May 12, 2007
fracture
You may have noticed we've been wasting away again in hiatusville; what's more, in the grand tradition of the original paper-based zine also called jane dark's sugarhigh!, we've been coopted by mainstream media. An entry from this very blog will appear, or so we're told, in the next edition of Best Music Writing; moreover, as of July we'll be starting a column over at FilmQuarterly, which will basically cover the kinds of movies we've been covering here, more or less in this style. In fact, the editor wishes for it to be like this blog, but focusing on more than one film at a time. And what will it be called? Marx and Coca-Cola, natch!
Still, we are intent on logging every new movie seen in a theater. Hence...
We can't quite be sure, not being lawyers or etc, but we're pretty sure that the legal denouement of Fracture is, uh, total nonsense? Someone out there, enlighten us: wouldn't the bullet to be removed from the wife's brain equally be found to come from the detective's gun and not Hopkins'? And once one of you legal whippets clarifies this for us, can you elucidate on the plausibility behind almost every interaction between Gosling and his new boss? We have rarely been so baffled. Maybe there are a lot of invisible jump cuts. Seriously, a little help?
13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Fracture (was neither Factory Girl nor Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)