Melati Cocktail (1988, D+). Shake jigger of smarm & dash of greed, top with paeon to female subservience. Beach Boys garnish.
prednisone to buy uk The Descendants (2011, B-) A VitaminWater film: slickly packaged to look nourishing, but really just the same old sugar-water.
Corridors of Blood (1958, B+). Late-period Karloff turns “Tops in TERROR!!” poverty-row shocker into a chilling character study.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012, A-). As heady, pulpy and earnest as the best comics but takes Bruce & Bats to a hard-won ending the books can’t.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011, C-). AKA Tintin & The Uncanny Valley. “Billions of blue blistering boring action scenes! Where’s my whisky?”
So the second time around with The Wrestler, I was struck even more by just how creaky and cliched the script was. But this time I appreciated it more.
I didn’t really care that every twist and turn is predictable and shameless. I know it, and Darren Aronofsky and Micky Rourke know it. And this time around, I think I kind of get why they don’t really care. It’s really not about dodging the campiness of a professional wrestler sports hero movie, or about embracing it. It’s about digging into the artifice for the nuggets of honest humanity, the kind that make a story like this compelling in the first place.
Grade: B+
There’s a brilliant 90-minute film here: a Tolstoyesque tale of a group of men searching for the body of a murder victim, shot through with meditations on epistomology and haunting digital-video shots of rural Turkey at night.
Unfortunately, that film is packed into a butt-numbing 157 minutes that manages to feel both austere and self-indulgent. No moment passes that is not lingered on. No revelation is too minor to revist. Rainy windows are gazed out of. Cars creep through panoramic landscapes. Pumpkins are picked.
And in the end, like the men in the film, you just want to stifle what you’ve learned and go home.
Grade: C+