Film Capsule

Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Details of the film’s universe; Tenderness; Adventure
Side Effects: Forced climax; Loss of focus on central characters

from teaser-trailer.com

Much of the storybook visual design and convivial humor of Moonrise Kingdom will feel familiar to fans of director Wes Anderson. While his tender, warmhearted tale of young love and misunderstood eccentrics may not be a stretch for Anderson, there’s enough genuinely new and resoundingly satisfying about Moonrise Kingdom to make it Anderson’s best live-action film in a decade. Read more…

from reflectionsonfilm

Film Capsule has recently been contributing to Indiewire’s weekly survey of film critics, which poses some great questions to film writers around the Internet. This week’s Criticwire Survey was a particularly tricky one: “What late filmmaker would most benefit from being alive today and having access to modern filmmaking technology?” My answer was Andrei Tarkovsky, but although digital technology may have afforded the great director tempting new possibilities, how would he have reacted to these change in film art? Read more…

Magic and Loss / Lim Kah Wai / 2010 /

Active Ingredients: Unpredictability; Indie charm
Side Effects: Sense of mystery; Lack of cohesion

Cultures and identities blend and sublimate in the international indie curiosity Magic and Loss, which makes its North American premiere at the Koren American Film Festival in New York on June 5th. Produced by and starring Kiki Sugino (“muse of the Asian independent cinema,” according to the Tokyo IFF), the film follows two women, one Japanese one Korean, on a vacation to an eerie Hong Kong resort. They’ve both won some sort of contest, driven together by a mysterious force, the film would have us believe. The two develop a friendship and quickly begin spending their days together, alternately exploring the grounds as giggling tourists or in a trance-like possession. A lonely hotel concierge, representing yet another nationality, becomes intrigued with the ladies, but struggles to communicate through a verbal stew of four different languages. Read more…

Ashes / Apichatpong Weerasethakul / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Strong sense of mood; Layered, abstract images
Side Effects: Inconsistent use of sound; Digital finale

from mubi.com

Ashes is Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s experimental short created using the LomoKino camera, a small, hand-cranked device that creates dynamic, kinetic images. The camera is a good match for Apichatpong, a filmmaker interested in process, free-flowing creativity and natural beauty. Ideas seem to overflow in his work, unpredictable both formally and narratively. Many of his films, for example, feature sequences comprised of still photographs, and the LomoKino allows Apichatpong to experiment with this stop motion effect, shooting fragments of everyday life either at full speed or in a jumpy collage of animated stills. Read more…

Mourning / Morteza Farshbaf / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Control over sound and image; Revelation of information
Side Effects: Incomplete ending; Restrictive locations

from clevelandfilm.com

A protegee of Abbas Kiarostami‘s, Moretza Farshbaf exhibits much of the Iranian master’s control and restraint in his debut film, Mourning. Don’t let the title fool you though, Mourning is a vital film, fully realizing the lives of its three central characters. Narratively, it feels neither sombre nor restrictive; on the contrary, the great success of Mourning is how deliberately and convincingly it expands, taking a simple story and opening it up to nuance and complexity, allowing the audience to enter into the world of the film where there are no easy answers. Read more…

Rampart / Oren Moverman / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Woody Harrelson; Well-observed character study
Side Effects: Performances by the family; Some stylistic experiments

from examiner.com

Oren Moverman’s gritty character study Rampart is a seething slow burn just like the morally compromised cop at its core. It  contracts and expands along with Woody Harrelson‘s David Brown, mirroring his rising anger, frustration and sadness in the way it pitches each scene. It opens, for example, dangerously slow with Brown eating fries with his partners. It’s a banal scene, filmed from a distance and could almost pass for something out of Super Troopers (Harrelson would have been great in that!). Soon, however, we begin to grow accustomed to Rampart‘s rhythms, ping-ponging between the violent, hateful cop and desperate father and family man trapped within the same person. Read more…

The Avengers / Joss Whedon / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Split time between heroes; Individual arcs; Hulk
Side Effects: Villains; Humor; Samuel L. Jackson; Pacing

from nytimes.com

It seems obvious now that The Avengers was going to be a huge success. Drawing on fans of both the previous Marvel Comics films and of writer/director Joss Whedon, the film has shattered box office records. There’s no doubt The Avengers was intricately planned, with belabored tie-ins in multiple films all culminating in one action epic. Still, it surprised me that the film works as well as it does. Read more…

Alien / Ridley Scott / 1979 /

Active Ingredients: Dense atmosphere; Restrained pace; Creature design
Side Effects: Jump scares

from horrorphile.net

Alien or Aliens? It seems like everyone has to choose one, and the last twenty years or so of blockbusters makes James Cameron’s action sequel look influential and prescient. Really, though, the two films couldn’t be more different, and for me Ridley Scott’s tension built from a combination of intricate production design and uncommon patience far surpasses Cameron’s cheesy machismo. Read more…

The Double Hour / Giuseppe Capotondi / 2010 /

Active Ingredients: Unpredictability; Characterization of two leads
Side Effects: A few too many twists, dead ends

from andsoitbeginsfilms.com

The Double Hour is a twisty Italian thriller, dangerously proud of its own intricate design but ultimately saved by delivering a solid character drama that most genre films forgo. The film is often compared to Tell No One, but the differences between the films illustrate where The Double Hour succeeds and the earlier French thriller fails. The story revolves (and that is the correct word) around Sonia, a Slovenian immigrant living and working as a hotel maid in Turin, Italy. She seems lost, mysterious, a bit opaque. She tries speed dating to fill some void in her life, but even then is reluctant to let others in. She recognizes her own trust issues in Guido, and finally allows herself to hope for a better life—until a violent encounter sends Sonia and the film reeling, and calls into question everything we thought we knew earlier.

As the story begins to circle back in on itself, small gestures, figures and characters from earlier are repeated with variations. As the title suggests, there are at least two versions of most scenes and the audience is always left unsure which way each event truly played out. Rigorous formal structures like this one can often feel inert, as if the filmmaker forgot to supplement them with anything else. The Double Hour, happily, uses the twinning of its story as a nice parallel to the emotional wounds and trust issues of Sonia and Guido, themes to which the film is always sure to return. The piles of plot twists and surprise reversals don’t all pack the punch director Giuseppe Capotondi intends, but they deliver just enough excitement and intrigue to support the subtle and unpredictable twin character study at the film’s heart.

This is my 100th post on Film Capsule! It’s been a lot of fun writing so much about film the last year and I look forward to a lot more material to come. Some of the highlights for me have been attending and covering last year’s New York Film Festival, recording two podcasts with my friend Ian and getting the opportunity to meet and interact with other critics around the web.

I may have been a bit slow getting to my 100th post so this is the perfect forum to vow to reach 200 much faster! I plan to continue writing a mix of capsules on films new and old, and also to try out new features and segments. I recently linked to the new Film Capsule Vimeo page, and I hope to add more video content there in the future. I’ve also been working on a new design for the blog that I’m excited to implement soon.

Lastly, I’d really like to find more opportunities to interact with whoever’s reading, through comments, polls or other means. As always, I encourage any thoughts or feedback on content you’d like to see. And most importantly, thank you for reading and following, and remember to take two daily.

- John