Fontaine's Film Wipe

Tim Burton's "Batman" is the film responsible for the last thirty years of ponderous superhero movies, a fact I should probably overlook, but I'm not sure I'm a big enough person. I could get into the many long stories about its tortured production (a budget that bloomed from $30 million to $48 million), its equally-tortured casting (50,000 complaint letters to Warner Bros. over Burton's choosing Michael Keaton to be Batman), and its being artistically overshadowed by the sequel ("Batman Returns" is simply a better film), but none of this would tell you what to expect if you've never seen it before. I want to break down in the plainest terms possible whether "Batman" is a good movie, or a great movie. Spoiler alert: it's not a great movie. Burton has said that "Batman" was more of an event than a serious cinematic accomplishment, and he did not enjoy making it. He was under a lot of pressure to deliver a satisfying renditi...

"Underwater" is confusing, boring, derivative, and frustratingly close to greatness. Every genre aims to have a specific effect on its audience, and thrillers are meant to thrill. "Underwater" has all the right elements in place. It takes us seven miles down to the depths of the Mariana Trench. It puts its characters in a Ridley Scott-inspired tech-scape of depressurization chambers and seemingly endless corridors that wouldn't look out of place in a Hans Giger painting. It even has a worthy cast of mostly young and sexy people to throw around for ninety minutes. So why doesn't any of this thrill me? Remember how "Alien" allowed us to familiarize ourselves with its characters before the aliens show up? Remember how well that leisurely first part worked when contrasted against the terrifying second and third acts?  I had a problem with "Underwater" three minutes into watching it. The opening scene involves a scantily-clad Kristen Stewart a...

In the first thirty minutes of "Five Easy Pieces," there's a moment between Jack Nicholson's Robert Eroica Dupea and his waitress girlfriend, Rayette Dipesto, played by Karen Black. Robert attempts to clean-up after a spat with her, and promises he'll never leave her. But he makes promises the way car salesmen cut deals, and his awful treatment of the woman he's ostensibly in a relationship with raises the question of how far a man can pull at the frayed ends of his life before his humanity is irrevocably undone.  Director Bob Rafelson's passing compelled me to revisit his fifty-two year-old masterpiece, and marvel at how Nicholson and Black elevated its grim material into the highest echelon of film history. It's a story about a musical genius from America's sequestered upper-class who rejected the advantages of his upbringing so he could work the oil fields for minimum wage and sleep with floozies. Robert's inner tension radiates into the tap...

Horror works best when ordinary situations turn horrifying. Think of "Jaws," where innocent swim meets killer fin, or "The Shining," where what should be a boring winter of checking boiler pressures and frozen pipes becomes a supernaturally murderous time-warp. When director Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill wrote "The Black Phone," they had the formula right by allowing the mundane day-to-day lives of two sibling school kids slide into the macabre. I thoroughly enjoyed how Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw portrayed Finney and Gwen, and Jeremy Davies was wonderful as Terrence, their alcoholic and abusive father. But as I watched, I couldn't stop thinking that there's a fundamental problem with how the film conveys its horror. It wasn't until days later that it clicked: the problem is the adaptation.  The screenplay is derived from a short story by the same name by Joe Hill (Joseph Hillström King, Stephen King's son). It's a faithf...

The original "Top Gun" was more of an event than a movie. Tom Cruise was, quite fittingly, an ascending Hollywood megastar when he made it, and its success was where he crested. In the decades that followed, Americans continued to see him break new records in Hollywood, particularly with his hugely successful "Mission: Impossible" franchise, and by now I've come to see him as the only movie star who transcends stardom. Tom Cruise produces. Tom Cruise sells. Tom Cruise insists that other actors keep their facial hair. Tom Cruise performs his own stunts. In 2022, Tom Cruise is the event. Nowhere is this more evident than in "Top Gun: Maverick," Cruise's long-awaited sequel to the eighties blockbuster. It's a film where his signature high-intensity and big-budget production clout converges with his iconoclastic all-American image. You'd think it would be too Tom Cruisey, even for the Cruisiest of Cruise fans, but you'd be wrong. This film...

The 1990s was a decade of prodigious filmmaking, but now that the tide is out we can see who was swimming naked. At the time of its release, "The Lover" was considered a sophisticated big-budget foreign film based on the semi-fictional memoir of screenwriter Marguerite Duras. Today it's akin to a poor-man's Merchant-Ivory picture, oozing with the requisite pomp and bustle of a period drama, yet lacking in any sense of bohemian worldliness or romantic warmth. Put another way, it's a love story without any heart.  Director Jean-Jacques Annaud ("Seven Years in Tibet," "Enemy at the Gates") attempted to make the film with Duras herself, but creative differences led him away from her and to Polanski confidante Gérard Brach, who made the unscrupulous details of the novel somewhat more palatable to western tastes. Casting was just as challenging, and it wasn't until Annaud's wife spotted Jane March is a teen fashion magazine that the role of T...

Here's how a scene from "Slam Dance" would look if it were filmed today: A professional cartoonist comes home to find his apartment door tampered with. His face is frozen in a look of seriousness. His body slowly enters, turns on the lights, and he finds his place trashed. He notices a closet door closing, and suspects someone is hiding there. He carefully tip-toes his way towards it without making a sound, looking very serious. Still looking serious, he grabs the first thing he can find to defend himself, an umbrella. Looking ever-more serious, he reaches for the closet door. His hand closes on the doorknob, and suspenseful music shrills. He pauses so he can look serious, so, so serious, and slowly turns the knob. Cut to his face -- looking serious.  Now, here's how it actually plays with Tom Hulce as C.C. Drood, who happens to be a cartoonist: A man comes home to find his apartment door tampered with. His face is puzzled, then slightly alarmed, yet it wavers on the ...

Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut was a sensation in 1992, and officially launched his long and illustrious career of making far better films. Its violence and foul language made it popular, which I think is an indictment of our morally bankrupt culture. I wasn't sold on "Reservoir Dogs" when I first saw it in the nineties, and my opinion hasn't shifted much since. To me it's a crude story filled with bad characters played by excellent actors, and that last bit is what saves it from the abyss -- or saves the pieces, anyway.  It's a tale about a band of jewel thieves whose best-laid plans go seriously awry. We're introduced to eight men, five of whom are the main players, in a cramped diner. The camera orbits their table until vertigo sets in. The script subjects us to Tarantino's trademark dialogue for what feels like an hour. It amounts to small-talk about Madonna songs and tipping, but it's punctuated with incessant cursing and the strain...

If we relate to the thin line between love and hatred, then we know why "Gilda" made Rita Hayworth legendary. Her radiant presence had never been put to better use on the silver screen than it was in Columbia Pictures' famous film noir, which was directed by Charles Vidor, meticulously shot by Rudolph Maté, and written by Jo Eisinger, Marion Parsonnet, and Ben Hecht. To call it film noir is slightly misleading, as the story doesn't abide the conventions of the genre. It lacks a single "hard-boiled" character, its visual style was fairly mainstream in the forties, and it isn't much of a crime caper. It even has a happy ending, a noir no-no. But it also features a classic love triangle, connected to an iconic example of the femme fatale, Gilda herself. Hayworth was born for the role, and her portrayal of a woman who hides her insecurities behind sexual swagger made her scenes emotionally profound.  Instead of foisting a Byzantine plot with inscrutable char...

"Violation" is a movie that makes me doubt that the people who made it watch movies themselves. If they do, their meager contribution to the art form is a clear indication that they don't understand the good ones, and can't recognize the bad ones. At least they got the title right, because I felt violated after watching this badly-made rape/revenge debacle. Truth in advertising.  I've seen several critics compare the imagery of the film to the work of Lars von Trier, which is clearly delusional. Cinematographer Adam Crosby does achieve some beautiful nature shots, one in the opening credits of a bucolic bridge over water, others of various wooded enclaves and wild animals. They're all marred by the shaky-shakys; Crosby apparently suffers from a personal fear of tripods, and took hand-held shots that weren't corrected in post. The result is Thomas Kinkade on caffeine.    When I apply the film's title to its story, I get more honest advertising, starting...

In 2022, people take the advancement of digital technology for granted. Some suggest that in the next thirty years we'll see artificial intelligence (AI) assert control over humanity. This is understandable, given how far it has come already. But I'm haunted by the suspicion that the cosmos, with its propensity for hurling planet-altering space rocks at Earth every few million years, has its own plans. "The Matrix" is a movie that tells the story of what could happen to us in a universe without those planet-altering rocks. The film, written and directed by the Wachoswkis, raises one niggling question for me: how did they go from "Bound" (1996), to this? "Bound" is a slow-burn neo-noir thriller starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as lesbians who conspire to steal mob money. It's well written, well directed, and left me wanting more. "The Matrix" could not be more different, and while I consider it a commendable change of pace for ...

Some films are the full package, delivering style and substance in equal measure. Others are more style than substance, and that can be fatal to a movie, but not always - good films tend to be more atmospheric than television shows, for the simple reason that time is against them. It's much harder to connect with audiences in 120 minutes than it is in 120 hours. To achieve maximal effect, directors turn to the most basic device in their creative arsenal: imagery.  In "The Swimming Pool," which is now part of the Criterion Collection, director Jacques Deray ("Three Men to Kill," "He Died With His Eyes Open") makes up for his thin screenplay by focusing less on the actors' lines, and more on the silences between them. His film is exemplary of style over substance. It doesn't hurt that its stars are Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, two beautiful people who could easily captivate audiences without saying a word. Adding a 21 year-old Jane Birkin (of ...

I should begin with a confession: I have a soft spot for period pieces. Director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant made the best of them in the eighties and nineties, having been partners in both the movie business, and in life. Merchant-Ivory Productions released 44 films, but none are as prescient to an audience in 2022 as the 1992 romantic drama, "Howards End."  The film, based on the 1910 novel of the same name by E.M. Forster, brings Forster's themes of class prejudices and social injustices to life. But to stop there would be akin to saying a clicker brings a TV to life; James Ivory's vision for this picture is so brimful with lush color and vivid beauty, that I marvel at how he made a priceless masterpiece of every shot on a budget of $8 million. "Howards End" is a stunning film.  But his genius, and that of screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, transcends imagery. "Howards End" reminds me of Woody Allen's joke about how England woul...