Woody Harrelson: A Man “Rampart”
If “Rampart,” the new film from Oren Moverman, was a song, you would swear that you’d heard it before.
You might even be able to sing along: a police officer gets involved in the wrong end of his business, abuses the law he’s sworn to uphold and protect and deals with unsavory people. And then his pockets are empty and he needs cash so he goes deeper into the fray: he abuses drugs, has sex with everyone, he destroys his professional life and pushes loved ones away with his self-destruction. And then he goes right to the edge.
Burning Down the “Safe House”
In an early scene in Daniel Espinosa’s whip-paced, uninspired film “Safe House,” ex-C.I.A. operative Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) pays a South African pimp to dress in his overcoat, scarf, and hat and then the man is instantly felled by a sniper’s bullet from some baddies that were targeting Frost. This tone sets the backbone of the whole film, which traipses its preposterous intelligence thriller/manhunt in and around Cape Town as if the city were a Hollywood back lot filled with anonymous extras and not a thriving, dynamic city of its own. The film rolls up Cape Town and all it’s inhabitants, diversity, and culture and stuffs it inside the chambers of a hundred American guns and then fires them all at Washington and Ryan Reynolds.
Over Alaska and Through the Wolfpack in “The Grey”
The Alaska of “The Grey” is a desolate landscape of ripping wind and thundering howls, and in the middle of its chaos are seven survivors of a plane crash: outcasts and roughnecks that are, with a few exceptions, not prepared to battle the wilderness or the wolves that stalk them. The film is a grim trek through a snowy wasteland toward civilization and it mostly avoids the heroic themes that oft characterize adventure films. Joe Carnahan (working from a sharply dialoged screenplay he co-wrote with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”) deftly presents us a unique vision wrapped inside what could have easily been a stock survivalist film. The result is a strongly textured, serious film that doesn’t fail to surprise.
Crossing the Rubikon
At Hunt’s Photo & Video in Harvard Square, they ship your exposed, unprocessed film cassettes out to a lab in Melrose, Mass., where they process the film and make prints. When the processed film returns in a week or two, they transport it in white paper bags with different boxes checked for what was printed. At the bottom of theRead More →
Constructing the Rubikon
The process of building a paper camera, The Rubikon Pinhole Rebel 2, is no quick work, the product is not a simple origami project where the paper can be scored willy-nilly and then re-scored to work. My first draft of the camera took about four hours to finish. But once I finished that test, I held the camera for aRead More →
