Anti-dis-arts-and-entertainmentism

The Rum Diary

2011-10-30T13:01:00.001-07:00

The Rum Diary
Grade: B
Cast: Johnny Depp, Michael Rispoli, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins
Director: Bruce Robinson
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(Reviewer’s note: What do you when you really like a film but disagree with it? You write a review like this.)

I’ll start my review of The Run Diary with a short explanation of why I ceased to be a journalist some time ago.

Very simply, I never knew a journalist in his 40s who wasn’t a deeply unhappy person. They were all poor, burned-out, and resentful. I remember once sitting in a job interview with the bureau chief of the Associated Press and listening in on a phone call with his wife about how in the world they were going to afford a minivan. And this was 1999, when they were practically giving away minivans with two bottles of Pepsi. And this was the state bureau chief of the Associated Press!

That’s the first thing that you need to understand when you consider the self-righteous pose that journalists unfailingly assume. Because underneath that whole “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” routine are a lot of people who regret the choices they’ve made in their lives. And so they soothe themselves with a cocoon of self-righteousness that’s really unrequited envy. That’s understandable, because serving as the public watchdog is essentially one long, repetitive kamikaze raid against unstoppable American carriers, except unlike kamikazes journalists don’t get the relief of dying and missing the next morning.

The Rum Diary is the adaptation of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s novel about his times as a journalist in Puerto Rico, and Bruce Robinson’s film drips in newspaper ambience. Consequently, it’s very wise about newspapers and journalists. It has the wackjob cop reporter, the husky photographer who always appears to be sweating to death, and the harried editor beaten down by the demands of his job. It also gets the moral preening so right that it actually participates. While I really like the film for its amusing adventures and early-sixties-Mad-Men-tropical-division ambience, I come away with a very different take on the values it holds, for the stated reason.

With rum-soaked deadpan bemusement, Johnny Depp plays Kemp, a new reporter at the worst newspaper in Puerto Rico. Kemp is a talented writer and a talented drinker at a newspaper short of the former and full of the latter. His adventures in Puerto Rico range from drinking to cockfighting to bowling to drinking. He pools his poor pay for a crummy apartment with a pair of oddball newsmen (Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi) who get high, drunk, or both and watch the television through a window across the alley with binoculars.

The so-called villain of The Rum Diary is Aaron Eckhart’s slick real estate man Sanderson, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what he’s doing that’s so wrong. Kemp comes to regard him as a criminal, but Sanderson’s crimes against humanity appear to be building a resort, having a hot girlfriend, and not being such an inebriated junkie screw-up that he can’t get to work in the morning.

Seriously, what exactly does Sanderson do wrong in the film? He befriends a newcomer. He recognizes Kemp’s talent and invites him on a massive resort deal. He provides Kemp with a home, gives him a cool car, and pulls strings to bail him out of jail when his screw-up friends land him there. In return, Kemp violates his trust, swipes his boat and tries to steal his fiancée (The Pineapple Express’ Amber Heard, who’s pretty good at the ray of light part and not so good at the putting-emotion-into-her-line-readings part).

But here’s the real thing … Kemp doesn’t hate Sanderson. Kemp wants to be Sanderson. Honestly, he’s pretty cool with the whole high-life until his irresponsibility gets him kicked out of it. His self-righteousness doesn’t come from a well of conviction but from a well of sour grapes.

The film indulges in pouring some “lovable losers” sympathy on its journalists, generally a bunch of drunk and disorderly idiots, as if they are somehow ennobled by their failures. They’re losers, they’re practically the Chicago Cubs, and we’re all supposed to love losers, especially when squared off against sweet-smiled successes like Sanderson. Except I really rather hated them. I was supposed to be cheering them on, but mostly I kept thinking Kemp should kick them out of his life, get his stuff together, and beg his way back into Sanderson’s graces. Because it’s like watching the Big Lebowski, except The Dude has actual talent and he’s wasting it by bowling with Walter.

All of this means The Rum Diary is a movie about alcoholics who can’t figure out that their problem is that they’re alcoholics. This makes The Rum Diary Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia without the painful self-awareness.

Does that sound like a recommendation? Well, it is, even if it doesn’t. And a pretty strong one, actually. Good film.

Take Shelter

2011-10-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

Take Shelter
Grade: B
Cast: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain
Director: Jeff Nichols
Free Admission Granted

Why are art films becoming horror films?

Art film directors are finding the best way to relate to our frazzled age is to mask it in the aesthetics of terror. Last year’s apocalyptic ballet movie, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, was a leading entry in this new trend. It might as well have had zombie dancers. This year it’s Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols story of mental illness, marriage, and prophecies of doom.

Shelter stars Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche, a family man in small-town Ohio who may be having a prophecy or may be losing his mind. He keeps having visions of dead birds, murderous people, and a giant storm coming to wipe out his town. The film traces his crumbling relationship with his family as his vision turns to obsession. At great cost, he decides to expand his storm shelter to prepare for a storm that the sane world doesn’t see coming. The audience is left to question whether he is wise or deluded.

Have I liked any movies this year? I want to like Take Shelter more than I do. I do like it. But I want to feel that unconditional passion for a movie that I haven’t felt in some time.

I respect Take Shelter for taking an intelligent approach to mental illness. Its picture of a supportive marriage is refreshing. Shannon has a lot of great moments without saying much, and Chastain has more of an impact than her limited character might be entitled. However, for a film with an unusual plot (although very similar to Todd Haynes’ brilliant Safe), it’s strangely predictable. Its too-cute twist ending also undermines the rest of the movie without producing any gain.

Its supporters feel Take Shelter taps into the uneasy feeling we have of the present and the future we see on the horizon. We do live in an age where we wonder if today’s worst fears are tomorrow’s reality. At the same time, the apocalyptic visions here have not much antecedent in real life. They seem to matter more to the people in the film than they do to us.

The Texas Killing Fields

2011-10-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Texas Killing Fields
Grade: B
Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Sam Worthington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jessica Chastain
Director: Amy Canaan Mann
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As I watched The Texas Killing Fields, I had one question running through my mind: why don’t they make more films like this?

I don’t mean this in the Terrence Malick random-acts-of-genius sort of way, as in “why can’t every filmmaker take seven years in post-production to create a high-minded masterpiece?” I mean it in a “whatever happened to the if-it’s-Friday-it-must-be-a-new-police-procedural movie” sort of way.

Texas Killing Fields feels like it dropped out of 1986 with its spiked hair barely mussed. This film used to star Ellen Barkin as the fish-out-of-water detective from the city investigating a crime in the backwater. Or Mimi Rogers as the damsel in distress who needs protection from a killer after witnessing a crime. Or, if you’re really lucky, Ellen Barkin as the damsel in distress who needs protection from a killer after witnessing a crime. Someone like Al Pacino or Tom Berenger would star as the cop who crashed into the apartment just as the killer broke in. Killer dead. Mystery solved. Let the kissing begin.

In short, this used to be what adults did on Friday night – mom and dad get a little mystery, a little romance, and a chance to support the neighborhood economy by paying the babysitter. Yet I can’t remember the last time I saw a standard-operating-procedure cop film like this. When did a cop film become so rare that it could be treated as a bit of a prestige picture?

A cop movie about multiple murders on the Gulf Coast refinery town of Texas City, The Texas Killing Fields certainly embraces the genre clichés – the intense family man detective from a large city now working in the small town (Jeffrey Dean Morgan); the hard-knocks ape-in-a-suit partner with marriage issues (Sam Worthington); a complete weekly motels’ worth of transients who have probably done something wrong, even if none of them are the murderer. Nothing in Texas Killing Fields will seem unfamiliar, but there is a value to doing the old things the right way, especially when they are delicately written, acted with intensity, and capture the local flavor with some useful color. The Texas Killing Fields ultimately raises this interesting movie theoretical: at what moment does yesterday’s cliché become tomorrow’s classicism?

Beyond that, note that the director is Ami Canaan Mann, daughter of producer Michael Mann, and notice that extra-loud gunshots run in the family.

The Ides of March/Contagion

2011-10-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Ides of March (d. George Clooney)
Politics moves so quickly now that movies can’t keep up with it. Production time mangles relevance. George Clooney's The Ides of March sits you in a John Edwards-like scandal with an Obama-like candidate. Riffing on political events of just a few years ago, The Ides of March nonetheless feels like a movie from a dusty past. Situated in an era of mass-protest spectacle, we get an insider’s story, of a semi-idealistic press secretary (Ryan Gosling) who finds out – get this – that politics is dirty business that’s not always what it seems. Directed and starring George Clooney, The Ides of March isn’t really a bad film, just very generic.
(Free Admission Granted)

Contagion (d. Steven Soderbergh)
A film for everyone who has ever suspected Gwyneth Paltrow will be the death of us all. Stephen Soderbergh takes the clinical approach to the deadly virus genre, extracting the natural grotesque hysteria and dread for a realistic government procedural, depicting a worldwide race between the viral nature of information and the viral nature of, well, viruses. Even the stars in the all-star cast meet abbreviated ends, while mid-level public health and Hollywood bureaucrat Jennifer Ehle saves the day. Then she goes straight back to work without a press conference or Oscar buzz. A 70s-style big topical film with an all-star ensemble, Contagion is that rare example of a movie that is exactly the sum of its estimable parts - nothing more and nothing less.

Moneyball

2011-10-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Moneyball
Grade: B
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
Director: Bennett Miller
Free Admission Granted

No one wants to watch a movie about the Yankees.

No one wants to watch Throwing Money At It: Superstars, Dollar Signs, and Left-handed Relief Pitching. No one wants to hear the story about how the Pinstripes used their massive financial advantages to hire the best coaches, scouts and players in order to forge an American League dynasty – and guess what – they did it!

There is no market in the American imagination for the Goliaths of Gotham. We love the Davids of Decatur (himself a David in a real sea of Goliaths). Our national mythology trains us to root for the little guy, to imagine ourselves as the little guy even when, for example, we’re the world’s dominant power. We glorify the innovators and rebels at the expense of the proven and traditional.

So we make movies like Moneyball. Moneyball is the baseball term applied to the overrated success of the millennial era Oakland As formed by general manager Billy Beane (played in an invitingly laconic big-star performance by Brad Pitt). These teams had a way of outperforming expectations in the regular season before dying in the playoffs. Beane achieved his success by elevating cutting edge statistical analysis over traditional scouting, allowing Oakland to compete with the monetary advantages of the big-market teams.

Baseball shows reverence for certain player statistics handed down through the generations. Moneyballers (like the film’s Jonah Hill) gained their success by asking whether these statistics really matter to winning baseball games. They favor on-base percentage and slugging percentage to batting average; average hits per 9 innings to ERA. They love walks, runs, and going deep in the count. They hate steals, bunts, fielding percentage, and fielding percentage again.

The new stats allowed the As to identify and sign undervalued and inexpensive players. These players excelled at getting on base and helping the team score a pre-determined amount of runs over the course of a year. This number of runs had been calculated as the number needed to win a division. (The Moneyball system is not designed to beat more talented teams in seven-game playoff series – hence Beane’s teams never won a title. The source book by sportswriter Michael Lewis is subtitled “Winning at an Unfair Game.” It could just as easily be “A Better Variety of Losing.”)

The more spiritual fault of Moneyballers – they re-evaluate the statistical basis for producing wins but never ask if the real success of baseball is winning. Certainly that’s the immediate demand for front office people wanting to keep their jobs. But do we really want a game of baseball with a bunch of statistically-approved on-base robots drawing abnormal numbers of walks? Is the real value of athletics to society the sense of collective victory? Or is it mythology? Is it taking something common and contemporary and delivering it to the realm of the legendary and timeless? To the credit of prominent screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List), the script gets something like this, framing it as whether statistics rob the game of its sentimental romance (while the film’s dreadful pacing and Bennett Miller’s predictable, add-nothing direction nearly robs the film of its.)

In one of the year’s best films, the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, director Werner Herzog explores a French cave with the oldest-known cave paintings – recordings of the bears, lions and buffalo of the time. We also see the first sparks of narrative exaggeration – oversized horns, ferocious teeth, endless rumbling herds. We sense the tales of the great hunters, the legendary athletes of their time. We watch the creation of history, imagination, culture. We grasp the need of storytelling to our human essence. We also see the first impulses toward the larger than life.

Thinking about that cave, and thinking again about Moneyball, I wonder: are the statisticians a vanguard of clairvoyants for the new reality? Or are they, to borrow Herzog’s creative formulation, crocodiles staring into the abyss?

Drive

2011-09-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

Drive
Grade: B
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Christina Hendrick
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
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It boils down to this: Drive is a decent film but I find its critical adoration bordering on reactionary.

It’s fun to watch a team play in its throwback uniforms one game each year, and yes, Drive’s combination of sun-tinged neo-noir, eye-contact chemistry, gear grinding chases and silent leading man charisma makes chilling entertainment. But ever since its release at Cannes this May, the real attraction has been as a “man, they don’t make them like they used to” rallying point for filmmaking puritans, those who believe every good film was made before 1977 and see the current dominance of chaos cinema as a shooting offense.

These champions see the stripped-down action of Drive as a welcome course correction to that foreboding moment when Michael Bay was given a camera, possibly by Lucifer. As such there is a rush of hype to bill this Nicolas Winding Refn film as the future. In truth it is the opposite – a leather-glove grip on the past. Drive is cinematic oatmeal for those old-timers who just wish Tony Scott would quit doing donuts on their cleanly edited, visually elegant lawns.

Drive shares a number of plot points with one of the best examples of chaos cinema, Scott’s Man on Fire. A loner with a dark past finds his humanity through his surprise affection for a mother and child. When the poisonous vines of the underworld threaten the family, he fights nocturnal urban warfare to defend (or avenge) them. In Man on Fire, it’s a former CIA assassin in Mexico City. In Drive, it’s a mechanic and stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who drives getaways through the tangled Los Angeles streets at night.

Yet for all of its dream-like visual elegance and lean editing, Drive doesn’t have a lot to say. It attracts only the vague label of “existentialism” that often finds its way to quiet movies in which no one bother to name the main character. It doesn’t match the visual fever of Scott’s film, nor its moral provocation, nor its critique of the American view of the Third World, and not enough its aching heart.

I’ve written myself into a corner, because there is much about Drive to recommend. Refn’s hypnotic glaze simmers in the classic noir motif of a man against his fate in the indifferent city. Gosling makes the silence of the driver radioactive, and Mulligan enwraps years of suffering into a simple twitch of a lip. But as the film moves from cold style to heated violence, a rising cartoon tone undermines the alienated urban drama coming before. Not only does everyone turn out to be a killer – they all turn out to be experts at it, as if stabbing were passed down over firelight from father to son. Drive never quite decides whether it wants to be Taxi Driver or Dirty Harry, and is the less for its indecision.

The Debt

2011-09-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Debt
Grade: B
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds
Director: John Madden
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Split between two settings, two time periods, and two casts, it’s no wonder that John Madden’s The Debt divides so easily into two levels of quality. There’s one part that I like to call a classy, sexy Cold War spy thriller. There’s another part that I like to call “the ending.”

Three Mossad agents share an apartment in East Berlin in 1966 – two men and a young woman. The cramped quarters in a hostile land breeds danger and romantic tension. Their job is to identify and take captive a Mengele-like Nazi doctor who tortured Jews in a concentration camp and blended back into society after the war. This leads to some of the creepiest moments in cinematic gynecology, as the young woman agent (Jessica Chastain of The Help and The Tree of Life) comes face to face (among other anatomical places) with the target.

The Debt is at its most convincing moments in this past, when it feels like the mature spy films and political thrillers of many years ago. The tension inside the apartment builds beautifully through looks, touches, and silences. Not for the first time, Chastain and Sam Worthington are particularly adept at saying a lot without saying much.

The sixties era feels like it should go on forever, or at least for two hours, whichever comes first. Unfortunately, it is bookended by the relative present (1997), in which Helen Mirren takes over for Chastain. The plot tries to pivot to issues of lies and regrets lingering from the mission. It’s here that The Debt goes from tight and plausible spy film to preposterous thriller with forced tensions.

It seems like the steady Madden (best known for Shakespeare in Love) and the writers are aware of the weaknesses and unsuccessfully try to shore them up with hackneyed suspense beats. If an already absurd scene of Mirren snooping through an office lacks tension, well then, let’s send in the after-hours canoodling couple to fool around. When you start trying to spread the jelly, it’s an admission that all you have is plain peanut butter.

The biggest hint that someone knows something is wrong – cars are everywhere. People entering cars, people leaving cars, quick stops, doors snapping open, ominous drives to ominous Ukrainian nowheres overlaid with ominous electronic music. As we reach a flat tire ending inside a Ukrainian mental hospital, it’s obvious that the spare isn’t the only thing being pulled out of the rear.

The automotive strangulation is so different from what’s so good about the sixties portion, so unforced and natural. Even being adapted from an Israeli movie, I would have considered removing a good portion of the modern story. I do recommend the film, but The Debt is a film where less would have been more.

Last Year at Marienbad

2011-08-28T14:16:00.001-07:00

(Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown - El Paso, Texas - and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14 features 80 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports on the classic films that he watches at the festival.)

Last Year at Marienbad
(1961, d. Alain Resnais)

A man and a woman discuss a statue in a French garden. In the male stone figure, the man sees a protector, cautioning his wife against a danger up the road. The woman sees it differently, that the female figure has a spark in her eye from something that lies beyond.

Is this a statue of doom or fascination? The camera circles the stone. It picks apart the figures, examines them piece by piece, hand, foot, head, all outside of the context of the whole. Then we pull behind the figures to find a vast pool of water in front of them.

What is this body of water before them? Have they reached the sea? Is this what frightens or fascinates them? No and no, of course. We know the context. We know it's not the sea, only a pool at a chateau, its position in front of the statue a seeming coincidence. How do we draw these lines of coincidence? Where does art end and reality begin? Where does the observer end and the observed begin?

Two men play a game. Set out on a table are cards, toothpicks, finally photographs. The only rule - the same man wins every time. The crowd spins theories as to this feat of domination. They try to wrestle this fact with words. The victories move forward, indifferent to explanation, game after game.

A woman receives a photograph. A man insists this photo was taken last year, maybe at Marienbad (maybe not), when the two were lovers (or were they not), when they spun elaborate plans to run away together. The woman insists she does not remember. The man must be mistaken. How can he remember it so well, and how can she remember it not at all? The photo could be anywhere, anytime. Isn't this proof? How can a woman staring at a camera grasp the entirety of a past?

They say one thing in one room, then run into the same words later on the balcony. The images have shaken free of the words, follow their own drummer, circle back on themselves. Times change. Colors change. Details change. Never the same. Who are this man and this woman? Did they really meet one year ago? Did it happen? Is it happening now, if there is even a "now?" Are they flirting? Avoiding suspicion? Is he only the romantic fantasy of a lonely wife? Is she only the fictional muse of an artist who has thrust himself into his own story?

A mystery wrapped in an enigma, baked into a delicate chocolate eclair, and placed in a vase at the center of a hedgerow maze for years, weeks, days, seconds, centuries – because really, when it comes to time, wouldn't an artist say it's all just a blink of an eye? - there is no way out of Alain Resnais' brilliant, maddening, and brilliantly maddening Last Year at Marienbad. We glide through corridors of an ornate chateau that seem to have no end. The music swells and sharpens, dies and sharpens. A voice repeats a paragraph, fading in and out of sound. Shadowy men and women circle, chat, freeze. Are they real, ghosts, unstuck in time?

The architecture imitates the circular nature of the human mind - the way we visit an idea, consider the possibilities, visit the idea, draw a conclusion, inject a meaning, visit the idea, reopen the book, change our mind. Marienbad prefers this psychological reality over a linear and material reality - a baroque collage formed from imperfect fragments of memory, knowledge, speculation, intuition, fantasy, desire, nightmare, art and context.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, the co-writer of this script, was a noted mid-century French writer whose work was often noted for attacking the use of symbolism, preferring to analyze each thing as itself rather than as a stand-in for another. Why should an object have a second meaning when we're not sure that it has a first? In writing, this meant long, descriptive passages about objects and a characters' movements. In film, I think he has gone about it another way - by making the audience aware of how each member - like the couple theorizing about the statue - projects a psyche, a context, and ultimately a meaning onto the work of art. The film undermines meaning by making it clear that this meaning comes from us and not from it. The most important question about Last Year at Marienbad isn't "what does it mean?" The most important question about Last Year at Marienbad is the question before - "Why does it have to mean anything at all?”

The Awful Truth

2011-08-28T14:14:00.001-07:00

The Awful Truth

(1937, d. Leo McCarey)

(Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown - El Paso, Texas - and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14 features 80 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports on the classic films that he watches at the festival.)

Faced with a prolonged economic calamity of devastating proportions, Depression-era America did the only sensible thing that a self-respecting bankrupt nation could do - it made an endless series of comedies about zany millionaires.

If in the thirties you lived in a tent in the Arabian desert and only knew America through its films, then you would be convinced that every American woman was an oddball heiress who probably owned an unusually spunky dog. The image that America sent into the world was quite different from its real domestic life.

If this wasn't exactly using art to capture the zeitgeist, it at least had the benefit of being damn funny. Among the best of these films - arguably the best - is Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth. The Thin Man might be more romantic and polished. Bringing Up Baby, wackier. The Philadelphia Story, more star-studded, His Girl Friday better known. But The Awful Truth runs on a wry series of ironic lines, arched eyebrows, knowing glances, and a genuine, recognizable emotional current that makes it stand out from its competition.

The Awful Truth has Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a stylish and unfaithful New York couple who choose to divorce on a whim. They realize their mistake early, but pride keeps them from reconciliation. Each one gets engaged, and each one sabotages the new engagement – his with an heiress, hers with an awkward millionaire from Oklahoma who lives with his mother across the hall (Ralph Bellamy).

To understand what I like about The Awful Truth, you should first know what I dislike about The Philadelphia Story. In that 1940 comedy, Cary Grant does nothing to earn the heiress (Katharine Hepburn) except show up, sit around, be rich, wait for Hepburn to let her guard down and for the Hollywood star system to kick in. He doesn’t work for it at all, as he does in The Awful Truth. Grant may be polished confidence on the outside, but he’s a playful and vulnerable child inside. He wants what he wants, and he's willing to play ball to get it. One of the film's best moments is his cage match with a sitting room chair in the middle of a singing recital. He does the thing that a star can never supposedly do – he lets the chair win.

So much is written about Grant and not enough about Ralph Bellamy. The definition of “character actor,” Bellamy was formed out of some scientific goo as the Anti-Cary Grant. He spent the thirties playing that part in movie after movie. There was good reason that he served as the Anti-Cary Grant – he was darn good at not being Cary Grant. If his part were written today, he would be a high-rolling jerk who never listens to the heroine, shows up late, and says nasty things about her friends. As an oil-rich Oklahoman on a mission to the big city, Bellamy gives us a comic manufacture that’s alternately creepy and sweet without ever losing sympathy. We know he’s not the right guy for Dunne, but you never doubt there’s some sweet girl for him back in Tulsa.

There’s a famous nightclub scene in The Awful Truth, in which Grant lassoes Dunne into dancing with Bellamy. Ever the oblivious Oklahoman, Bellamy leads her in a vigorous dance in which she can barely keep up. The perfect look on Dunne gives to Grant screams, “Rescue me.” Grant obliges by having the band play the song again. It’s a moment that cuts through the games being played and tells us what we already know - that when the theses two are meant to be together. It’s hard to imagine this couple living out their lives entirely content or faithful. But you know they’ll spend a lifetime of chasing each other around the kitchen table.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

2011-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Grade: C
Cast: Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison
Director: Guillermo Del Toro

If we were loading cultural items onto a deep space vessel headed beyond the Milky Way and you wanted a prime example of the horror movie with a disturbed little girl (Bailee Madison) moves in with her father and stepmother in a threatening old mansion, a crazy secret murder in the basement, a grumpy groundskeeper who knows all the secrets, an oblivious father (Guy Pearce) who refuses to move even after the mutilations begin, a mother-bear maternal figure (Katie Holmes), an ominous teddy bear, little man-eating monkey-men crawling through the shadows, a lead character who always does the dumbest thing possible to move the plot along (Creepy voices slithering out of the furnace? I think I’ll open it!), and superbly stylish framing and editing, then your choice might be Guillermo Del Toro’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark might be the one you pick. It’s the Voyager II candidate of well-made derivative schlock.

One Day

2011-08-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

One Day

Grade: B
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarckson, Romola Garai
Director: Lone Scherfig

We've reached the point that a significant portion of the English-speaking world - that bankrupt, riot-helmented, penalty-kick-blowing island named England - has reduced all acting to one thing - the ability to perfect the British accent.

The land of Olivier has ceased caring about things like sympathy, emotion, delivery, comic timing. They are only interested in an American's ability to speak in their certain way, as if the rest of us are somehow deficient. It raises the question: why don' they do the rest of the world a favor and start speaking like us?

The vitriol over Anne Hathaway's accent in One Day has been enough to ask the Archbishop of Caterbury to intervene. British fans of the 2009 David Nicholls novel wonder why Carey Mulligan wasn't chosen for the role of shy Emma (presumably the filmmakers want a few Americans to actually see it.) It's true, Hathaway's accent is a little dodgy, and it comes and goes. The rest of it she delivers pretty well in this literate romance.

Directed by Lone Scherfig as her follow-up to sort-of breakthrough An Education, One Day is relatively low-key affair. It prefers character development and relatively subtle shadings of dialogue (at least compared to the comedies of this summer) to build a genuine emotional base. The film even has one great scene, a frank mother-son discussion between Dex (Jim Sturgess) and his dying mother (Patricia Clarkson) that's incredibly tender.
Emma and Dex, the shy, studious girl and the registered heartbreaker, spend the night together after their college graduation on July 15, 1988. Emma's record player kills the romantic mood, spitting out Tracy Chapman's "Talkin' Bout a Revolution." The perils of late-80s political awareness.

The pair decides to be friends, and they join each other for each subsequent July 15 (for saints' fans, that's St. Swithin's Day). He meets quick career success, becoming a television presenter on an awesomely cheesy early 90s music show, but his fame overwhelms his life. She becomes a waitress, a teacher, and eventually a children's author. We navigate with them through their trials and successes until the inevitable crown of their relationship.

You can measure the tone of an era in several ways. Scherfig's feel for period detail of the 1990s, one of the best things about An Education, remains sure - dingy flats, combat boot fashion, sleek surfaces. She also captures the strangely matched impulses toward art, intellect, and integrity on one side and partying its tail off on the other. When Emma reads a book on a nude beach, it's Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That's exactly the book that that girl would be reading in that time and that place.

Does anyone really know why a romance works? I can observe good chemistry between the leads. I can say the peppered dialogue is a grade smarter than we usually get for romances, and the characters a grade deeper. I can say that One Day is so honest and roundly developed that you don't notice the conventions that it does indulge. When it finally goes for the big melodramatic moment, it feels like a violation, which is a measure of the film's overall success.

30 Minutes or Less

2011-08-27T15:49:00.001-07:00

30 Minutes or Less

Grade: B
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari
Director: Ruben Fleischer

Like any good pizza delivery driver with a bomb vest strapped to his body, 30 Minutes or Less knows how to get there, get the job done and get it over with a second to spare.

When it comes to explosives, every second counts, and there aren't many films with such a clear-eyed grasp of its premise's lifespan. LIke a good pizza, it goes down with a smile before you can taste too much of it, before the cheese has a chance to get moldy and old.

Coming off of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg slides way down the food chain. He plays a pizza driver caught up in a murder plot hatched by the nincompoop son of a lottery winner (Danny McBride) who wantsto live the American Dream of opening a tanning store that doubles as a brothel. To pay for a professional hit, his accomplice locks a bomb vest on the pizza boy's body to force him to rob a bank, which drags in a friendly teacher (Aziz Ansari, a veteran of the Apatow circuit).

Director Ruben Fleischer, the writer/director of Zombieland, takes inspiration from action-comedies of the eighties and does a generally nice job with it. He gets another nice collaboration out of Eisenberg, whom I've never thought of as a genuine-article movie star, but maybe the mechanics are there. I don't get the cult of Danny McBride, though. He goes from movie to movie as a petulant dimwit with nothing else. He seems destined to ruin a Wes Anderson movie.

30 Minutes or Less might have the short lifespan of a meat lovers supreme on a table in front of a hungry teenage baseball team. But it will taste about as good.

The Change-Up

2011-08-27T15:34:00.001-07:00

The Change-Up

Grade: D

Cast: Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin

Director: David Dobkin

This summer, we’ve reached a crisis point in the American comedy: why can’t Jason Bateman get promoted or laid?

The summer comedies are stocked with middle-aged men who dream of having sex but never do. That’s a healthy sign for marriage, I suppose. But if you’re a married dad who secretly wishes he could spread the seed again, do you want to spend $10 to go watch a movie about another guy who can’t, either? Where’s the fantasy? Where’s the edge? Face it, this has been one long, scalding summer of “Whatever you do, do not make me have sex with the babysitter!”

So the infidelity comedy has become the fidelity comedy, and other than the audience, no one seems to get the short end of the stick – so to speak – as often as Bateman. He is the only guy in Horrible Bosses who doesn’t receive an explicit come-on from Jennifer Aniston. A couple of years ago in Extract, he got Mila Kunis into a hotel room where he …. promptly fell asleep.

In The Change Up, he plays a lawyer and family man who switches bodies with his irresponsible best friend, a womanizer having a hard time kicking off his acting career— probably because he has made the ill-advised career choice of living in Atlanta.

Disembodied from the ball and chain, the family lawyer gets to sleep in, smoke pot and figure out reasons not to have sex with Olivia Wilde. The womanizer takes on family responsibility that he knows nothing about, a legal career that he knows nothing about, and a tricky marriage to Leslie Mann (a gifted comic actress with a weird attraction to movies with recycled television plots.).

The question about The Change-Up – who is sitting around Hollywood thinking, “What this world needs is another body-switching movie?” And who is sitting around Hollywood thinking, “You know who I have always wanted to see switch bodies – Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds!” I once knew a girl without any artistic taste. She thought that the live-action Rocky and Bullwinkle movie “was going to rock.” And even she thought body-switching plots were stupid.

There are two ways that this most tired television plot could have any chance of being worthwhile. One way is to do it with two well-established and opposite screen personalities. It might be enjoyable to watch this plot with, say, DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman in their prime.

The other possibility is the arty one – have the characters excel in their new lives. The characters find they’re better being the other person than they are at being themselves. Their spouses are completely satisfied. The people around them like them better. Then you create interesting questions about what our identity really means to us.

You know you’re not going to find that type of soul searching in a movie that starts with a father of twins taking incoming fire while changing diapers. While Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin launched the R-rated comedy wave, that the only launch that The Change-Up is likely to make.

2011-08-27T15:31:00.000-07:00

Crazy, Stupid, Love
Grade: C
Cast: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Analeigh Tipton, Kevin Bacon,
Director: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa

I like marriage.

I do. At least in theory. I am unmarried, myself. But my parents are married. My friends are married. It seems like a good deal.

So why is it that more and more, I find myself rooting against marriages when I watch them on film? In real life, whether divorce re-invigorates miserable people is situational. As movies go, for better or worse, it usually frees them. I’m not sure why. Perhaps writers overdo the marital suffering so the revival seems more dramatic, not realizing it buries the romance for good. That is certainly the case with Crazy, Stupid, Love.

I have a simple rule about the success of an onscreen romance. A good one feels like a movie is conspiring to keep the couple apart. A bad one feels like the movie is shoving them together against the movie’s will. Crazy, Stupid, Love shoves like a school lunch line on chocolate milk Friday. The marriage of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore is cemetery dead, probably in a way that didn’t play to the writers on the page. The worst marriages are those that don’t just die but drown the two people with them.

Their separation sets in motion the best (and luckily, longest) part of the film – the My Fair Lady transformation plot between the serial ladies man (Ryan Gosling) and Carell, a henpecked father of two decked out in baggy jeans and New Balance sneakers. In My Fair Lady, professor Henry Higgins tries to turn Eliza Doolittle into a proper lady. Gosling’s challenge is to turn Carell into an improper man.

Freed of marriage, this section crackles with life. The men have chemistry, each has a handle on the character’s (admittedly one-dimensional) tics and tacs. As Carell learns the pickup moves with predictable speed bumps, the story has enough momentum to carry things. Why does it retreat into a re-marriage comedy, when no one wants Carell to sink back into that lifelong of despair? The film charges hard for the comfortable landing, with a schmaltzy final speech that makes you want to burn a wedding dress.

There is some attempt to make it an ensemble comedy, the type that requires you to draw arrows Glenn Beck-style between pictures of the characters. An office mate (Kevin Bacon) has a thing for Moore. The mouthy son (Jonah Bobo) has a thing for the babysitter (Analeigh Tipton). The babysitter has a thing for Carell, who loves and leaves his son’s English teacher (Marisa Tomei). Emma Stone is in there, too, somehow and somewhere. She’s a young lawyer who hangs out with her lawyer friends and lawyer beau. If you want to know how far off some of Crazy, Stupid Love is from reality, the lawyers wear tailored suits everywhere they go. In reality, young lawyers have already surrendered to baggy jeans and New Balance sneakers, too.

It’s hard to judge comedies anymore. The standard has slumped so far. So a film like Crazy, Stupid Love can be fairly funny, with more character development than its competition, but still feel shallow. It’s certainly better than a lot of Steve Carell’s recent summertime mass-audience comedies, but is it good or just better? You want to pat it on the head for making a little headway. Yet you don’t want to encourage it too much, either, lest you wind up with too many more.

The Guard

2011-08-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Guard

Grade: B

Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Mark Strong

Director: John Michael McDonagh

What is a veteran Irish policeman to do?

There he is, tending to his rounds of bar fights and domestic disturbances. Stealing drugs off car wreck victims. Indulging in lovely imported visitors from “the agency.” Thinking nothing of selling the IRA back their lost-and-found weapons.

His sleepy coastal town isn’t the first place that you would suspect for a major drug deal. But that’s what it comes to An international drug ring is running its goods through the town. It’s so big that it attracts an African-American FBI agent (Don Cheadle), whom Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) delights in engaging with racially-tinged deadpan banter.

Boyle Is a fabulous character to follow, a man who skimps on small moral matters but whose heart is in the right place on the big ones. His encyclopedic knowledge of his village grapevine plays out against the sophistication of the FBI.

Director John Michael McDonagh borrows Gleeson from his brother Martin (director of In Bruges) and gets a whale of a comic performance from him. He has different shades and levels in a way that an American comedy character would never have. Outside of the winning performances, McDonagh also gives us something comedies are often too afraid to give – a unique look born of the village in which it is set.

It’s a natural comedy, arriving from character and place rather than forced situations. It comes from comes from villagers who watch too much American television, philosophical criminals who cite Nietzsche as they shoot victims. At times, it might get caught up a little too much in Wes Anderson weirdness and homages to spaghetti westerns. For the most part, it’s a satisfying dark buddy cop action-comedy.

Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-08-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

Captain America: The First Avenger
Grade: B
Cast: Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, Sebastian Stan
Director: Joe Johnston

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. But he likely invented modern life. He then used his fortune to build Greenfield Village, a park dedicated to the preservation of the horse and buggy world he had nudged to the past.

The further we go with technology, the more we have a fascination with the past. As the future becomes more artificial, we come to know the past as the only thing more grounded and authentic. So if the kids go online to buy vinyl records or swanky fedoras, it makes more sense than it appears.

With all the technological wizardry in filmmaking, nostalgia and sentimentality are increasing forces in this summer’s movies. The nostalgia wave extends from the Spielberg-retro Super 8 to the artiest of arties – Tree of Life. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the surprise hit of the summer, is a study of the joys and risks of living in the past.
Captain America: The First Avenger is the summer’s final sweet indulgence in sentimentality, a 3-D tribute to 1940s retro-futurism and patriotic nostalgia. It shares imaginative space with Spielberg’s Raiders flicks and countless World War II movies. The tearjerking ending of this endearing truffle will almost make you stand and sing “We’ll Meet Again” without a hint of Kubrick’s irony.

Captain America ambles along in this glorified past, when America believed itself an Arsenal of Decency and the nation believed in better living through chemistry. American power is undeniably beneficial. Science advances with flying car optimism. Love is something delayed in the name of duty. It is as if revisionism never happened, warmly embracing the nation’s most idealistic values.

Captain America is born out of this innocent time, when a science experiment to create a perfect supersoldier would seem like a great idea. It’s all the better to fight HYDRA, the Nazis’ scientific division, headed by the mutant Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), who wants to teach Hitler a thing or two about mass murder. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a flimsy asthmatic chosen by a loopy professor (Stanley Tucci) to transform into a superhunk. Captain America becomes the model of humble power sticking up for the little guy.

With its amber-coated vision of burly GIs, saluting chorus girls, black-booted villains and a wildly pretty compatriot fighting in the perfect red lipstick, Captain America is something more than a fun summer ride. It’s a yearning for the innocence of yesteryear. Just as much, it yearns for the ways that movies used to make us feel.

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

Horrible Bosses
Grade: D
Cast: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx.
Director: Seth Gordon

Horrible Bosses pretends to be a movie for all people who hate their bosses, but really it’s a film for all people who hate film.

Directed by Seth Gordon and partly produced by Brett Ratner, it’s the a classic case of a movie that doesn’t seem that wretched, until you start to take it apart afterwards and realize how badly you wasted two hours. It has some funny moments, yes, but that barely hides the fact that it approaches a cultural disaster.

There isn’t a single moment in Horrible Bosses – an ensemble comedy about three dorks who decide to kill their obnoxious bosses – that is remotely cinematic. It has no eye whatsoever, nor any scale beyond sketch comedy. It’s not surprising that director Gordon, since his well-received documentary The Kings of Kong, has worked mainly in episodic television. There’s not a shot in the movie that doesn’t say “sitcom.”

Calling Bosses a sit-com is unfair to sitcoms. Even the average sitcom must create characters with a consistent personality and acceptable motives. Sometimes sitcom characters begin as a single joke, but sooner or later they get a mother and a father or maybe a quirky girlfriend. Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel had far more depth than Bosses’ randy dentist, a one-joke sketch comedy monster.

Would being pursued by a hot, sexually forward boss be enough to drive a man to murder? That’s what we’re asked to believe about the dental assistant played by Charlie Day (from the minor TV hit It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), a random comedy generator in the style of a poor man’s Zach Galifianakis. Why does it bother him? He loves his fiancée, of course! So if he wants to be with his gal forever, why does he risk the electric chair? And why does he spend all of his time plotting murder at the bar with his friends instead of half-watching Dancing with the Stars on the couch? Why, you almost get the sense that his fiancee exists as a flimsy prop so that he has a reason to hate his boss.

I usually value Jason Bateman’s put-upon-everyman-just-trying-to-hold-it-together routine. He’s quite good at it. But it may be reaching the point of being a signature tic rather than a fresh character. It also isn’t exactly a murderous personality type, even with a slimy, egotistical jerk of a corporate boss (Kevin Spacey). The only boss here that might invite a murder plot is Colin Farrell’s cokehead. But after this film and Hall Pass, Saturday Night Liver Jason Sudeikis’ middle-aged horndog persona has taken a remarkably short time to seem stale.

By the way, isn’t conspiracy to commit murder still a crime? In the happily ever after ending, the cops seem remarkably cool with it. Maybe they just want to leave the door open for future filmmakers to kill a similar project.

Transformers 3

2011-07-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Transformers 3-D
Grade: C
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand
Director: Michael Bay

A funny thing happened on my way to pan Michael Bay’s midsummer mecha monster mash Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It turned out that I liked about half of it.

Strangely that would not be the gargantuan 3-D final hour of demolished Chicago skyscrapers, impossible Special Forces stunts, flying glass, metal tentacles, and super-powerful interplanetary robots that could think of no better disguise than the cab of a truck. The evil Decepticons want to turn the human race into slaves, doomed to change out the 5W-30 every 3,000 miles for the rest of eternity. The Autobots with their Earthling allies fight to preserve the most essential human rights –like the right to have a girlfriend who’s 100 times out of your league.

Apparently against the good judgment of the entirety of the filmgoing world, I enjoyed the buildup that leads to that final hour of phony spectacle. Over the first hour or so, this film finally tastes the high-speed anything-goes comic sensibility that the previous entries miserably failed to find. It isn’t smart or gleaming enough to be true screwball, exactly, but it gets lost completely, admirably, in its own lunacy. This time the lunatic is on the grass (and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon).

The joys of the film, too, are not solely found in its overwhelming touches of humanity (yes, joke). They lie in its willingness to stretch technology. Take even the first shot in the film, among its best shots, and it should be nothing – a simple establishment shot of deep space. But it looks like a DEEP SPACE that goes on FOREVER. Say what you will about Bay’s macho posing – he shakes the most out of the 3-D experience. In this long prologue, the “camera” defies gravity to move in and out of an alien spaceship as well as the mechanics of the robot inside, as if they are one.

Things go south when shifting gears toward the emotional assembly line. The integration of human physique with CG landscape is splendid, the integration of human emotion less so. Shia LeBeouf is considerably better at adventure and comedy than convincingly portraying his emotional bond with a classic seventies muscle car. He is only slightly better with his improbably stunning girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whitely, who replaces Megan Fox). Like so many other unemployed college graduates out there, Sam Witwicky has taken solace in the warm glow of a lingerie model. Even better, it’s a lingerie model who doesn’t mind him eating Cheetos on the couch all day.

So is this a better film than the other Transformers? How could it not be? Someone bothered to edit this one, for one. Rarely have so much skill and so much technology been put in the service of so much idiocy.

Cars 2

2011-07-11T13:49:00.001-07:00

Cars 2
Grade: D
Cast: (Voice) Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, John Turturro
Director: John Lasseter

Imagine that after Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace George Lucas ditched the whole Anakin/Vader storyline and turned Attack of the Clones over to Jar Jar Binks.

If you can imagine that without crawling into a mental fetal position, then you can imagine Cars 2. In this animated sequel from Disney’s Pixar studio, Owen Wilson’s neurotic race car Lightning McQueen turns over the keys to the two-ton four-wheeled village idiot Mater, the buck-toothed tow truck. Jar Jar, it’s your big chance!

Usually, keys get turned over after a few drinks; we can’t rule that out here. Effectively, they took the film away from a genuine comic talent in Wilson and gave it to Larry, The Cable Guy.
Perhaps they went fishing for a fresher tone. Or perhaps Larry’s schedule was surprisingly open. For whatever reason, the change inserts one-note comic relief into the role of the main character. While it has its cute moments, the hit-over-the-head-by-comedy feeling hurts like a five-car pileup on the far turn.

The plot itself is a bit of a two-car pileup of a pair of wildly different storylines. Lightning McQueen enters a worldwide racing series against an Italian rival. The races are part of a campaign to promote a new all-natural alternative fuel, made out of things that a bear would wipe his bottom with.

This is backdrop for the real plot, an espionage spoof in which Mater accidentally falls into international intrigue after being mistaken for a spy. The James Bond of British sedans admires his doggedness – somehow Mater never breaks his cover story of being a simpleton. This plotline begs the question, why would you make a film filled with James Bond allusions when the humor here wouldn’t be funny to anyone over six years old?

When it comes to animated films, and especially Pixar films, I usually shoot a little lower than everyone else. It’s best to judge relatively to other Pixar films, and I think Cars really is the weakest of the Pixar franchises. While the Pixar technical sheen is present (the movement of the animated race cars is slick and life-like), the project feels obligatory. After a few summers of celebrated animated features, you wonder if Cars 2 felt like a letdown to its creators. This summer’s two major animated movies (Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2) are tricked-out 3-D sequels that have no reason for existing other than the fact that the first one made a ton of money.

The Green Lantern

2011-07-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Green Lantern
Grade: D
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett
Director: Martin Campbell

Have you ever gotten into a conversation – and for the life of me, I hope you haven’t – about the supposed fascist underpinnings of comic book superheros?

A film that accepts and teases this fascist nature is The Green Lantern. Test pilot Hal Jordan joins an interplanetary army built on the idea that pure willpower can overcome fear, making the universe safe for corrupt politicians, the military industrial complex, and Blake Lively’s two emotions (for which she has one tone of voice). Triumph of the will, indeed.

That’s not to say these Little Green Brownshirts are without their white hat moments. Their multicultural imperial army is open to purple warriors, elves with crew cuts, and anthropomorphic fish. And while all members share a green uniform and ray-shooting ring, in a modern concession to individuality they let Ryan Reynolds keep his perfect hair. They do fight evil, an evil so lacking personality that even these intergalactic stormtroopers look like the good guys, and so careless with strategy that its first instinct is to blurt out its evil plans to anyone who floats past.

The Green Lantern sees evil in every dark cloud (granted, a spooky planet killer with fangs and tentacles) but sees no evil in Lucas-level screenwriting. Nor does it hear evil in the way that every character catapulted through the air screams something like, “Wooooooooah, oooooooooh, …. Oh.” It also gives us a sub-villain who’s so unlikable, so physically repulsive, so naturally demonic, that he’s a college teacher. (Word to the Hollywood establishment: never dress your villain in a hoodie. It’s hard to feel too menaced by someone who still orders midnight pizza.)

The Green Lantern is bland fun for awhile in a goofy, corny sort of way. The hundreds of millions sunk by director Martin Campbell into 3-D, CG, and every other set of initials don’t go to waste. The script also has an occasional sense of humor about itself and the genre. These brief touches of humor show where The Green Lantern might have been more adventurous, more imaginative, more grotesque, and more genuine.

Beautiful Boy

2011-07-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Beautiful Boy
Grade: C
Cast: Michael Sheen, Maria Bello, Denis Leary, Meat Loaf
Director: Shawn Ku
free admission granted

It’s clear from the early stages of Beautiful Boy that a dish will be thrown.

The school-shooting/domestic drama is a classic example of a dish-thrower, the sort of movie where quiet but steady family tension eventually takes its punishing toll on the family tableware. Like ancient Greek actors, the dishes perform in the horror of not knowing if they will survive the shoot. If the props guys start shoveling innocent-looking cookies on top of you, you know your time has come.

Movie shorthand for inner turmoil, the thrown dish often inhabits the same habitat as a shrieking, hair-pulling husband-wife boilover. I have only so much tolerance for such scenes. They’re vestiges of deconstructing plays that wanted to puncture the happy ending in the name of reality. Frankly, their over-the-top-ness cracks me up. That said, Beautiful Boy owns a live one that operates in the realm of In the Bedroom. It grabbed my attention. After I stopped laughing for a second.

The tragedy gnawing at separating spouses Michael Sheen and Maria Bello is the college shooting rampage perpetrated by their son. Why the son goes bananas is a mystery. No one really ever knows why these things happen. (That said, has anyone examined the mental effects of being followed by a treacly piano score? Or prolonged exposure to living in a world of washed-out cinematography? ) Regardless, the self-examination and the guilt are vexing, real, and an unavoidable part of every day.

Beautiful Boy has a lot to recommend it. It develops real characters. It treats them with generosity, and offers a rare portrayal of an amicable divorce, in which the spouses still care but are no longer in love. Unlike Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and reportedly unlike Lynne Ramsey’s upcoming We Need to Talk about Kevin, it doesn’t aestheticize school violence. Debut director Shawn Ku seems more interested in a sensitive portrait of the minutia of suffering.

Michael Sheen is winning wide praise for his role as the father, a corporate careerist lost in some other world. He does a splendid job of entering and sustaining his character. Yet even his subtle scenes have the scent of an actor who’s looking for The Big Moment. He has the subtlety of someone saying, “Look at how subtle I can be.” I came away more impressed by the performance of Maria Bello. I do wonder, however, is it necessary for Bello and Amy Ryan to coordinate schedules and make sure someone is always on duty, in case an indie housewife role walks into the store?

There are two ways to consume Beautiful Boy. Part of me says this is the sort of small, thoughtful, worthy filmmaking that the indie scene exists to promote and preserve. And part of me wants to check the listing for the next showing of Bridesmaids. It’s not my idea of a Friday night. But I do respect it. And that’s enough for an honest day’s work.

Kung Fu Panda 2

2011-07-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

Kung Fu Panda 2
Grade: D
Cast: Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffmann
Director: Mark Osbourne, John Stevenson

Kung Fu Panda 2 breaks new ground in the history of cinema. Everyone knows you can’t use 3-D in the second movie in a series. You have to wait until the third one. Then again the second movie strategy makes sense. All the better to hold up helpless parents at the box office, I suppose.

Breaking the 3- D sequel custom appears to be Panda’s lone innovation. Otherwise this is one of the laziest sequels that you can imagine. Take a lovably clumsy warrior panda, add some daddy issues with a long-necked father goose, and mount the latest chapter of the epic eternal struggle between panda and peacock. Arm the peacock with a cannon that shoots Happy Fun Ball to devastating results. Add sweet and sour sauce. Steer the story by that very famous Chinese proverb, “Give them more of the same.”

What worked for the first film was its touch at spoofing kung fu and action films. In between the animated action were light moments that sent up the silliness of the genres that inspired it. In this sequel, such moments are so far between, in this more straightforward action cartoon with less comedy, or at least with less comedy that works. Perhaps the only thing that does work is a fun sequence in which Po the panda and his kung fu friends disguise themselves as in a bug costume from a Chinese parade. To overcome their enemies, they “swallow” them at the mouth and pass them out the other end.

My favorite part of the film? The part where the film stopped, the lights came on, and we found out we were in the middle of a tornado warning. Now that was an innovation. Unfortunately for you, I don’t think your screening will have that part. But if you are stuck in there, you might pray for some nasty weather.

Tree of Life

2011-07-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

Tree of Life
Grade: A
Cast: Hunter McCracken, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Laramie Eppler
Director: Terrence Malick
free admission granted

Absence grows mystery.

If Terrence Malick is a saint of cinema, then this is his holy lesson. Over a four-decade career, the mercurial American visionary has mastered absence and flowered a daunting mystery. After making one of the most impressive debuts in American film history, 1973’s Badlands, he quit talking to the press. After the dreamy masterpiece Days of Heaven five years later, the perfectionist dipped a toe back in and quickly removed it. He then famously disappeared for 20 years.

Swathed in stunning cinematography, pieced together by mood and memory (rather than linear story), The Tree of Life is a radical contemplation of mystery. These mysteries take forms from childhood curiosities to cosmic riddles, stretching from the Big Bang to a fifties Texas family and on to the end of time.

Michael Phillips, the Chicago Tribune critic, calls The Tree of Life “an infinitely more forgiving 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Critics and viewers will find a natural similarity with Tree’s centerpiece, an already famous 20 minute pre-historic spectacular, sketching the origins of the universe and the planet Earth. Stars, cells, seas, volcanoes, trees, sharks, jellyfish and, yes, dinosaurs. This section, though, seems to be a critique of 2001 rather than agreement. If Kubrick were still with us, he might feel the need to reply.

As a philosophy student at Harvard and Oxford, Malick studied the German thinker Martin Heidegger. Like a philosopher, Malick interprets 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence, aka “the part with the apes,” as an imagined “state of nature.” When Kubrick’s ape strikes another with a bone, the notorious pessimist suggests human consciousness arises from intelligence and violence. In reply, Malick’s dinosaur comes across a partner and thinks about making a meal of it. Instead, it senses its suffering and moves on. This is the “Dawn of Empathy,” and The Tree of Life gives us consciousness born of love. We soon jump-cut across eons not to an orbiting military satellite but to a pregnant woman’s belly.

Still, it’s not all sunshine and dandelions and epic amounts of oak wood. Love arises as the twin of suffering and the realization of death. Why do we suffer? Why do we love if it only ends in suffering? Malick’s characters live a precarious distance from the divine. They can sense it through love and beauty, but feel estranged from it due to loss and death. Playing the film’s angelic mother, the flame-haired actress Jessica Chastain points to the sky and tells her child, “That’s where God lives.” This is a myth we tell children to make concrete those things that, if they exist, hide in a divine realm. In other words, mystery.

“What are we to you?” she demands, as she bears the loss of her grown son. Without words, she wanders through the streets and lawns of her neighborhood. We skip quickly between images of comfort and distress, as Tree of Life opens with a potent rush of grief and nostalgia. The editing makes clear these are moments imagined years later by a spiritually fried architect, crawling through a maze of glass towers in a modern Texas city.

In a moment of unspecified anguish, the architect Jack (Sean Penn – you can tell Malick puts much more thought into his metaphysics than his character names) dwells on his mother’s suffering after the death of his brother. In endlessly beautiful images from cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, his memory collects images of his youth with his three brothers, enjoying bike rides and throwing footballs deep into the gigantic sky. The splendor of youth is presided by the sweet light of his mother, who he thinks is a saint. I don’t mean figuratively. He envisions her floating in the air near a tree. It is through her, he says in voiceover, that God first spoke to him.

His father (played by an all-in Brad Pitt) is a loving tyrant. He pushes the boys with strong discipline, especially the oldest, believing it will toughen them for the real world. As he grows, Jack (played as a child by Hunter McCracken, whom everyone feels obliged to call “jug-eared”) struggles to reconcile the world’s beauty with hardship, injustice, and his first taste of death. Confused by life’s random pitfalls, he tells God that he wishes he could see the world as He does.

Different observers have different things to say about this portrait of family life in small-town Texas, a Book of Job drawn from Malick’s real life. What strikes me is the seriousness that children place in their first experiences. Every first time seems like a miracle or a sin. Every small event has cosmic importance. Every act seems like a weighty revelation of the soul.

Religiously, I would place Malick as a skeptical Christian. At times, he seems like a man from another time, a monk slaving over a text in a medieval monastery (which would deprive him of his mammoth gifts as a filmmaker). While open to all, his films like spiritually rich biblical stories from the modern age. It’s like the Bible never stopped. We simply stopped writing it.

In this, I think The Tree of Life shares a mission with 2001: Each is an effort to resolve ancient wisdom and modern thinking. It does so by introducing us with renewed eyes to a world of beauty and suffering. It promises the meaning of life. It substitutes the awe of experience.

Incendies

2011-07-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

Incendies
Grade: B
Cast: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette
Director: Denis Villaneuve
free admission granted

The thriller Incendies, a 2010 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, is a Canadian product spoken in French about events that took place, fictionally speaking, in Lebanon during its infamous civil war.

The death of Canadian immigrant with a secret past, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), places the burden of discovery on her twin children. The daughter, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin), is a graduate student in mathematics at a Canadian university. The son, Simon (Maxim Gaudette), has idled his life while taking care of their sickened and peculiar mom.

In her will, the mother leaves the children two envelopes to deliver before they can bury her. One goes to a brother they never knew they had, who is lost in Lebanon. The other is to the father they never knew. Soon thejounrey leads Jeanne to Lebanon, where she negotiates the landscape and her murky family history.

From there, Incendies gradually unravels the mother’s trying path through Lebanon’s years of Muslim-Christian strife. In depicting this time, the film spares few brutal details. The one that stands out most is a massacre of a busload of Muslims by Christian militiamen. The doomed passengers are first treated to a hail of bullets and then set on fire. Only a cross on a necklace saves the woman from being burned alive.

Incendies resembles the noble tradition of politically-aware films of the 70s and 80s, where outsiders must travel into the dangerous centers of international strife on a personal mission. Think Missing or The Killing Fields. Even think the soap opera of The Year of Living Dangerously. But Incendies feels more gripping and real. The style director Denis Villanueve carries that dusty, gritty verisimilitude achieved so often in modern international cinema. He tosses in an eerie Radiohead track from time to time to relieve that claustrophobia.

The film, based on an acclaimed 2003 play by Wajdi Mouawad, reaches for a shock ending that feels like it might work better on stage. Whether or not that’s true, it doesn’t work for the film. Until that moment, Incendies is an intriguing and realistic journey through a time and a life.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4

2011-07-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

Pirates of the Caribbean 4 On Stranger Tides
Grade: D
Cast: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, Ian McShane
Director: Rob Marshall
free admission granted

I don’t know if it’s a funny thing, a sad thing, a tragic thing, or really nothing. But the thing about Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides is that it is an improvement for the series. If anyone still cared. Which no one still does.

The box office will argue with me. A disturbing number of zillions of dollars will pile into the bank accounts of Disney, Jerry Bruckheimer and new director Rob Marshall this weekend. Thousands of multiplex zombies will show up out of some weird sense of obligation and need to see the next big thing that’s really the old big thing all over again. But they will leave it in the theater like so much bubble gum on the bottom of a seat.

Of course, that’s probably wrong for me to say. For the first time in the sequels, Johnny Depp actually seems to care again. There’s a sparkle in his eye that’s been missing. Several of the action sequences require deft physical slapstick comedy, particularly a fun chase through London that starts in Buckingham Palace. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were not only the first comedians; they were the first stuntmen, after all. And in its best moments, Pirates, Depp, and his doubles share that spirit.

It’s also probably wrong for me to say about Penelope Cruz, because she definitely cares, which is a lot more than we could say for Keira Knightley. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the Spaniard has been in a blockbuster previously. So finally set loose as the first mate on the evil Blackbeard, she brings the same sort of relish that Cate Blanchett brought to the last Indiana Jones. She also creates a sexy edge that’s been wholly absent from previous voyages.

But the sailor’s yarn of Jack Sparrow’s quest for the Fountain of Youth is bedeviled by the way it uses its action beats as a crutch. The ADD chases, swordfights, CG mermaid attacks, etc. go off on a tight schedule, and become increasingly less effective by repetition. We can feel the way that modern Hollywood executives are held hostage by their fear of the American teenager’s attention span. They don’t need to be memorable so long as they are distracting.

So we finally wash ashore on this conundrum. If this were the second Pirates film, rather than the fourth, it might get a pass as the good ship of summer fun. (I say might, because it remains a ridiculously modern pageant of distraction ) But coming so late in the series, it just seems like more of the same.

Fast Five

2011-05-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

Fast Five
Grade: B
Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Dwayne Johnson (The Rock), Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Gal Gadot.
Director: Justin Lin
Free Admission Granted

It’s the moment that we’ve all been waiting for!

No, not when Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson throw each other through a series of windows, as they sweat nails in a scuffle only missing a cage. (The moment when The Rock spits out broken glass is precious.)

It’s rather the moment when, after surviving an urban warfare ambush in a armor-plated Humvee, these two macho adversaries lock Marine-thick forearms to climb off the ground in a show of respect. It’s the sort of pure man moment that touches every guy’s id. Director Justin Lin even lathers it in slow motion. You think about that first wheelie on your bike. You think about peeling out your first car. And damn it, for a brief moment you allow the words “best movie ever” to tickle the inside of your lips.

It’s at that instant that we reach the hyper Man-mageddon toward which the Fast and the Furious series has been driving since its beginning in 2002. I’m not sure if the movie is actually any good, but it does seem to reach some kind of an ideal.

As ideals go, it’s not ashamed to be a lizard-brained one. The only apparent logic appears to be the male id. This is an ideal of fast cars, machine guns, stringy babes, roadway smashups, somersaulting buses, a deadly double-cross by the richest man in Brazil, and a plot to steal millions from the vault of a Rio police station. It’s like the filmmakers read all the scholarly feminist criticism and shouted “Hell yeah!”

Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster return from the four previous adventures. A cast of all-stars (audible air quotes) return from the scattered remains of the previous outings. That sound you hear isn’t the screech of wheels. It’s the sound of the air quotes digging in around the word “stars.” No one in this five-film series has gone on to more success, and this is a profitable refuge for a number of them..

If the good guys are the protons in the nucleus of the testosterone atom, then it was inevitable that they would attract Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, as a take-no-prisoners federal agent. All buff, goateed, and camp, he’s perfect for the role. His vein-bulging intensity has a way of being scary and comic at the same time. One of the film’s small drawbacks is it spends too much time on the supporting team and not enough on The Rock.

There are three deliciously unreal action set pieces. The first is a fantastic piece of work, a superb car heist from a moving train at 100 miles an hour in the desert that keeps upping the ante. The second, a rooftop to rooftop chase through the favelas, stands out by having three different sides – good guys, bad guys, and cops. In the last, a moving bank vault takes out half the storefronts in Rio as the anti-heroes try to outrun the cops. This is the weakest of the three – the editing is poor, and it’s too easy to see the moviemaking rather than the movie magic.

The Fast and The Furious first appeared in 2002, it came at the end of two decades of steroidal male action heroes. By then the exhaust was coming from something more than the tailpipe. But everything old becomes new again. In an era in which shrimpy nerds like Jesse Eisenberg or Emile Hirsch vie for leading man stardom, the muscular escapism of Fast Five feels like a delirious relief.

Insidious

2011-05-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

Insidious
Grade: D
Cast: Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson, Ty Simpkins, Darth Maul
Director: James Wan

There are two good things about the indie horror flick Insidious, directed by the original Saw helmer James Wan. One is the awesome retro-Bernard Hermann-style score, all nutso violins in the key of Psycho. The second is that it’s always good to see Darth Maul getting work again. The years after Return of the Jedi were so hard on Chewbacca.

Other than that, there’s not so much to say about a pretty conventional schlock horror story that might as well be made by a studio. Jennifer Connelly would play Rose Byrne as the harried mother moving into a strange new suburban house. David Straitharn or Peter Sarsgaard or heck, Patrick Wilson would play Patrick Wilson as the cursed father. A child actor from the Disney pod factory would play the boy going into a mysterious coma. The creepy noises and creepy voices would play themselves.

The only difference is that Insidious uses pretty back-to-basic spook stuff built around a family drama to get the job done. The ghosts and demons don’t do much CG contorting. They just open and close doors, wear eerie lace gowns, and hover ominously in dark rooms. Let’s just call them method spooks. I’m glad there are still spooks out there who love and respect the work enough to work on an indie budget.

I remember how much Poltergeist scared the living tar out of me when I was 10 years old. It took me a while to look at trees or television the same way. I’ve been looking for (or more likely hiding from) that same feeling ever since. Insidious builds nicely, until it tries to make itself make sense. When the psychic and her comic cohorts start slinging around paranormal explanations, it loses power by the second. It never lost me entirely, but I cared less and less.

Sucker Punch

2011-05-11T13:23:00.002-07:00

Sucker Punch
Grade: NR
Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Carla Gugino. Vanessa Hudgens, Scott Glenn
Director: Zack Snyder

What, exactly, have video games done to us?

That might not be the question that Zack Snyder meant to ask with Sucker Punch, the lustful, bizarre adolescent fantasia, billed by the 300 director as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.” But for me, that question certainly rises to the top.

I’ll submit this early answer so that it doesn’t get buried – video games have allowed us to become the heroes of our own myths. Technology has reached the point where we no longer must long for the legendary glories of others. In doing so, they have encouraged our culture of narcissism.

Sucker Punch is shaped as a quest story, a search for five items that Baby Doll (Emily Browning) must find to set her free. Imprisoned in a mental asylum, she uses fantasies to escape her dour surroundings, first into a swanky bordello and then a video game fantasy. In doing so, she empowers herself to take over the center of the story.

This may be one of the more insane comparisons I can make. But it’s an insane movie, so here goes an insane comparison. Sucker Punch reminds me of Max Fischer and Rushmore. Hold it for a moment. They share a curtain-opening motif, like a play, that winks at their artificiality. They both center on the narcissism of teenage sociopathy (albeit Max has a friendly, familiar variety).

Each character deals with their isolation by creating imaginative spaces where they are the heroes of their own story and others are bit players. Max and Baby Doll reach the same epiphany – that there are other people in the world living their own lives, and that they are not always the star of the story.

None of that is to say that Sucker Punch approaches Rushmore in quality. It really is high-sheen absolute crap in many ways. And that linear description of a deeply buried theme doesn’t give the real sense of this weird, reckless, and sometimes fascinating vanity project.

The film has enough levels of dreams to make Inception’s Dom Cobb a little loopy on the giggle juice. In the bordello, Baby Doll and her fellow inmates dress like sluts and dance like slaves. When Baby Doll dances, she slips into the sooty video game world, where the women fight giant samurai, World War I zombie Germans, and James Cameron’s lost dragon, while searching for five objects that will set them free.

The problem is that this 16-year-old girl dreams like a 16-year-old boy. A boy whose notions of history and reality have been formed from video games and too many Bjork videos from the 1990s. The fantasies focus on girl power, machine guns, and Abbie Cornish’s chest. Somehow this young woman has managed to dream in the male gaze.

Despite its rather serious flaws, Snyder and his team really are gifted filmmakers. Aside from the head-swimming detail of his visuals, he’s such a swift technician and editor. Take the scene where the girls try to steal a knife from a cook as Baby Doll performs a cutting table dance. glides through a quick montage of six or seven shots so well-chosen that we feel we know every inch of the room.

His style is also slightly different than other CG overlords. Some directors prefer their CG to create verisimilitude. Others, particularly in Sin City knockoffs, go for high contrast, in which the characters seem alien to the surroundings. Instead, Snyder creates a stylized batter that’s smooth until you run into chocolate chips of real objects. These dreams are built with the metal of reality.

Interesting visual style isn’t enough to save it. Not with the flammable dialogue sending up the wooden performances (of the women, only Abbie Cornish has done enough good work to be disappointing). Not with the lack of human moments (something that Watchmen served to balance the violence). Not when the most human moment is a dragon checking on its dead baby (if it’s a greensreen, then it’s got to have a dragon). Snyder does more with the greenscreen than many other directors. But sometimes it feels like he’s really doing less.

Win Win

2011-05-11T13:23:00.001-07:00

Win Win
Grade: B
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Alex Shaffer, Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, Jeffrey Tambor, Burt Young
Director: Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy’s Win Win is the sort of well-meaning, well-considered indie movie with crisp dialogue and perfectly modulated performances that no one will ever watch twice. Not even the projectionists, who are in the break room trading ideas on how to take shelter. That said, the one single viewing – the only one that you will ever want or need – should be a modest delight.

The title itself is the catch phrase of situational ethics. More often than not, the phrase serves as a mental and moral lubricant. When fingertipping through an ethical thornbush, the benefits to each side outweigh the disadvantages of conventional morality. It might be the right thing to do, given the situation, but it’s not something you’d brag to your mother about doing.

Left in the everyday world of small moral crises, win-win becomes a lifestyle for getting by. How someone fixes a boiler or cuts down a tree has deeper moral implications. The formula is flavored by the performance of Paul Giamatti, whose bald head and earnest style attract our affection for a friendly neighbor, even as he does slightly crooked things.

These moral issues circumnavigate a small town life of courtrooms and wrestling. As a New Jersey lawyer and high school wrestling coach struggling to make ends meet, Giamatti draws a rich client (Burt Young) in the early stages of dementia. Needing the money, he volunteers to serve as the stranger’s guardian, shuffling grandpa to a nursing home against his wishes. Everything is going perfectly diabolically when the man’s grandson (Alex Shaffer) – a champion high school wrestler – shows up on the doorstep, looking for a place to live. You know how this goes. It’s the cinematic law of conservation of generosity. Every shady lawyer has a saint of a wife. (Amy Ryan, doyenne of the indie movie that no one will ever watch twice).

McCarthy’s last film – the unduly celebrated The Visitor – indulges in that precious downer vibe that sours too many indies. Win Win reverses this formula and stays remarkably upbeat (too upbeat at times – with a soft landing for an ending). It finds honest rewards from messy situations, without shortchanging the personal awakenings or moral seriousness.

If it sounds like a short story, that description isn’t far off. Films of such minute focus – like those of fellow traveler Nicole Holofcener – can feel like they are failing to use all that cinema offers. When done right, as here, such small details aren’t small. They are the finishing touches on an overwhelming grasp of life.

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-05-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

The Adjustment Bureau
Grade: D
Cast: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, Terrence Stamp
Director: George Nolfi

Few actresses know the torments of fate quite as much as Emily Blunt.

Not many actresses are more affected by the proverbial “shortage of great roles for young women” than this English not-quite-a-star. Each time someone writes a news story on this perpetual topic, it should include her photo. Five years since people took notice in The Devil Wears Prada, one of the best young actresses around is still looking to stamp herself on a signature role.

She adds grace and spice to The Adjustment Bureau, an otherwise silly sci-fi romance of fate, flukes, and magic fedoras. It only takes a single meet-and-makeout in a ritzy hotel restroom for her free-spirit dancer to entrance Matt Damon’s bad boy politician. While you watch her carry her few scenes, you wonder about her destiny. Is it her fate to spend an entire career in films that are not as good as she is?

If it’s a matter of fate, then it fits with The Adjustment Bureau, loosely based on a Philip K. Dick science-fiction story that contemplates free will. The movie imagines the hierarchy of angels as a bureaucracy of men with hats headquartered in a New York skyscraper. They travel the earth observing important people, keeping them in line with God’s plan. When life distracts their subjects from the right path, the adjusters return it.

Damon’s politician is just such a man. Blunt’s dancer is just such a distraction. The adjusters are determined to keep them apart and Damon on the path to his rendezvous with destiny.
Yes, Damon and Blunt project chemistry. But the performers have more of it than their characters, who are ciphers headed for predictable ends. The look of the film, directed by George

Nolfi, conjures the technical filmmaking term “looks like crap.” Besides, romances are hard enough. There are enough normal obstacles. Why do we need men with hats?

Hall Pass

2011-05-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

Hall Pass
Grade: D
Cast: Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate
Director: Peter and Bobby Farrelly

During their heyday in the nineties culminating in There’s Something About Mary, the Farrelly brothers had the power to shock you into submission.

It wasn’t just that the films made you laugh. They made you laugh involuntarily. They made you laugh against your will. Which is the best sort of laughter.

They were often made of disgusting raunch, yes. But the brothers also had a clever eye for satire, one that seems to have disappeared while watching Hall Pass.

Too bad, really. The skills might have been a promising combination for the premise of Hall Pass. Two horndog husbands get permission from their wives to take a week’s holiday from marriage. That’s an idea in search of surprising satire.

The brothers seem to have lost all their sense of daring. They left a predictable film in its place. Has there been a movie lately that takes so much time to go to the safe place that it’s obviously going? There is no danger that anyone is going to do anything that they regret. The brothers have lost all their daring.

Hall Pass is a fantasy of emasculation. It traffics in the currently vogue sitcom notion of grown-up men as dorky weaklings. It’s a cheap gag, to make men seem hopeless, and there’s something enormously unappealing about it. This doesn’t feel more real than watching Dork and Dorkier frog march toward the inevitable moment when they beg for their wives’ pardon. It makes marriage look like a prison. Worse, it makes marriage feel like a prison. The only real prison, though, is this movie.

And that’s what really stood out amid all the flat characters and phony predicaments and stale hijinks that barely deserve the words hijinks. Why would anyone want to spend two hours watching these de-balled men. Why are men such easy targets? Why stretch the caricature until it’s no longer amusing? Men may be hopeless. But they’re not this hopeless.

Cedar Rapids

2011-05-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

Cedar Rapids
Grade: C
Cast: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isaiah Whitlock Jr., Sigourney Weaver
Director: Miguel Arteta

Cedar Rapids, by Kevin Bowen (with help from Carl Sandburg)

Corn feeder of the world!

A city smelling of insurance, the cleaner of messes, where accidents are always accidents, even naked in bathrooms at the end of slackless ropes.

Temptress of lusts, shaker of souls, the moral poisoner of overgrown children,

City of the weak shoulders.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I see your painted women, drizzling outside convention-center hotels, luring the insurance salesmen.

And they tell me you are crooked, and yes, I have watched annual awards for moral business practices pass neatly for wrinkled travelers checks,

And they tell me you are wanton, dear Iowa, and yes, I have watched your drunken midnight swims in hazy pools, with no lifeguards or rings or memories of family.

And they tell me you are funny, and I say yes, but not quite enough Fargo and a little too much The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Randy (Sigourney Weaver),

Dirty (John C. Reilly),

Anonymous (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.),

Building (Ed Helms), Breaking, Rebuilding (Anne Heche)

A movie that is proud to be funny, but not quite enough Fargo and a little too much The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

The Last Lions

2011-05-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

A review of the Oscar-nominated nature documentary The Last Lions.
The Last Lions
Grade: C
Cast: Four-legged
Directors: Derreck and Beverley Joubert

Nice.

A review of the Oscar-nominated nature documentary The Last Lions from a screening interrupted halfway through by a fire alarm?

Geen-yus!

True, it’ might not be best to review a movie that you’ve only seen halfway. But that’s one of the beauties of nature. The plot is pretty straightforward, and there are not a whole lot of unforeseen plot twists. If you get confused, you have the soothing FM voice of Jeremy Irons to cover the lost ground.

The documentary, by South Africans Derreck and Beverley Joubert, lays down the “man encroaching upon natural habitat” card a little thick. Wild, evil lions, driven from their normal habitat, kill papa lion and drive our relatively friendly lioness out of her domain. She hustles out her cute little cubs across the savannah to an island in an African river, where she tries to make an animal living. There’s a lot of stress that comes with trying to put enough wild buffalo on the table.

We think of certain types of audiences for geek movies, superhero movies, or romcoms. But I’ve noticed that’s there’s a certain high-minded audience that always makes preview screenings for Africa films. I have to say that I’m a little fascinated. They wear furs. They drink wine in the theater. And not going to a movie since Titanic has dulled any previous compunction about speaking loudly in the theater. It’s not that I wanted the loudmouths next to me to be overpowered by smoke inhalation. But I probably wouldn’t feel much survivor’s guilt, either.

The Last Lions does offer a lot to soak in. There are some spectacular African vistas and raw footage of chases, clashes, and cute little lion cubs doing cute little things. Still, nature shows dominate cable television and it’s not clear what makes it worth paying an additional $10 to see what you can see for ….

What’s that ringing? Again ….

The Rite

2011-05-11T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Rite
Grade: C
Cast: Colin O’Donoghue. Anthony Hopkins, Alice Braga, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Rutger Hauer
Director: Mikael Halstrom

If you walk into The Rite without ever having seen another exorcism movie, then you might have a hell of a time.

The odds are that isn’t the case. These films have an unholy way to multiply. As such, we know most of their moves. The habits of these films are now old hat on Linda Blair’s spinning head.
Have you ever wondered how The Exorcist looked in 1973? For an audience raised on musicals, what would it have felt like to watch such shocking horror? When I watch films from that era, I’m always curious how those films played to the audiences of the era, and how that’s different from the way they are perceived now. I don’t think you could re-create that feeling.

Why do audiences flock to exorcism movies? Besides the naturally scary material, exorcism stories stand at the collision of the metaphysical and material reality. If there is a devil, you can at least take comfort in the fact that there is a God, and that our sense of a battle of good and evil has that metaphysical reflection.

That sort of material proof is what Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue) needs. Having entered the seminary, he is losing his faith. In a last ditch effort, he agrees to attend a program at the Vatican, where the Catholic Church is assembling a sort of A-Team of exorcists. There, Kovacs finds his skepticism challenged by events. Little things like a pregnant woman contorting spitting up nails have a way of doing that. Anthony Hopkins, playing a veteran Welsh exorcist, teaches him the craft. I have no doubts about the existence of Anthony Hopkins. I ham, therefore I am.

The Rite is supposedly “based on real events.” It asserts that Kovacs is one of 14 exorcists working in the United States today. The profession of reality is one of those habits of exorcism films. Come to think of it, it is a staple of horror stories generally, from the time you shared them over a campfire. No one wants to walk into a horror film and hear, “This is totally fake.”

There’s not a lot to say about The Rite. It’s an adequate Friday night freakout. But if you have seen one exorcism, you have seen them all.

No Strings Attached

2011-05-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

No Strings Attached
Grade: F
Cast: Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Greta Gerwig,
Director: Ivan Reitman

When does No Strings Attached lose all credibility?

When its second scene allegedly takes place at a frat house at the University of Michigan and the frat house is loaded with pretty California girls. I went to Michigan. There’s a longstanding saying at Michigan. Nine out of ten girls in the Big Ten are attractive. And the tenth goes to Michigan. (How do I account for Lucy Liu? I suspect she’s lying.)

The question about Natalie Portman’s career has always been how an actress can seem like such a natural as a child and then have such a hard time as an adult. The short quip is that Harvard ruined her. The longer answer and my current guess, as evidenced by her recent round of movies, appears to be that she is a good but limited actress who specializes in emotionally frigid characters and controlled personalities. That makes her perfect for a role like Black Swan.

In theory, it makes her perfect for the role of this film’s emotionally frigid and controlled doctor, after an emotionally-condom-covered sexual relationship with Ashton Kutcher. But it also makes the character all wrong for a romantic comedy. An actress might be able to pull it off if she could exude a reserve of likable warmth that makes her a rooting interest. That actress isn’t Portman. It doesn’t help that she’s paired here with indie it girl Greta Gerwig (of Greenberg), whose presence is immaculately natural.

Needless to say, “controlling” is not the first word in comedy, even if No Strings Attached offered any actual opportunity for it. Whenever there is a chance Portman shows no natural spontaneous instinct for it. Her actions always have the taste of Elizabeth Meriwether’s script. Whatever facility for comedy she showed in Garden State is not in evidence.

As for the rest of Ivan Reitman’s film: it’s not warm. It’s not sad. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. It’s not true. It’s not even enjoyably false.

It’s just not.

The Green Hornet

2011-05-11T13:06:00.001-07:00

The Green Hornet
Grade: D
Cast: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Edward James Olmos, Tom Wilkinson
Director: Michel Gondry
Free Admission Granted

When small children lay their head on the pillow each night, do they dream of running into a phone booth to change into Seth Rogen?

A more popular figure in raunchy comedies than little boy’s daydreams, Rogen is one of the least likely Hollywood stars to play a superhero. Nevertheless, that’s what we get in the Green Hornet, occupied by Rogen as his typical directionless man-child. Accompanied by his mechanic/martial arts expert Kato, his archenemy isn’t so much the bad guy as maturity. At least we’re talking about the only superhero that drives a Chrysler.

In fairness, the Green Hornet might be a good fit. He has always been an imitation superhero living in the shadow of more popular zillionaire superheroes like Batman and Iron Man. The film’s plot contains the same father issues with the same idea of crimefighting as philanthropy. Yet you sense the shoddiness of the imtation, and the crimefighting seems more like a prank that got out of hand.

The mostly forgotten 60s camp television show is remembered for one thing – it launched the career of martial arts superstar Bruce Lee, plays Kato as the martial arts sidekick. Thus the film has plenty of slow-motion martial arts moves. Played here Jay Chou , the character’s subservience to his white master doesn’t fit well in the modern day.

The Green Hornet is directed by frequent Charlie Kaufman director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and it is best when it is weird. The problem is that Gondry has delivered a mostly by-the-book action-comedy that superhero fans would expect. The other notable thing is the first post-Basterds appearance of Christoph Waltz. A veteran bad guy of German movies, it rather kills the mystique of an Oscar to think it only buys you better opportunities to play better-paid bad guys in American movies.

The Green Hornet is the latest comic book hero to run into the perils of modern Hollywood casting. Having come to a point of popularity with comic book heros, Hollywood finds itself with a generation of Peter Parkers rather than Supermen. You can play this shortage for comedy for a while. However, eventually it turns a superhero just a man in a mask.

Top 10 Films of 2010

2011-01-18T13:02:00.000-08:00

2010 has been a year in which the indies, arties, foreign and prestige films overpromised and underdelivered, while the best genre and mainstream films delivered and then some. Hooray for Hollywood!

10. The Social Network - David Fincher’s Facebook origin story is like the NFL team that wins the Super Bowl with the ninth-best player at every position. You have to respect that level of quality and consistency. But at some point, shouldn't football fans and moviegoers want something more than extreme competence? Shouldn't they want to root for brilliance? Even if you admire its stoic precision, you’re left begging for a scene that wouldn’t get lost in the middle of Fincher’s Zodiac.

9. The American - Do you ennui? We ennui! So does George Clooney, as the aging criminal gunsmith stashed in an Italian village waiting for… something. That rare thing – the quietly sexy existential film.

8. Never Let Me Go - Who says all the English can make are literary adaptations and royalty porn? Oh wait. It’s been that kind of year. Nevertheless, Mark Romanek does an admirable job adapting author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Harry Potter story, where all the students are the thematic cousins of Blade Runner's replicants. It's a shame she won't live, but then again, who does?

7. The Town - "I'm proud to be from Charlestown. It ruined my life, but I'm proud." So begins Ben Affleck's Boston crime drama about a neighborhood where bank robbery provides for the family and destroys it. What follows is a dazzling breakneck opener, oats of sentimental characters with considerable fictional depth, a mature love story, and working class ambition, survival and pride. It doesn't have the thematic dots and loops of the film it loves - Michael Mann's Heat. But its clever set piece in the bowels of Fenway Park comes closer than most to Mann's epic bank heist gone awry.

6. Waiting for Superman – Is our kids learning? The answer are no, and David Guggenheim’s quietly angry call to arms for education reform proves its case intellectually and emotionally. The only hesitation for placing it on a top 10 list is that it’s hard to imagine people watching it 30 years from now.

5. Winter’s Bone – The best traditional indie of the year, two hours of backwood bravery and low-budget magic. Debra Granik’s methhead parable gives us a great heroine in Ree Dolly, searching for her father in order to save the family home. Of all the lead roles of emerging stars this year, Jennifer Lawrence’s performance may be the keeper.

4. Unstoppable – Could I have asked for a better week to make the case for Unstoppable? A week with New York knocked out by a blizzard, the roads frozen, the unions scheming, ambulances slamming into parked cars, and the city’s zillionaire mayor standing in front of his mansion telling New Yorkers to chill out and go see a Broadway show? A portrait of institutional failure and industrial decline in the face of disaster, who would have thought Tony Scott’s silly little runaway train flick would be the harrowing zeitgeist movie of the year?

3. The Ghost Writer – Roman Polanski’s on-target thriller crackles with hard-boiled dialogue, claustrophobic isolation, and black humor. A simple plot transformed by style and panache, with one of the most memorable final scenes in a long time. And we heart Olivia Williams.

2. True Grit – Amid Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right, and Winter’s Bone, 2010 has given us a number of types of women to know and care for. The last and seemingly most successful is the smart-beyond-her-14-years Hailee Steinfeld searching for her father’s killer in True Grit. By turns as funny as The Big Lebowski, as foreboding as No Country, and as gentle as a Disney movie, True Grit is in part a coming-of-age movie and a meditation on justice.

1. Inception – Inception is middling deep and cinematically spectacular. Dazzling as it defies arthouse cookie cutters and studio idiocy, Christopher Nolan’s dreamscape mindbender pushes deeper and deeper into the most vibrant genre of our times – the thinking man’s blockbuster. When I call Inception a “popcorn Tarkovsky,” I say it with admiration on both ends of the phrase. We’re living in the Christopher Nolan Moment.
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True Grit

2011-01-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

True Grit
Grade: A
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Free Access Granted

She arrived in Fort Smith with two long braids, her father dead in the street, bent on revenge and calling it justice.

All of 14 years, she carried the aura of a professional. She would quote the law. She would spook old men. She would hire the marshal least likely to take the man alive. She would look like Judy Garland and act with the iron, or the “sand,” or the “True Grit” of Cate Blanchett.

And Mattie Ross would be torn between two men. The one-eyed marshal would begin as the avenger, turn to the brute, then end as the father. The Texas Ranger would turn from a menace to a mystery to the first breeze of a lover. For this is the moment in a girl’s life when men transform from the myths of mother’s stories into the angels and beasts of reality.

It would be as if the tornado tore Dorothy’s house off of the Kansas prairie and dropped her in the middle of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. And she would share with Sissy Spacek’s Holly a basic reality: two adolescent women piecing together manhood after wandering into violent and unforgiving circumstances.

And like Holly she would enter a world of masculine excess as a child play-acting maturity. She would shake down a stable owner. And ford rivers deep into Injun Country. And cut down corpses hanging from trees without a tear. Yet when the time came to buy a pony, she would names it “Little Blackie” and ride it like a child. For a moment we would leave a dark Western and enter a Disney pony movie. She might as well name it Flicka.

And the days that a teenage girl spent deep in the Choctaw wilderness with a one-eyed man would be an innocent adventure. And a trip into the violent heart. And a lesson that no matter how smart you are, things don’t always go as you expect.

And the Western always bears the psychological landscape of a man’s world – all fatalism and desperation and a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And the women of Westerns have always been seen as forces of civilization, viewed with suspicion and inevitability. And how does the Western change when shot through the gaze of a female and an innocent? And how does it change with that lasting female illusion – that through wits, and stubbornness, and playful campfire stories, she can tame a man?

With so much contradiction to play, with so much to embody, the newcomer Hailie Stanfield has been the object of deserving praise. A standout performance from a young performer leads inevitably to questions of how far she can go, what she will do next. Perhaps that’s not the way to look at such a performance. Perhaps True Grit – like the children of Malick films – is the one film she was born to make. (And if I don’t mention Jeff Bridges much – or Roger Deakins, or whoever – it doesn’t mean I think any less.)

And what has gotten into The Coen Brothers? Where are the filmmakers who gave us the world’s most passive sheriff? Who tossed us a tornado and told us not to read the mind of God? After making a string of cynical films, how do a pair of snowy Minnesotans turn around and make a story this overtly sentimental? Did they give up Nihilism for Lent? I suspect not. They’re Jewish.

Here is what I suspect. At the movies, we’re watching a movement away from cynicism toward sentimentality. You see it in Inception. You see it in Unstoppable. You see it in The Town. You see out your window each morning that cynicism is getting us nowhere. That we need to meet the world with resourcefulness rather than resignation. That we are in need of an age of heroism to solve the times in which we live.

The Fighter

2011-01-18T12:58:00.000-08:00

The Fighter
Grade: B
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams
Director: David O. Russell

I once referred to Christian Bale as The Actor Most Likely To Tick Off His Wife By Staying In Character Over Dinner.

Shortly thereafter, to my amusement, I read an article in which Bale admitted this was true, that his method actor’s commitment sometimes got on his wife’s nerves. With that in mind, Bale’s role as a crack-addicted ex-boxer in The Fighter must have been a rough few months for Mrs. Bale.

For the mainstream audiences that equate Bale with the stoic anti-hero of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Bale’s smoking-fuse performance in The Fighter could open eyes. This is the first film with popular aspirations in which Bale completely submerges into an edgy character. He lost weight to create a gaunt and wasting appearance, and I’m not sure how any normal human being could voluntarily make his eyes bulge like that. One wonders if he took a pair of pliers and plucked out his own real teeth just to heighten the authenticity.

While The Fighter centers on the struggles of boxer Mickey Ward, played with an odd mix of masculinity and sensitivity by Mark Wahlberg, it’s dominated by the method performances of Bale and Melissa Leo. A local legend in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bale’s Dickey Eklund once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. He has since been knocked out by crack addiction. He trains his brother on the rare passing occasions of his sobriety. Leo is a piece of work, a drunk but dominating mother mismanaging her son’s boxing career.

While his parents and siblings (nine brother and sisters) drink themselves numb on his earnings, it’s Wahlberg’s Ward who must drink the family acid. He tries to stay loyal to family as family loyalty ruins his personal dreams. What better way to redeem yourself than to fall in love with Amy Adams? She plays wisely to her redeemer role, albeit a redeemer with a right cross, a foul mouth, and a chowder accent.

What is it about blue-collar Boston that inspires this rash of similar films – The Fighter, Conviction, and The Town? Are there any males in Boston who don’t go to jail? Do all the women have damaged hair and dress themselves in the clothes that the Salvation Army left in the dumpster? For whatever reason, Boston lends itself to themes of loyalty, of the tribal instincts versus modern reality. A veteran of dysfunctional family comedy (see Flirting with Disaster), director David O. Russell captures it with sad intensity and humor, even if the film’s multiple screenwriters wrap up the story a little too neatly.

A boxing movie always builds up to one big fight. A good one needs a knockout final round. This is one weakness of The Fighter – its culminating fight is rather lightweight, compared to the great fights of film history. It lacks the palpable blood, sweat, and exhaustion of the original Rocky. Nor does it have the cinematic vision of Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Frankly, at some point some enterprising director needs to re-examine how to make a boxing movie in order to break the structural dead end.

The Tourist

2011-01-18T12:57:00.000-08:00

The Tourist
Grade: D
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Free Access Granted

I suppose it’s at least a small accomplishment that The Tourist ends in the exact place that it’s been going all along – with its two mega-stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, in white tux and evening gown, dashing and bejeweled on a sailboat in Venice.

For two hours, The Tourist ignores all logic, reason, and possibly pleas of relief from multiple Nobel Peace Prize winners to relentlessly pursue this moment. Two stars. Looking for a port of call strong enough to hold their wattage. Deigning to allow us to peek in on their fabulous adventure.

The Tourist has in mind the big-star heist films of the sixties like Charade that made it on charisma and splash, with characters who seem to live on champagne. (A latter-day example would be the George Clooney-Jennifer Lopez pairing in Out of Sight.) Depp plays a college math teacher mistaken for a jet-set white-collar criminal. Jolie plays the hyper-elegant woman of mystery who seems like she was born in a luxury hotel, prancing about Paris and Venice deciding if they deserve her.

Except that The Tourist wants to be a quirky satire of those films, as well. That’s the shake. There are giant tone shifts between suspense and comedy that suggest the film’s three writers each had a different movie in mind. If the overt attempts at humor aren’t good for a guffaw, there’s always the accidentally silly action sequences, such as Depp jumping roof to roof in jammies.

The Tourist is somehow the follow-up for director Florian von Donnensmarck, he of The Lives of Others. Such a subject shift makes for career whiplash. Only one scene, a night on the town, delivers the glamour he seeks. The rest of the film is a waste.

Oh, well. At least everyone enjoyed a nice trip to Venice.

Black Swan

2010-12-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

Black Swan
Grade: No rating
Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Director: Darren Aronofsky

The Criterion version of the classic 1953 musical The Band Wagon includes a brilliant lost dance number by Cyd Charisse called Two-Faced Woman.

The lanky Texan with the French married name performs a delirious routine in a sleek black outfit. For all the Technicolor appeal, the outtakes reveal something you don’t expect. You get to see Charisse screw up. There are moments in the creation of all that magic when her body (and her five-inch heels) let her down.

Charisse could dance as the elegant priss, the prim damsel fantasy. But ask her to play a devilish seductress and she would cut loose, a beauty fully aware of her beauty and confident in her sexuality. Watching Charisse dance isn’t just watching someone execute steps. It’s to assume she is good in bed.

This duality is the torment of Nina, played by a resurgent Natalie Portman, in Darren Aronofsky’s erotic ballet psychodrama Black Swan. She has plenty of the steps but none of the seduction. She’s the sort of young woman still asked if she is a virgin. Even at 28, she lives in a pink room, locked inside her overbearing mother’s creepy cryogenic chamber of adolescence. Her window sill has fluffy stuffed animals serving as prison guards to prevent her escape.

As her ballet troupe casts Swan Lake, the gifted, fragile dancer is seen as a natural for the lead role of the angelic White Swan. But to get the role, she also must dance the seductive Black Swan. Can she also dance the Black Swan? The head of the dance troupe (a sharp Vincent Cassel) isn’t so sure. What he needs is for her to seduce the audience like the naturally flirtatious new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis). He needs Nina to lose herself in the performance. But losing yourself sometimes means just that – losing your self.

From the category of fortunate accidents – I recently viewed Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. For all the clear references to The Red Shoes and All About Eve, Repulsion and Black Swan seem like companion pieces that share several elements – a frail female sinking into paranoid fantasy, a libidinous sister figure, and even a freaky-gory scene with fingernails and oozing blood (eek!). Both films have the same basic purpose – to re-cast a woman’s paranoid inner life and frosty sexuality as a horror story.

This brand of film always leads me to ask (suspiciously): are these insights recognizable (not necessarily realistic, but recognizable) to women? Or is this the received wisdom of men about women, derived from movie formula rather than insight? It’s possible that I lost the authority to answer this question nine months before my birth, when I lost the grand zygote lottery in the birth canal.

Perhaps I need to watch the film less literally and more emotionally. Dance and dance films are often about the transformative power of emotion. The power of the musical is the feeling that our emotions can transform the real world into the emotional realms of imagination.

Dancers become the physical embodiment of the emotion of the audience. They become the physical embodiment of emotional ideals. Their bodies are sacrificial, objects of beauty whose frailty is the impediment to the unachievable. A dancer strives for perfection at the expense of physical (and mental) breakdown.

Black Swan labors on the stress with ample attention to physical exertion and deterioration. It showers attention on broken nails, dislocated joints, mystery rashes, and bulging arm veins. A wound adorned in feathers resembles a bleeding vagina. Nina’s physical and mental ordeal in the pursuit of the ideal suggests – like Mickey Rourke in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler – a sense of martyrdom.

In the end, Black Swan doesn’t take its own creative advice. It never gets lost in the performance. For all the talk of a crazy descent-into-madness finale, it feels more controlled and studied (even cliché) than unstable. The movie screams for the dark anti-Fred-and-Cyd dance number to send all dance numbers to hell. It even tries. But it never shakes loose enough to get there.

Unstoppable

2010-12-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

Unstoppable
Grade: A
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson
Director: Tony Scott

I loved Unstoppable.

I loved every improbable, electric minute of Tony Scott’s runaway train movie. I loved its ludicrous start. I loved its “Why didn’t they do that in the first place? Because then we wouldn’t have a movie” ending. Most of all, I love the fact that it’s red meat for the Great Tony Scott debate – is he a cinematic genius or a cinematic vandal?

First and foremost, Unstoppable returns Scott to his best action instincts with appealing simplicity. A runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals cruises through rural Pennsylvania toward a certain derailment among thousands of people. Denzel Washington, all relaxed and authoritative, and Chris Pine are the veteran-rookie conductor team who chase down the “missile the size of the Chrysler building.” The chase includes relentless pace, a dead-man’s curve, and a spectacular attempt to drop a Marine onto the bullet train from a helicopter.

Yet Unstoppable isn’t really a movie about a runaway train. It’s a movie about a runaway society. Like Domino, it portrays a rapidly changing America struggling with disintegrating institutions and identities. It’s set in fossilizing towns of blue-collar Pennsylvania, focusing on a rusting railway industry that once signified American industrial power. Now it seems like a leftover of the past.

Within its high-speed antics, Mark Bombeck’s script quietly ties in almost every social anxiety ailing our country in recent years – failing elites, corporate malfeasance, cronyism, unionized incompetence, downsizing, the devaluation of age and experience, cost-benefit anti-morality, creaky crisis management systems exposed by the test of reality, and that lingering suspicion that we’re going to turn on the television any day and watch thousands die. I’m sorry, friends of The Social Network. That was the decade I just lived.

With the institutional rot and breakdown, it naturally falls to a pair of workaday palookas to save the day. The problem is that they don’t trust each other. Frank Barnes the engineer is a veteran being forced into retirement. Young conductors like Will Colson are snatching their jobs through connections and favoritism. Needless to say, it’s not a happy cabin, and Pine chose the wrong day for a first day of work. Like the passengers of United Flight 93, they are ordinary people deputized by fate to stop a disaster.

Their chase takes place underneath the pestilent eye of modern communication – the railway sensors, the two-way radios, the news choppers attracted to the possibility of death. Everyone knows a little. The audience knows some. Corporate busybodies know something else. The control room (headed by a strong Rosario Dawson) knows a little more. Evaporating the space among them is Scott’s filtered, fast-edit, multi-camera ping-pong style, a frequent target of criticism. However, the style simulates a world of multiple isolated viewpoints, built from pieces, lingering in fracture and distortion.

For all the larger social forces acting upon the train chase, Scott evinces a remarkable belief in the individual. As the corporate figures falsely present their evil calculations as certainties, Scott places an enormous amount of faith in hunches and experience. When Washington and Pine finally catch the train they even use ancient railworkers’ hand signals. They’re like ancient mariners communicating in a dead code. It is part of a story that shows faith in the regenerative powers of all things human.

Tangled

2010-12-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

Tangled
Grade: B
Cast: Mandy Moore (voice), Zachary Levi (voice)
Director: Nathan Greno, Byron Howard

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair ….

Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen ….

As a friend of mine noted, we are entering an age of collective amnesia. We no longer have to remember anything anymore. There are no long debates over beers about factual details. If there’s a disagreement, the conversation ends and someone pulls up Wikipedia.

For example as I get older, I no longer remember the storylines of fairy tales, and I want to know, can I trust Wikipedia? If Wiki is wrong, is it possible to tell the wrong story, impart the wrong meaning, and mis-teach a child?

Getting it right might be especially important with Rapunzel. As fairy-tale sexual metaphors go, the story of a certain hairy girl rides to the top of a very phallic tower. A witch traps a young woman with extremely long, rich hair in said phallic tower. A young prince climbs the tower using Rapunzel’s long hair, planning to marry the young woman. When the witch discovers the ruse, in some versions due to a growing belly, she confronts and blinds the prince. If children don’t get the story straight, then how will we prepare young boys for overbearing mother-in-laws? They need all the time they can get.

Disney's animated Tangled is a modern update that follows the Grimm story in many ways and departs in many others. Rapunzel goes from the daughter of paupers to a lost princess with magic hair that can replenish youth. Her selfish stage mother refuses to share her secret with the outside world. The prince is transformed into a sly rogue thief, who stumbles on the startled tower dweller, meeting the flat side of her frying pan. Rapunzel forces the thief into a date outside the tower, traveling to watch distant flying lanterns that are released each year on the lost princess’ birthday. Good morning Starshine ….

By and large, Rapunzel’s hairy adventure is not a letdown. The visually striking Tangled is vivid in both its colors and its details. The 3-D is more than a gimmick and adds depth of field.

So yes, give me a head with hair.

Morning Glory

2010-12-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Morning Glory
Grade: C
Cast: Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton, Patrick Wilson, Jeff Goldblum
Director: Roger Michell

What’s wrong with being happy?

Contrary to the evidence presented in adult-focused movies, you might never know there are happy people out there. It’s true. I’ve ignored them at parties. But I never see them onscreen.

In Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams plays a lemons-to-lemonade go-getter named Becky Fuller, with all the spritely dewiness that such a wide-eyed name conjures. Addicted to work and hapless in love, she lands her dream job as a producer on a last place network morning show. Her overenthusiastic job interview leads her boss (Jeff Goldblum) to ask, “Are you going to sing?” She seems less like a news producer and more like an auditioner for Glee.

McAdams’ unicorn attitude meets her non-match in Mike Pomeroy, IBS’ former nightly news anchor and resident black cloud. Having grumbled his way out of the network’s anchor job, he acquiesces to Fuller’s request to join the morning show. Cooking demonstrations and light banter with Diane Keaton really aren’t his thing, at least not on camera. A spiritual battle of wills ensues between McAdams’ girly bangs and Ford’s gravel-bed voice for the integrity of the show.

The infinitely up-with-life McAdams will draw comparisons to Holly Hunter in Broadcast News (and Melanie Griffith in Working Girl). However Hunter’s energetic producer was trying to preserve the integrity of the newsroom. She would have regarded McAdams’ sweetie-pie infotainment whippersnapper as the face of evil. McAdams doesn’t win her battles because she’s right. She wins because she’s so darn likable. Lowering your standards isn’t just a survival strategy; it’s good for you! Good Night, and Good Luck, this is not.

Morning Glory seems like it should be better, like the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The script, by The Devil Wears Prada scribe Aline Brosh McKenna, feels smart – or perhaps just educated – but predictable. When Ford cooks up a frittata in front of McAdams at his apartment, everyone knows it’s destined to show up at an important moment later in the film. (Everyone except the producer, strangely, who’s on the lookout for any soft news contribution that he might make to the program.) The occasional comedy breakthroughs point out how much fun you’re not having the rest of the time.

McAdams is a perky natural at the one speed that the script and director Roger Michell has to offer her, but sometimes she leaves footprints of “acting.” Ford is a real treat, dispensing one-line wisdom from his cold, dead tongue. That said, I never quite settled into their relationship, as it has less to do with reality than script manipulation.

Like its irrepressible lead, Morning Glory is trying too hard to please. I like what it is trying to do more than what it has done.

Due Date

2010-11-07T14:51:00.001-08:00

Due Date
Grade: B
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx
Director: Todd Phillips

Lately in movies there has been an epidemic of obvious music choices.

For example, the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” ends The Social Network. In Due Date, a Motown song about getting back to my baby opens the film as expected father Robert Downey Jr. prepares for a cross-country flight home to his very pregnant wife. It doesn’t end there. Is there a more obvious choice for a drug scene than Pink Floyd? If you have a touchy scene involving a dead father, what better way to spice it up than Neil Young’s “Old Man,” one of three songs known to make grown men cry.

Yet Due Date, Todd Phillips’ follow-up to the mysteriously popular The Hangover, makes the obvious choices work consistently. It takes an obvious two mismatched-strangers-on-a-road-trip movie premise (Robert Downey plays Steve Martin. Zach Galifianakis plays John Candy) and makes it funny and occasionally moving.

Much of what works has to do with the chemistry between its leads. Downey is not just a natural as an uptight professional with a deadpan wit. He’s also a very good supporting actor who sharpens the performers around him. He sharpens Galifianakis, and the two have great fun playing off of one another (at least once, you can see Downey starting to crack up in the background). The comedian is helped by an emotional undercurrent of missing fathers, giving him a chance to do a little more emotion and a little less random chaos generation. A little less.

Due Date draws the cannonball dynamics of male friendship competently. It’s not as strong in this area as Sideways or The Big Lebowski, but it’s better than many films. Downey’s character swings between irritation and a fatherly desire to guide and comfort Galifianakis’ man-child.

Things that Due Date does right: it’s quite funny and doesn’t waste its comic premises, such as the everpresent coffee can with the surprising contents that becomes a recurring third character. The comedy style relies more on clever observation than vulgar disgust. Even the obligatory vomit projection has a touch of tenderness. (One last thing: in two films, Philllps and cinematographer Lawrence Sher have shown a real talent for shooting desert vistas.)

There are a few times that it goes too far, asks us to believe too much. A single comic car crash is one thing. Two comic car crashes is hard to take. And when was the last time you saw an entire crew of attractive stewardesses on a domestic airline flight like it was still 1975? Seriously, whatever happened to attractive stewardesses? Perhaps they should retitle this Planes, Trains and Time Machines.

Whatever mistakes Due Date makes are done with enthusiasm more than cynicism. Either that, or I’m getting old and soft. Take your choice.

Inside Job

2010-11-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

Inside Job
Grade: B
Cast: Matt Damon (voice)
Director: Charles Ferguson

As I write this review, the Federal Reserve is embarking on a near trillion-dollar program that it hopes will stimulate the economy. Quantitative Easing amounts to Helicopter Ben Bernanke printing money in order to horse-whip capital off the sidelines and into circulation.

You might think this is the best thing to do. Or you might think it's a last-ditch backdoor stimulus and taxation without representation (by devaluing the money that you have sitting in the bank). You might even be looking at wheelbarrow investments and polishing your father’s 1975 vintage Whip Inflation Now button.

If you think this is another handout to a politically-connected banking industry, you might be interested in Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job. The much-praised documentary takes a biting, long-term look at the institutional corruption that fed the financial crisis we’re still trying to escape. The film’s big achievement is boiling down the truth without dumbing down the truth.

This damning view of the US financial system starts with the major players in their roles during the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80s, proceeds through the 90s boom and the Internet Bust, and finally plows through detail after detail of the subprime mortgage fiasco that resulted in the Great Recession of 2008. Ferguson points to consolidation and rapid growth of the banking industry as the main culprit, fueling riskier and riskier investments. Ultimately, perverse incentives led risk-taker bankers to make billions of dollars in housing loans for which they had no good reason to expect repayment.

That’s not where it ends. Ferguson goes through painful detail of the political-financial inbreeding that enabled the housing crisis. Figures from both worlds bounce from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Ave. doing what’s best for the big banks. Neither Republican nor Democrat is spared. Those who should be blowing the whistle fail to do so. Those that do are ignored. The best moments are when participants are cornered over their roles in rubber-stamping the subprime crisis, then shown to have survived with reputations and power intact.

I don’t agree with all of the premises. For instance, the movie shows a graph of the proportion of recent tax cuts the very rich received. But it doesn’t show the amount that the very rich pay. And it doesn’t show the amount that that revenue might have generated through circulation in the economy. Also the film doesn’t draw much of a line between sinister intentions and honest mistakes. What appears like corruption is, I would guess, sometimes incompetence.

If you want a cynical, snappy explanation of the bank bailout, here’s one. They stole your grandchildren’s money so that bankers could still pay for their cocaine and call girls. There is a whole, whole, whole lot more to it, but it's a shocking little sentence that does a nice job summing up the risk, dissolution, corruption, and narcissism. And if this little documentary doesn’t get you fired up about macro-economics, nothing will.

127 Hours

2010-11-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

127 Hours
Grade: C
Cast: James Franco, Clemence Poesy, Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn
Director: Danny Boyle

In movies, nothing good ever happens on a mountain. Unless you’re Julie Andrews, and good things happen to you everywhere.

There’s Kevin MacDonald’s documentary Touching the Void, about a mountain-climbing expedition shot to hell. And what was that mountain disaster movie that at first advertised its cannibalism but later changed to a “triumph of the human spirit” angle?

I‘m not sure if 127 Hours is technically a mountain movie, but it’s close enough to invoke the rule. Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire trails a rugged young outdoorsman, Aron Ralston, who finds his arm pinned beneath a boulder. In a crevice. In a desert national park. Cut off from civilization. Running out of water. With only a small knife to keep him company.

No matter how you slice it, 127 Hours is a movie that builds up to and away from its one big moment. The good news is that it has one big moment to build up to and away from. The bad news is that if you know what’s coming, and most viewers will, it sometimes leaves you wanting to cut to the chase. Somewhere around the 41-hour mark, I wanted the film to be chopped down and retitled 67 Hours.

Nevertheless, most viewers will be entranced by the story’s grotesque circumstances. They will like James Franco’s performance as the hiker, whose experience leaves him both more of and less of a man.

Being an arty project, we know there has to be meaning derived from the moment. Boyle chooses to ruminate on the nature of human connection in the face of terrifying isolation. We enter the film through shuffling images of random crowds, images in search of a grand point. The images of human connection stand as a counterpoint to the isolation of nature and Ralston’s Lone Wolf personality.

Stuck in a rut, slices of Ralston’s life flash before his eyes. He imagines his loved ones, whom he keeps at arm’s length, and the only woman that ever really mattered. It’s a little like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (except without the eye-rubbing, head-shaking, and one critic’s prayers for divine relief). There is also a tinge of Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.

For a while, Franco has been a star-in-the-making that Hollywood couldn’t quite figure out what to do with. It appears the answer is, stick him in a hole. Ralston is a role that takes an actor out on a limb, because it is a lot of doing not much, and it’s all about you. For the most part, his performance never snaps a branch.

The arthouse loves a good grotesque rural survival story. It’s a way to enjoy a good horror film free of a feeling of slumming and guilt. Why just this year, there’s Kelly Reichardt’s forthcoming Meek’s Cutoff, and we’ve already seen Winter’s Bone. Whereas Cutoff and Bone would appear to be traditional indies, 127 Hours contains an element of horror, as well. So come, enjoy the terror, and feel fine about it.

Red

2010-10-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

Red
Grade: D
Cast: Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Karl Urban, Brian Cox, Richard Dreyfuss
Director: Robert Schwentke

“Roger that.”

They were trying to sneak that one past me. The first Bowen Rule of the Cinema: There has never been a good movie that contains the phrase “Copy that.” But what if they say, “Roger that,” instead? What then? Does the rule apply?

Let’s face it – from the first spunkless assault-team cliche amid Bruce Willis’ suburban Christmas decorations, Red had “copy that” written all over it. But it took awhile for the inevitable to happen. After an hour of wondering if I would need a Synonym Corollary, the movie finally coughed up the “copy that” that we could all see coming. You’ve heard that the criminal wants to confess? So it goes.

It’s not that “copy that” is a cause of a bad movie, nor some linguistic leprechaun that plants a bad film at the end of the rainbow. Rather “copy that” strikes me as a leftover of lazy screenwriting, a symptom of less than 100 percent effort. It means that in all the time from script to screen, no one bothered to imagine a better thing for the character to say.

Laziness is something that I want to talk about in relation to Red, a languishing DC Comics adaptation about retired CIA assassins fighting against people who want them in permanent retirement. I want to talk about it in terms of this proposition: Irony in action movies is dead.

It used to be, particularly in nineties indie cinema, that you could take a stock movie situation, remove the serious character, introduce a quirky character in that place, and voila, you have satire. As a famous example, there’s Harvey Keitel’s “cleaner” character in Pulp Fiction, a play on the dead-serious cleaner in Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita.

Once upon a time, that sort of flip ironic detachment counted as hip and satirical. But after so many times, irony has come to hide lazy screenwriting and characters we don’t care about. When a film sells itself with the calculated oddness of 65-year-old Helen Mirren firing a machine gun, the familiarity of the irony reflex means it has lost the satirical charge. It’s just lazy and flat and dead. To misquote Bruce Willis … Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Take a look at the successful action movies this year, stuff like Inception and The Town. There are romantic strands in both films. Some would label these strands cliche or melodramatic. To say that is to miss the point: these romantic strands are intensely sincere. The successful action films of late share that sincerity. The unsuccessful ones (like Red or Knight and Day) are void of sincerity. They float in the comic-geek netherworld of unreality. Even the explosions don’t really mean it.

Conviction

2010-10-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

Conviction
Grade: B
Cast: Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Melissa Leo, Peter Gallagher
Director: Tony Goldwyn

Why are so few people talking about Conviction?

Is it boring to talk about Hilary Swank being very strong in a quintessentially awards-style role? Over-awarded or not, it shouldn’t stop talk of how real and involving she is as Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts waitress who saves her imprisoned brother by becoming a lawyer and absolving him of murder.

Swank is sturdy as the accidental lawyers and Sam Rockwell lights it up as the convicted murderer, Kenny Waters. Swank’s great advantage is that she fits so easily as a normal person, with perfectly measured emotional range. Rockwell plays a barfight scene in a totally new way, teetering between violence and comedy. Swank may be the backbone of Conviction, but Rockwell is the heart.

Conviction is a type of film rarely made about women – movies about obsession. Usually female film obsessions are about age, looks, and men in that All About Eve sort of way. Far fewer are films, particularly obsession films, about women at work, as with Conviction. The movie plays like a female counterpart to David Fincher’s Zodiac, a film about male obsession surrounding a real-life unsolved murder mystery.

For all the talk about Conviction being conventional (traditional might be a better word), it rarely goes for the expected payoff to a scene. Even a courtroom scene that offers plenty of chance for riotous jubilation gets an admirably underplayed treatment by director Tony Goldwyn. (The director of Diane Lane’s A Walk on the Moon gets two great female performances from Swank and Minnie Driver.) This crowd-rousing film always goes for something more quiet and more fulfilling. This is a movie that gives traditional a good name.

Secretariat

2010-10-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Secretariat
Grade: C
Cast: Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Baker, Dylan Walsh, AJ Michalka
Director: Robert Schwentke

Poor Sham.

In 1973, the magnificent chocolate stallion ran the second fastest time in the history of the Kentucky Derby. His mark remains to this day. He probably had the talent to win horse racing’s Triple Crown. Instead, he has gone down as the forgotten rival to a horse whose only real competition was the limits of reality.

There is a very good movie to be made about Sham, an artsy, angsty Sisyphean drama about the horse that never quite could. Needless to say, that film won’t be made by Walt Disney Studios. Instead, the Mouse House has made an inspirational sports film about Sham’s great rival, Secretariat.

The 1973 winner of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the first horse to achieve that cherished feat in 25 years, became a national sensation. Like a great performer, he saved his best for last. He won the final leg, the Belmont Stakes, by an unbelievable 31 lengths. It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest performances in the history of modern sports.

That’s a heck of a story, and we get why Disney wants to bring it to a new generation. However, the tale doesn’t follow the established Disney sports film formula, which wears its heart for the underdogs above all else. So it looks past the horse to find an underdog in Penny Chenery (rendered by the very able Diane Lane), the Denver housewife who inherited the superhorse from her father. It’s fair to say Secretariat is the story of a woman cheating on her family with a horse.

Like a good lover, the horse brings her joy in good times and support during bad times. Secretariat allows the sheltered housewife to become the cutthroat businesswoman that she always wanted to be, as she tries to keep the family horse farm afloat. Her life away from washing clothes becomes a source of empowerment in an era of rising feminism. With a female lead operating in a male world, Secretariat carries a politely feminist tact.

That isn’t a theme you would expect Disney to do well. At times, it doesn’t. Secretariat runs wild with cartoon chauvinism. Take Sham’s owner, who comes across as the Don King of the Battle of the Sexes. The real-life social tension caused by a housewife abandoning her traditional place in the family led to a real life divorce. Here it is only an obstacle to overcome for a moment of uplift. That said, the film pays attention to the balance between family and business that women face, giving the audience a heroine who is easy to cheer for.

Disney sports films are known for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. Secretariat’s corny script (from Miracle scribe Mike Rich) is no exception. It should be hard to ignore the fact that the Meadow Stable won the Kentucky Derby and Belmont the year before Secretariat (with Riva Ridge), but somehow it happens. It’s also left unsaid that this particular Denver housewife went to an Ivy League business school and wasn’t quite the pony circuit beginner that the film portrays. Also, real life 1973 would beckon Ang Lee to turn Secretariat into The Ice Storm 2, but such unpleasantness doesn’t dare intrude (arguably for the better). The Tweedy children are only faux hippies long enough to clean up for a grand ball like the guests at a Very Special Von Trapp Christmas.

If the facts are wrong, the story isn’t. Director Randall Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler deliver a mostly rousing entertainer due to its charismatic horse, fun race scenes, and Diane Lane’s refusal to let the film sink to the hokey level always tempting an inspirational sports movie. She plays Chenery as a woman whose bite is worse that her maternal bark. She dominates John Malkovich’s eccentric trainer, a rough-and-ready jockey, and two corporate men played by faceless actors named Dylan (Walsh and Baker). She flavors the role with a degree of seriousness that pays off against the odds. This easy backstretch of a movie doesn’t wring out all the drama in the story, but it works for what it is.

Waiting for Superman

2010-10-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

Waiting for Superman
Grade: A
Cast: Documentary
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Free admission granted

I don’t like to pull out the phrases “important movie” and “This is the one movie you should see.” But if I had to describe a movie as important, and had to say there is one movie you should see, it’s Waiting for Superman.

That’s not to say it’s my number one film for the year. And that doesn’t mean it’s a future classic. In 30 years, this film isn’t going to matter. Our education system then will teach our children for the world of that time. Whether that’s producing graduates prepared to compete in the global economy, or imparting the nuances of prairie dog hunting to survive winter on the freezing plains, we will get the education we deserve.

If there is one thing that left and right have agreed on all my life, it is the public education system stinks. In a democracy, in theory, such a consensus ought to mean that the public demands and receives successful reform. Yet in 30 plus years we’ve barely seen a squirt of it, as the world gets more competitive and our test scores flatline. Davis Guggenheim, the director of the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, explains why.

Past documentaries about children and “inner city life” – even very good films like Hoop Dreams or Mad Hot Ballroom – have emphasized the desire for escape. As such, they present their child subjects as exceptions with the skills or luck to escape tough realities. Underlying these stories is an assumption of fatalism about their situations, that tough lives are unavoidable and a permanent reality for children in these places. Guggenheim’s withering assessment stares right at this belief and refuses to let us buy it.

Waiting for Superman introduces two myth-busting challenges to perception. The first is that bad schools are the products of bad families and bad neighborhoods. Guggenheim points to evidence that the opposite might be true, that neighborhoods might well fail because their schools fail. The second is that we don’t know how to improve the education of these children and that perhaps there is no way to do it. Guggenheim asserts – and it makes the situation all the more damning – that 20 years of charter schooling have given us the solutions, but that entrenched powers dedicated to protecting bad teachers prevent our society from putting them in place.

And that’s the thing, right? We can do something about this. Maybe not everything. Maybe not perfectly. But something. But we won’t. Narrating his own film, Guggenheim examines the success of some charter schools, public schools that operate independently from the rules governing the rest of the system. We visit places like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the KIPP schools that use innovative techniques to routinely produce top-level students. More importantly, these schools do not seem to be the products of a single terrific staff. They reproduce their results in numerous cities across the country.

These schools have been founded by teachers and administrators who were fed up with the failing system. One is Geoffrey Canada, a Harvard-educated reformer operating a charter school in the Bronx, whose childhood fantasies inspire the title. A second is Michelle Rhee. The driven chancellor has fired underperformers and introduced charter school techniques to the horrendous Washington D.C. school system. In real life, she is about to be fired despite her successes. Some writers, particularly on the Washington Post website, suggest Rhee is better at public relations than reforming schools. Whatever her performance, what she says makes sense. When she says we’re sacrificing the lives of children to preserve harmony among the adults, we all know that’s true.

We see the impact on lives by spending time with several inner city children (and one suburban girl – that’s a third myth busted here, that suburban schools are immune). These students are hoping to escape the “dropout factories” of the public school system and attend charter schools. We watch them walk to school, play with dogs, and dream of becoming veterinarians. We listen to the parents speak their fears of their neighborhood schools and their hopes for their children. These aren’t original scenes, but they are necessary scenes. By the end, we feel a stake in the bouncing-ball lotteries that determine which of the hundreds of children will fill the 30ish spots offered by the charter schools.

At first you’re sad because most of these children will miss out on a quality education. Next, you realize the absurdity of having futures determined by the bounce of a plastic ball. Finally you’re angry, because you know that as each child loses his or her future, our society loses something by refusing to give the best available education to the most promising among us. All because a stupid plastic ball didn’t bounce right. And all because we’ve abdicated our responsibility to a stupid plastic ball to make these decisions for us.

Everyone knows who the villains are, bad teachers and those who protect them. Over the past few decades, the teachers unions – the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association – have stifled reform and created employment contracts that make it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Unions might have been great back when factory workers were being forced to work 73-hour days in between dodging bullets from Pinkerton agents. Nowadays, we know – heck, we even joke about – what happens when unions make ridiculous demands debilitating to the success of an organization. We’ve seen General Motors. In fact, nowadays we own half of it. But unlike car companies, public education systems don’t have to come begging to Congress when they fail; they just raise your taxes. Think of this country’s education system as one slow-motion legalized bailout.

Superman has a gentle delivery, even occasionally humorous, but it is made out of a cool anger. It’s a good anger. It’s the type of anger that gets something done. You know that stiff drink that people in movies take to steel their nerves before they deliver a baby on a plane, or otherwise fight the odds? Waiting for Superman is a cinematic shot of gin for a difficult but absolutely necessary task. Because yeah, our future depends on it.

The Social Network

2010-10-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

The Social Network
Grade: B
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara
Director: David Fincher
Free admission granted

I know I’m supposed to get out and help push.

The fight for great cinema is on, and I’m expected to throw it into neutral, hop out, and chug-chug-chug with my hands on the door. We all have to get behind The Social Network and push the crowds to every mall across the country to see this, The Movie of a Generation.

Can I tap the brakes just a little, just a little, without people saying that I didn’t like it? I did. Very much. However, I remember when Baby Boomers chose Reality Bites as the movie of my generation. So I always hesitate to declare one for the next generation. We like to think we are forever advancing as people, and that makes it flattering to pick a film set on the Internet cutting edge. But the rural meth-topia of Winter’s Bone or the collapse of the public education system in Waiting for Superman is every bit as current and relevant.

Still, it’s reasonable that David Fincher’s sharply made, widely praised film is a good candidate. So let’s take the time to celebrate The Social Network for what it is – a very, very good origin story about how the founders of Facebook brought us all closer to our lifetime friends while destroying their own friendships in the process.

You can’t turn around without finding a review that compares The Social Network to Citizen Kane. Critics such as IndieWire’s Todd McCarthy and Salon’s Andrew O’Heir note or dismiss the similarities in the rise of fictional Charles Foster Kane and the portrayal of real-life Facebook genius Mark Zuckerberg.

Is that an accurate comparison? I say, who cares if it’s accurate? It’s such a fertile comparison that accuracy is beyond the point.

Both pictures come from the tradition of American stories in which self-made rich men end up with everything and nothing. Both Kane and Zuckerberg are lonely figures whose drive for success has slowly erased their human relationships. We want to admire our millionaires, because they represent what we deep down desire. We want to feel we can have the American Dream without having the cost be too much to our soul. These stories reflect the deep hesitation we feel toward our sometimes conflicting values.

Kane and Zuckerberg are also privileged young men who fashion themselves as outsiders. They build their empires by imagining bonds with the common man, in alliance against idle and unfeeling privilege. For Kane, this means muckraking newspapers going after the political bosses of the day. For Zuckerberg, this means taking aim at old money Harvard classmates like the impossibly entitled Winklevoss twins (each played by Armie Hammer, who makes it seem like Brendan Fraser is part of a set of triplets). They are rebelling against the power that they know personally. However, these men might be as much a part of what they hate as they are opponents to it.

The big difference, I would say, is motivation. Kane doesn’t shackle its man with a motivation so much as insinuate his motivation. Rosebud is not just a sled or a symbol of lost innocence. It is the manifestation of the one ineffable thing that Kane chases that he can never regain. The Social Network tries to do the same in the form of a lost girlfriend (Rooney Mara). That seems like a stretch. It’s weak in comparison to the accomplishments. But maybe the flaw isn’t failing to find the motivation. Maybe the flaw is looking for it in the first place. Maybe the flaw is not recognizing that some people are just driven because they are.

Written by The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network has a full set of lively characters and performances centered around the living-on-credit decadence of our recent past. Eisenberg comes into his own as Zuckerberg, portrayed as a lonely sadist but also admirably ambitious. Some see him as a monster, but I never reached the point of disliking him. I just thought he was willing to do what it took and it couldn’t always be nice. Some have taken his mistreatment of best friend/original partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) as a hideous betrayal. I thought it reached a point where Saverin was out of his depth. Having been impressed by him in Black Snake Moan, count me as unsurprised by Justin Timberlake as the party boy entrepreneur Sean Parker. Frankly, I’m a little surprised he isn’t a bigger movie star by now.

Fincher’s direction is sharp, typically meticulous and professional. It achieves the level of precision that has characterized his career. That said, The Social Network seems like a collection of good to great moments without a wowser scene. Zodiac has a number of wowser scenes. Kane has a dozen wowser scenes forever enshrined in our collective filmgoing mind. That doesn’t make The Social Network bad. It’s just makes it a little less. It’s just a happy matter of degrees of good.

Let Me In

2010-10-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Let Me In
Grade: C
Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloe Grace Moretz, Elias Koteas, Richard Jenkins
Director: Matt Reeves
Free admission granted

Life is unfair to middle children and remakes.

If Matt Reeves’ vampire coming-of-age story Let Me In had been made before the Swedish original, Tomas Alfredsson’s Let the Right One In, would we automatically think it was the better of the two?

It didn’t work that way, and we’ll never know. What I can say: Let Me In, written and directed by Cloverfield’s Reeves, underlines and capitalizes so much of what was wonderfully understated about the original. Still, this creepy vampire flick, set in 1983 small town New Mexico, is better than most horror films that Hollywood will release anytime soon.

Alfredsson’s 2008 original (you know, the good ol’ days) has a real genius for holding sick or horrifying scenes and daring you to laugh. A great example: a sweet dog stumbles onto a private moment in the woods. The killer is draining blood from a victim, and the fluffy white critter comes and sits, as if he is waiting for a ball to be thrown. In comparison, the same scene in Let Me In is shot strictly for its shock value, effective but one-dimensional. Reeves also misses what I assumed about the original, that the child vampire (Chloe Grace Moretz from Kick-Ass) is a psychological projection of the disturbed 12-year-old boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) that enables his Carrie-like vengeance on the bullies around him.

I disliked the first half of this one, when I only noticed what was missing. Then something happened. It suddenly got good. Reeves does a better job at crafting touching moments, and the film is high on creepiness that’s generated fairly – through character and place and the fears of growing up. Will loving a girl free you, or change you, or enslave you? No boy going through puberty knows.

What I do like about the new one is the efficiency. The Swedish version had a subplot about aging hippies with an ending that didn’t pay off for the limping along. It disappears. The cinematography and production design are more elaborate, all darkness and halos of light, spooky and memorable. Reeves and his crew show a real talent for transforming a closed door into more than a closed door.

A couple of pet peeves: Why choose Los Alamos, New Mexico? If you’re interested in small-town metaphors (rather than aimless Cold War metaphors), why choose the home of the National Laboratory and one of the most educated small towns in the country? When the boy tells the girl that no one ever moves there, it’s pretty funny. Everyone who lives there moves there. Unless Los Alamos High School has an unusually great program in nuclear science.

The second pet peeve: You know those painfully over-researched 18th Century period pieces where everything is too much like a painting? Where the dresses are too clean and too perfect and everyone has nice teeth? Let Me In is that to the eighties. It’s loudly full of Ms. Pac-Mans and Now and Laters. And the music? Eleven-year-olds in New Mexico in 1983 didn’t listen to Freur. You were lucky if you had Oingo Boingo. Let’s all take a breath and admit that all they played was Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.

But I call them pet peeves for a reason. They’re pet peeves, not deal-breakers. In the end, you won’t find a better October horror film this year. Happy Halloween!

Never Let Me Go

2010-09-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

Never Let Me Go
Grade: B
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Kate Bowes Renna, Charlotte Rampling
Director: Mark Romanek
Free Admission Granted

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go is the Harry Potter film for a modern dystopia. It nails much of what I dislike about Hogwarts Academy – the conformity, the noble-minded authoritarianism, the obedient little drone who achieves heroism through destiny rather than sacrifice. Created by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, the Hailsham students of Never Let Me Go are chosen by birthright to save people, as well. They won’t be celebrated, and it will come at great unspoken cost.

Then again, Never Let Me Go is like Blade Runner, isn’t it? Anchored around the lives of characters who are designed to use and dispose. Sacrificial beings for the betterment of others. One film calls death “retirement.” The other “completion.” Each reasons if the characters are worthy of the rights and protections of souls. In style, the film follows in the line of English science fiction like Children of Men as a reaction to this enormously influential forbear. Rather than an eye-catchingly dystopian future, these films strive for oppressive anti-spectacle in a recognizable modern world.

And it’s a little like Inglourious Basterds, right? Each takes place in an alternative history, where it’s certain in one and possible in the other that World War II didn’t end the same way. Nazis, or at least Nazi medical ethics, might have prevailed, with a genteel totalitarianism setting in. The story gives life to that unpleasant little Nietzsche observation that all forms of higher culture are based on cruelty.

And it is a little like the book and film of that other towering contemporary English novel, Atonement. They each follow a love triangle around lives of psychological oppression, lingering on an impressively interior performance by Carey Mulligan. She gets great mileage out of short sentences. They mark monumental discoveries that are really short and simple wisdom.

And maybe Never Let Me Go is like a Pink Floyd song. The famous Dark Side of the Moon track "Time." You truly feel the line “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.” And they share that feeling of a whole life being felt in one moment. The time is gone. The song is over. Thought I‘d something more to say.

I’m uncomfortable with things. I’m not sure that Andrew Garfield adds enough magnetism to carry the role of the doomed love interest (Charlotte Rampling, in two scenes, does). As for themes, I’m not sure it’s treading new ground so much as nicely re-treading sown ground.

I didn’t love it. I didn’t connect to it. Yet I reserve the right to. I suspect it is a film that will keep a hold on me for a while. Indeed, never let me go.

Easy A

2010-09-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

Easy A
Grade: Pass
Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Aly Michalska, Dan Byrd, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Thomas Haden Church, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell
Director: Will Gluck
Free Admission Granted

The Easy A might well be for a class in astronomy. This is supposed to be the movie in which the redhead It Girl Emma Stone (Superbad, Zombieland) is born as a star.

If dying stars turn into black holes, sucking everything around them into eternal darkness, then movie stardom defies the laws of physics. Stone absorbs the surrounding creative matter, burns it into a ray of light and shoots it across space and time. If this were a political science class, I would say she transforms each scene – and eventually the whole movie – into a referendum upon her. And that is how a star is born.

Astronomy aside, Easy A thinks of itself as an English class. This teenage sex comedy studies at the school of filmmaking that snatches classic high school literature and resets it in high school. For better or worse, that’s how Shakespeare becomes 10 Things I Hate About You, all so the kids “can relate.” Director Will Gluck and writer Bert V. Royal choose that all-too-mandatory Nathaniel Hawthorne novel The Scarlett Letter. The smart-girl-gone-wild Stone even stitches the letter A on her suddenly spicy wardrobe.

That takes us to drama class. The invisible understudy Olive Prenderghast (Stone) rises to the role of school floozy after a false rumor spreads around school. She becomes the lead actress, creating the illusion of a convention-challenging sex life that doesn’t exist. Like any great thespian she lures other students into her performance, pretending to have sex with school outcasts – such as her gay friend (Dan Byrd) – so they can win social acceptance. Hester Prynne-like, she accepts shame so that others can live freely.

As in many schools, there’s the risk of plagiarism, but really it’s more allusion and talking about your favorites. Royal’s script mentions John Hughes by name, and Gluck throws in an energetic musical number referencing Matthew Broderick’s famous singalong in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Otherwise, the verbose snark, at times, reminds of Diablo Cody’s Juno. A snotty Christian student (Amanda Bynes) brings a bit of Mean Girls or Heathers.

It might be more sensible to grade Easy A with a pass-fail system. It is very attentive one minute and looking out the window the next. Why create delicate differences in rating its success? Everybody gets what they expect, and everybody gets the point.

The Virginity Hit

2010-09-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Virginity Hit
Grade: D
Cast: Matt Bennett, Zack Pearlman, Nicole Weaver
Director: Andrew Gurland and Hunt Botko
Free Admission Granted

The Internet was born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Military planners were confronted with the question of how to maintain command and control during a nuclear war. A decentralized method of electronic communication was proposed, leading to a communications system that could transport information long distances almost instantaneously.

All of that danger. All of that ingenuity. All of that technology. All so that a foursome of buttfucks could film the end of their friend’s virginity for Youtube.

And when I say buttfucks, I really do mean buttfucks about the unsympathetic characters in The Virginity Hit. Sometimes we let young people off the hook too easily, hoping they will grow out of their childish impulses and one day transform into productive clockmakers. Not on my watch. When you secretly film and record sex with your girlfriend – or worse, when you don’t have the balls to tell your friends not to record it – you deserve your teenage virginal tragedy.

This intentionally obnoxious comedy, produced by Will Ferrell and his frequent collaborator Adam McKay, takes inspiration in the casual sadism of the teenage years. Its boorishness passes with little reflection or commentary, accepting the world of digestible Internet voyeurism.

The voyerism is perpetuated through a fake documentary style familiar to its co-directors, Andrew Gurland and Hunt Botko (The Last Exorcism). The film uses unknown actors, shoots on handheld cameras, and imitates a Youtube video. In films like The Blair Witch Project, this style conjures a heightened state of reality. In films like This Is Spinal Tap, it serves as an ironic framing device for the absurdity. This one has too many implausible moments to be the former, and too few laughs to effectively do the latter.

I was reading a John Hughes quote the other day about teenage life. He described it as the period of time when each person takes life most seriously. It’s true that Hughes made his share of hormonally charged movies, but his characters often possessed serious and vulnerable sides rarely spotted in today’s teen movies. Watching The Virginity Hit, I wondered, do these kids have thoughts? Do they talk about life? Or is every minute consumed with sex, drugs and Youtube?

Going the Distance

2010-09-30T18:09:00.000-07:00

Going the Distance
Grade: C
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Justin Long, Christina Applegate, Other people who are just happy to be in a movie.
Director: Didn’t this thing just direct itself?
Free Admission Granted

One of the great things about useless romantic comedies is how easily they break down into question and answer form. Observe the Drew Barrymore-Justin Long long-distance get-together Going the Distance.

Q: Is it funny?
A: Eh, not bad. The leads dish out their easygoing dirty-mouthed patter with bland precision, and there is a bottom-barrel Zach Galiwhatever guy-talk character. In the end, it doesn’t ask you to remember a single gag or line, so you can use that space in the memory bank for more important mental pursuits.

Q: Do you want the couple to get together?
A: Yes. If the script or the star pairing makes it seem like they’re forcing the couple together, then you have a disaster (or at least Slumdog Millionaire) on your hands. Fortunately, Drew Barrymore is at the top of her rom-com game here. (Don’t read me in that tone of voice.) Actually, one might say she’s above her usual rom-com game, as we actually like her and wish for good things to happen for her.

Q: Does it have anything to do or say? Or does the whole thing hinge on getting the couple together?
A: Nope, nothing to say whatsoever. The whole thing hinges on getting the couple together. If you are looking for any grand insight into relationships, or even minimally original insight into having a long-distance relationship, Going the Distance is not the film for you.

Q: Does it make you feel like an idiot?
A: No. And wow, was that a new experience!

Q: Should you go?
A: Is your girlfriend asking? Then of course, sweetheart.

The American

2010-09-30T18:03:00.001-07:00

The American
Grade: A
Cast: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Paolo Bonacetti, Thekla Reuten
Director: Anton Corbijn
Free Admission Granted

It’s time to submit a definition of the George Clooney hero.

He’s an aging professional who has grown smarter than the system to which he has indentured himself. The distance between his intelligence and the system’s need for myopy breeds cynicism and alienation. Finding himself the villain of his own story, he is sinking into a crisis in which his soul suddenly wants more than the system can give him.

Since at least Out of Sight, and most effectively in the tremendously underrated Michael Clayton, Clooney has explored iteration after iteration of this role, in the way Tom Cruise used to play the young hot shot needing mature guidance. Being a smart star, Clooney has chosen a character (or a character has chosen him) that is indelible to this modern time and place. It has made Clooney a star worth investing in.

The American sees Clooney as a darker shade of this hero, an underworld weapons expert forever on the move. He arrives in a picturesque Italian villa to slowly custom-build a high-powered weapon for a sexy female assassin (Thekla Reuten). His instinct is to keep a low profile, to stay professional, to submit to the system, even though he feels it closing in. A recent tragedy finds this taciturn wanderer slowly opening to human connection. He befriends a priest (Paolo Bonacetti) who knows a sinner when he sees one. He succumbs to the beauty of a gorgeous prostitute (Violante Placido) who views an American as a path to another life.

It’s too bad Grahame Greene has already used the title The Quiet American. It fits this film’s hushed European style, the alienation it gathers out of chilly imagery. As a young photographer, director Anton Corbijn (Control), matched moody images to the moody music of Joy Division. The American shares that same icy visual mystery. The town’s narrow stone corridors seep with paranoia. Clooney’s attraction to a gorgeous spot of countryside serves as an antidote of liberating beauty.

Clooney’s charm and charisma usually soften films with the Clooney hero. They are stories of alienation without feeling like stories of alienation, missing that cold Antonioni thing of watching characters come apart in the emptiness. Not so The American. For one picture, Clooney scrubs down the charm and hides it in a shell. The film relates his character to a butterfly, but really, he’s stuck in a cocoon, a permanent state of transformation, unable to fly away.

Plaza Classic Film Fest #3: The Last Picture Show

2010-09-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

(The Last Picture Show, 1971, d. Peter Bogdanovich)

Black and white is the actor’s friend.

So said Peter Bogdanovich, during his onstage appearance at the Plaza Classic Film Festival Aug. 14, before a screening of his 1971 masterpiece, The Last Picture Show.

Bogdanovich was quoting his friend, Orson Welles, who was occasionally known to bum around the director’s home during his residential wanderings. We can only have fun imaging the two directors exchanging this little nugget as Cybill Shepard washed their underwear. Whatever its origins, this explains the nostalgic black-and-white look of this 1950s coming-of-age story, set in a slowly dying Texas town.

If black and white is the actor’s friend, then Bogdanovich was graciously paid back by a largely unknown cast. This really is an actor’s film. While only Jeff Bridges would go on to measure up to The Godfather graduates, the rest of the young cast (Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepard, Randy Quaid, Sam Bottoms) would dot the great films of the 1970s.

Bogdanovich gives each actor one big speech or scene. Often, the camera starts as if it is a character hidden in the room. Then it slowly, auspiciously closes in on the actors’ faces, as if closing in on their souls. Breaths freeze. Time holds. The characters dig for a thought or moment buried deep within. Then the camera slowly fades back, releases the tension, and allows time to resume its normal speed. We see this technique again and again, most effectively as Ben Johnson reminisces at a fishing hole shortly before his death.

It is generally thought that the Oscar winner Johnson stole the show, letting the withered miles of his face serve as the town’s soul. But I’ll take Ellyn Burstyn. Her aging beauty possesses the callousness to draw blood and the tenderness to be wounded in equal measure. Could an actress have a breakout performance at age 39 nowadays? You could in 1971. Her subsequent five-year career run is a treasure of the seventies’ New Hollywood films.

Perhaps the biggest star is the town itself. And this leads to a mystery … how did a New York boy so acutely capture the rhythms of a small Texas town? Arnene, Texas, is a place of perpetual dying – a small brick speed bump for the northern winds rushing down the plains. The town no longer lives, but it never quite vanishes.

While the film is based on a Larry McMurtry novel, there is something vaguely Faulkneresque about the location and story. I see a loose similarity to the Compson clan of The Sound and the Fury. The girl runs off to the fast life, Dallas or Hollywood. One young man leaves town for a perch of psychological distance. And one young man remains to mind the farm and preside over the decline. In Picture Show, it is the sweet Sonny left to watch Arnene slide further into dust.

All this leads to that fantastic ending, a small table, a lovers’ conversation, an ending that becomes a beginning. Sonny still has Ruth (Cloris Leachman), his older lover, but their prospects are dim. Their final wounded conversation is a thing of sadness, generosity, and a humane uncertainty. It’s a film moment that I can never shake. That’s why I love the movies.

Flipped

2010-09-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

Flipped
Grade: D
Cast: Madeline Carroll, Callan McAuliffe, Rebecca DeMornay, Anthony Edwards, John Mahoney, Penelope Ann Miller, Aidan Quinn.
Director: Rob Reiner
free admission granted

Is this all that I have to look forward to?

Three or four decades of looking back to the good old days? While I remain at an age when I can effectively deny the presence of gray hairs, I’m still displeased with this future. When I’m 60, will I look back or will I look forward? Rob Reiner’s Flipped doesn’t help.

This 1960s puppy love story plays as if someone hacked all the locks on the cages holding the lost episodes of The Wonder Years. Now they’re scurrying around the Boomer Porn laboratory. Hopefully, someone can stop them before they reproduce.

It would be one thing if Flipped were an act of sunny but genuine nostalgia. But there are enough out of place references to seem like somebody else’s nostalgia. For instance, no one commonly used terms like “visually challenged,” or anything challenged, until the 1980s at the earliest. Is this real nostalgia? Or false nostalgia? Calculated nostalgia? Marketable nostalgia?

From the first shoo-bop 50s moment that little girl Julie (Madeline Carroll) falls in love with little neighbor boy Bryce (Callan McAuliffe), we know we’re in for a lot “I’m never talking to him again” tween drama.

It balances the beam a little better while telling Julie’s story. She’s freaky but spunky, climbing trees to keep them from being cut down. John Mahoney, best known as the father on Frasier, pitches in a nice supporting role as the young boy’s grandfather who takes a shine to the female neighbor. That said, Bryce really is a spineless little corporate nobody in training.

Romance of a lifetime? I seriously doubt this one’s surviving the sixties. He’s headed for a cubicle or a car lot. She’s headed for the free love commune in Easy Rider. But that’s for parents to know and kids to find out later.

I suspect Flipped will provide a harmless, even modestly pleasing departure for fans of the Wendelin Van Draanen children’s novel upon which it is based. It sells the basic tropes of pre-teen sensibility and teaches a few valuable lessons. But it never departs much from the expected.

Plaza Classic Film Fest #2, The Godfather

2010-08-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

(Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown - El Paso, Texas - and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 5 to Aug. 15 features 70 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports on the classic films that he watches at the festival.)

The Godfather (1972, d. Francis Ford Coppola)

My Godfather observation on my recent viewing: Fredo is gay. And Moe Greene is his lover. And this is the rarest, deepest and most vital secret of The Godfather saga.

No, this isn't a gaydar thing: I'm not picking on Fredo because he is the effeminate son of Mafia Don Vito Corleone. And when I say gay, I don't mean nebulous literary homoeroticism that otherwise arises in parts of the series. I mean they are literally homosexual lovers, and if true, it is a critical piece of the story.

Now there are hints of each man's possible homosexuality (or bisexuality) throughout the saga. For instance, Greene takes a bullet while receiving a massage from a male masseuse. True, real-life straight guys do that everyday. But real-life straight guys do not have a writer/director trying to convey significant detail to an audience.

The question of sexual orientation counts most strongly in the scene with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) arrives in Las Vegas, where Fredo has been sent for protection under Greene's watch. The newly minted head of the Corleone crime family plans to move the family westward. He is there to forcibly buy out Greene's interest in the casino/hotel.

How do they do business in Vegas? Not like the traditional Sicilian way back east. Michael meets Fredo with Johnny Fontaine, the ladies man pop singer, and a room full of bimbos assembled for the men's pleasure. At first, the bawdy party plans seem to establish Fredo's playboy status. But consider an alternative. Is it possible that the excessive public promotion of his heterosexuality, particularly to family, is suggestive of a closeted gay man?

When Greene arrives, Michael makes an offer that Greene can't refuse. The discussion turns into a shouting match. Michael threateningly chides Greene about an unseen past incident in which he slapped around Fredo in public. Greene responds that Fredo has been picking up too many chicks at the gambling tables, preventing the real gamblers from playing and losing.

More evidence of heterosexuality, right? He might as well say he slapped Fredo for watching too much Man Vs. Wild. Hold on. Look at what Greene said. It's a weird thing to say. Can one womanizing drunk really cost that much money to a big casino? Or does Greene sound more like a jealous lover rationalizing his violence?

If there is a relationship, then it forms an unusual, unspoken dynamic. It creates a scene in which what is being said is less than what is actually going on. Michael may well know about his brother's orientation, or at least suspect, but he cannot say it. Fredo must suspect that Michael knows, but he must put on a show, just in case. And Michael may well understand that the his brother is putting on a show. Everyone plays along, because putting on a show and playing along is a universal practice in The Godfather. It may be the point of The Godfather.

If my theory is correct, watch what it does: it creates a parallel story between Fredo and the Corleone sister Connie (Talia Shire), who receives regular beatings from her womanizing husband Carlo. Each one is abused by his or her lover. Each one defends their abusive lovers to the head of the family (Connie to Sonny, Fredo to Michael). And each conflict leads to an assassination attempt on the head of the family.

Double Lives

Fredo is leading a double-life. But he isn't the only one leading a double life. Almost every Godfather character leads one life internally and one life for public and family consumption. This is most effectively and importantly seen with Michael.

When we meet Michael, we learn that he is the family's baby brother and golden boy. He is characterized repeatedly as Mr. Clean, a college kid and war hero, destined for things outside of Mafia life. Don Vito expects him to lead the family into acceptance, legitimacy, and respectability in America. The young Michael we meet is still at least residually invested in this vision of him. He has gone to college, fought in the war, dates the pretty WASP girl, etc.

Deep down, I don't think this was ever the real Michael. Maybe as a teenager he might have been the type to stop the car and help a stranded sea turtle cross the highway. However, he is cold from the minute we meet him, in uniform, at the opening wedding. When he protects his father from assassination at the hospital, a point is made that his hand never shakes as the assassins drive by. At a minimum, the war made Michael Corleone a cold killer outside of family view. More likely, he was always this way. He chose to play the role of the good son in order to please his father. The Godfather is usually interpreted as Michael's transformation from the goody-two-shoes son to a cold muderous mafia don. However, I do not think this is a transformation. I think it is a revelation.

For all the mob warfare onscreen, The Godfather is really the story of a marriage. It begins with the wedding of Carlo and Connie. It ends with Michael ordering Carlo's death, Connie storming into Michael's office to scream about killing her lowlife husband, and Michael falsely denying responsibility to his wife Kay (Diane Keaton).

Ultimately, this is the double life of the story itself. The wedding introduces the Corleones as a family based on love and loyalty. Over three hours, The Godfather erodes this facade and exposes the Corleone family as a fraud. Family members play their roles and pretend not to notice the big picture. The family is not held together by love and loyalty. It is held together by power and deception.

Plaza Classic Film Festival, No. 1

2010-08-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

(Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown - El Paso, Texas - and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 5 to Aug. 15 features 70 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports on the classic films that he watches at the festival.)

Yojimbo (1961, d. Akira Kurosawa) The value of re-watching old films is to reach new conclusions that reflect growth and experience. Everyone has those films they saw in high school that they were too young to fully appreciate. As a high schooler, I never suspected Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo is actually a samurai dark comedy.

And when I say dark, I mean dark. Dark, dark. Like "Michael Haneke called to say 'Turn that frown upside down'" dark. This is a movie bathing in the worst instinct in human nature. In the late 19th Century, two rival gangs hold violent sway over an isolated Japanese town, turning it into an undertaker's delight. The only thing preventing an evil bloodbath is that both sides are too cowardly for an all-out fight to the death. Playing both sides, Toshiro Mifune's romaing master samurai tries to lure them into a mutually assured massacre, partly for his own twisted amusement. Later, his primary act of nobility gets punished with torture and near-death. That's dark.

This is a bleak vision of the world made at the peak of the Cold War in 1961. Now think about it ... two rival sides ... always backing away from the brink of all-out conflict ... facing the introduction of a new weapon of mass destruction (a pistol) ... a town with a compliant Japanese mayor .... has anyone pointed to this film being a Cold War allegory? This film reminds me as much of Dr. Strangelove as it does Kurosawa's other epics.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, d. Agnes Varda)
There is an astounding visual sequence early in Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnes Varda, the First Lady of the French New Wave. We see Cleo through a Paris shop window as she samples chapeaux. The camera strolls smoothly along the storefront, capturing the busy street life in the reflection, blending the indoor and outdoor images. We then cut inside to a circling closeup of Cleo trying on hats. The rotating camera captures her images fractured in the store mirrors, creating disorientation out of the mundane.

I don't know how Varda even conceived of this shot, much less executed it. But the former photographer and her second film give deep consideration to the power of the camera. Take a moment later when two people on a park bench are shot at three different distances. Each has a different feel - close and intimate; medium and removed; long, isolated and part of the surrounding environment.

Or take another photographic idea - the power of observing versus the power of being observed, of being an object. In the latter, others watch us. We attract their attention. We become an influential part of their world. But we become slaves to their distorted image. We deny ourselves to gain that power. Then we watch others. We become unimportant, anonymous to them. We lose the ability to influence but gain the ability to find and fulfill ourselves.

This polarity seems at work in Cleo. As a drama queen pop singer waiting on the results of a cancer test, Cleo at first chooses to be an object. She uses her pending illness to attract attention and sympathy. She maintains this diva posture. Then something changes. She feels horrified when an ass-kissing pair of songwriters presents a new song inspired by her struggle. The song flatters her, worships her, but the dirge does not grasp her real struggle.

At this point, Cleo performs the most meaningful tearing off of a wig in screen history, thereby rejecting her status as a famous object. Naturally coiffed, she descends into the streets into a position of observation and anonymity. She converses with a nude sculpture model in a similar position. She meets a soldier with a real reason to fear death. By the end of the film, she finds new possibilities rooted in her real self.

There are so many small things to talk about in this film of subsections. Notice the integration of the soundtrack with the ambient street noise. At one moment, Cleo passes a child playing a few notes on a piano in the street. Those notes are picked up by the score as she walks. Later, the music abruptly ends amid the flutter of street pigeons. Also note the radical shifts in emotional tone during long takes. Brilliant. The first time that I saw Cleo, I was impressed by it. The second time I fell in love with it.

Easy Rider (1969, d. Dennis Hopper)
What is more amazing about Easy Rider? That this film was ever made (by a major studio, Columbia, no less)? Or that such a wild country ever existed which could produce such a wild film?

No other significant American film is so precisely moored to its moment in time, an epic freewheeling travelogue through late-sixties America. The only way to make it more sixties would be a special guest appearance by Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm Commune. (Wavy Gravy's not in the film, right?)

Easy Rider is a little hamstrung by Dennis Hopper's limits as a director. While the highway-apocalypse finale is brilliantly put together, there are a few too many loose scenes and underwhelming New Wave mimickry. More disconcerting is Jack Nicholson's star-turn-at-all-costs role as a tagalong small-town lawyer, a noisy performance in a film of understated authenticity. Do we know for sure that the rambling band of rednecks beat him for hanging out with no-good longhairs? Or are they just sick of him chewing scenery?

Easy Rider has suffered its own Odyssey, from the heaven of cultural myth to the Hell of cultural mockery. Isn't it time to remove it from the Cinematic Underworld and start seeing it again for what it is - an eager paean to the best virtues that came out of the America of its time? This time-capsule treasure has plenty that is timeless - kindness, cruelty, innocence, sadness, freedom, death.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

2010-08-18T07:16:00.001-07:00

Scott Pilgrim Versus the World
Grade: B
Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Anna Kendrick, Jason Schwartzmann
Director: Edgar Wright
free admission granted

Stephen Stills? His name is Stephen Stills? ... And he lives in Canada? ... and he's the singer in a band? .... Do the kids know Stephen Stills nowadays? ... Are the kids thinking "There's somthing happening here and what it is ain't exactly clear" .... I guess his roommate is Neil Young, right .... Ha no! Young Neil .... Isn't that joke a little too hip for the room? .... and hey, hey-hey, hey-hey-hey-hey, these guys can play ....

So Michael Cera, Scott Pilgrim .... Nice guy bass player extaordinnaire ....Tragically Canadian .... dating a high school girl .... A little old for that, no? .... But Scott Pilgrim, such a nice guy, can't bring himself to .... And now we're running through a door in the middle of a snowy nowhere .... and through surreal scene to surreal scene like we're in a dream .... A dream .... A dream .... Are we in a dream? .... Are we in a dream? .... But who would dream of Toronto? ... Do even people from Toronto dream of Toronto? ....

Oh, hey, look, there's a skater girl with dyed purple hair, skating around a cactus in the desert .... And now she's in the library, flesh and blood and tempting, wounded eyes .... and now she's at that party .... And has she heard that story about why Pac-Man was called Pac-Man? .... And are you going to dump girl for girl? .... The nice guy code forbids dating two girls at once .... And how do you write about Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World? .... The adaptation of the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O'Malley .... Is there a normal way to do it? .... Can you accurately convey the feeling of a film with such a short attention span but so long on humor and just being itself ....

Wait! Wait, wait, wait ....

Now we're at the battle of the bands .... And stop children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's goin' down .... And Scott has to fight him .... And him ..., and him and him and him .... her seven evil ex-boyfriends .... Nooooo, seven evil exes .... Defeat each one .... to win Ramona's affections .... How romantic .... How bone-jarring .... And that's why she moved to Toronto .... Because love is a battlefield and Canada is for deserters .... and isn't that the dude from Superman .... And he has vegan superpowers? .... And he plays bass, too .... And now her hair's blue .... And now her hair's green .... And now everybody is kung-fu fighting .... And everybody is fast as lightning ....

And .... And it's like a video game .... so like a video game .... director Edgar Wright (of the lovable Hot Fuzz) embracing video game aesthetics with as much gusto as a movie based on a video game .... And how do you write about Scott Pilgrim .... How do you write about a film that is so aggressively its own unique self? .... Even if it has absolutely nothing to say .... You know what this film is like? .... It's like that entertaining house guest who's a blast for an hour then slowly gets just a little bit on your nerves ... Just a little bit on your nerves .... Because he goes to the same well once too often .... And twice too often ... And maybe thrice too often .... But even if you quit laughing hard, you never quit smiling .... you never quit smiling ....

Get Low

2010-08-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

Get Low
Grade: C
Cast: Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black, Gerlad McRaney
Director: Aaron Schneider
free admission granted

This is the thing about a movie with a deep dark secret. The payoff should be about equal to or greater than the buildup. It certainly shouldn’t feel like a letdown or a cop out. It should not be a way to get off the hook a likable character with a checkered past. No matter how tenderly Robert Duvall tries to sell the revelation in Get Low, it never quite burns off the rubbery smell of a soft landing.

As Felix Bush, Duvall hits a sweet spot as the Boo Radley of a Tennessee town in the thirties. Living as a hermit on his farmstead with only a mule for company, children make a game of running up to his property and throwing pebbles at him. Bush answers their rock-throwing with shotgun fire, which is roughly his answer to everyone. There are rumors and fears about the things he has done.

With death approaching, Bush wants to “get low” before God and seek forgiveness. With the help of the local funeral home, the shaggy old man decides to hold a funeral … while he’s still alive… to make amends. He invites the town to come and tell the stories they have heard about him. He plans to tell a story, as well.

Director Aaron Schneider’s smartest stroke is casting Bill Murray as the town’s mordant mortician. Placing Murray into this setting seems so antithetical to his screen persona. Yet it’s perfect, because we have all met people in small places that make us wonder how they got there. Murray delivers perfectly playing a mirror to Duvall; they are both men in whom it is too easy to believe the worst, only to be surprised by the generosity that emerges.

Most of Schneider’s career has been spent as a cinematographer, and that is evident. The film sparkles with a beautiful candlelit tone. A magical haze that makes it feel like the town might disappear, like Brigadoon, once the rainbow disappears. Some will inhale this mythical feel; some may see it as too much movie magic. I felt both ways at times.

Get Low has a fairly singular quality, it manages to be unique without being quite daring. While its emotions never feel fraudulent, at times they feel a little forced. It does many things right, leaves a memorable and amiable feeling. But it does not stamp itself on your mind.

Dinner for Schmucks

2010-08-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dinner for Schmucks
Grade: F
Cast: Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Bruce Greenwood, Stephanie Szostek, Jermaine Clement
Director: Jay Roach
free admission granted

How bad is Dinner For Schmucks?

It is so bad that I wish there were a bunch of other movies featuring dead mice in dioramas, just so I could say, “This is the stupidest movie with dead mice in dioramas that I’ve ever seen. “

Paul Rudd is a financial analyst aiming for a promotion. To land the job, he must impress his boss at a dinner attended by the company executives. At this dinner, each person invites the strangest person that they can find, so the group can make fun of them. Mind reader. Animal psychic. Blind swordsman. It is a little like the Gong Show.

Rudd runs into Steve Carell with a car, because in movies that is the only way people meet these days. Anyway, Carell collects dead mice, dyes their hair, makes little mice clothes, and inserts them into re-enactments of famous paintings. Rudd sees him as the ticket to the big time. But he doesn’t count on Carell destroying his relationships in the process.

The “annoying buddy ruins my life” genre has been done a million times. In about 999,999 of those times, it’s been done better. Rudd does his comic everyman routine to no discernible end. Carell places an unusual and unwise amount of faith in the comic potential of dumb windbreakers and overbites. He appears to be under the impression that he is in a Jerry Lewis movie. Perhaps the French will dig it.

At one point, the movie’s phony artist (Jermaine Clement) observes that a goat will eat anything. That is a telling moment, because Dinner for Schmucks seems to be a Hollywood test just to see how low they can go and still get you to eat. If you choose to go to this particular dinner party, then the laugh is probably on you.

Inception

2010-07-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

Inception
Grade: A
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine
Director: Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan’s dashing mindbender Inception is doomed to wide and inaccurate comparisons to Stanley Kubrick.

I say this because every challenging English-language film that critics cannot immediately box draws comparisons to Kubrick. True, there is a mind-blowing zero-gravity fight scene with the weightlessness of 2001. Then again it could be Fred Astaire, dancing on the ceiling of the HAL 9000. Inception creates some odd visual marriages among its overspill of film references.

So is it wrong of me to say that too many observers are betting on the wrong psychedelic space-station mind trip? I think a more productive point of entry for Inception is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. What would it look like if Andrei Tarkovsky directed a James Bond movie? Inception would seem to be the answer.

Each film – Solaris and Inception – examines the relationships of dreams and art, ideas and memory and filmmaking, psychology and reality. The films suggest that artistic endeavor comes from public exposure of the subconscious mind; art is therefore both sparked and troubled by subjectivity, affected by the deficit between reality and our personal perception of it.

Their plots center on dead wives and dead realities, imperfectly rebuilt from the troubled psyches of guilty men. These copies can be brought to life, indeed, but never made whole and real. Time diminishes memory. Reality can never be known entirely or remembered perfectly. We can only see through our lens of love and hate, memory and desire, and most of all guilt. If there’s one word in this review to underline and remember, it’s “guilt.”

If there is a flaw with Inception it’s this – Tarkovsky was willing to lose himself in his own personal dream logic. Nolan remains cold and clinical, approaching the subconscious mind as an investigator. The English director keeps a precise, rational, drumbeat structure (the rational structure of a magic trick, a collective deception agreed to by a performer and an audience). Inception feels like an ego making a movie about the Id.

Now if you are not a Russian film scholar, or if you would rather watch an action movie than sit through three hours of ten-minute car rides and Russian poetry, then that’s understandable. More people will see Inception this weekend than have ever seen a Tarkovsky film. Those masses are unlikely to be disappointed. Tarkovsky directing a James Bond movie would still be a James Bond movie, after all.

The film takes place in dreams, and dreams within dreams, and dreams within dreams within dreams. One dream might have a deadly struggle in a hotel suite; at the same time, the next dream might have an Arctic snow battle removed from The Spy Who Loved Me. During a ski chase, you are left waiting for the Union Jack parachute to open.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb is an extractor, an agent who steals secrets from people’s dreams. Like many pros during a life crisis, his home life has started to harm his work. The manufactured dreams in which he operates are being compromised by the vengeful presence of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard).

To clear his name and return to his children, Cobb makes a deal with a Japanese tycoon (Ken Watanabe). Rather than steal an idea, he must do the impossible – successfully plant an idea in the mind of a powerful businessman (Cillian Murphy). His dream team includes an architect to build the dreams (Ellen Page); a sidekick thief (the quite great Joseph Gordon-Levitt); a forger (Tom Eames) and a sedation expert (Dileep Rao). Like The Dark Knight, Inception’s final 40 minutes shoot forward with the authority of a freight train, powered by the conviction of its own greatness.

We could chat about the high quality of Wally Pfister’s cinematography or Hans Zimmer’s score. We could talk about the film’s openness to interpretation, how it feels like another audience on the other side of the screen might be watching the same events, the same characters, but ultimately not the same movie. There are questions left to ask and answer, ranging from “What the hell was that?” to “Is Inception a modern way of saying Genesis?” As a critic I do not pretend to have the answers. OK, I do pretend to have the answers. But ultimately I only hope to direct you to the right questions.

Despicable Me

2010-07-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

Despicable Me
Grade: B
Cast: (voice) Steve Carrell, Jason Segal, Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Julie Andrews.
Director: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud

It’s wonderful when movies serendipitously converge with current events. But how often do current events play prelude to a coming cartoon?

Successful animation hasn’t been the calling card of the current do-nothing batch of Russian secret agents, milking Mother Russia for an American lifestyle. But successful animation is something achieved by Despicable Me.

Our Russian super-villain, Gru, is a sharp-snouted cross between Boris Badanov and the Grinch. He lives the typical suburban lifestyle of a gifted evildoer. He has a normal neighborhood home, if you happen to live in the Munsters’ neighborhood. Gru’s idea of interior decor comes from the Tower of London, circa 1670.

Gru has only one goal in his dark little heart – stealing the moon out of the sky, using a homemade rocket and a shrink-wrap ray-gun. He is missing a mouse and a squirrel; for a rival he only has a nerd called Vector. Helping him along is a slave race of little yellow overgrown Mike-and-Ikes, called “Minions.” When he adopts a threesome of cute little orphan girls to further his devious plan, can it be long before they capture his heart, as well? Gag.

Despicable Me is a referendum on the concept of “cute.” Is cute a good thing? In puppy dogs, sure. Is it a cinematic virtue? Well, it worked for ET. How about in family entertainment? The answer to that question depends on your tolerance for saccharine.

Fortunately, Despicable Me has more than sugar to spread on its cereal. The Universal release boasts a scoop of cleverness, too, as well as sunny visuals and a very good score by the great Hans Zimmer. Scattering humorous references for all ages, some of it will fly over younger children’s heads, such as a visual reference to The Godfather’s horse’s head scene. But for the most part, it works as a weekend baby-sitter.

The Kids Are Alright

2010-07-16T07:35:00.001-07:00

The Kids Are Alright
Grade: C
Cast: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
Director: Lisa Cholodenko

Does the American family need a good dick at its center?

A comedy focusing on a lesbian-headed family, The Kids Are Alright asks that question, whether writer-director Lisa Cholodenko knows it or not. And it seems to say so, before it changes its mind and says no. I don’t know, and I’m not sure the film does, either.

Joni (Alice in Wonderland star Mia Wasikowska) and Lazer (Josh Hutcherson)are the teenage children of a lesbian couple. They decide to secretly track down the sperm donor who gave them life. From behind door number three steps the amiable Paul (Mark Ruffalo). He is a motorcycle rider, a cool dude, and a little too talented at bedding women. The athletic brother and brainy sister worry he might be weird, but it turns out he’s a nice, welcoming man.

As the children spend time with their new father, it places stress on the relationship of the lesbian pair. They are already on the border of love and staleness, with low sex-drive, kitchen table bickering and three-drink alcoholism. The domineering physician (Annette Bening) finds him threatening. The more moon-beamy one (Julianne Moore) finds him intriguing. “Intriguing” might be a code word for something else.

Do the kids need a father figure? They certainly seem thirsty for a male presence. Lazer takes quickly to shooting hoops with him, and the teen responds to fatherly guidance with obedience. While the sheltered super-brain Joni has a girl-next-door personality, some of her behavior falls squarely within the stereotype of “the girl who grew up without a father.” One mother wonders, “Are we not enough?” For a while it seems like the answer is no, not entirely. That admission stands slightly at odds with the desire to put forth an overwhelmingly positive vision of a lesbian family unit.

As a remedy, the film gently turns the nice guy into a nice villain. It later apologizes and grants him a touch of unlikely redemption. One might look at this as generosity on Cholodenko’s part. I’m sure that’s how it is intended. But it feels more like she really doesn’t know where to go. Ultimately, that’s a fair description of The Kids Are Alright as a whole.

I’ll take a stab and assume The Kids Are Alright will be hailed as a groundbreaking and politely controversial film, a warm comedy placing before the American public a different kind of American family. That’s fair, but it is still undeniably a sitcom. Clever sitcom, funny sitcom, but sitcom nonetheless. And while you enjoy spending time with these people, their personalities are burned down to their tics, and their lives are burned down to the plot.

It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you wonder, “Where are The Who?” Then you will scratch your head and leave the theater.

Twilight: Eclipse

2010-07-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

Twilight: Eclipse
Grade: C
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed
Director: David Slade
Free Admission Granted

Loving a vampire really is forever. When the minister says Til Death Do You Part, it comes with a distant expiration date. Facing sex, marriage, and permanent transformation into a creature of the night, Twilight: Eclipse finds Bella and Edward exploring the neuroses of eternal love.

Should Bella Swan say sayonara to her human friends to be with vampire Edward Cullen for eternity? Shouldn’t Bella graduate high school before making eternal decisions? Will this puppy-dog romance ever bark its last breath? Twilight: Eclipse is the first in the popular vampire-romance series to see that love has a downside.

Take a look at the side stories: the film is haunted by images of eternal love distorted into something else. One vampire’s back story ends in revenge on an ex-lover while dressed in a wedding gown. “I was much more theatrical in those days,” she says. Then consider the motives of the widow Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) – raising an army of newborn vampires to avenge the death of her lover. The red-headed villain is motivated by love and loss, the permanence of affection and the impermanence of existence.

Still, Twilight is selling the mythologies of youthful love and youthful perfection. As such, the film plays up romance’s appeal and glosses over the problems in its werewolf-vampire-cockteaser triangle. Robert Pattinson’s steely cool softens Edward’s gentlemanly detachment. Taylor Lautner’s genial personality and burly physique deflect the fact that Jacob is kind of a manipulative asshole. And does Bella really love both men? Or does she love the fact that they love her? Twilight insists that it is driven by the purity of teen-age love, but in reality it is driven by the blindness of teen-age narcissism.

Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way if not every thought revolved around Ms. Swan. Shouldn’t young men talk baseball? Instead they talk Bella. Yet we never feel why she’s so special, why so much is risked for her sake. Perhaps we would feel more if Kristen Stewart were improving alongside the rest of the cast, rather than being outdone by the help. Instead, Stewart seems lost, or stuck, or generally apart from the proceedings.

Directed by David Slade (30 Days of Night), Eclipse is the most normal of the Twilight movies. Catherine Hardwicke’s hormonal original rode the line between swoony and corny .New Moon’s Chris Weitz, oft criticized, brought a greater cinematic sense to the series. As his contribution, Slade turns the series to both horror and coming of age. While I appreciate its willingness to treat its characters as blossoming adults, very little of this film lasts. Will this ever-popular series ever produce a true winner? It’s losing daylight.

Winter's Bone

2010-07-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Winter’s Bone
Grade: A
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes
Director: Debra Granik
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As a reporter long ago, I worked a story involving illegal trash dumping in Georgia. After locating a popular illegal dump, I headed up the walkway to the nearest door. I was met by a shadow, a man I never quite saw, asking suspiciously about my business there. I identified myself. He told me to leave, with serious intent in his voice.

Walking down that driveway is the only time in my life when I’ve been convinced that a shotgun was leveled at my head. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t prove it. But I won’t forget it.

That unnerving feeling arose again as I watched the cavalcade of backwoods characters – meth dealers and hostile faces – in Winter’s Bone. Every conversation hides a lurking danger, but you have a hard time getting a handle on the smoky nature of the peril.

The 2010 Sundance Grand Jury winner shares with the year’s other great film, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the formula of mystery deaths and amateur sleuths in over their heads. The Ghost Writer’s elite characters and Cape Cod setting are a socio-economic mega-leap away from this film’s Methamphetamine America.

That amateur sleuth is Ree Dolly, a resourceful teenager barely making it, encamped in an Ozark cabin coated by winter’s chill. I would call her poorer than dirt, but dirt has asked not to be associated with her lifestyle. She cares for a little brother and sister, surviving off the scraps of a neighbor. Her mother has been struck deaf and dumb by too much of something – drugs, death, life.

Her absent father, a legendary meth cook, has jumped bail, leaving the family home on the brink of foreclosure. Ree has one week to track him down for his court date. Smart but naïve, brave but vulnerable, Ree pushes into the business of the locals, all distant cousins, as she investigates her father’s disappearance. Her unstoppable search places her further and further into danger and grotesque secrets.

Winter’s Bone gets at something I’ve seen in person but never on film. Small towns are usually shown as either racist Hickvilles or as wholesome antidotes to city life. That is to say rural America is a constructed otherness that inverses attitudes toward city life at any one time. Yet, films only occasionally reveal rural America for its own sake.

Winter’s Bone presents a side of modern rural America rarely seen – one where addiction is replacing tradition and where criminal ties are replacing family ties. These wildly conflicting trends inform and destroy each other. The conflict is most wholly centered in the person of Ree’s uncle Teardrop (slyly played by John Hawkes), who must steer between rival codes of behavior.

Equal to this rough environment is its fringe-dwelling Nancy Drew, as well as the young actress who plays her, Jennifer Lawrence. Sometimes you wonder if it is the actress or the role that makes a great character. I have no doubt that Ree Jessup is a great character on the page, but Lawrence is such a natural steel wildflower. You might be shocked to find out that, yes, she is only a teenager.
If Lawrence becomes a star, it won’t be the first such launch for director Debra Granik, whose last film Down to the Bone brought Vera Farmiga into prominence. Granik mines the same “fringes of American LIfe” territory as Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop or Kelly Reichart’s Wendy and Lucy. Reichart’s film has definitely grown on me with time and reflection. However, there’s something in Granik’s film that seems less theoretical, less like a sociology experiment and more like a living story. The result is a wonder.

Jonah Hex

2010-07-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

Jonah Hex
Grade: C
Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender
Director: Jimmy Hayward
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The comic book is to this age what shoot-em-up Westerns were to an older time – an outlet for children’s heroic fantasies. So perhaps Jonah Hex – a combination of the two – was inevitable.
This DC Comics Western slyly refers to this fact, as a frontier father watches his son read an illustrated Western storybook by candlelight. The father tells him it isn’t highest literary material. He can feel his son’s brain turning to mush.

The father is Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), who witnesses his son and wife burned to death in their cabin as revenge for a Civil War betrayal. Driven by a need to avenge his family, Hex turns into a deadly bounty hunter after the war, with a bullet hole in his right cheek for his trouble. His arch-rival, Southern general Quentin Trumbull (John Malkovich), falsely believed dead, plots to re-start the Civil War with a top-secret super-cannon. The government hires Hex to track him down. (Did I mention that Jonah Hex walks with the animals and talks with the animals, too? Not to mention his habit of speaking to recent corpses.)

Directed by Jimmy Hayward, whose background is in animation, Jonah Hex attempts a stylized version of a Clint Eastwood Western – anti-heroic violence mixed with a self-indicting moral indifference. But what starts as intriguing ode unravels into mere aping. Brolin’s leathery performance slowly slips from homage to mimicry.

The film has all of the trademarks of the DC Comics brand for lesser known comics. A lesser-level star (Josh Brolin). A starlet (Megan Fox) who can handle action. A revenge story. A bright-crayola War on Terror metaphor. Thrown into this formula is Tom Wopat. It’s always good to see one of the Duke boys getting in on the action. Too bad this Civil War film had no role for General Lee.

Another trademark of DC Comics films – the set-ups raise expectations that the resolutions rarely meet. Jonah Hex wears down from a buyable premise to a yawn of an action ending. If you can stand the violence, there are amusing parts along the way before it sticks its foot in its grave.

Please Give

2010-07-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Please Give
Grade: B
Cast: Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet
Director: Nicole Holofcener
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Layered in the tiny personal details of its quietly odd characters, Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give falls in the category of “slice of life.” It doesn’t inflict drama. Nor is it smitten with anti-drama in the manner of some indie films, that nagging feeling of falsely repressing emotion with a goal of being different. The film’s vibe just “is,” ambling along at its own little pace and its own little scale.

In keeping the volume down, Please Give is notable for the things it doesn’t do. An affair doesn’t explode into a domestic crisis. A death doesn’t lead to life-changing reflections. A budding romance isn’t an escape into bliss. The romance doesn’t even receive an ending. It only goes as far as it goes.

If I ever compile a volume of film reviews, I plan on titling it, “And Cathy Keener plays the Kooky Wife.” It’s a personal joke, based on the actress’ reliability, repeatedly displayed, to do just that. Please Give deepens that role. She plays a Manhattan used furniture dealer who collects and re-sells the furniture of the dead. As a bleeding-heart extraordinaire – unable to pass a street bum without handing him a twenty – her job makes her guilty.

Despite her goodness, she also has mixed feelings toward her 91-year-old neighbor living next door in her Manhattan apartment. No one likes to admit that a bitter 91-year-old woman living out her final days is an unlikable person. And no one likes to admit that she and her husband (Oliver Platt) are awaiting someone’s death so they can expand into her apartment.

Caring for the old woman are two grown grandchildren. The first is a tall wallflower (a superbly gentle Rebecca Hall) who visits everyday, a devotion that causes her own life to suffer. The other is a sharp tongued flirt (Amanda Peet) who lacks a filter for her mouth. As acts of spite, she openly discusses her grandmother’s coming death right in front of the old lady.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This sounds like a story that needs a teenage ordeal with pimples and a dose of family politics over buying expensive designer jeans. Well, you’re in the right place. Your wish is the film’s command.

Holofcener’s style is most similar to short stories. The style is breezy and tender. Small things have larger meanings. It dwells in small questions, such as what we owe people in need and why we feel that way. In its own quiet way, it is compelling.

2010-07-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

Princess Ka’iulani
Grade: C
Cast: Q’orianka Kilcher, Barry Pepper, Will Patton
Director: Marc Forby
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So things never did go well for Linda Manz.

The 16-year-old girl at the stem of Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece Days of Heaven, she met the ill fate of many young actresses who give performances-for-the-ages. She soon disappeared, left to glance back on her one indelible performance, certainly with pride.

On the other hand, Sissy Spacek used her role in Malick’s Badlands (and later Carrie) to propel a storied career. Granted she was 24 somehow playing 15 (born Christmas day, 1949)m but the acting instincts on display would later launch her path to fame.

In 2005’s The New World, Malick maximizes the strong eyes and dewy natural innocence of newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher, taking her on a journey from lovestruck child to an emergence as the Mother of America. Writing last year in The Guardian, the English critic Peter Bradshaw said The New World was “anchored by a perfomance so instinctive and note-perfect by a teenage non-pro called Q'orianka Kilcher that I almost hope she never acts again.”

For five years, Bradshaw had his wish. Now with Princess Ka’iulani, it is Kilcher’s turn at the verdict of fate. Will she be a Manz or a Spacek?

It seems clear that writer-director Marc Forby has seen The New World. In story structure, Princess Ka’iulani recalls that film to the last ripple of water. Amid political turmoil, the last princess of Hawai’i is sent from an idyllic tropical kingdom for stodgy old England. Staying with friends and attending a boarding school, she faces British snobbery and falls in ooey-gooey love with an Englishman. This will force an eventual choice between her affections and her allegiance to her people.

The setting is Hawai’i during the political turmoil at the turn of the 20th Century. The Hawaiian king and queen are pawns of British and American colonial interests. American-born landowners plot a revolt that will bring Hawai’I into American possession. The fate of the Pacific is at stake.
Princess K takes advantage of its beautiful natural setting. (Obviously, it’s Hawai’i. Just stick the camera somewhere and start rolling.) It layers its characters in attractive, sun-dappled photography often in twilight, presenting figures as shadows in nature.

Princess K has noble aspirations, playing the traditional role of historical corrective. However, it does so in a very conventional culture-clash way. Too often, the princess and other characters break into portentous speeches. They pose and enunciate as if they know they are in a historical moment.

I’m reluctant to criticize a 19-year-old actress too harshly. How good were you at your job when you were 19? Would you have wanted the whole world to watch your professional performance at that age? However, at times Kilcher simply appears to be reciting lines. While she adds a charge to her angry moments, it’s too much too often. However she does have a sense of photographic presence, as well as an expressive side. All is not lost.

Get Him to the Greek

2010-07-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

Get Him to the Greek
Grade: B
Cast: Jonah Hill, Russell Brand, Elizabeth Moss, Sean Combs, Rose Byrne
Director: Nicholas Stoller
Free Admission Granted

Dear Judd Apatow: You rock. I suck. Thank you for putting me in my place.

As I cower in the corner clinging to what’s left of my former dignity, you may ask, of what am I speaking? Get Him to the Greek, the latest dirty-minded, XXL-sized laugh riot to emerge from the Judd Apatow factory.

I’ve worked so hard to sharpen my resistance to this brand. I deplore its arrested development. Its reduction of manhood to pornography and video games. Its pinballing view of women as either whores or sources of male validation. Yet this little charmer is so overwhelmingly likable and manly that even I felt a surge of testosterone. Briefly.

I can’t say I didn’t try. One look at its embarrassingly juvenile poster sent a shiver. I thought I knew what I was in for. But who knew that Russell Brand would so delightfully balance happy-go-lucky charisma with randy excess? Or that director Nicholas Stoller would find such gentleness in the usually prickly Jonah Hill? Or that the film would irresistibly translate what men love about the fantasy of rock’n’roll?

Aldous Snow, amiable dunce rock star, has lost his mojo. His wife leaves. His album sucks. His most recent single, designed to raise awareness for beleaguered African children, is called the worst thing to happen to the Dark Continent since Apartheid.

Not all his fans have given up hope. Record company stooge Aaron Greene (Hill) convinces him to perform a comeback concert at LA’s Greek Theater. That part of the mission is easy. The hard part: getting him there clean, sober, and ready to perform. Aaron spends three crazy days of long drinks, loose women, anal hideouts for heroin, and epic rock and roll fistfights in Vegas hotel rooms with fur walls. That’s showbiz.

Get Him to the Greek has fun with cliched rock-and-roll horror stories. It also lets men believe what they want to believe about rock stars. Sure, they might be assholes who demand that concert promoters take all the green ones out of a bowl of M&Ms. But deep down, they’re really just cooler versions of our own best friends.

That vibe turns Get Him to the Greek into a pretty dirty, highly amusing man party. It remains to be seen if another result is status as the sleeper hit of the summer.

Mother and Child

2010-05-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

Mother and Child
Grade: B
Cast: AnnetteBening, Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits, Shareeka Epps
Director: Rodrigo Garcia

They are talented and respected. They are famous. They draw much praise.

So is it possible for them to be overlooked, too? I would say yes.

In this way, Annette Bening and Naomi Watts are similar actresses from slightly different generations. Each could make an argument for being best among their age. Yet each one is overshadowed – Bening by the long legacy of Meryl Streep; Watts by Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.

Mother and Child is an inviting showcase for these two talents.The new film from Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives) embroils them in a distant teenage adoption that severely wounds all sides.
Bening plays the once 14-year-old mother now creeping into a lonely middle age. She is an unusually prickly personality, alone, with only an aging mother on whom to lavish her care. At moments such as breaking up a coffee break with a co-worker, her blunt, unaware manner becomes darkly funny. As a man arrives in her life, she slowly comes to terms with the loss that has haunted her for so long.

Watts really shines here as the 37-year-old daughter, a gifted but itinerant lawyer who avoids other human beings. Her main contact with other people comes in the form of seduction and manipulation. When she uses the figurative expression “There are many ways to skin a cat,” you wonder how many she has literally tried. Yet through her iciness, Watts magnetically brings forth both distress and sympathy. This is her best performance since her best performances (Mulholland Dr., 21 Grams).

The story, shaped in the well-established three-story form of producer Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, offers Kerry Washington as a third mother, seeking to be matched with a child for adoption. She’s matched with a teen mother-to-be (Shareeka Epps) who is picky and brutally honest toward potential adopted mothers. While Washington holds her own, the storyline comes across as unnecessary and distracting to the main dynamic.

In Nine Lives, Garcia used long takes to study stresses on women. Here he continues that trend. The pull of motherhood, as well as its absence becomes a wounding experience for these women. Then as the story goes on and as love and motherhood re-enter their lives, it becomes the only tonic. While the film gets there through contrivance and coincidence, it is necessary and earned, by te care of the director and the talent of the women.

Sex and the City 2

2010-05-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

Sex and the City 2
Grade: D
Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Chris Noth
Director: Michael Patrick King
Free Admission Granted

Sex and the City 2 isn’t funny.

That’s not a surprise. The television show was never funny, either. As comedy, it was always for those women with a sense of humor commensurate with Samantha’s sexual appetites, i.e. the easy lay.

The show’s value, as it was, arrived by giving young women across the nation a vicarious fantasy life in New York City. Podunk princesses could tune into HBO and live out fantasies of glamorous faraway lives. Also, each character provided its audience a definable shorthand for their own sexual energies. Women could describe a friend as being a Charlotte or a Samantha and know exactly what each meant.

Mainly, Sex and the City was about being at a certain place in a certain age – the New York of millennial opulence and optimism. As we watch the aging four women now, the characters are insufficiently aware, as we are, that that time and place is no longer there. The fantasy has melted into nostalgia – a silent plea for the way we were, not the way we should be.

The second movie, after the 2008 summer hit, heads directly into menopause. It is no longer the fantasy of young vibrance. It is more the nagging dream of middle-age concerns – marriage, and hormone pills, and children.

Essentially, Sex and the City has lost its sex drive. Except for a pair of Samantha’s brief backside adventures, it’s entirely sexless. And once the girls leave New York for the United Arab Emirates – no, really – you can say so long to the city. The harder it becomes to tastefully make a feel-good movie about overindulgence in America, the more likely you are to see these chicks on the road.

As they sashay into the riches of the desert, the women coo. And coo. And coo some more. Yet their concerns never vanish – gold-plated palaces cannot guarantee happiness, or light entertainment. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) worries about becoming a boring married couple when Big (Chris Noth) buys a bedroom television. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) frets about leaving her husband with their springy-breasted nanny. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) predictably gets arrested, briefly, for violations of strict Muslim sexual prohibitions. If only they could put someone away for soft-headed sexual puns, instead. Oh, and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) ... appears.

The film begins with a very camp gay wedding, fully decked out with a choir. And swans. And Liza Minnelli. It ends with a vaguely offensive moment, with Muslim women disrobing their traditional clothing to reveal the latest high fashion hidden underneath. Two cultures stare into each others’ mutual shallowness. Everyone wants to live in New York. Soulless fantasies, the film suggests, are a worldwide notion.

Robin Hood

2010-05-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

Robin Hood
Grade: B
Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max Von Sydow, Mark Strong, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Danny Huston, Matthew McFadyen.
Director: Ridley Scott
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There is history. There is myth. And somewhere in between these approved fictions and those neglected realities is legend.

Perhaps weary of tights, director Ridley Scott chooses to literalize the legend of Robin Hood, grounding it in the reality of the Crusades. Robin Longstride, a common archer in the Crusader army of King Richard the Lionheart, assumes the identity of a dying knight on the way home from war.

Returning the man’s family sword to his father, he is asked to stay on as the dead man. He takes his wife, Lady Marion, and settles in the forest village of Nottingham. Grain is short. Orphans play Lord of the Flies in the woods. Unaffordable taxes are long overdue.

In faraway London, the new King John has an army to pay, a treasury to fill, and a mistress to please. What better way than to wring more taxes from the already impoverished countryside? He sends an army to collect. Little does he know the troops are actually French horsemen at the command of a traitor, the prelude of a French plot to take over England.

What happened to “steal from the rich to give to the poor?” Robin Hood features barely any noble thievery, as Scott pursues grander historical and thematic scale. I’m just glad he was able to work in both a French invasion and the Magna Charta. I was worried for a minute that we’d miss out on one or the other.

As history, all these elements are nonsensical in combination. But Scott’s concern isn’t that era but rather this one. As with Gladiator, he stuffs the modern world into the trunk of history. Sometimes he leaves an arm dangling awkwardly out the rear.

Some of the critical chatter about the film, such as that by Village Voice media critic Karina Longworth, has fallen on its allegiance toward Tea Party politics – the faraway king carelessly taxing the peasants into the dirt in order to pay for licentiousness and foreign adventures. There’s a favorite conservative joke – “Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich to give to the poor. He stole from the government to give to the taxpayers.” The script seems aware of the saying.

As Robin Hood, Russell Crowe returns close to form. Opposite a wily Cate Blanchett, he shows that quiet muscularity that American stars no longer seem able to produce. At the head of a cavalry charge, mysteriously missing his helmet, grumbling attractively to his men about the virtues of liberty, Crowe successfully cools Scott’s radioactive Braveheart envy.

If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for at the movies, it’s medieval warfare. The way teen-agers today feel about watching a giant robot transform into a Plymouth? I feel that way about ancient technology – battering rams, fiery flocks of arrows, dumping flaming tar over the castle walls. When soldiers raise their shields skyward in a turtle formation, I nearly cry.

So that makes me a complete sucker for Robin Hood – a dark pastel of muddy battlefields, grungy blue forests, and a wildly vivid display of big budget filmmaking. The battle scenes are brawny and frantic, alive with perfect sound. If you love movies, there’s simply no way to watch the creation of such a brilliant fictional space and walk out of the theater unsatisfied.

A film of enormous visionary scope, in which even fireside singalongs take 74 cameras to shoot, with perfect props, convincing sets, and super-imaginative detail, Robin Hood is all the positive things associated with Ridley Scott with only a fair scattering of the negatives. Robin Hood might be the Ridliest Scottiest of all Ridley Scott movies.

Letters to Juliet

2010-05-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Letters to Juliet
Grade: D
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, Gael Garcia Bernal, Vanessa Redgrave
Director: Gary Winick
Free Admission Granted

So, yes, obviously, as a man, I can sit here and warn you that Letters to Juliet is an estrogen crucifixion of the bloodiest magnitude.

But that would be ignoring the most interesting (and appalling) thing about it – what in the world is Gael Garcia Bernal doing in this?

Four or five years ago, he was the hottest thing in international cinema, the biggest star of the Mexican New Wave, a borderless phenomenon appearing in films all across the world. How does he end up playing the stereotypical insensitive boyfriend in a banal girl-fest? And how does he end up losing the girl to some stiff English dork?

This is like watching Jean Seberg dump Jean-Paul Belmondo for Ricky Nelson.

Of course, Amanda Seyfried has a way to go to be Jean Seberg. Whatever her shortcomings as an actress, Seberg had that uber-cool presence, an ingénue with an edge. Seyfried (who admittedly showed guts in Chloe) is a super-cutie pie who seems to be having her star turn this year. That sound you hear is the many Carey Mulligan worshippers in the criti-rati throwing themselves under buses in frustration.

Seyfried’s Sophie is a fact checker with the New Yorker who wants to be a writer. While on holiday in Italy with her self-absorbed chef fiancé, she stumbles upon a strange ritual where heartbroken women attach letters to a stone wall, asking for romantic advice. A small committee of Italian women mail comforting letters in reply.

When Sophie finds and answers a fifty-year-old letter from an Englishwoman, the now sixty-ish-year-old woman shows up to find and reunite with her long lost love. So does her testy grandson. Sophie tags along for the romantic adventure. He’s a jerk. She’s a sweetie. They clash. Sparks fly. At least for them.

Letters to Juliet is a film where the acting doesn’t do a good job of playing out the emotions found in the script. Part of that is the casting, which runs into a traditional problem. The male lead, in this case Australian actor Christopher Egan, must be strong enough to win the woman in a short period of time, but not strong enough to overshadow the female lead. It’s a contradictory task and it shows. Egan is far too anonymous, Seyfried lacks immediate warmth, the chemistry never materializes, and even struggling through the script’s obligatory asshole part, Garcia Bernal still seems the preferable choice. I mean, maybe he’s just having a bad weekend.

There’s nothing truly offensive about the film, it’s always nice to see Vanessa Redgrave get out of the house, and I suppose it will let less demanding women open the purse for the hanky. However even as romantic afternoon time-wasters go, Letters to Juliet is up a balcony without a suitor.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

Iron Man 2
Grade: C
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Garry Shandling
Director: Jon Favreau

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, is dying. And as he dies, he multiplies.

In the original Iron Man, the technological Tin Man replaces his heart, both physically and emotionally, to make it through his military-industrial Wonderland. In the sequel, the electronic heart that provides life is now poisoning his blood.

From its opening speech, Iron Man is a movie about legacy. Slowly owning up to the specter of his own death, Stark gets a glimpse of the world he’ll leave behind. He watches movies of his industrialist father laying out a perfect Disney-like planned city of the future, stressing the virtues of better living through technology. We learn that Stark, to a degree, has fulfilled this vision and achieved the Weapon-Makers Dream – a peaceful world through perfect deterrence.

As he dies, Stark watches his personality splinter. His enemies are uncomfortable shades of himself – a wannabe business rival (Sam Rockwell); an estranged techie best friend (Don Cheadle) who steals an Iron Man suit; the evil son of his father’s Russian ex-partner (Mickey Rourke), who has fashioned his own supersuit while in a state of exile. The Russian channels his feelings of rejection into two electrified whips for hands. As the technology spreads to the wrong hands, Stark foresees his legacy of peace melting into a legacy of more destructive warfare. The struggle in Iron Man 2 is that of a man fighting the future he has created.

Now, with money-making expectations, Iron Man 2 will get too distracted and diffuse to fully satisfy this careful subtext. After all, Iron Man is a blockbuster franchise. It has important landmarks to reach as it stretches into the future – on-set feuds, contract disputes, disinterested performances and eventual self-parody. That some of these things already are creeping into the second film is a little disappointing. And so these meticulous emotional and thematic battlefields are only sporadically matched by what’s on screen.

The original Iron Man was an awaiting dud lifted to watchability by Robert Downey. After a decade in small indie films working his way back into the picture, Iron Man was a perfect crossroads performance. Returning to major stardom, Downey now has earned the right to slack off when the material isn’t there. That’s about half the time here.

Director Jon Favreau has established a slo-jam sort of pace, unusual for a modern action film. Yet notice how perfectly this pace builds up the film’s best action sequence – with the whip-handed Rourke slowly, dangerously, slicing up race cars at the Gran Prix of Monaco. The scene doesn’t hurry, and it’s a model of blending comic book action and a realistic setting. The film might have made more of this sort of thing. Yet a lot of the film, too much of it really, is dedicated to Stark looking for a remedy for his heart situation, not the most lively plot point.

If Tony Stark is multiplying, so are the stars who want in on the deal. There are too many faces asking for screen time. Take one head-scratching transition of Paltrow and Johansson exiting a car and walking up stairs; it seems so unnecessary as to exist solely to satisfy a contract. In fact, Johansson has little to do until she and her stunt double get a sexy little action sequence near the end. First thought: Wow! Second thought: Where has this been for the past two hours?

With so many known faces signed up, Iron Man 2 still fails to pick a satisfying bad guy from among too many bad guys. Cheadle is ultimately a pal who’ll be around for the next film. Rockwell’s character is too comic to be a threat. Rourke disappears for too long and has not much to offer besides a Russian accent. As a result, the obligatory big final battle focuses mainly on a legion of military robots, designed from captured Iron Man technology.

Intellectually, that creates a perfect existential vision of a man confronted by his own disposability, reproducibility and ultimate insignificance. As action, we know in movies that robots can never resist doing something stupid enough to get their asses shot up. If Tony Stark only had a heart. If his enemies only had a brain.

The Losers

2010-04-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Losers
Grade: C
Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, Chris Evans, Columbus Short, Jason Patric
Director: Sylvain White

In the future, will every comic book have its 15 minutes of fame?

As we hurtle toward some grand geek culture apocalypse, The Losers might be evidence of this theory. Have you ever heard of DC Comics' The Losers? There’s not a lot you are likely to expect from the film, and it’s likely to live up to your expectations.

There are two approaches to comic book filmmaking. Some films notably stylize their efforts by using digital technology to create over-the-top fictional worlds (Sin City or The Watchmen). Then there’s the older style, such as the original Superman films. The Losers never chooses between the two. Sometimes it’s straight-up realistic action. Other times, it opts for ridiculous stylized violence within a realistic setting. As a result, it’s often difficult to suspend disbelief. It’s a nagging problem that never gets solved.

An Army recon team raids a drug processing compound. A camp CIA maniac orders their death but misses, leading to a tragedy. Believed dead, they want revenge. A mysterious woman shows up to help them. The villains include previously noted CIA guy, his not-too-bright henchman, and a team of the flabbiest former special forces soldiers that you’ll ever see. The material is so inspired by The A-Team that the group sometimes travels by ugly van.

Chris Evans, as the group wiseass Jensen, has moments, but not as many or as clever as he should. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the leader Clay, brings some haggard charm. Zoe Saldana seems to be at her weakest, maybe a little bored.

There certainly nothing all that wrong with The Losers. It has some decent action moments, some effective comedy, and it never lost my interest. But as it leaves itself open for a sequel at the end, it really just makes you sigh.

Death at a Funeral

2010-04-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Death at a Funeral
Grade: D
Cast: Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, James Marsden, Zoe Saldana, Danny Glover, Columbus Short
Director: Neil LaBute

Stressed at a funeral. (Chris Rock)

Suave at a funeral. (Martin Lawrence)

High at a funeral. (James Marsden)

Hot at a funeral. (Zoe Saldana, who has grown a mysterious tilde)

Short at a funeral. (Columbus Short)

Gay at a funeral. (the corpse)

Short and gay at a funeral. (Peter Dinklage)

Looking more and more like Alec Baldwin everyday at a funeral. (Luke Wilson)

Dead at a Funeral. (Death at a Funeral)

After.Life

2010-04-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

After.Life
Grade: B
Cast: Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, Justin Long,
Director: Agniezska Wojtowicz-Vosloo

Is it time to ponder the career of Liam Neeson?

Perhaps it is, as he enters the theaters for the second time in two weeks. Last week, he posed through the role of Zeus in Clash of the Titans. This week it’s the psychological thriller After.Life.
There was little streak between Schindler’s List and the biopic Michael Collins where Neeson seemed destined for great things. Now, his screen presence is that of a late, bloated Orson Welles or a Charlton Heston hemmed in by defining roles. This is coupled with an unhealthy attraction to small roles in schlock. It still feels like slumming for his Schindler’s co-star Ralph Fiennes to take a role in Titans. Yet nowadays it feels like Neeson’s home.

Still, a smart director can still use his sunless presence to strong effect, as the Dutch debutant Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo does in this unsettling psychological thriller. The result is the first effective Neeson performance that I’ve seen in quite some time.

Neeson plays a solemn mortician who might have a special gift. Is he a psychically endowed loner kindly escorting the recently dead to the afterlife? Or is he a delusional serial killer? A mostly naked Christina Ricci is the prospective corpse who is about to find out. The whole thing plays like a good, long Twilight Zone episode, always on the precipice between irony and dread.

After.Life is a creepy little number that keeps threatening to ruin itself but never quite does. It solves its own mystery and then reverses course. You will likely leave the theater discussing with a friend exactly what was going on. In this it trusts its audience enough to forego the typical Hollywood rule of complete explanation. I also like the way the film looks – different and nightmarish without being outgoingly showy, with generous use of the entire frame. And this is one of the little secrets of horror films today – they’re the only ones willing to take visual chances. It is paired with a spirited performance of a spiritless man.

Clash of the Titans

2010-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

Clash of Titans
Grade: D
Cast: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Alexa Davalos, Mads Mikkelson
Director: Louis Leternier
Free Admission Granted

So it’s a race to the bottom.

We get one remake. That eliminates one film that can be remade. So the next one - as a natural law - will be worse than the last. So we keep going down and down and down.

Clash of the Titans is an uneasy and possibly unholy mix of Greek mythology and popcorn movie. Watching it is like watching a film out of the fifties based on a classic novel. No one will mistake the dialogue for Sophocles. The language seems to be borrowed from another film character directed by Louis Leternier, The Incredible Hulk.

The mythic storyline is fairly straightforward. The city of Argos is in revolt against the Greek gods on Olympus. To punish their insolence, Zeus gives the god of the Underworld, Hades, permission to release the beast known as the Kraken and demand the sacrifice of the princess Cassiopeia. The only hope is a half-god, half-man named Perseus (Avatar’s Sam Worthington), who happens to be wandering around the city at the right time.

If you’re going to do this, you might as well do the action well. It’s quite good, particularly the scene in which Perseus and pals seek to take the serpent head of Medusa. In addition, the advances in effects help tremendously over the original, in particular for the flying horse Pegasus, quite smooth now.

The film continues the Curious Case of Sam Worthington, an Australian actor who likely will be in three significant box office hits, including the biggest hit of all time, and still not be a recognizable star. Will he become a star before he successfully emotes? Vegas certainly could put out a wager.

Clash of the Titans has 3-D, but barely. I can hardly tell you where or when. While having depth in the field of vision is one thing. Depth in characters or story is not the same.

Hot Tub TIme Machine

2010-04-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

So quick, Back to the Future meets The Hangover.

You pretty much have to get that thought out of the way before discussing Hot Tub Time Machine, a film that deserves an Oscar for its title alone.

Famously Howard Hawks designed Rio Bravo as a response to High Noon, a film he couldn’t stand. You get the feeling that director Steve Pink is up to the same thing. Didn’t I call The Hangover the Death of the American Comedy? Raunchily smart, appealingly dumb, and willing to take it the whole nine outrageous yards, Hot Tub Time Machine might be at least a little bit of a rebirth.

Consider the similarities:

• Four friends take a bonding trip. The four friends are the above-it all asshole (John Cusack), the henpecked emasculee (Craig Robinson), the antisocial nut (Rob Corddry, annnnnnnnnd somebody else (geeky teenage nephew).
• Each film has a last-hurrah trip that turns into a wild and crazy weekend. In The Hangover, it’s a Vegas Bachelor Party trip goes to Hell when they lose the . InHot Tub Time Machine, a visit to a California ski resort goes haywire when their hot tub transports them back to spandex1986 to relive events.

With that in mind, Hot Tub Time Machine does exactly what it should do – it takes all the Hangover’s problem and corrects them.

• By having the men drugged or sleeping through the experience, The Hangover becomes a film of mild reaction shots rather than outrageous events. It’s a lot more fun to actually watch the zaniness in Hot Tub Time Machine than to have people tell you about it afterward.

• The Hangover thinks it’s crazy, but never actually gets there. Hot Tub Time Machine gets crazier and crazier and weirder and weirder until everyone is winking and nodding at its silly premise because it’s too much fun not to.

• The Hangover takes its running gag – the lost baby – and surrenders it. Oh, it’s your baby? Here’s your baby. The running gag in Hot Tub Time Machine is how the bellhop loses his arm, which it keeps teasing, maybe one or two times too many, but at least they don’t give it up without a punchline.

• While it made me smile a lot, The Hangover made me laugh less than 10 times, and three of them were during Ed Helms piano song. The quick-witted raunchiness of Hot Tub Time Machine, finds ways to make you laugh, even when you think you shouldn’t.

The result is that Hot Tub Time Machine becomes the film that I kept reading that The Hangover was.

Police, Adjective

2010-03-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

Politist, Adjectiv (Police, Adjective)
Grade: N/R
Cast: Dragos Bucar, Vlad Ivanov, Irina Selescu
Director: Corneliu Poremboiu

Have you ever said that you would pay to watch your favorite actor read the dictionary? Well if you happen to be Romanian, now you can!

Not only that – the dictionary happens to be one of the more action-packed sequences of Police-Adjective. Forced to read the definition of “police” after objecting to an assignment, the detective notes that it describes a form of story with drama and suspense. Police, Adjective actively rejects that definition of “police drama,” depicting instead the tedious absurdity of a pointless stakeout directed at a few kids smoking hash. When the story threatens to veer into an action scene, the film ends.

The deflation of action and drama seems to be the cause of director Corneliu Poremboiu. His camera spends its time in drawn-out takes of people eating, sitting in a waiting room, or mainly following them down the street. As an investment in minimalism, plotlessness and existential futility, Police, Adjective takes its ennui very seriously.

The film classically pits the letter of the law against the spirit. Words are portrayed as the enemy, weapons of oppression for Romania’s lingering communist bureaucratic mentality. Its long periods of silent observation exchange the carelessness of words in favor of the purity of the image. This pure cinema simulates the phenomenologist writings of Frenchmen like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who dropped psychology and symbolism in favor of description and observation, believing the latter to be the only real way to the truth.

If you are brainy, you can come to appreciate Police, Adjective. This is good news. The only chance for this film is for the viewer to respect it. There appears to be no possibility that you will enjoy it. I watched Police, Adjective in a theater all by my lonesome. For once, I was convinced that the rest of the human race was right.

That is ultimately the disturbing thing. This past weekend, I watched a film, Inglourious Basterds,that raises weighty questions of historical depiction and historical amnesia while remaining immensely entertaining. Watching Tarantino’s film, you’re transported back a decade to when indie films simultaneously felt smart, serious, and in love with the medium.

Saddled by funding issues, indie cinema increasingly feels the need to make a virtue of its downsized obscurity. The current indie drive for verisimilitude at all cost makes for intelligent films that are hard to watch. At worst, they feel punishing to the audience. In eradicating entertainment for intellectual authenticity, Police, Adjective appears to continue the trend of suicide by purity.

The Bounty Hunter

2010-03-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

The Bounty Hunter
Grade: D
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler
Director: Andy Tennant
Free Admission Granted

Are you an inventor in California? Are you looking to find the Snuggie pathway to the American Dream? I have some advice. Create a Gigli detector.

A what? A why? It’s obvious that celebrity power couples have a very hard time identifying cataclysmic vanity projects that will damage their career. While reading the script for The Bounty Hunter, did Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston not notice the creeks of the floorboards and the spooky sounds of dragging chains upstairs, forever strapped across the backs of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s career?

The reaction is unlikely to be that negative. It takes a coincidence of time, celebrity and arrogance to produce a train wreck for the ages. This is especially true of such a well-liked star as Aniston. Butler, however was a good choice for a film called The Bounty Hunter. In Hollywood he would have a hard time getting arrested. Although if “Impersonation of a Charming Leading Man” ever becomes a crime …

If any director seems destined to eventually end his career in a Gigli-like disaster, it is Andy Tennant. Aniston’s Friends episodes used to carry names like “The One Where Ross and Rachel Throw a Picnic and Get Mauled by a Bear” or such. Tennant’s romantic comedies fit those types of titles: “The One Where Will Smith Gets Kevin James a Hook-Up With a Cameron Diaz lookalike.” “The One Where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey Fight Pirates.” Does anyone go to film school thinking, I really want to direct Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in a movie where they fight pirates?

If there is a good point to Tennant’s films, it is the way that they are structured. To their credit, they are shaped, in ways, like classic screwball. To their discredit, they’re lousy. One doesn’t need to be a decorated film historian to tell the difference between Katherine Hepburn and Goldie Hawn.

Aniston, here, is a hotshot newspaper reporter arrested for giving an accidental butt-kicking. To a police horse. With a car. When she fails to show up in court while chasing a story, they send Butler, her bounty hunting ex-husband, to retrieve her. Watch him stuff her in the trunk of his car! Watch them make up and make out! Ooooohh, what a perfect set-up for a Battle of the Sexes! You can only imagine how many times they fasten the handcuffs to the bed posts for a weak laugh.

How many movies so quickly and efficiently announce their intention to be awful? Granted romantic comedies are supposed to aim below the waist, but The Bounty Hunter introduces itself with not one but two crotch-punches in the first five minutes or so. That’s at least one more crotch punch than there are laughs in the first hour.

And no, like most bad marriages, it doesn’t improve with time.

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-12T04:25:00.000-08:00

The Ghost Writer
Grade: A
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Eli Wallach, Timothy Hutton
Director: Roman Polanski
Free Admission Granted

It might occur to you after watching The Ghost Writer how little the mystery really needs to matter in a mystery. The film’s would-be stumper isn’t much of one. The solution doesn’t impress. Yet you move slowly and unstoppably into its silent unease. The Ghost Writer is, predominately, a film of mood and execution.

As such, Roman Polanski’s new film is one of my easiest top-graders and something hovering around a masterpiece. Reminiscent of Chinatown, Polanski turns the summer elite playground of (a fake) Cape Cod into a rainy pit of deception and self-deception, of femme fatales and dark humor, of paranoia and lust and dread. Homes become traps. Beaches become prisons of muddy sand. “I feel like the wife of Napoleon on St. Helena,” says one character, bluntly and bitterly.

A writer known only as “The Ghost” (Ewan McGregor) is not on vacation. He is there working. He will make a huge score to polish a British Prime Minister’s autobiography and walk away anonymously. The timing is awful. There’s a love triangle. A frustrated wife. And a political crisis over acts of torture by the Minister’s government. To top that, the first ghost writer took a mysterious and permanent plunge into the Big Drink. A man smart enough to know better, the writer starts looking into the “suicide.”

The sublime dialogue of the script – written by Polanski and the novelist Robert Harris, on whose 2007 novel the film is based – is a thing of sophistication – a mixture of English dry humor and American hardboiled lingo, delivered with gentile bite by the tragically overintelligent. When MacGregor suggests to a smoking and smoky Kim Cattrall, “Maybe you’d like to search me,” it’s the sort of line that you would imagine roll out of Humphrey Bogart’s mouth. Every word seems to carry a secret meaning – sexual or perilous, perhaps warnings of each.

As the film’s isolated hero and patsy, McGregor is silently intense, shrewd but vulnerable. He is matched and probably outdone by Olivia Williams as the Prime Minister’s Lady MacBeth, a slick, secretive steel matron losing her grip. Along with a memorable turn in An Education, it’s been a strong year for an actress who has been missing too long, As the neocon devil, Tom Wilkinson makes every polished word feel like it hides a dagger.

After Polanski’s recent arrest, it occurred to me that the key to Chinatown’s ending is the failure of Jack Nicholson’s imagination. Incest is outside the realm of Jake Gittes’ — and the audience’s – range of possibility. With The Ghost Writer, all the clues stare us in the face. but the writer only slowly comes to see past the comfort of the official stories. A mystery is supposed to restore our sense of order in the world, but the perfect frame at the end of The Ghost Writer subversively denies us that which we most want from a story – our sense of justice.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-12T04:23:00.000-08:00

Alice in Wonderland
Grade: D
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway
Director: Tim Burton
Free Admission Granted

Have you ever heard this apocryphal story? NASA spent millions and millions of dollars to develop a pen that would work in space. The Russians simply gave their cosmonauts a pencil.

That came to mind watching Tim Burton’s CGI cornucopia of Alice in Wonderland, in which no pixel was spared in creating the dream world. If you’re going to spend nine jillion dollars on a movie, is there some reason you can’t afford a real dog? I mean really, do you have to fake the dog? Was it too hard to work with the conditions of the canine actors union?

And so you should know they spare no expense to create the Wonderland of Alice. And still the movie never really takes us down the rabbithole. It lacks the bite of surprise. And surprise is necessary element if you are creating an unnecessary sequel.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) isn’t a young girl. She’s a teenager on the brink of an arranged Victorian marriage. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter)shouts “off with his head” with a comedy sketch glee that doesn’t endear. The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) dances madly. The Cheshire Cat grins. Because that’s what Cheshire Cats do. They grin. They’re very good at grinning.

The characters might be stamped Lewis Carroll. At least I think so. I don’t really remember my children stories. I was only a kid. I wasn’t taking notes. I do know the look, the plot, the structure and the effects are standard Hollywood. I do remember Hollywood. That I see every week. That might get by, if the film had any of the trademark Burton originality. This film is all visuals and no vision.

That’s the thing about Tim Burton – his outrageous creativity always seems to be in a life or death struggle with the faint whiff of dull rot that seems to underlie his films. He peddles distraction. When distraction isn’t distracting, it’s noticeable.

Depp’s Hatter is two buck teeth and a pair of crazy eyes in search of a character. That means that he has more depth than Alice, who is a rather polite bore. Her big thing is growing tall and growing small. Because she is not a young child, there isn’t much wonder to Wonderland. Nor is there much connection to her story.

But really, who needs to connect to the person or the story when we have 3-D? Even that is not quite what it could be. By the time of this writing, I had already forgotten that it had been in 3-D. Alice suffers greatly from the extraordinary three-dimensional detail of Avatar. It seems like a step backward. It misses the wow factor, and that is the only possible reason to see the movie.

Alice in Wonderland isn’t the flop that it has been rumored to be. It doesn’t take the necessary risks to be something so interesting. It’s something quite less, a film rooted in the mediocrity of dull competence. That’s what Hollywood cash can buy these days.

Shutter Island

2010-03-12T04:21:00.000-08:00

Shutter Island
Grade: B
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kinglsey, Michelle Williams, Max Von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson
Director: Martin Scorsese
Free Admission Granted

As he ages, Martin Scorsese appears to be making a clear turn to pulp.

I would say that some of the hesitations often expressed about The Departed stem from this change. The Academy Award winner doesn’t’ have the sense of burned-in reality of his early New York films. You also hear, incorrectly that it is shallow, a misimpression that lingers. Rather, it’s a quiet study of the relationships among violence, loyalty, and rival forms of authority.

Shutter Island takes a similar approach and will probably suffer the same accusations of shallowness. You will hear that it is just Scorsese making a piece of intriguing entertainment. While I don’t think it is Scorsese’s deepest film, I would say this description sells the film short.
Like a previous adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, Mystic River, Shutter Island is interested in violence and the way that the arrival and absence of knowledge shifts the morality of it, as well as the way that violence burdens the futures of its subjects. What is interesting about Shutter Island is the way that our investment in violence changes as our perception of the film’s “reality” changes.

Whatever its underlying meanings, Shutter Island is primarily an expert piece of popcorn, a bump-in-the-night psychological thriller enlivened by Scorsese’s child-like sense of cinematic exaggeration. It’s like Avatar for someone who grew watching 50s tough-guy B-movies.
Haunted by memories of liberating a concentration camp and his wife’s death, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes a ride across the waves to Shutter Island, a foreboding piece of mid-Atlantic real estate that houses an asylum for the Criminally Insane. A female inmate has mysteriously disappeared without a trace.

The island institution is run by an effete doctor, played by Ben Kingsley, who believes he can reform and save his criminal patients. But he seems to have something to hide. It’s 1954, just after the War, and the presence of doctors with German accents aren’t helping his case.

Despite my recommendation, the use of the Nazi theme disturbed me. Generally speaking, I think the more we use the Holocaust as a storytelling device, the less impact the real thing has on us. Its use should be carefully chosen, but here the Holocaust is reduced to a storytelling device and ultimately a Maguffin. It could be anything, so perhaps it shouldn’t be that.
The film also too much time down t he stretch to reach what has become its obvious conclusion.

Nonetheless, it held my suspense and interest, because I wasn’t quite sure how all the details would work out. That’s true of most of this often brilliantly suspenseful film. It captures your attention, holds it, and has a little something to say. Throw in Michelle Williams, who I’m quickly becoming convinced is the best actress out there, and that’s not bad for a night out.

Valentine's Day

2010-02-15T20:39:00.001-08:00

Valentine’s Day
Grade: D
Cast: Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Alba, Emma Roberts, Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, Bradley Cooper, Patrick Dempsey, Topher Grace,Hector Elizondo, Who am I forgetting?
Director: Garry Marshall
Free Admission Granted

One of Valentine’s Day’s big stars, Jessica Biel, plays a lovesick publicist who throws a pity party each year on Valentine’s Day to mark another year without a guy. As if Biel or any other member of the star-studded cast would have trouble finding dates.

On this particular year, the pity party has no takers. That’s something of a surprise. After being saddled with this melted-chocolate film and its dead rose of a script, every member of Valentine’s Day’s long roster of the famously beautiful deserves a good pity party. With some care, attention, and alcohol, it could even turn into a support group.

When we watch a movie with a giant cast of stars, we want to see them interact, play off each other, match skill and ego. With a few notable exceptions, Valentine’s Day fails to deliver, its stars spending most of its time in isolation, unless you count a wickedly and intentionally starless set of male pushovers (Patrick Dempsey, Topher Grace, and the like). In fact, the film’s one interesting pair is the underrated Biel with the only male star of rival stature, the charismatic Jamie Foxx. It’s the one story that you sort of wish they would chuck all the other stories in favor of.

I said sort of.

So Valentine’s Day’s enduring mysteries are not the mysteries of love. They are the mysteries of casting. Starring in Valentine’s Day is less a matter of appearing in a film than making sure that you get into the right Hollywood sorority, no matter how bitchy the sisters are. If you’re not in, you’re definitely out. It’s not as important to be in the film as it is not to be outside of it.

Yet strangely, the sorority sisters don’t even get rewarded with the funny things to do or say. Time after time, director Garry Marshall, he of Pretty Woman fame and Exit to Eden infamy, wraps up its few laughs for the faceless bit players wandering at the edges. The result is Cupid shooting arrows not dipped in love but rather in career poison.

So who survives this thing? Biel and Foxx, as mentioned, might have made an interesting date movie on their own. Julia Roberts has one great moment demonstrating the power of star presence. While her phone sex secretary role shows her cut above-ness, even those of us who have championed Anne Hathaway need to stop and wonder if she’s starting to waste her career.

On the downside, yesterday’s bombshell Jessica Alba fades into the woodwork of the Beverly Wilshire hotel even among these meager surroundings. Jennifer Garner confirms her status as the actress who’s remarkably adequate at doing what 100 other actresses could do. And as an actress Taylor Swift makes a great singer.

Aside from once again noting one of my favorite Laws of the Cinema – there is no good movie in which the phrase “Copy that” appears – that’s all I have to say.

From Paris WIth Love

2010-02-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

From Paris With Love
Grade: B
Cast: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Director: Pierre Morel
Free Admission Granted

Does From Paris With Love ever stop?

Nah, this French flavored actioner romps through its steps as if its success depends on outrunning logic. For the most part, it succeeds.

It’s hard to know what a fussy Frenchman would think, the City of Light transformed from film’s most romantic locale, suddenly vulgarized by an American action film mentality. Sprouting wild-ass shoot-outs like vineyard grapes, unleashing a damn exciting highway chase with weaving cars and a bazooka, From Paris With Love is the movie equivalent of EuroDisney – Americanizing Paris, both spectacular and distracting, with zero attention span and ….. hey look, a balloon!

Jonathan Rhys-Myers is a civilian security officer at the American embassy in France. On the night of his wedding proposal, he’s dispatched to assist a visiting agent on a mysterious and dangerous mission. Enter John Travolta as Charles Wax, a maniacal assassin dispatched to chase a terrorist syndicate.

Travolta anchors the film down deep with his sudden hulkiness, bald pate, and the weight of his screen ego. His forehead seems to be gaining mass and could go supernova any second. You wonder if he should be the first movie star tested for steroids. Roid rage would explain his foul mouthed, shoot-first ass-kicking through the seedy side of Paris. Perhaps torn apart by the gravitational pull of Travolta’s forehead, the film completely loses sense of reality. And don’t you just love it for it?

From Paris With Love is the product of Pierre Morel (joined by producer Luc Besson)l, responsible for the respected District B13 and last year’s big hit Taken. It is carnivorous cinema, digesting recent action films and sharply regurgitating them. We might be regurgitating, too, if the film didn’t know how to intelligently and amusingly smother the whole thing in tasty action gravy. You can’t put Travolta in Paris without handing him a Royale with Cheese. At least the film has the good graces to decorate it with a hint of cleverness.

If From Paris with Love changes your life, it will only be by awakening your long latent epilepsy. Yet its pleasures are undeniable– superbly staged and edited, pasted together by a wink and nod, washed down with a hint of genre satire.

Edge of Darkness

2010-02-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

Edge of Darkness
Grade: D
Cast: Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston
Director: Martin Campbell
Free Admission Granted

Why is Mel Gibson shaving?

The government wants him dead. They’ve already killed his daughter. Killers are still on his trail. Again, why is he shaving?

And why is he opening the door without his police-service revolver? In fact, why is he opening the door, period? And don’t let that guy in! What are you thinking?!

Edge of Darkness, a revenge thriller and would-be comeback for the beleaguered Gibson, leaves you asking those questions. You also are left asking what looks older, the balding Mel Gibson or the film’s exhausted plot? Conspiracies abound. If only someone had conspired to make the film worthwhile.

Edge of Darkness also presents us with the paradox of director Martin Campbell. How can a man be so successful with directing James Bond films (Casino Royale, Goldeneye) and so hopeless outside of the series (The Legend of Zorro)? Squished together from a 1980s BBC miniseries, Edge of Darkness leaves doors swinging in the wind, barely attached at the hinge. Entire scenes and subplots evanesce and then turn to vapor. One character’s fight with blindness drops in in a single scene before the darkness swallows it whole.

Edge of Darkness does have its pleasures. They come in the form of two of the better character actors around – Danny Huston and Ray Winstone. Huston has a habit of falling back on slimy operators. While these roles put food on his table, he’s a smarter actor and I wish he would do other things more often. Winstone eats everything and licks the plate as a wine-sipping man with no identity. William Monahan’s dialogue does crackle from time to time, giving Gibson and the chubby Englishman something delectable to ooze at each other.

It is rather shocking to see Gibson nowadays looking like an aging Robert DeNiro. There’s something Fred Astaire in the Towering Inferno sad about watching such a gigantic movie star reduced to playing in a bland revenge thriller.

As a grieving father lit with rage, Gibson remains a feral avenger. After eight years on the other side of the camera, he dons the uniform, straps on the pads and hits the holes. Yet it’s like watching aging male stars paired with Audrey Hepburn. There is a sadness watching him go through the motions, a star painted into a corner with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

Top 10 of 2009 (Finally)

2010-01-28T02:14:00.001-08:00

The Year of the Woman? Isn’t every year allegedly the Year of the Woman? Nonetheless, my essentially interchangeable top two films are both from female directors – Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion – who have established reputations for talent and inconsistency. It is wonderful to see them both hit the top of their games at the same time.

1. Bright Star – Jane Campion’s love story of the poet John Keats told through the eyes of his fiancée Fanny Brawne, Bright Star is a film that works emotionally on the surface level and intellectually on deeper levels. In the old days, we used to call that a masterpiece. Set in 19th Century England, the film’s restrained love story is unusually moving. However, Bright Star is more – a contemplation on the force of beauty in the world. Aided by stunning cinematography and production design, as well as head-turning performances from Abbie Cornish and Paul Schneider, Campion’s direction is gently assured; you wonder if other directors watch this film and wonder if they’re working hard enough.

2. The Hurt Locker –It’s rare that you find a film that takes a spent genre and re-wires it for modernity. Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War film eliminates decades of “Army of Victims” assumptions and rewires the war film for a modern professional military. The Hurt Locker confounds the accepted liberal post-Vietnam wisdom by presenting a demolition expert – simultaneo1usly professionally focused and divinely insane - who lives for war and couldn’t live without it (a great Jeremy Renner). While the film is one tense wartime set piece after another, it’s that quietly shocking five minutes on the homefront that seems to stick out in everyone’s mind.

3. Thirst- Vampire films are tales of male predation upon women. Films noirs are stories of female predation upon men. Put them together and apparently you get a fantastic vampire screwball finale in Chan Wook-Park’s mucho bloody, darkly funny morality tale.

4. The Road – I don’t understand the critical hesitation to accept The Road. There seems to be a thought that it is too bleak or that the book does not translate well to screen. What I saw was a tender father-son story in a post-apocalyptic imaginative space that re-inforces the timelessness of love and morality. Even in humanity’s worst moments, we have the choice to love and to do the right thing. Fantastic performances from Viggo Mortensen and the youngster Kodi Smit-McPhee, as well as Charlize Theron’s great five minutes.

5. A Serious Man - The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is the most intellectually challenging major American release of the year. It's too bad that it's only half-enjoyable to watch. Nonetheless, the brothers re-imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey as a Jewish-American domestic black comedy. The film contemplates the ways that both fables and rationalism fall short in understanding the mind of God.

6. Inglourious Basterds - All the endless discussion of Quentin Tarantino, The Director, misses his true great contribution to film history - liberating screen dialogue. In the Pulp Fiction era, Tarantino was superb at writing lines primarily in that one familiar Tarantino voice. The World War II dazzler Inglourious Basterds finds him writing great lines in multiple voices, multiple styles, and multiple languages.

7. Fantastic Mr. Fox - Some view Wes Anderson's animated outing as a return to form. I never thought he ever lost form. I just think of it as another terrific outing. Glad to hear nice things being said about him again, though.

8. The Brothers Bloom - One wag memorably described Rian Johnson's quirky con man film as "The Sting directed by Hal Ashby." Actually, this mix of con man picture and anachronistic screwball comedy is better described as The Lady Eve directed by Hal Ashby. Rachel Weisz dominates as the reclusive innocent Penelope Stamp, a cross between a Katharine Hepburn screwball heiress and Being There's childlike hero Chauncey Gardiner. A smart post-modern sensibility permeates, giving us the brilliant bit of wisdom, “The ultimate con is to tell a lie so well that it becomes the truth.”

9. Adventureland - Greg Mottola upped the ante on the Apatow comedy with this late eighties summertime memoir set in an amusement park in the last rung of Hell. Nostalgic and tender where others are coarse and cynical. Too bad everyone’s forgotten Ryan Reynolds in this.

10. Public Enemies - Michael Mann's take on the short, brilliant bank robbing life of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), bathed with a death wish and a taste for fame. A throwback crime film in which the crook is a one-man last stand of romantic American individualism, as both law and crime advance to a more corporate and technological condition. A film that starts slow and gets better and better as it goes along.

Free Admission Granted on some of these

Extraordinary Measures

2010-01-28T01:21:00.000-08:00

Extraordinary Measures
Grade: C
Cast: Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell
Director: Terry Vaughan
Free Admission Granted

Things to like about Extraordinary Measures, with clinical researcher Harrison Ford and father/businessman Brendan Fraser joining forces to save Fraser’s children from a deadly form of muscular distrophy:

1) It’s relatively adult.
2) It treats its subject seriously.
3) It treats its subject carefully.
4) Based on a true story, it doesn’t much Hollywood-up its ending.
5) For a disease-of-the-week flick, it’s fairly spare on the mawkishness.
6) It rolls out the sick kids more for soft humor than to tug the heart strings.
7) It chooses a rare subject, work. Don’t we all go to the movies to watch what we do every day?
8) It’s actually interesting, for me anyway, to watch the details of medical research and see how they play as drama. I mean, who doesn’t want to watch the quiet explosiveness of cost-benefit analysis of medications for orphan diseases?
9) It’s a story of two men doing nothing more “dramatic” than bonding over a common goal.
10) It gives a realistic portrait of starting up a business and keeping it going. In fact, this makes up some of the more compelling moments in the film.
11) Therefore it tends to use natural drama, rather than manufactured drama, to propel its story.
12) It gives Harrison Ford something to do, even if it is a bit grumpily over the top. You half expect him to utter, “Dammit, I’m a doctor, Jim.” And no, we don’t want to watch him run wind sprints ever again.

And still even with these positives, could I look you in the eye and tell you to spend money to go see it? That’s what this comes down to, right? No, no, not really.

Produced by newcomer CBS Films, which is exactly what it sounds like it is, the film looks like it was shot on rejected sets for CSI on mid-80s film stock left over from the vaults of Knots Landing. The product never escapes its television movie tendencies.

The Lovely Bones

2010-01-28T01:19:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Bones
Grade: D
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz
Director: Peter Jackson
Free Admission Granted

Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones accomplishes one thing that’s hard to do.

I’ve never seen a film in which the foreboding sounds of inanimate objects cause such an emotional stir while the allegedly animate actors cause almost none.

In his adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel about a child murder, Jackson’s film does pretty well in re-creating the sights and sounds of 1973, capturing that Lynch-ian fraudulent suburban paradise with the depraved desires lurking underneath. And yet for all of its indulgence in graphic situations, you never get that disturbed jolt. The movie’s narrator isn’t the only thing that’s dead.

The gimmick of The Lovely Bones is that it is narrated by the dead child, Susie Salmon (whom Saoirse Ronan at least keeps her from also being a dead fish), from a halfway point to Heaven that bears considerable resemblance to Candyland or an endless screensaver. There, she watches her murderer and family from above, and soapily longs for the boy she longed to kiss. Having been brutally killed, these digs aren’t too bad. Child murder has never looked so inviting.
The tone of the film swings wildly among horror film, domestic melodrama, Twilight-y romance, and cheesy comedy. At times it is deadly serious. At other times, deadly ludicrous. This culminates in Stanley Tucci’s murderer. Under dorky windbreakers and a ridiculous sandy mustache, the effect is more comedy than horror. It’s hard to be too creeped out when the epitome of evil appears too much like a Carol Burnett skit character, to make a nice seventies reference.

The film seems to have little to say and exists only to bathe in (un-)emotional pornography. That is until the end, when it suddenly advises against vengeance and tells everyone that we should chill out and Zen-like move on from the tragedy. Then it reverses course and grants the audience’s desire for the bad guy to get it. There’s nothing worse than a movie that can’t take its own advice.

Youth in Revolt

2010-01-28T01:15:00.000-08:00

Youth in Revolt
Grade: B
Cast: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta
Director: Miguel Arteta
Free Admission Granted

…. And so once again we join Michael Cera in progress as he tries to lose his virginity ….
Does this sound like the plot of every Michael Cera film? I mean, at least in Juno, he got it over with real quick-like. In Youth in Revolt, it doesn’t come so easily. But at least it is, surprisingly, darn funny, if silly as hell. You must wonder why the Weinsteins would wait to stash this in the January dump period.

With a loser mother (Jean Smart), a loser father (Steve Buscemi), a loser mom’s boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis) and …. well, a loser life, Cera’s over-intellectual teen-ager Nick Twisp is floating through high school without hope of a lay. When they head for the hills – or rather the trailer park – to keep mom’s loser boyfriend from getting a good beatdown, he meets the French-film-loving girl of his dreams (Portia Doubleday), until fate separates them.

The film goofs on Cera’s awkward image by pairing him with a more confident (and more French) alter ego. The alter ego – a perfectly foul-mouthed, mirrored-sunglassed psychopath, by his own description – instructs his innocent formal self in arson and other acts of delinquency, all in a plot (that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to) to re-unite him with the momentary love of his 16-year-old life. From there Youth in Revolt gets less and less probable and more and more humorous.

Director Miguel Arteta (Chuck & Buck)simultaneously mocks and tries to achieve the spirit of the New Wave and other restless youth films of the sixties. It doesn’t rise to the level of appreciation or success of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in that category, but it could be worse. The plot is silly, the humor is broad but clever. That means it had better make you laugh or fail. Haha. Ha haha ha.

The White Ribbon

2010-01-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

The White Ribbon
Grade: No Rating
Cast: Christian Friedel, Ulrich Turkel, Burghart Klausner
Director: Michael Haneke
Free Admission Granted

Misanthropy can be a powerful tool in the chest of a filmmaker.

Few are as misanthropic as the German filmmaker Michael Haneke, and The White Ribbon might be the bleakest film that you will see in a long time. Reviling humanity isn’t a crime. It just tastes better with a little cube of humor. For all of its stunning filmmaking, The White Ribbon is misanthropy without the charm.

Inspecting the psychological dynamics of a small German village on the brink of World War I, The White Ribbon follows a series of mysterious unsolved murders that are driving the villagers nuts. The village life is dominated by several powerful father figures – particularly a cruel doctor and a dour minister who is a monstrous father – who fail to live up to the virtue of their profession. Haneke makes one gesture of conciliation to his audience –the courtship of a wife by the narrator, a schoolteacher re-telling the story from the distance, safety and sad perspective of the future. But that is a crumb of sunshine in an onslaught of paranoia and dread.

Like Cache, The White Ribbon sweats underneath the feeling of being watched. Even without videotape, the village is a crucible of surveillance. Children peer through windows. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. In this little Peyton Place of a town, knowing your neighbor’s business isn’t appealing. When one woman declares her desire to leave, she runs down an indictment of the village’s envy, brutality, and other very bad things. Andy Griffith, this is not.
Visually, The White Ribbon is quite impressive. It is shot on film in a stark black and white. It is a film of open gates and closing doors, creating frames within frames, alternately giving a sense of enclosure and disclosure. Captured in long takes, the camera alternates between eavesdropping gently and freezing characters in close-ups, leaving them imprisoned in their own isolation.

The White Ribbon has a weird way of seeming both like reality and like a dream. Without Haneke’s liquid filmmaking talent, without the film achieving such amazing verisimilitude, would the story seem comically over-the-top? Or is the Funny Games director entirely serious about the dire cruelty he sees in humanity? There is a disenchanting lack of sympathy found here, and little hint that Haneke knows that his concentrated mendacity isn’t the only thing there is.

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-29T21:46:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes
Grade: B
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams,
Director: Guy Ritchie
free admission granted

In its still short history as a sub-genre of film, the series reboot has traditionally been an origin story. In a word, it's been "elementary."

By that, we mean a back-to-the-basics sort of the story - a neo-traditional approach that takes and re-works the original elements of a character and points him in a new direction. It contains a sort of puritanical fundamentalism, even if it ultimately points this new fundamentalist character can taste somewhat different than its literary forbear.

Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes is something of an oddity in this context, because we have reached the point that the re-vitalized character isn't necessarily a fundamentalist. Playing up the action hero of the world's best known fiction detective, this is not your father's Sherlock Holmes. Or your grandfather's Sherlock Holmes. Or his father's. Or his father's.

In fact, it might not be Sherlock Holmes at all, but whatever it is, it is still quite fun. Traditionalists might shudder at the thought of Holmes doing action set pieces, but they're fairly enjoyable in a Hollywood sort of way. The sooty London streets are enough to make you sing, "A sweep is as lucky as lucky could be," even if the fog is lifted too often for presumably California sunshine.

The clues here are an eccentric detective (Robert Downey Jr.), an able doctor (Jude Law), some tremendously fun chemistry between the two leads, and a somewhat goofy supernatural criminal with aspirations of world conquest in Victorian England.

Downey is thoroughtly enjoyable as the half-cocked detective, strumming his violin as he silently contemplates clues, all with a method to his madness. It's a role built for Downey and around Downey, and he delivers with an enjoyably spacy twist. Law provides a sober and practical sparring partner.

One thing that I found interesting about Sherlock Holmes is how difficult it is for the modern audience to buy into a mystery. As a society, we're used to the instant payoff, and holding an audience's attention is considered a risk. Watching Avatar within a few days of watching Sherlock Holmes, you're struck by this difference in pace. It might be a shame that this is true, but it is rather bold to try a mystery these days. The audience might not accept the delayed gratification.

Much of your taste for Sherlock Holmes is a glass-half-empty-or-half-full sort of thing. If you see it as a Hollywood-ized action-hero corruption of Doyle's detective, then you are bound to hate it. However, you might see it as that rare thing - a thinking man's franchise movie, one that runs on brain rather than brawn. It would be nice to have one of those.

Avatar

2009-12-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Avatar
Grade: B
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: James Cameron
free admission granted

In the many early raves for James Cameron’s Avatar, one critic compared the film to the first major talkie, The Jazz Singer.

Not a bad comparison. The 1927 audience for that film was undoubtedly astounded by that first magic sprinkling of sound onto film. Yet 1927 happens to be the greatest year for silent filmmaking. Few would think of The Jazz Singer as being artistically in the same league as Metropolis, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise, The General, Eisenstein’s October, etc.

It is undeniable that Avatar is a stunning 3-dimensional showcase that may well be ahead of its time.Nor is it mind-numbed – it has something to say. Cameron’s Noble Savage fantasy is too deeply felt a mindset to deny it springs from a personal ideology. Yet Avatar is so miserably written and so far off on its own merry Marxist moonbeam that it becomes a challenge to entirely give your heart to. I left wishing that this staggering technological advance had accompanied a story that didn't need excuses made for it.

Avatar is a sort of Space Age Dances With Wolves, with one eye beautifully open to painterly excess and one ear closed to its atrocious third-grade dialogue. With its three-dimensional CG effects, every inch of the theater seems to be in play with something new and stunning to see. Unfortunately, though, we must hear, too. It’s not that the dialogue is badly written. It’s that it is calculatingly idiotic, betting on exactly how low the international lowest common denominator goes.

The plot can be (and is) diagrammed in the first ten minutes, which it then executes like a battle plan for the next two and a half hours. Wheelchair-bound Marine Jake Sully volunteers for a mission to a far away forest moon Pandora. A human military outpost has been scraped onto the surface. The planet’s natives are the 12-foot blue Na’vi, the sort of eco-friendly inhabitants that only exist in the minds of the Hollywood Hills.

The scientists on the planet want to make peace. Through technology, the humans transport into Na’vi bodies – called avatars – when they sleep. Jake’s avatar comes to be accepted among the Na’vi, learning their ways with horse-like creatures, flying on candy-colored pterodactyls, and falling in love. For a peace-loving society, all of their customs are curiously martial. Who exactly is at home cooking the roast?

Once taken in by the Na’vi, the military branch wants him to spy. Their mission is to clear the Na’vi village to make way or mission of peace is spat upon by the militarists on the moon, who want to drive away the Na’vi and clear the woods so that a corporation can mine a valuable ore.
Avatar’s anti-imperial enviro-friendly storyline, of a purely innocent living in harmony with nature Na’vi and the bulldozing American military, is heavy-handed, and presumably designed for distribution overseas. Really, it’s only missing Richard Gere asking us to send vibrations of good feeling to the Chinese leadership. However, what it reduces the Nav’i to plot points and constructed others without much personality, whose only duty is to create a fantasy opposite for thinly-drawn humans to mistreat.

The motion-capture animation is brilliantly life-like, and there isn’t a hint of feeling like you are in a movie. It is lovely, painterly, and from the minute you arrive on Cameron’s Fantasy Island. the concentration the way that every inch of it is loaded with a small, beautiful detail, is truly astonishing. But is it really worth $400 million dollars to produce a better flying dragon?

Avatar forces its viewers into a huge choice – should we forgive Avatar its trespasses in favor of its claim to film history? Or should we wait until someone uses the same technology to make an indisputably great and complete film. Is it a crime to hold out for a film with the same technology to a more satisfying artistic end? I think I’ll wait.

2009-12-29T21:40:00.001-08:00

The Young Victoria
Grade: C
Cast: Emily Blunt Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

So we’ve started to reach that point with Emily Blunt.

Is the talented English actress going to become a true star in her own right, rather than supporting everyone else’s star? Or will she turn dull watching Rebecca Hall steal all her roles for the next decade?

The very talented English actress has been One to Watch since catching the critical eye, first in 2005’s My Summer of Love and as Meryl Streep’s other assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Originally, it was assumed that The Young Victoria would be her potential star turn.

A year’s delay in release and a film suffering more knife wounds than Rasputin, it remains to be seen. Fluttering between youthful confidence and political naivete, Blunt is the best thing about this otherwise average costume drama. Beyond her performance, the slender story doesn’t have reason to exist on film besides the fact that every Oscar season needs a queen.

In fairness, The Young Victoria takes the mustached matron of later years and turns her on her head into a passionate youngster tormented by her power-mad mother and step-father and deeply confused by her marital prospects. Never mind that at a tender age 18, she is about to be thrust onto the throne of England during a turbulent age.

All this would make for an interesting story, if the queen herself had much to do with it. The impression left is of social upheaval happening outside the Palace walls. As a counterpoint, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth felt like the lynchpin in her era. Blunt’s Victoria feels like she’s trying to keep the turmoil from compromising her social life.

Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction glows on the surface but doesn’t have much steel underneath. It’s pretty, but in that suspicious way. The final version takes an already thin story and chops it even thinner. The Young Victoria is a film that feels like it has been given the once-over twice.

What we’re mainly left with is a performance by Blunt that reminds us that she is still a comer. But she needs to find that role soon.