Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
The struggle is real. Or maybe just in your head.
Conflict, external and internal, in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Buster’s Mal Heart
Buster’s Mal Heart. It’s not a quirky psycho-thriller. Well it is, but it’s a lot more.
In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of crankery, perhaps best exemplified by a gaunt, disheveled man on public access TV (is that still a thing?) talking about how the universe is governed by sphincters, “from black holes to assholes,” and how the in the coming inversion all of creation is going to disappear up its own backside. Or something like that. Marvelous.
Movie
Buster's Mal Heart ***
Buster is a happily married (if not entirely happy) young dad working the night concierge desk in a remote mountainside hotel.<br> He’s also a bearded crank who breaks into luxury homes and calls in to radio shows to rant about "the coming inversion."</br> He’s also lost at sea and daring God to just finish the job. Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith’s ambitious, assured drama about a man divided against himself (heh, heh, “Buster”) is definitely not for all tastes, but it is most definitely for some. The sort who can sympathize with (though perhaps not wholly endorse) the suspicion that something is off, and possibly malignant, in everyday modern life, and that there really are signs and portents visible to the soul brave enough to step outside the machine. (Most prophets are probably madmen, but does that mean they’re entirely wrong?) Rami Malek employs his bugged-out, thousand-yard stare to excellent effect, and his oddity seems strangely justified by Smith’s presentation of his ostensibly quotidian environs. Happily, the weirdness is not for its own sake, and the story, while scrambled, is anything but incoherent.
And yet, where would we be without cranks? How many movies have for their hero the one man who refuses to accept the horse manure that the system shovels at him every day? “In a world...one man...” etc. So many great comedians are cranks, calling bullshit on the accepted, the standard, the unexamined garbage that passes for normality. The world has dealt them a blow and left them tender, and now they’re probing the wound and wondering what hit them. Buster’s Mal Heart is like that. I liked it a lot. And what’s more, I liked looking at it and listening to it.
Movie
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword *
Guy Ritchie takes his Guy Ritchiefier to the tale of Uther Pendragon’s son and his magical sword, thus ensuring that the lad (eventually played by Charlie Hunnam) will grow up in a whorehouse where he learns to be kind to whores and mean to bullies, that he will become an amoral operator who sees all the angles (and occasionally forecasts them), that he will exhibit hot buttered smarm and bruised-kiddie emotion in equal turns, and that he will frequently be surrounded by sparks, fire, and/or explosions. Also that he will be accompanied by a throbbing soundtrack and stop-start action that mostly conveys Ritchie’s love of stop-start action. (Is this what it’s like to watch a film on speed?) There’s something in here about how the tyrannical use of force creates rebels and sparks riots (relevance!), but it’s lost amid the tasteless violence (hey look at this spear punch through Mom!), desaturated murk (the better to highlight our hero’s white jacket), goofy humor (Which George? Kung Fu George!), and ponderous, pointless pop-psych from a pretty mage. Jude Law almost manages to chew his way through the CGI scenery and create a gloriously wicked villain, but in the end, even he succumbs to the dumb.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword? Not so much. Too desaturated, sparky, and twitchy visually; too bombastic, throbbing, and thumpy in the audio department. Guy Ritchie fans will probably not be disappointed. But I was, especially since there was a lot of up-in-your-head psychodrama that, SPOILERS, got resolved without any real change or sacrifice from our hero. As with Moana, there needs to be more drama on the protagonist’s part than accepting your status as The Chosen One. (Even The Matrix understood this and had the smarts to bring in salvific love.)
The Wall falls somewhere between the two. It’s a solid piece of action filmmaking that finds a way to make its headgames feel like they matter.
Alas, all the rumination in the world couldn’t save Risk for Scott. Politics makes strange bedfellows, but from the sound of it Laura Poitras maybe should have stuck with Edward Snowden and steered clear of Julian Assange. Hasn’t he had enough cinematic exposure already, what with Underground and The Fifth Estate? (Maybe not, I guess, given that just about every big-budget action film now features a hacker and talk about how the one who controls the information controls the world.)
As for Snatched and After the Storm, they managed two stars apiece, but the reviews include phrases such as “could have used a laugh track” and “imitation Koreeda.” Something to think about. Still, Scott had a good chat with director Adam Levine, so it wasn’t all bad.
Here's something you might be interested in.
The struggle is real. Or maybe just in your head.
Conflict, external and internal, in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Buster’s Mal Heart
The struggle is real. Or maybe just in your head.
Conflict, external and internal, in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Buster’s Mal Heart
Buster’s Mal Heart. It’s not a quirky psycho-thriller. Well it is, but it’s a lot more.
In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of crankery, perhaps best exemplified by a gaunt, disheveled man on public access TV (is that still a thing?) talking about how the universe is governed by sphincters, “from black holes to assholes,” and how the in the coming inversion all of creation is going to disappear up its own backside. Or something like that. Marvelous.
Movie
Buster's Mal Heart ***
Buster is a happily married (if not entirely happy) young dad working the night concierge desk in a remote mountainside hotel.<br> He’s also a bearded crank who breaks into luxury homes and calls in to radio shows to rant about "the coming inversion."</br> He’s also lost at sea and daring God to just finish the job. Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith’s ambitious, assured drama about a man divided against himself (heh, heh, “Buster”) is definitely not for all tastes, but it is most definitely for some. The sort who can sympathize with (though perhaps not wholly endorse) the suspicion that something is off, and possibly malignant, in everyday modern life, and that there really are signs and portents visible to the soul brave enough to step outside the machine. (Most prophets are probably madmen, but does that mean they’re entirely wrong?) Rami Malek employs his bugged-out, thousand-yard stare to excellent effect, and his oddity seems strangely justified by Smith’s presentation of his ostensibly quotidian environs. Happily, the weirdness is not for its own sake, and the story, while scrambled, is anything but incoherent.
And yet, where would we be without cranks? How many movies have for their hero the one man who refuses to accept the horse manure that the system shovels at him every day? “In a world...one man...” etc. So many great comedians are cranks, calling bullshit on the accepted, the standard, the unexamined garbage that passes for normality. The world has dealt them a blow and left them tender, and now they’re probing the wound and wondering what hit them. Buster’s Mal Heart is like that. I liked it a lot. And what’s more, I liked looking at it and listening to it.
Movie
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword *
Guy Ritchie takes his Guy Ritchiefier to the tale of Uther Pendragon’s son and his magical sword, thus ensuring that the lad (eventually played by Charlie Hunnam) will grow up in a whorehouse where he learns to be kind to whores and mean to bullies, that he will become an amoral operator who sees all the angles (and occasionally forecasts them), that he will exhibit hot buttered smarm and bruised-kiddie emotion in equal turns, and that he will frequently be surrounded by sparks, fire, and/or explosions. Also that he will be accompanied by a throbbing soundtrack and stop-start action that mostly conveys Ritchie’s love of stop-start action. (Is this what it’s like to watch a film on speed?) There’s something in here about how the tyrannical use of force creates rebels and sparks riots (relevance!), but it’s lost amid the tasteless violence (hey look at this spear punch through Mom!), desaturated murk (the better to highlight our hero’s white jacket), goofy humor (Which George? Kung Fu George!), and ponderous, pointless pop-psych from a pretty mage. Jude Law almost manages to chew his way through the CGI scenery and create a gloriously wicked villain, but in the end, even he succumbs to the dumb.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword? Not so much. Too desaturated, sparky, and twitchy visually; too bombastic, throbbing, and thumpy in the audio department. Guy Ritchie fans will probably not be disappointed. But I was, especially since there was a lot of up-in-your-head psychodrama that, SPOILERS, got resolved without any real change or sacrifice from our hero. As with Moana, there needs to be more drama on the protagonist’s part than accepting your status as The Chosen One. (Even The Matrix understood this and had the smarts to bring in salvific love.)
The Wall falls somewhere between the two. It’s a solid piece of action filmmaking that finds a way to make its headgames feel like they matter.
Alas, all the rumination in the world couldn’t save Risk for Scott. Politics makes strange bedfellows, but from the sound of it Laura Poitras maybe should have stuck with Edward Snowden and steered clear of Julian Assange. Hasn’t he had enough cinematic exposure already, what with Underground and The Fifth Estate? (Maybe not, I guess, given that just about every big-budget action film now features a hacker and talk about how the one who controls the information controls the world.)
As for Snatched and After the Storm, they managed two stars apiece, but the reviews include phrases such as “could have used a laugh track” and “imitation Koreeda.” Something to think about. Still, Scott had a good chat with director Adam Levine, so it wasn’t all bad.
Comments