Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is submerged from the start. Sloshing around in a flooding police station, Sergeant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and his lacky partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) ransack a locker room, pocketing dirty pictures of a colleagues wife, snickering maliciously. Their joking isn’t imbued with puerile innocence, it comes weighted...
Big Shot: Bully
[embedded content] Before Harmony Korine recruited Disney’s brightest stars to shed their tops in Spring Breakers, he teamed up with Larry Clark to throw moms into a tailspin with their debaucherous youth exposé Kids. Six years later, Clark’s Bully is an attempt to tackle similar territory. Based on true events, the film follows a group...
BIG SHOT: Law of Desire
[embedded content] Law of Desire is the first film director Pedro Almodar made under his production company El Deseo, allowing him to have full artistic control over the production. It shows. From the very beginning the film eschews any subtlety, decency, or political correctness. The result is a comedy verging on melodrama that lays the...
BIG SHOT: Sherman’s March
In Sherman’s March, Ross McElwee and his camera barrel through the South on a tour-de-force of twenty-something self-doubt and heartbreak. Such navel-gazing terrain is not my usual purview, as it’s rare that self-indulgence pays off as much for the viewer as it does for the filmmaker. It’s supposed allow for easy alignment between the film...
BIG SHOT: Sherman’s March
In Sherman’s March, Ross McElwee and his camera barrel through the South on a tour-de-force of twenty-something self-doubt and heartbreak. Such navel-gazing terrain is not my usual purview, as it’s rare that self-indulgence pays off as much for the viewer as it does for the filmmaker. It’s supposed allow for easy alignment between the film...
Big Shot: The Player
[embedded content] The Player is famous for it’s eight-minute plus opening shot (a throwback to Truffaut’s intro in Day For Night). Snaking in and out of offices, conference rooms, and parking lots on a major Hollywood studio lot, this shot is the ultimate introduction to the world of the film. It’s like an ant farm...