions on Shakespeare and instead tries to tackle about two questions that it doesn't fully answer. The first is 'What is Richard III about?' The second is 'Can American actors pull off Shakespeare'? The answers to these questions are 'look it up on wikipedia' and 'yes', but Pacino looks into the questions over the course of 2 + hours. Annoyingly unknowing, but obviously knowing this to thus show what the play is about, LOOKING FOR RICHARD never really succeeds at explaining what the play is about because it does so in confusing rambles by Pacino that oversimplify the play, but does however convince us that American actors can pull of Shakespeare because no shit sherlock, of course they can and any notion otherwise is just born out of wrongheaded british pretension that doesn't take into account that the speakers in Shakespeare's time would sound like inner-city people in present-day America. Pacino never goes this deep though, and his scattery film shows this also. I wouldn't say, however, that I disliked LOOKING FOR RICHARD. Many people will, especially due to the length and the lack of substance within that length, but, for me, being used to long films, I found Pacino to be extremely likable despite the film that surrounds it. Still, however, this is not technically a good film at all.
Looking for Richard: ★★

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

So 90's in camera style, detached documentary work, and uncanny subject divulgence due to the still new mass-television-audience medium. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky direct, admittedly for HBO, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas. The people are trash, obsessed with the idea of satanism, which has seeped into their consciousness with television. 3 boys, Michael Moore, Christopher Byers, and Stephen Branch, in 1993, were brutally killed in, or near the forest. Their deaths and mutilated bodies, were attributed to satanic killings, the parents angry as hell (understandably), but, as it is, too eager to see any justice rather than real justice. Sinofsky and Berlinger have astonishing access. Not only into the families of the deceased, but into the subsequent trials that took place afterwards. Police, eager to place blame, sought out the weirdos in town. These were: mentally retarded Jesse Miskelly, Jr. (forced to confess under duress), 16 year old Jason Baldwin, and the supposed ringleader, Damien Echols. The three were bastardized by the townspeople, and put on trial to no evidence, emotion, and hearsay. Berlinger and Sinofsky have an  intent here: to show an injustice, and simultaneously, they craft the picture of an uneducated mass of people as fascinated by satanism as they are ignorant of the power of the camera. The following documentaries by the documentary duo exhibit even more of this truth, and its gradual realization.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills: ★★★1/2

Crash

Like many other films, CRASH is so upsetting that second viewings are hard to come by. Its counterparts of this syndrome would be Darren Aronofsky's REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, or Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST. These films each have something within them that is either so revealing of raw humanness that to re-see such harrowing things would file under masochism. But, then again, many American films exhibit how masochistic the audience is. Any horror film, where an audience becomes frightened, is an act of semi-masochism. Tension is too. But CRASH is a special case because it varies from the expected horrors within a film. CRASH is, at its heart, a fantasy, but one that parades itself as existing within the real world. It tells of a man (James Spader) who crashes his car head-on into an oncoming vehicle. The man in the car (who is presumed to have not been wearing a seatbelt) flies out and dies immediately, but the woman (Holly Hunter) survives, and as she escapes the car, her breast pops out which Spader's character looks at in surprised pleasure. Later, the two are at the hospital. Scars and scabs adorn their bodies, and Spader's character still gets turned on by his predicament, screwing his wife, and later the woman whose husband died in the crash. He later discovers more people who share his fetish: car crashes, which turn him on sexually. He gets involved with all of these people because of the love of cars, and that the story sometimes doesn't make sense only supports the idea of sexual compulsion. Many who hate this film, I fear, would take it's ideas of cars turn people on seriously. But this is merely a substitute for any number of odd turn on's and its creepiness only serves to support how creepy some turn on's are, and what they lead to. CRASH is a brilliant film, although it is occasionally upsetting. It's a porno, but instead of naughty nurses entering as foreplay, the car crashes are the foreplay.
Crash: ★★★★

Scream

The 1996 film SCREAM is quite an effective horror movie. It's a film so stylized and defined by horror director Wes Craven and his screenwriter Kevin Williamson, that it has, with time, become a defining film of the 90's. It's theme is self-awareness, and how in spite of that feature, people still do the same old shit. SCREAM tells the tale of a bunch of high school students who undergo the usual territories of a horror film, are aware of what comes with that territory, and still act stupid. In the lead as Sydney Prescott is Neve Campbell. Sydney and her group of friends laze about and talk about the "rules to survive a horror film" and callously discuss the newly murdered classmates at their high school. There's a backstory. Sydney's mother was raped and murdered a year ago, and Sydney is still feeling the hurt. But now its the anniversary of the killing, and new murders are taking place. Connection? SCREAM has its faults. It's a little repetitive near the end, and it's perhaps a little less important than it thinks it is, but it's a pretty solid film with an interesting premise that pays off in humorous and even scary ways.
Scream: ★★★

Waiting for Guffman

Waiting for Guffman is a mockumentary directed and written by Christopher Guest (who also stars). It focuses in upon a flamboyant drama director named Corky (Guest) who has been commissioned by the town of Blaine, Missouri, to direct and write a musical about the town's history. He does this for the 150th anniversary of this odd little town, whose claims to fame include a UFO landing in 1946, and they make a lot of stools. He holds auditions, and ends up with this dubiously talented group: A dentist (Eugene Levy), two travel agents (Fred Willard & Catherine O'Hara), a bumpkin (Parker Posey), and a car dealer. The show ends up becoming a big deal, and after Corky sends in a ton of proposals to New York, a Broadway producer sends down a man named Guffman to see if the show is ready for Broadway. Now, the way the movies goes about everything is quite unique. It builds a lot of tension with obviously idiotic characters who try to go about things in normal ways and fail. We get a lot of (fake) interviews with the townspeople, and it's amusing how they are astounded at small things, and how they have put so much faith in Corky. Waiting for Guffman is an amusing film. It's filled with amusing moments, but as a whole it isn't really what it could have been. It's nice to see a film that doesn't plow jokes into our heads every ten minutes, but the film is just a little off from what it could have been. The same director/writer/actor's other film: Best in Show is a far superior film, and perhaps its greatness makes Guffman worse just because he's done the same thing better.
Waiting for Guffman: ✰✰✰

Beautiful Girls

Here's a movie filled with good actors who elevate the caliber of a semi-good script. It perfectly evokes the small town group of buddies, and they are all sort of still living as kids. They all have nice girlfriends, but they have an unrealistic dream that some great beauty will come across some day. Because of this, they take what they have for granted, and almost lose it. It is only when one of the men (Tim Hutton) meets a 13-year-old neighbor girl (Natalie Portman) when he starts to realize the power of just a nice girl. It takes a while for this idea to seep into the mind of all the other men, but it eventually does so in clever and amusing ways. This is a good movie. However, it could have been a lot more, for the film tends to drop plot lines and draw meaning from metaphors that don't really fit. There's a lot to love though, and its a damn good holiday film. (It has that quality of people "finding" themselves).
Beautiful Girls: ★★★