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.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Top 10 Films of 2010
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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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.
.
True Grit
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Black Swan
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Due Date
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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