A few weeks ago, Summit Entertainment released the first seven minutes of The Brothers Bloom online. Normally, this kind of marketing strategy is useful, particularly if the movie isn’t well known. However, it helps for such a movie to have a terrific opening, which grabs the viewer in and makes him/her need to see what happens after that teased beginning. The Brothers Bloom, unfortunately, has an unbearable start, enough that I couldn’t even get through the entire seven minutes. I turned the streaming video off at the 4:24 mark.
The primary cause of my annoyance was the voice-over narration, provided by actor/magician Ricky Jay, a man whose speech is easily recognizable, only not for good reason. His lisped reading, sounding like a poor man’s Wallace Shawn, ruined the movie for me immediately. And I decided within those few moments that I wouldn’t bother to go see The Brother’s Bloom in its entirety.
I later learned that Jay’s narration is only in the film for that seven-minute prologue that opens the film, so I am willing to give it another shot, with hope that it gets better. Due to my initial irritation, though, I’ve decided to share a list of ten other movies ruined by their voice-over narration. …Read more
Paul on A Woman in the Dunes: “It seems the premise of a man trapped, living in poverty against his will with a cruel and unusual brood of villagers in control would make for a downer of a flick. But I found Woman to be as much ecclesiastical as it is existential.”
A few weeks back, listener DJP requested a show on spirituality, which coincides nicely with the Film + Faith blog-a-thon kicking off this week. As we thought about it, the spiritual is so broad and pervasive in movies it’s hard to know where to start. Somehow, Kevin and I sojourn on The Dareeling Limited, Children of Men and A Woman Under the Influence.
Karina investigates the “curse” surrounding one of the most spiritual characters in moviedom, Joan of Arc.
Over the weekend, Ray Pride posted a long interview with Chicago music scene stallwart/budding filmmaker Tim Kinsella. I’ve been a fan of Kinsella since discovering his first band, Cap’n Jazz, when I was in high school. By the time I moved to Kinsella’s home base of Chicago in the late 90s to go to art school, Kinsella was on his second album of experimental quasi-electronic indie rock with Joan of Arc. He’s since released half a dozen records under the Joan of Arc name, and countless more with tangential side projects such as Make Believe and Friend/Enemy.
Frustrated with what he calls the “lousy cost/benefit ratio” of life as a semi-well-known indie musician, Kinsella also recently wrote and directed his first feature film, titled Orchard Vale. It’s set to open the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Wednesday.
It’s a logical transition, as much of the Joan of Arc output has been infused with clear cinematic elements. The cover art for Joan of Arc’s 1999 album Live in Chicago 1999 (which was not a live album) featured recreations of scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; on one of that record’s tracks, Kinsella lamented that he’d “only want to make a film if it was in French/and I don’t speak French.” Later JoA records like the The Gap and In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust sounded like self-contained soundtracks for neo-realist disaster films. So I guess it’s no surprise that Orchard Vale is, as described by Pride, a “claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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