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Cinezine Kane

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STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS: Charting a new course in a galaxy far, far away

16 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Adam Driver, Andy Serkis, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Harrison Ford, J.J. Abrams, John Boyega, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Star Wars: The Force Awakens

starwars55352fd36e73eStar Wars: The Force Awakens lives up to the hype. Disney is begging critics not to give anything away, so I won’t. I will say that J.J. Abrams successfully walks the line between paying homage to the franchise’s origins and breathing new life into it. Episode 7 begins 30 years after Return of the Jedi ended, and if it weren’t for how much Han Solo (Harrison Ford), General Leia (Carrie Fisher), and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) have grayed, time scarcely seems to have passed at all as the forces of light and darkness are at it again. Abrams starts full throttle and rarely lets up the pace in a film that, in addition to bringing back old favorites like Han and the ageless Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), introduces several new characters to the Star Wars universe, including scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley, who makes the biggest impression among the freshman class), fighter pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), disgruntled Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), petulant Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), and the latest in adorable robots, the rolling BB-8.

Pitched battles of both the large-scale and intimate variety, special effects that incorporate the advances of the past four decades while very much reflecting that more lo-fi era, some arresting cameos (including a motion-captured Andy Serkis as holographic Supreme Leader Snoke—is a large-scale sci-fi/fantasy complete these days without a motion-captured Andy Serkis?), and John Williams’ latest take on his most notable score combine for a thrilling ride. If episodes 1, 2, and 3 felt like Star Wars had gotten lost in space, episode 7 feels like Abrams has righted the ship and charted an exhilarating new course in that galaxy far, far away.—Pam Grady

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Review: Alex Garland’s Turing test EX MACHINA

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Alex Garland, Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a coder at BlueBook (think Google) is enjoying quite the heady week. Invited to BlueBoook founder Nathan’s (Oscar Isaac) remote mountain home, he has been tasked with performing a Turing test on the boss’s pride and joy, Ava (Alicia Vikander), the latest iteration in ongoing experiments in artificial intelligence. But having now interacted several times with the comely robot with a woman’s beautiful face, voice and shapely, metallic body, he wants to know why Nathan made Ava humanoid at all. Artificial intelligence doesn’t need a body to exist, after all. With that question, Caleb gets to the one of the flaws in writer Alex Garland’s (The Beach, 28 Days Later) tense, creepy directorial debut Ex Machina. It’s the wrong question, though. The correct question is why would a man clearly interested in building himself a high-tech blow-up doll bother with granting it intelligence at all?

Isaac suppresses his considerable charm to play the poster child of a tech overlord divorced from humanity. Nathan’s chilly, impersonal home, filled with surveillance equipment that lets him watch everything that goes on inside his house, reflects the personality of a man who knows how to say the right things (social cues no doubt gleaned from his endless spying on BlueBook’s users) to appear that he’s just a regular guy who just happens to be a billionaire genius—“appear” being the operative word. As Caleb’s week with him wears on, it’s is increasingly clear that Nathan has little use for the world the rest of humanity inhabits and for all his assertions that it is great to converse with an actual human being for a change, his contempt for Caleb is never far from the service. It is no wonder that Caleb becomes confused as he tests Ava: In a wig and with clothes to mask her robotic parts, she seems far more human than his host.

Stephen Hawking is among those that have expressed reservations about where the development of AI might lead. That question simmers beneath Ex Machina’s sleek surface as Caleb and Ava interact during the “tests.” But despite stunning visual effects that transform Vikander into a mechanical being, the vibe is less sci-fi than neo-noir. Gleeson is brilliant as a man seemingly in way over his head. But is he really the classic chump he appears to be, and if so, who is playing him: Nathan, Ava or both? And why?

The whys are what is problematic about Ex Machina. Nathan’s explanation for why he wanted Caleb to visit and perform the Turing test rings hollow. And his experiments in artificial intelligence don’t compute not only in the form they take with his female models but also in the fact that a guy with this man’s ego is not going to risk not being the smartest being in the room.

Looking past that, the film is a nifty thriller. The remote location, the sterile house where the rooms can only be accessed by key cards (and not all cards work for all rooms), the wild card that is Ava, and the growing distrust between Nathan and Caleb keep the tension humming even in the quietest scenes. Garland delivers the goods with this stylish and suspenseful first feature. –Pam Grady

 

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A different measure of making it: T-Bone Burnett on INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

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Bob Dylan, Coes Bros., Dave Van Ronk, David Blue, Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn David, Joel Coen, Oscar Isaac, Phil Ochs, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett

tboneInside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, captures a moment in New York when a folk music revival was going strong inside smoky Greenwich Village clubs and on weekend afternoons in Washington Square Park. T-Bone Burnett, the lanky Texan who first worked with the Coens as their musical archivist on The Big Lebowski, won two Grammys as the music producer on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and serves as executive music producer on the new film, was just a kid in Fort Worth when all of that was going on. In 1975, though, he joined Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and got to know several of those musicians from those days. While the Coens have said they were particularly inspired by the life and career of Dave Van Ronk, Llewyn could as easily have been conjured from a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or a David Blue.

“That was a time when they were just trying to be good there,” Burnett says during a recent visit to San Francisco. “That’s a beautiful thing. That’s where everything happens, in fact. All the great things happen in small communities that aren’t thinking in grand thoughts. They’re thinking about taking care of the things that are right under their noses. All this energy converged there, so I would say in that way Llewyn wasn’t a guy who was thinking about making in that way. He’s just a guy thinking about what’s good, it seems to me. He’s just thinking like what’s good music and what’s not, according to him. That’s always what it is. It’s about taste. It didn’t seem like to me that he was a guy thinking, ‘I’ve got to make it.’

“Maybe David Blue thought he would make it,” he adds. “Phil Ochs thought he would make it. Phil Ochs put on a gold lame suit. It was mocking making it. He was doing some kind of like, ‘I’m the folk Elvis,’ and it was ironic and it was meant as a joke, but I don’t think it landed exactly the way he wanted it to, although I have a lot of admiration for Phil Ochs – for all those guys.”

llewyn 2Certainly, if Llewyn Davis has any thoughts of success on even a modest level, he is also the one person who can ensure that that will never happen. Part of Burnett’s job in choosing the music was choosing which songs Llewyn would include in his repertoire for any given occasion, thus Child ballad #170 a/k/a “The Death of Queen Jane” becomes a key song in Llewyn’s universe.

“He goes for his big audition in Chicago and he has a chance at the big time, and the song he chooses to play is a song about a Caesarean section, so he’s not a guy who’s going out of his way to try to alter show biz,” says Burnett.

Burnett thinks that every musician, even the most successful, will find something to identify with in Llewyn Davis. Everyone, he points out, goes through periods of boom and bust. Someone who’s the most happening thing out there today is nobody again tomorrow only to rise up once more out of the ashes. What is different for Llewyn and those folk musicians back in the day is a matter of scale. Until Bob Dylan came along, the New York contingent defined success by a different measure.

“Specific to that time, I would say that one of the interesting things about it is is that was a time where there was a park, Washington Square Park, and there were all these different camps that played in the park and there was never any – all the competition was within the park,” says Burnett. “It was all for space in the park, it wasn’t for trends on Twitter or something, right? It was for square feet in a little grassy area downtown – in the country of New York, because back then the Village was the country. Nobody was thinking about being famous. They were thinking about what was good and what was authentic and they were thinking about all these kinds of questions.

“So that’s why when Dylan came along, there was all this extraordinary music everywhere. They were all infighting and he was just like Fast Eddie came to town and just ran the table. He said, ‘I’ll have some of that and that and that.’ He had no compunction – he was doing the right thing. Those people were looking backward and they were doing the right thing, too. They were going backward and preserving and he was going backward and forward at the same time. He was going backward and preserving and all of that and then he was reinventing for us now. We’re still living in his reinvention of it now.” – Pam Grady

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ANOTHER DAY/ANOTHER TIME: CELEBRATING THE MUSIC OF “INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS” gets Dec. Showtime premiere

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by cinepam in News

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Another Day/Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis", Inside Llewyn Davis, Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford, Oscar Isaac, Patti Smith, Punch Brothers, T-Bone Burnett

 

Oh to have been in New York on September 29th for this concert at Town Hall celebrating the new Coen Bros. film Inside Llewyn Davis and the music that inspired it. Produced by T-Bone Burnett – the executive producer of the movie’s sublime soundtrack – the show’s performers included Llewyn Davis himself, Oscar Isaac; Joan Baez; Patti Smith; Jack White; Marcus Mumford (associate music producer on the film who also performs on the soundtrack); Gillian Welch and David Rawlings; Punch Brothers; and more.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime event that only a lucky few saw. On Friday, December 13, 10PM ET/PT, the rest of us can experience a vicarious thrill of that evening when Showtime airs Another Day/Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a 101-minute concert documentary produced by Burnett, the Coens and Scott Rudin.

Personally, I don’t get Showtime, but I will be hitting up my friends who do. – Pam Grady

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