Day four of our TIFF 2012 coverage rolls on with the festival's second day and looks at Argo, The Company You Keep, West of Memphis, At Any Price, Berberian Sound Studio, Imagine, and All That Matters is Past.
Although overstuffed, lazily plotted, and autotuned nearly into oblivion, the big screen adaptation of the jukebox musical Rock of Ages still has a real kind of shaggy dog charm evocative of the 1980s hair metal scene (minus, you know, any sort of crippling addictions, of course).
DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA CIRCUS DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA AFRO CIRCUS AFRO CIRCUS AFRO POLKA DOT POLKA DOT POLKA DOT AFRO
Wrapping up our look at the cinematic offerings for the month of June, we take a look at some real heavy hitters with Brave, Moonrise Kingdom, Prometheus, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Snow White and the Huntsman, Rock of Ages, and Piranha 3DD, which will undoubtedly win the box office crown for the month.
Director Tony Kaye's Detachment wants nothing more than to rip your guts out and make you feel like shit for 98 minutes… in a good way. It’s a sort of emotional horror movie for educators. It might ruin your day to watch the movie, but at least it feels like the harsh experience was done with a purpose, even if Kaye’s execution is somewhat muddled.
It’s hard not to talk about the World War II action drama Red Tails without bringing up George Lucas. Making a fighter pilot film had always been a dream of the man whose greatest strength was filming dog fights in the skies. Lucas, who allegedly oversaw reshoots and worked a bit on the script, receives only a producer credit here, but he probably should’ve had a lot more input on this tale of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a film that has its heart in the right place and nothing but the best of intentions, but also one the cries out for some sort of real guidance to hold this debacle together.
Director Steven Soderbergh takes on a deadly viral outbreak in his latest film, Contagion, with the same episodic story structure that he employed when he took on the war on drugs in Traffic. What this means is that Contagion is a very well made and often fascinating film that feels longer than it really is and it forgets about most of its characters at fairly inopportune times. The two films could really play side by side as a double bill of Soderbergh procedurals. They have almost the exact same strengths and the exact same faults.