Philip Martin
Stories by Philip
REVIEW: Monsieur Lazhar
posted: 05/25/2012 4:15 a.m. Discuss
Monsieur Lazhar 88 Cast: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nelisse, Emilien Neron Director: Philippe Falardeau Rating: PG-13, for thematic material, a disturbing image and language Running time: 94 minutes In French and Arabic with English subtitles It is Simon’s (Emilien Neron) turn to pick up the milk for his Montreal grade-school class before school starts for the day. And so he is the first to see — the favorite teacher has hanged herself from a ceiling pipe in the classroom.
ON FILM: Parking Lot turns spotlight on fans
posted: 05/25/2012 4:12 a.m. Discuss
If you’ll accept that I’ve disclosed enough about my ongoing relationship with the Little Rock Film Festival, I’ll tell you what I think about their opening night film.
Get your alien fix here
posted: 05/25/2012 4:12 a.m. Discuss
Men in Black 3 86 Cast: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Thompson Director: Barry Sonnenfeld Rating: PG-13, for sci-fi action violence, and brief suggestive content Running time: 106 minutes After the first 20 minutes or so of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3, we were in despair.
REVIEW: We Have a Pope
posted: 05/25/2012 4:01 a.m. Discuss
Tender and poignant, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope is a mild comedy of manners about a crucial crisis of conscience. The man at the center of the drama is not just a man, but Cardinal Melville (French actor Michel Piccoli), who has just been named supreme pontiff by the papal conclave convened in the wake of the death of an unidentified pope. (Moretti uses archival footage from the funeral of John Paul II, but for our purposes we can probably assume that the story takes place in a completely fictional universe.)
CRITICAL MASS: The sonic shapeshifter
posted: 05/20/2012 3:58 a.m. Comment 1
Fifty years is a long time to do anything. For most of human history, it was a long time to live. So maybe it is worth acknowledging that Bob Dylan has been making albums for 50 years.
10-recording Dylan toolbox holds vocals, guitar, attitude
posted: 05/20/2012 3:49 a.m. Discuss
It would be easy enough to list 100 Bob Dylan recordings that deserve your attention, but let’s start with these 10.
‘Equal under the law’ a simple concept
posted: 05/20/2012 3:19 a.m. Discuss
I understand that it is not always possible for good people to speak the truth and remain effective ; if you mean to do good through politics you must pick your spots and allow for the inevitable ignorance of otherwise decent people and the cynicism of those willing to exploit that ignorance for their own purposes. Incrementalism is often the best and only option.
REVIEW: Last Days Here
posted: 05/18/2012 2:18 a.m. Discuss
Harrowing and at times quite funny, Last Days Here is the latest and maybe the best in what seems to have become a trend — documentaries about obscure rock bands who somehow have maintained a small but devoted following despite their failure to make much of an impression beyond their cult.
Audi goes on the road
posted: 05/13/2012 5:44 a.m. Discuss
A friend found her wandering in the street; she trotted up to him. Because she looked like our Dublin, he tried to bring her around to our house. We weren’t home, but a neighbor agreed that it looked like one of ours, and so she looped a leash around her neck and called Karen at work. Maybe one of our dogs had gotten out of the yard?
SPIRITS: Talkin ’bout my g-g-gin-eration
posted: 05/13/2012 4:20 a.m. Discuss
I have always been wary of gin.
The birthplace of spring training
posted: 05/13/2012 4:04 a.m. Discuss
This feels like a village of secret histories and forgotten lore. It was a haven for gangsters to mingle and take the waters. It has a racetrack and had underground casinos. It’s where a president was reared.
Unseemingly academia
posted: 05/11/2012 1:56 a.m. Discuss
In Hebrew with English subtitles In 1917, the German economist and sociologist Max Weber delivered a lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” in which he weighed the pros and cons of life as an academic scientist. To his mind, scientists were limited to providing explanations and justifications, but that it was up to philosophers to explain why things mattered. And that while an artist might find fulfillment in his work, it was the scientists’ lot to have his work surpassed by others.
ON FILM: Wham! Bam! movies stir up uneasy questions
posted: 05/11/2012 1:54 a.m. Discuss
Summer seems to arrive earlier every year.
REVIEW: The Kid With a Bike
posted: 05/11/2012 1:50 a.m. Discuss
Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make films so naturalistic and low-key they might be mistaken for the sort of cinema verite documentaries the brothers made in the 1970s. Spare and unflinching, their movies, like Lorna’s Silence (2009), L’Enfant (2005) and Rosetta (1999), are characterdriven narratives about desperate people living on the margins of society.
CRITICAL MASS: Pulitzer snub a shock, but not all bad
posted: 05/06/2012 3:37 a.m. Discuss
Every sane person knows that subjective awards don’t mean anything unless you win them. Oscars and Grammys don’t really guarantee quality — more and more they seem to exist mainly to validate a certain set of middlebrow expectations.
Surviving, thriving, coming home
posted: 05/06/2012 3:01 a.m. Discuss
Newspapers have been dying since before I started working for Susie Smith and the Jennings Daily News about 30 years ago.
REVIEW: Damsels in distress
posted: 05/04/2012 2:24 a.m. Discuss
My closest friend told me she’d heard Whit Stillman on a radio program recently, explaining that there was no real mystery as to why he hadn’t made a film since The Last Days of Disco in 1998 — he’d simply “failed” to make several movies he’d wanted to make. That’s what happens, sometimes, even to wunderkinds with dazzling eyes,
REVIEW: Marley
posted: 05/04/2012 2:18 a.m. Discuss
It seems impossible that it has been more than 30 years since the death of Bob Marley, who is probably better known today as a kind of secular saint of marijuana or perhaps the namesake of a dog in an Owen Wilson movie than as the revolutionary Rastafarian demi-god some remember from the 1970s.
ON FILM: Tribeca’s a mecca for movie pilgrims
posted: 05/04/2012 1:21 a.m. Discuss
One of the reasons to go to events like the Tribeca Film Festival is to get a head start on what might be showing up in Arkansas movie houses a few months hence.
CRITICAL MASS: Clark sold pop; Helm gave tunes their soul
posted: 04/29/2012 4:22 a.m. Discuss
It’s simply a coincidence that Levon Helm and Dick Clark died within a little more than 24 hours of each other, but the timing presents us with the temptation to write another obituary for rock ’n’ roll — one of those “rock is dead” pieces that now and then pop up fully formed like Athena from the heads of long-haired music columnists.
Dense history in a green place
posted: 04/29/2012 3:31 a.m. Discuss
What you might realize only early on a weekend morning is how small an island is Manhattan. Go running at 6 a.m. and you will be surprised at the ground you can cover—I crossed the broad avenues at a trot, with only stray taxis to watch as I headed west through Chelsea to the river then turned south, skirting the West Village and the meat packing district, down to West Houston Street and back east past the Film Forum and the Angelika Film Center.
REVIEW: W.E.
posted: 04/27/2012 2:15 a.m. Discuss
Despite what you’ve probably heard, Madonna’s W.E. is not a completely horrible film. It’s enjoyable in parts, and there’s one sequence — an anachronistic and jarring one in which Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) dances with a Masai tribesman to the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” — that I think indicates that Madge has real potential as a director.
ON FILM: Three movies shine at Tribeca festival
posted: 04/27/2012 2:13 a.m. Discuss
A film festival is a mosaic, and you have to have some distance before you can even begin to say what it “means.” So I’m not even going to attempt to provide an overview of the ongoing Tribeca Film Festival, which really isn’t in (or at least not contained by) the Triangle Below Canal precinct of lower Manhattan anymore. I’m just going to talk about some of the movies I’ve seen — and some that I’m going to try my best to see.
REVIEW: The Deep Blue Sea
posted: 04/27/2012 2:11 a.m. Discuss
Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea is an indigo tone poem about romantic restlessness — some call it “lust” — that is at once devastating, infuriating and a little unsatisfying, despite the best efforts of the actors and some genuinely beautiful visuals.
It’s not hard for a cop to ruin your day
posted: 04/22/2012 4 a.m. Discuss
“In civilized life, law floats on a sea of ethics.” — Earl Warren When we were children, well-meaning adults often told us, “The policeman is your friend.” If you grew up in the times that I did, you might have been disabused of that notion fairly quickly—I remember in 1970 that a lawyer named Joseph S. Lobenthal, who’d just published a book called Growing Up Clean in America: A Guide to the Legal Complexities of Being a Young American, came and talked to my class.
REVIEW: Bully
posted: 04/20/2012 2:33 a.m. Discuss
It’s not my job to tell you what movies to see or not see. And I try to avoid broad pronouncements that might be churned into advertising by studio publicists. So I want to say this upfront, so that there’s no mistake: Bully is not a great movie, it is a problematic movie that, had it not been the focus of a highly publicized ratings debate (that quite possibly was ginned up by Harvey Weinstein as a kind of stunt), probably would not have made much of an impression on the American consciousness.
REVIEW: Deadline
posted: 04/20/2012 2:30 a.m. Discuss
The best cop reporter I ever knew couldn’t write a lick.
REVIEW: The Diary of Preston Plummer
posted: 04/20/2012 2:27 a.m. Discuss
It’s unfortunate that Sean Ackerman’s quiet and deliberately small-scale The Diary of Preston Plummer should arrive in town on such a busy week (there are at least eight other movies opening around the area this week), for we’d have liked to have given a more thorough review. It’s an ambitious independent film that has some interesting qualities, along with decent-to-fine performances and some excellent views of Amelia Island, Fla.
REVIEW: Jiro Dreams of Sushi
posted: 04/20/2012 2:25 a.m. Discuss
Thoughtful, gentle and wonderfully restrained, David Gelb’s brief documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a portrait of an artist in full flower, a master who has achieved a species of perfection. Jiro Ono might make the best sushi in the world, and he makes it every day, without fail. He disappoints no one ever.
REVIEW: Coriolanus
posted: 04/20/2012 2:21 a.m. Discuss
Ralph Fiennes makes a strong directorial debut with Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s tragedy based on the legend of Roman Gen. Caius Martius (I’ve more often seen it rendered Gaius Marcius), who may or may not have lived in the 5th century B.C.
REVIEW: Undefeated
posted: 04/20/2012 2:19 a.m. Discuss
While I admit to having enjoyed The Blind Side, and to having admired parts of The Help, both of these movies fall into an uncomfortable territory a friend of mine calls “movies about black people for white people.” Race relations in this country are complex and freighted with both the singular emotions of individual experience and centuries of cultural grievance.
CRITICAL MASS: Baseball, intrigue, life: Books have it
posted: 04/15/2012 3:30 a.m. Discuss
With the Arkansas Literary Festival under way, it’s probably a good time to hit the books. So here’s a book column focusing on recent work from Arkansans: To say Frank Thurmond has lived an interesting life is something of an understatement — he has played lute for the Queen of England, served as the education policy adviser to Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign and written one of the best unproduced screenplays I’ve ever read.
Still chasing the dragon
posted: 04/15/2012 2:48 a.m. Discuss
I am not doing much for the Arkansas Literary Festival this year, and so I feel a bit guilty.
REVIEW: Seeking Justice
posted: 04/13/2012 2:44 a.m. Discuss
We assume Nicolas Cage keeps appearing in insane movies because he needs the money.
REVIEW: The Forgiveness of Blood
posted: 04/13/2012 2:38 a.m. Discuss
A homicide is the precipitating event in Joshua Marston’s somber yet compelling The Forgiveness of Blood, but we never see the killer’s slicked knife. Instead, the movie is all about the fallout, the reverberations of an act that occurs off screen, beyond the apprehension of audience or characters.
SPIRITS: Skinnygirl margarita just a little preserved
posted: 04/08/2012 3:06 a.m. Discuss
Until I sat down to write this column, I knew next to nothing about Bethenny Frankel.
ON FILM: User guide to films, our reviews, our columns
posted: 04/06/2012 2:47 a.m. Discuss
Some of you have already figured out that I review a lot of DVDs. One of the recurring features of this section is a column called Home Movies, which is comprised of short reviews of recently released DVDs.
REVIEW: Pariah
posted: 04/06/2012 2:42 a.m. Discuss
Early on in Dee Rees’ refreshingly modest and honest coming-of-age film Pariah, we watch as a black Brooklyn teenager transforms herself from an edgy, androgynous and possibly dangerous street character to an unthreatening teenager (“Daddy’s little girl” ) in a pink T-shirt and hair bow with dangling earrings while on a bus ride home.
REVIEW: We Need to Talk About Kevin
posted: 04/06/2012 2:40 a.m. Discuss
We Need to Talk About Kevin is an unsettling horror movie that teases about the edges of the question of man’s essential nature. Are we angels shorn of wings or simply uppity beasts who imagine ourselves God’s favorites ?
CRITICAL MASS: Music celebrates Guthrie’s artistry
posted: 04/01/2012 3:41 a.m. Discuss
Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of the people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh-voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.
It doesn’t always bounce your way
posted: 04/01/2012 3:01 a.m. Discuss
My first reaction was to tear the legal-looking letter up. I took it for a credit card come-on, or a dunning notice for a magazine I didn’t order. Whatever, it wasn’t important and I didn’t have my glasses on. I ripped it in half and slid it in the trash.
ON FILM: Bully’s R rating shows MPAA’s capriciousness
posted: 03/30/2012 1:41 a.m. Discuss
I normally don’t use this space to advocate that you see — or refrain from seeing — any particular movie. I figure that you’re all big boys and girls, and that you can make up your own minds about the entertainment products you download.
CRITICAL MASS: Writer skewers unexamined life
posted: 03/25/2012 5:41 a.m. Discuss
At the very outset of her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), novelist Marilynne Robinson looks around and assesses the landscape, noticing that “we now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.” She is borrowing vocabulary from Walt Whitman, whose 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas” she’d invoked the paragraph before, and whose spirit of self-interrogation combined with cosmic involvement informs the Decalogue of essays that follow.
Time, death and the changing seasons
posted: 03/25/2012 4:54 a.m. Discuss
Vernise took a leave of absence from her job. She hated to do it, in part because her attorneys had been so good to her, letting her take off whenever she needed to and a bonus at Christmas besides. But she didn’t see any way around it. He was her husband, and it was her place to take care of him.
REVIEW: October Baby
posted: 03/23/2012 3:09 a.m. Comments 2
October Baby 82 Cast: Rachel Hendrix, Jason Burkey, John Schneider, Jennifer Price, Jasmine Guy Directors: Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin Rating: PG-13, for thematic material Running time: 101 minutes Writing about a “faith-based” film is a bit like writing about Tim Tebow.
HOME MOVIES
posted: 03/23/2012 3:07 a.m. Discuss
Battle Royale (Unrated, 114 minutes) — Just in time for The Hunger Games, the Japanese cult film based on the 1999 best-seller by Koushun Takami — about a group of ninth-graders forced to fight to the death under order of the government — finally gets a DVD release in this country. It’s a disturbing, energetic film that could never have been made in Hollywood, and one that’s rightly considered a modern classic by some. That said, it’s not to everyone’s taste, including this reviewer’s. Grade: 87
REVIEW: Crazy Horse
posted: 03/23/2012 2:59 a.m. Discuss
Let me admit up front that the octogenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman is a hero of mine, that I have long admired his methods.
CRITICAL MASS: Bruce’s words are still valid
posted: 03/18/2012 3:27 a.m. Discuss
It is pointless to argue taste because every sensibility has its fixed poles of nuisance and delight — or, as Woody Allen famously instructed us, “the heart wants what it wants.” You might come around to liking something you used to abhor, some things might grow on you, and understanding can foster respect, which in turn foments appreciation. But it’s never been the critic’s job to shame or validate your appetites.
Common humanity too easily ignored
posted: 03/18/2012 3:16 a.m. Discuss
Imagine if suffering were real.
