Movie Junction

Director Ti West’s “The House of the Devil” (2009) made him a fan favorite in the horror genre. Although the film offers nothing new to the genre, it was praised for creating horror elements from realistic, atmospheric situations and reviving memories of classic Hollywood horror movies. West’s recent effort, “The Innkeepers” (2011) utilizes the same framework from his previous film. The emphasis is still on the characters, keeping gore and violence to a minimum. Likewise, “The Innkeepers” is led by a female protagonist, Claire (Sara Paxton), who is shown as a daring and strong-willed character as the story progresses. Claire works with Luke (Pat Healy) at a local inn that will soon be permanently closed down. We gather there are not many guests living in this inn. Claire and Luke feel that the inn is haunted by ghosts. Luke shows Claire a video segment shot in the inn’s basement, but it is more of a gimmick. In spite of being initially scared, Claire slowly starts getting cu...

The Wisconsin Film Festival features a wide variety of feature-length films from different countries, allowing moviegoers to sample films from many genres. This year was no different than previous years, with more than a hundred and forty films playing over a five-day period from April 18-22, 2012. After having lived in Madison for twelve years, this year was the first time I have seen films at the festival. On Sunday, April 22, I watched two of them, “Policeman “and “Mourning.”  Let me tell you about the second one. “Mourning” (2011) is an Iranian drama from first-time director Morteza Farshbaf, who is a protégé of the famous Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. As we watch “Mourning,” we see glimpses of Kiarostami’s signature style, evident in his earlier works like “Taste of Cherry” (1997) and “The Wind Will Carry Us” (1999). Iranian directors, noticeably Kiarostami, have used the Iranian landscape to portray simplistic human stories before. There is something lyrical a...

The Wisconsin Film Festival features a wide variety of feature-length films from different countries, allowing moviegoers to sample films from many genres. This year was no different than previous years, with more than a hundred and forty films playing over a five-day period from April 18-22, 2012. After having lived in Madison for twelve years, this year was the first time I have seen films at the festival. On Sunday, April 22, I watched two of them, “Policeman “and “Mourning.”  Let me tell you about the first one. “Policeman” (2011) is an Israeli political drama, thoughtfully and poignantly directed by first-time director Nadav Lapid. Set in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “Policeman” offers a provocative commentary on the social structure that exists in Israel, where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The film’s class-divide portrayal bears similarity to the current social unease in the U.S. and elsewhere that has rapidly transformed into a rancorous deba...

“Chasing Madoff” (2011) should be named as “Chasing Markopolos.” I mean no disrespect to Harry Markopolos, whose investigation brought down Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but the movie’s second-half feels as if Madoff and SEC are chasing down Markopolos. Is this documentary about exposing Madoff? Or is the film about a financial analyst, Markopolos? The film’s second-half centers on Markopolos, who fears for his family’s well-being, and believes that his family might is the target for a possible gangster-style shootout, as a result of Markopolos going public with his highly-penetrating investigative report on Bernie Madoff. Ignoring the film’s name as a minor anomaly, the film truly stirs up a thought-provoking debate on the broken financial system in the U.S, and the failures of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). As such, “Chasing Madoff” is Markopolos’s lonesome and dangerous journey to expose the truth behind the biggest hedge-fund fraud of all time. While working at Rampa...

Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” (2000) still remains a genre-defining music film, featuring memorable characters, a lucid script, and above all, free-flowing rock music. It’s hard to top a film that gets everything right. “Roadie” (2011) is a new film in the music genre that feels like a film about music, but it is not. There is only a distant relationship to music in the plot, but this relationship never evolves into anything worth remembering. Considering that a “roadie” mostly provides operational assistance to a music band, the film, in this regard, offers a character study of a person operating on the fringes of the music industry. That person in question is the protagonist, Jimmy (Ron Eldard). Jimmy is a struggling roadie who has been working for a band called Blue Oyster Cult for almost twenty years. Jimmy’s career takes a nosedive when he finds out that the band will not renew his contract. Out of a job, Jimmy returns to his hometown to his ailing mom (Lois Smith),...

James Mangold’s “Kate & Leopold” (2001) offers something new, at least in its attempt of not adopting a formulaic romantic approach seen countless times now. The idea of time travel is nothing new in Hollywood, but for romantic flicks it still remains underutilized. The time travel definition for audiences may vary, greatly, as it routinely gets unclear when mixed up with the concept of parallel time zones, occurring within the same time period. Time travel, the way I see it, is a transition occurring in a character's life as a result of traveling from one era to the other, the timeline of which can be in the past or the future. There are only a handful good movies falling in the subgenre of time zone romantic flicks that I like: “Somewhere in Time” (1980), “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986), “Chances Are” (1989), and “Kate & Leopold” (2001). In “Kate & Leopold,” our main character, Leopold (Hugh Jackman) lives in New York in 1876, and later inadvertently travels thro...

“Why does God allow capital punishment?” – Werner Herzog, “Into the Abyss” Director-screenwriter Werner Herzog certainly knows how to produce realistic emotions from his characters. This becomes apparent when one watches the interview segments in Herzog’s 2011 documentary ”Into the Abyss.” These segments are emotional, and the characters are honest in discussing their inner feelings. The interview structure, which of course shows Herzog’s mastery of the documentary format, is a set of well-articulated questions touching on several aspects of the story, but, above all, it’s the sensitive and respectful manner with which Herzog asks the questions that enables him to get to the bottom of the characters.  Given another filmmaker, “Into the Abyss” could have turned into an investigative journey, but in the deft hands of Herzog, who has created about twenty-five documentaries in his forty-four year filmmaking career, “Into the Abyss” develops into a memorable, heartbreaking ...