Jonathan Poritsky

Valkyrie, dir. Bryan Singer, AMC Loews Lincoln Center 13, NYC

At long last, Bryan Singer’s con­sis­tently post­poned Valkyrie hit the­aters this past Christmas, actu­ally a few months ahead of sched­ule. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the film, which pro­vided about two years of delec­table biz lun­cheon gos­sip, will be for­got­ten with time, and thank­fully so because the result­ing film is a slick lit­tle addi­tion to Mr. Singer’s short but mon­u­men­tal resume. It is a great lit­tle thrill ride that man­ages to suck you in and con­vince you of a dar­ing con­cept, that not all Nazis are bad. In fact, the film is so good at pulling this par­lor trick off early on that the audi­ence is even able to sym­pa­thize with those most dev­il­ish of SS officers.

Based on the real-life attempt to to assas­si­nate Adolph Hitler from within the Third Reich, the film fol­lows the exploits of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, played with sur­pris­ing refrain by Tom Cruise. The megas­tar has trou­ble slip­ping into his­tor­i­cal roles, evi­denced by his twenty-first cen­tury charm on full dis­play in Ed Zwick’s 19th cen­tury drama, The Last Samurai. In that ambi­tious project, Mr. Cruise appeared to be repris­ing his role as Jerry Maguire only with more hair and a sword. Not so this time around. Thanks mostly to the vis­ceral pace of Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander’s screeen­play, Mr. Cruise is never afforded the chance to be cute or charm­ing. Instead, we spend the bet­ter part of two and a half hours watch­ing the world around him spin out of con­trol while he des­per­ately tries to keep him­self grounded in the mid­dle of it all. Read on…

Laundry is run­ning in the base­ment and I’m killing time by work­ing on the Valkyrie review and watch­ing TCM. I know, a trav­esty to dou­ble task with a film, but any­way, Rudolph Maté‘s 1948 noir pic The Dark Past was just on. I’ve never seen it before, but from my mud­dled van­tage point, it was pretty won­der­ful. The short of it is a ther­a­pist tries to cure a killer while he is being held hostage. Black and white, guns, cop­pers, and psy­cho­analy­sis. What could be better?! 

The film hinges on a real slick con­cept, essen­tially the pen being might­ier than the sword. Our main pro­tag, Dr. Collins, spends the bulk of the film try­ing to fig­ure out a neb­u­lous recur­ring dream of the das­tardly Al Walker, played by William Holden. Of course, the film is a cau­tion­ary tale, warn­ing that emo­tions left unchecked could rot, fes­ter, and grow into, well, into a mur­der­ous thief. Pretty basic stuff these days; the film plays like the last quar­ter of every episode of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”. Lee J. Cobb imbues Dr. Collins with an Atticus Finch level of impos­ing pater­nity. Hmmmmm, an ana­lytic cau­tion­ary noir film, do you think the bad guy might have some daddy issues?

So any­way, check this one out if you’ve got a chance. I enjoyed it. Now back to writing…

Of the few episodes I have seen of the suc­cess­ful HBO series, I can say with con­fi­dence that the tele­vised incar­na­tion of Sex and the City is smarter, fun­nier, classier and all around more sig­nif­i­cant than the recently released film ver­sion. This wouldn’t be such a prob­lem if that laun­dry list of pos­i­tives didn’t apply to pretty much every film I’ve seen in the past year when stacked up against Michael Patrick King’s first foray onto the sil­ver screen. In the end, as with every male-driven action film that comes out around this time, qual­ity isn’t such a con­cern for the core audi­ence, who have come out in droves to instantly push this rom-com into the black. We’ll get to the ladies who turned out their pock­ets and bedaz­zled purses at the box office in a moment, but let’s start with the movie.

The film starts almost like any episode of the show, with a mod­i­fied title sequence that should a har­bin­ger of shlock to come. Instead of Carrie’s tutu-ed prance about town which ends with her get­ting splashed with muck, we are put through an awful mon­tage updat­ing us on the shows ups and downs over some ter­ri­ble popi­fied ver­sion of the theme song. Message: this is a fash­ion show of fool­ish­ness you are about to see. Read on…

Perhaps it was because I was sit­ting in a uni­ver­sity audi­to­rium that I was sud­denly rock­eted back to my film school days while watch­ing the lat­est film “of” Melvin Van Peebles. Back then, I would have been snig­ger­ing through my fin­gers as the rau­cous movie veered out of con­trol around every sin­gle cor­ner, and when it was all over and the lights went up, I would have over-analyzed the shit out of it and bla­tantly made fun of my col­league in class.

On its sur­face, “Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha” resem­bles the worst of stu­dent film stereo­types, replete with sex, knives, con­fused edit­ing tech­niques, and above all, a mes­sage that it so con­vo­luted and over­done that it has got­ten lost among the screen-pollution you wit­ness while watch­ing it. That being said, I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just why I loved this film. Read on…

Back in 2005 when Jim Jannard took off his brightly col­ored and pre­sum­ably shiny Oakley CEO hat and set out to start a rev­o­lu­tion in dig­i­tal cin­ema, most of us scoffed, writ­ing off his inten­tions of build­ing a 4K tape­less cam­era at an “afford­able” price point as the ludi­crous rav­ings of a mil­lion­aire seek­ing his extra 15 min­utes. We ate our words a year ago, at NAB 2007, as the first Red Camera footage was put on dis­play in a short film by mega-director Peter Jackson. As the year went by, and the fledg­ling com­pany started to ship the cam­era in small doses, again, we started to feel the rum­blings of a rev­o­lu­tion as Stephen Soderbergh pro­claimed his love for the new format.

But now it’s NAB 2008. So you’d think maybe this Red thing would pick up and start get­ting adopted.

Nah. Read on…