Author Archive: degroot.jerome
Aileen Wournos: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer
Nick Broomfield has been accused of dumbing-down recently, his documentaries–particularly his films about Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur–receiving a number of critical reviews suggesting he was too interested in celebrity and that his gonzo style of filmmaking had become too overbearing and loose. In returning to the case of Aileen Wournos, subject of his 1992 [...]
Alien
Ridley Scott’s seminal film is reissued for the post-CGI generation–who needs Jar Jar Binks when you’ve got the Alien? After the countless sequels, platform games, comic/ movie tie-ins vs. Predator (no contest), board games, academic treatises, homage, parody, subgenres and general cultural impact, time to reassess Alien on its own terms as a movie. On [...]
Kill Bill, Volume 1
WHAM! A roundhouse to the head of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon despite its excessive beauty (and extreme slowness); KAAPOW! A rabbit-punch in the kidneys of Jackie Chan (the funniest thing out of Asia most of the time); SMASH! A swan kick to John Woo (master of all he surveys pre-Hollywood move); BOSH! There goes Keanu [...]
The 47th Times BFI London Film Festival
The London Film Festival is nearly a half-century old, and going strong. This year’s programme lacks the big hitters of Cannes, Venice or Berlin, but the sheer range, vitality and dynamism of the programming lends the event a buzz all of its own. This energy is due to the scope of work presented, both geographical [...]
Nicholas Nickleby
It is notable that apart from David Lean’s Great Expectations–an adaptation of a layered, subtle novel that fortunately for Lean has an incredibly dramatic linear narrative running through it–the best adaptations of Dickens have been versions of A Christmas Carol, a text which is essentially a morality short-story. Dickens’ long, rambling, brilliantly digressive texts with [...]
Vendredi Soir
Denis’ strange and self-consciously enigmatic film features very little plot and less dialogue. A woman, Laure (Valérie Lemercier) moves out of her flat and gets stuck in a traffic jam. She picks up a city drifter, Jean (Vincent Lindon). They check in to a hotel, have sex, go to dinner, have sex, go back to [...]
Goodbye Lenin!
Writer/director Wolfgang Becker presents us with a work which moves into more contemplative and thoughtful areas than many recent indies. He manages to present us with some of the hectic energy of recent breakthrough films such as Run Lola Run while dispensing, for the main part, with the stylistic tics and postmodern fragmentation which attended [...]
Le Cercle Rouge
This determinedly non-flashy noir has influenced all over the place–Miller’s Crossing, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo owe much to Melville’s ‘perfect heist movie.’ The master of the monosyllabic crime film presents a complex and layered account of a jewel robbery. The film is consciously leaden, shot in real time for the most part. Melville’s central [...]
Buffalo Soldiers
There has been a spate of pseudo-cynical war films recently–shot, obviously, before 9/11–questioning American military involvement in various global theatres. These films–Three Kings, Black Hawk Down and now Gregor Jordan’s Buffalo Soldiers–present the army as corrupted, indiscreet, brutal and divided. They suggest a move within the mainstream to interrogate, and a generation of filmmakers learning [...]
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