MOVIE BLOCK

Declaration of War (**3/4)

2012-02-03T20:47:00.000-05:00

Misleading titled, this French import nearly begins misleadingly too, with a montage scene straight from a romantic comedy. Actually, though, we first see a boy of five or so in a MRI machine. And then we see his parents, who are named Roméo and Juliette, meet. They have a boy, Adam. Not yet two, Adam gets sick. (Rarely does a toddler get so much screen time.) Relatives are informed. There are tears, but this is less of a tearjerker, all things considered, that one might have expected. The most notable segments are not the obvious ones—the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, and so on—but the ones in between, where the couple must go on living their lives.

The drama, cowritten by the two leads, Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm, and directed by Donzelli, is at its best in these small moments. (Donzelli and Elkaïm have played romantic partners in other films and have some chemistry.) Roméo and Juliette try to make each other laugh about their worrying too much. They try to understand each other’s different reactions to their situation. They smoke a lot. (It was the degree of smoking that made me suspect, correctly, that the movie was based on a true story.) Except for the smoking, I’d have liked the movie to be even more about these small moments. I don’t really trust those montage scenes in romantic comedies because they seem to be a substitute for actually showing why a couple are together, and I felt like that was true here. Without giving away what happens to either Adam or his parents, it also seemed odd that the story simply skips ahead and dispenses with both questions in a quick epilogue that is not necessarily implied by what has happened before. Additionally, the soundtrack music, which ranges from Vivaldi to Laurie Anderson, is jarring when it should have been intimate.

IMDb link

viewed 2/5/12 3:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/5/12

Albert Nobbs (***1/2)

2012-01-27T23:35:00.000-05:00

IMDb link

viewed 2/12/12 1:05 pm at Ritz 5

Man on a Ledge (***)

2012-01-27T11:55:00.000-05:00

For at least its first half, this fun little thriller kept one step ahead of me. Why has a guy (Sam Worthington) about to step out the 21st-story window of a New York City hotel wiped off his glass and silverware? Why has this ex-cop been sentenced to 25 years in prison (from which he escapes in an early sequence)? Why does he ask for a particular officer (Elizabeth Banks) to be the one to talk him down? What’s going on with the brother he fought with at his father’s funeral? And what does a rich real-estate mogul (a deliciously nasty Ed Harris) have to do with it?

By the time a crowd gathers on the street below, it’s clear that this is not an ordinary suicide threat, but not what it is. Only when that’s all clear do things slightly unravel, when action gets substituted for smarts, the hero pulls a couple of unlikely superhero moves, and weapons are discharged, though the violence quotient stays low. I could talk about a couple of plot holes, but I hate to spoil things, and they don’t mar the main plot, which maintains the tension even though, of course, the guy’s not going to jump and ruin the whole movie.

IMDB link

viewed 1/4/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/4/12

Miss Bala (***)

2012-01-27T11:34:00.000-05:00

Wrong place at the wrong time would begin to describe the worst few days of one young Mexican woman’s (Stephanie Sigman) life. Trying to find out what happened to her friend after a drug gang shoots up a dance club, she finds herself a pawn caught between the dealers and the DEA gringos in the border wars around Tijuana. Also, she’s a contestant in a local beauty pageant. That last part comes off as more surreal than quirky in a suspense drama that’s deliberately paced but rewarding. Sigman, as a character who throughout the film can’t tell whether her best move is to stay with the dealers or try to escape, conveys realistic fear throughout. The dealers, too, are realistic, as banal as they are fearsome. Despite its pessimistic take on the country’s ongoing drug wars and corruption, this film was a hit in Mexico.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/25/11

A Separation (****)

2012-01-27T05:45:00.000-05:00

Iran boasts a fairly robust film industry, but its only filmmaker whose work has been widely seen outside the country is Abbas Kiarostami, who makes minimalist, arty films like A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. This drama by Asghar Farhadi (whose previous work has been shown at US film festivals) is both accessible enough to have been a hit in its native country and complex enough to garner a passel of awards.

The main characters in this story (Leila Hatami, Peyman Maadi) are a married, middle-class couple, but the wife is seeking a divorce. On what grounds an unseen clerk asks. Does he mistreat you? No, he is a good man, she explains, but he will not emigrate with her. He does not wish to leave his elderly father, who has dementia. Neither party will budge. And so, instead of divorce, the couple separate, necessitating hiring a housekeeper who can also look after the old man. There is also a choice for the couple’s eleven-year-old, who elects, for now, to stay with her father.

The rest of the story is all complications that lead to an unfortunate incident and an accusation against the husband. What’s brilliant about the movie is the way it brings several elements together in a completely natural way. It has much to say about human psychology, but it’s not a self-consciously psychological film. It depicts an unfamiliar (to Americans) legal system, but is not a legal thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 2/11/12 12:45 pm at Ritz 5

Source Code (***1/2)

2012-01-21T23:16:00.003-05:00

Imagine waking up on a Chicago-bound train with no idea how you got there or why the unfamiliar young lady (Michelle Monaghan) next to you seems to know you, but by another name. That’s what happens to the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal here, and it’s not a story about amnesia, but something else entirely. Perhaps he, a pilot who fought in Afghanistan, doesn’t remember because it’s not real. Perhaps the next people he speaks to, after everything disappears, an Air Force captain (Vera Farmiga) and a government scientist (Jeffrey Wright) who appear on a video screen, will explain. I won’t, because it’s better not to know.

This sci-fi thriller, a first feature for its screenwriter, Ben Ripley, is the second for its director, Duncan Jones, whose film Moon also dealt with artificial intelligence, alienation, and trust, but in a much quieter way. It may remind viewers of movies like Inception or The Matrix, with its plot involving virtual worlds, but also Groundhog Day, in that way it craftily telescopes myriad variations of the same scenario into a concise narrative. (Oddly, Gyllenhaal starred in another movie in which time gets recycled, Donnie Darko.) Obviously, it’s no comedy, but it maintains a lighter feel than those other sci-fi films (or than Moon) while carefully maintaining an internal logic that leads to a fairly satisfying outcome.

IMDB link

viewed 3/23/11 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening with director Q&A] and reviewed 3/23/11 and 1/21/12

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (***)

2012-01-20T19:07:00.000-05:00

I’ve not read either of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels—only excepts from each—but he obviously doesn’t go in for subtlety. The first, Everything Is Illuminated, is written in an ersatz syntax parodying that of an an Eastern European immigrant. The second, adapted here by screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and director Steven Daldry (The Hours), is told in the voice of an extremely bright 12-year-old.* They’re mysteries wrapped in tragedies, and not just any tragedies, but the Holocaust in the first case and 9/11 here. (Oskar is played by Thomas Horn, a newcomer who definitely knows how to convey smarts, having been a Jeopardy Kids Week champion.)

Young Oskar’s father has died on what he refers to as the “worst day”; he happened to be in one of the Twin Towers. That fact figures in the story, significantly but peripherally, as when Oskar insists, to his mother’s (Sandra Bullock) consternation, that without a body there can only be a “pretend funeral.” The deceased, played by Tom Hanks in flashbacks, is the sort of dad who insisted that New York City had a now-lost “sixth borough” and from time to time produces “evidence.” The flashbacks are meant not to convey that he was a kook, but that he invested his son with a sense of wonder. One wonders if he also invested him with the sense of superiority the character conveys.

The mystery has to do with a key left behind. Armed only with a name — Black — and New York City phone books, Oskar (who’s a little Asperger-y) begins a systematic search for the lock that fits the key. (As with many New Yorkers, he seems not to consider the possibility that some people live in places outside the five boroughs.) I suppose there are brainy kids who might be like this, but must Oskar be so irritating? (Probably this is not Horn’s fault.) He irritates his mother; he irritates the staff in his building; he irritates the mute old man (Max von Sydow) who boards with his grandmother in an adjacent building. He’s indeed extremely loud. Now, I don’t mind flawed heroes. The heroine of the recent The Hedgehog, for example, who is the same age as Oskar and possibly even brainier, is flawed, but she’s not as irritating. Also, that movie less transparently— pun intended—tugs at the heartstrings.

But I’m going to say just barely that I liked this, because I liked the mystery of it and how it’s resolved, because von Sydow is as winsome as the boy is irksome and because Bullock seems like a real mother and not Sandra Bullock being Sandra Bullock. I don’t think the movie comes close to being worthy of its Best Picture Oscar nomination, but it’s diverting if the above caveats don’t distract you.

*However, he is quite incorrect in claiming that there are more people alive today than have ever lived before. Not even close, as it turns out.

IMDB link

viewed 1/12/12:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/20/12 and 1/30/12

Haywire (***)

2012-01-20T16:52:00.000-05:00

These are good times for ass-kicking movie heroines. While Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, Zoe Saldana in Columbiana, or Angelina Jolie in Salt may have convincingly looked the part, Gina Carano is the real deal, a mixed-martial-arts fighter in her first starring role, in a Steven Soderbergh film as it happens. So maybe she could really knock around Channing Tatum, as she does in an opening scene that teases the audience by setting it up so that her character, Mallory, seems like the victim of an abusive boyfriend. But Mallory, an operative for a government contractor doing high-risk undercover jobs, gives as good as she gets (better, actually), whether she’s outrunning a kidnapper in Barcelona, nearly destroying a hotel room in Dublin, or fleeing the police in upstate New York.

You’ll recognize Soderbergh’s hand if you’ve seen his Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, or Traffic, or The Limey, his previous collaboration with screenwriter Lem Debs. Note the way, when Mallory and her team go into a building, guns blazing, tones down the artillery he noise and turns up the music instead, opting for panache over thunder. Style points don’t quite overcome what is still essentially a genre exercise. The non-linear structure, confusing at first, doesn’t quite hide a familiar plot. The Limey, for one, has richer characters, even if this film has some well-known actors (Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton) in small roles. And Hanna had a fairy-tale quality that made me overlook its basic implausibility. But this film does boast the best rooftop foot chase sequence since The Bourne Ultimatum. Its fight scenes are very good if you don’t insist on strict reality. I imagine even MMA champions wouldn’t get up so quickly from a couple of the blows inflicted here.

IMDb link

viewed 1/16/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/16/12 and 1/19/12

The Iron Lady (***)

2012-01-20T15:22:00.000-05:00

This is perhaps two thirds of a very good biopic about the life of Margaret Thatcher, British counterpart to Ronald Reagan, yet his temperamental opposite. Unfortunately, the employment of a mostly useless framing device — Thatcher (Meryl Streep) spends half a dozen segments in the near-present day as she struggles with dementia and has conversations with her late husband (Jim Broadbent)—mars it. Not only does it rob the narrative of some momentum with a storyline that emphasizes the artificial nature of the medium—how could screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame), or anyone, know that Ms. Thatcher is turning on her radio and other noisy appliances to drown out the sound of the imagined husband she’s bickering with?—but it also uses up time that would have better spent, say, showing us how a grocer’s daughter came to such firm conservative beliefs that, even today, she is a controversial figure in her hometown in the English Midlands. Or how young Margaret Roberts became so determined to break into the nearly uniformly male field of electoral politics in the 1950s. (Director Phyllida Lloyd depicts some of the sexism that greeted her efforts, but wisely doesn’t make it the main focus; the visual statement of the pearl-necklace-wearing Thatcher among a sea of grey suits makes its own statement.)

Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.

Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.

For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.

IMDb link

viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12

Carnage (***1/2)

2012-01-13T21:53:00.000-05:00

There will be those who describe this as stripping away the veneer of civility that hides our contempt for others. Some may see it as skewering a certain kind of liberal hypocrisy. Undoubtedly, some will think it’s just two unpleasant couples bickering for 80 minutes. I thought Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage was all of those things, but mostly just funny.

Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play one couple; they’ve arrived at the home of the other, played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, to deal with an altercation between their eleven-year-old sons, who are not present. Actually, they’re about to leave as the story begins, the four of them having hashed out a description of the incident and committed it to print, all legal style. (Waltz’s character is, in fact, a lawyer.) The only thing that struck me as unrealistic, if clever, is how Reza/Polanski get them all to stay together the whole time. (Polanski does nothing to “open up” the story, which nearly all takes place in one fashionable Brooklyn apartment, though it didn’t bother me.)

Quickly enough, talk about the incident becomes talk about parenting, talk about marriage, and talk about whether the cobbler being served is a cake or a pie. The couples ally against the other; the men ally against the women; the wives argue with their husbands. The lawyer’s repeatedly ringing, familiarly annoying cell phone becomes an ongoing punch line. And though I tend to dislike body-function humor, this movie shows that even a gross-out scene can be funny if done right.

Foster’s sanctimonious writer character is simultaneously the least likeable character and the one I felt sorriest for, since she seems most unhappy. Actually, hers was only the one of the four I really felt much toward, other than amusement. I can still see the bulging veins in Foster’s neck when her character gets extremely angry. I suppose it would have been even more impressive watching these actors delivering the torrent of dialogue on the fly, live, but even on film it’s a showcase for all four. The nasty edge to all of these characters might put off some people, but it’s impressive that in the short space they are all well-defined, and they have such delicious dialogue.

IMDb link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 1/18/12 and reviewed 1/18/12

Pariah (***1/4)

2012-01-13T08:55:00.000-05:00

As far I I knew, no one in my high school was gay. Nor did I suspect that anyone was. This began to change ever-more rapidly in the last 20 years, so that someone can be out to friends, ambiguous to classmates, and closeted to parents all at once. That’s more or less the case with Alike (Ah-LEE-Kay) (Adepero Oduye), the heroine of this semiautobiographical first feature from Dee Rees.

That Alike is a black, lesbian teen certainly provides the dramatic hook, but in form it’s a coming-of-age tale. If Alike is a pariah—though she frequents a local lesbian club with a best friend—it’s as much because she’s introspective and shy as because of her sexuality. Her unexpected first romance is of less note than the relationship with her parents.

The tiny silver lining of the pre-don’t ask, don’t tell era was that, if you didn’t tell—and if you were in high school you almost certainly wouldn’t—no one was likely to ask. But though Alike’s mother (comedy veteran Kim Wayans, surprisingly capable) frets about her daughter’s “tomboy” phase, and her dad asks about boys, it’s apparent that they both kind of know the truth. If it’s true that their level of denial would seem a bit behind the curve were they white, professional Brooklynites rather than black, working-class ones, it’s also true that this story has played out thousands of times among all sorts of Americans. But this is the first time I’ve seen it on film, and Rees tells it with authenticity.

IMDb link

viewed 1/5/12 at Rave UPenn (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/12/12

A Dangerous Method (***

2012-01-06T20:54:00.000-05:00

It’s probably a cliché to point out that being a good therapist doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to resolving your own conflicts. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly)

Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.

IMDb link

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (US version) (***)

2012-01-01T23:50:00.002-05:00

Very much like its Swedish forbear, David Fincher’s remake substitutes Daniel Craig for Michael Nyqvist as disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (he’s had to pay a libel judgment to a wealthy businessman) and Rooney Mara for Noomi Rapace as the titular, wiry hacker heroine. It may be that I’d just seen the original film that made this one a little less riveting, although the casting is equally good. Mara’s Lisabeth Salander is just a tad softer than Rapace’s, and a little quieter, and there are small plot differences, but not big ones. The location stays the same, Sweden, and, in particular, the isolated island where a family’s patriarch (Christopher Plummer) has hired Blomkvist to delve into his troubled family history, in particular a murder that occurred some 40 years before. Only the language switches to English, with the accents ranging from Craig’s and Plummer’s English ones, to Robin Wright’s (Blomkvist’s editor/lover) Euro-tinged American, to Mara’s Swedish. Real Swedes, most prominently Stellan Skarsgård, play smaller roles.

IMDB link

viewed 1/1/2012 12:30 pm at Riverview and reviewed 11/1/2012

War Horse (**3/4)

2011-12-25T01:52:00.000-05:00

It’s rare that you see a movie these days without the slightest shred of cynicism or guile. Though he may have been among the generation of directors who helped make us all a bit more cynical, and be depicting World War I, a war that inspired much cynicism, Steven Spielberg is not afraid to be sincere, or even a bit corny in this case. When even Batman movies are celebrated for their darkness, the sincerity of this adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo novel (also made into a play) is somewhat refreshing. Beginning just before the war in Devon, in the English countryside, Spielberg gives us a virginal, literally wide-eyed farm boy (Jeremy Irvine) whose love-at-first-sight bond with the horse he calls Joey bounds an otherwise episodic film that slightly reminded me of The Red Violin, in which a musical instrument, not an animal, is passed from hand to hand. In the course of this film, “Joey” finds himself among the allied Brits and French as well as their German enemies (though all dialogue is rendered in English), and everyone seems like a fine fellow, or gal.

This is not to say the film is without social critique. Though there is not a moment in which anyone discusses why the war is being fought, that itself suggests the pointlessness of it all. Spielberg is judicious in depicting the violence—this isn’t Saving Private Ryan—but the few combat scenes make an impression. In the first, Spielberg shows us a phalanx of men on horseback, and machine guns, but not the horses falling. Instead, we see the battlefield littered with corpses. (The film evokes also of the significance of animal power just before it would give way, in battle, on the road, and on the farm, to the internal combustion engine.) Later sequences are set among the trenches so peculiar to that conflict. There is also a class-consciousness in the film. A foolish British commander is, like the landlord threatening to foreclose on the farm boy’s parents, just another person controlling the lives of ordinary folk.

Though most of the above is intended as praise, the entirety of the thing has a cloying quality not unlike certain romantic comedies—like Love Actually, actually, whose screenwriter, Richard Curtis, collaborated with Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) in adapting Morpurgo’s novel. Like Love Actually, War Horse is full of appealing but thinly drawn characters who disappear—or die—before their stories become compelling. It is possible for a war story to be also a fable, but the realism here only emphasizes the heavy hand of the storyteller. The way the farm boy’s dad buys the horse on a whim—risking the farm because he has a feeling about the horse—is indicative of the approach. Of all the characters, only his wife, played by Emily Watson—emerges as somewhat three-dimensional.

Spielberg has rarely made a bad film, and maybe never a dull one. This is neither, and would actually be a good film to see with a child, one just old enough to begin to understand war and to appreciate a glimpse at the world on the cusp of modernity.

IMDb link

viewed 2/4/12 1:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/4–2/5/12

The Artist (***3/4)

2011-12-23T23:14:00.000-05:00

As a child, one favorite of mine was Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976), a nearly silent movie about a latter-day effort to make a silent movie. In its opening, this irresistible effort from Michel Hazanavicius — who’s French — goes Brooks one better in the movie-within-a-movie department by being a silent movie set at the gala Hollywood premiere of a silent movie whose star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, star of Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 spy spoofs), is both onscreen and backstage. Hazanavicius has great fun confusing what’s happening with what’s on screen. Valentin’s accidental encounter with a young female fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), sparks her Star Is Born-style ascent as the sound era dawns. That revolution, which doomed many a real career, creates irony and pathos as Valentin (whose name recalls silent star Rudolph Valentino) resists adaptation and Miller embraces the change, the irony being that we, the audience, can’t hear her voice.

Far from being ponderous, Hazanavicius’s film playfully relies on our collective storehouse of Hollywood tropes to both celebrate and satirize movie history. The lack of audible dialogue creates humor that only works in that context, where imagination supplies what is missing. As does music. Even people who rarely notice a film’s soundtrack might notice its heightened importance here, and Ludovic Bource’s score gorgeously sets the mood, though it’s more representative of the early sound era, especially when it cops Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo theme for the climax. While never abandoning the comic overtones, Hazanavicius reminds us of how, even in its earliest days, cinema had the power to move us in ways different from earlier media.

IMDB link

viewed 10/27/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/22/11

Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (**1/2)

2011-12-23T04:35:00.000-05:00

Previously adapted into an acclaimed BBC miniseries in 1978, this pared-down version of John le Carré’s novel stars a well-cast Gary Oldman as George Smiley, the British spy played by Alec Guiness role in the miniseries. Smiley is aptly referred to as “The Anti-James Bond” in a recent Atlantic article by that name and is, one imagines, probably more typical of anyone whose profession requires the utmost care and covertness. A man in late middle age, he has recently retired, or been retired, along with his old boss, “Control” (John Hurt). He spends his time on ordinary chores like getting his glasses repaired and wonders what went wrong in his marriage. He does not stand out in a crowd or make a fuss over how he likes his martinis, if indeed he drinks martinis.

But, following a botched Hungarian operation in which an agent is shot, he becomes the ideal man to flush out a probable mole within “the Circus,” as the London MI6 headquarters is known. The Hungarian fiasco is the tense beginning; merely by varying his shots, director Tomas Alfredson (the Swede best known for Let the Right One In) creates a good deal of suspense. After that, not so much. Despite telegraphing a good deal of story into a two-hour window and featuring several significant characters, the pace is measured without particularly building tension. That is, it manages to be confusing yet slow, being most noteworthy for its sense of English gloom. Rather than the glamor of the Bond series, the emphasis is on the mundane and drab surroundings at headquarters, where in 1973 microfilm represents new technology. That’s fine, but only if used as a counterpoint to what is quietly happening, which is only the case sometimes. The story is reasonably revised to fit the needs of a feature, but the characters probably seem less noteworthy with screen time reduced.

IMDb link

viewed at Ritz 5 12/19/11 [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/19/11

We Bought a Zoo (**3/4)

2011-12-23T01:45:00.000-05:00

It’s not often that a title so well sums up the plot. Benjamin Mee, played by Matt Damon, is a real guy who actually did buy a zoo and write a book about it, which has been adapted by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire) into this very drama. The real Mee was English and was living in France when he decided to buy a zoo. Crowe has unimaginatively turned Mee into an Angeleno and transplanted the zoo to Southern California. Just like the real Mee, the one here is a grieving widower with two children. One is an angry fourteen-year-old boy, the other a seven-year-old girl who spends the entire film being adorable, and it’s probably her lines, not her delivery, that makes her seem just a little too child-actorish. Elle Fanning, the second youngest female in the cast, also spends the entire movie being adorable. Probably the movie is a little too adorable. Damon and Scarlett Johansson, who plays the head zookeeper, are mostly adorable too, but their best scene is the one where they’re in conflict.

Crowe is a filmmaker who favors characters who boldly gesture—his most famous scene might be John Cusack’s holding up a boombox to woo Ione Skye in 1989’s Say Anything—but a more intimate approach may have better suited the material. (The soundtrack, featuring songs by Jónsi, is appropriately quieter, on the whole.) Or it might be that Crowe makes everything about owning a zoo seem surprisingly unsurprising. Here’s what I learned about animals from the movie—you have to talk to them the right way. Also, someone with experience can tell when a tiger is suffering.

This is a movie with a nice feel to it, but everything feels a little too simplified. The way the movie Mee buys the place is that, having decided that moving would help him get past his grief, he goes house hunting, spots the place the first day, and decides to buy it immediately after seeing how much his daughter likes it, even before seeing the photogenic staff (including Patrick Fugit, barely recognizable from his starring role in Almost Famous) that comes with. This was easily the most transparently false scene. I guess the real story, that Mee carefully researched before buying, seemed dull or complicated, but it seems to me that with a story like this, it’s the odd details that would have made it more compelling. Instead, most of this movie is simply sweet and pleasant, a good family movie if the kids aren’t too young or too cynical.

IMDB link

viewed 12/13/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/13/11

Shame (**3/4)

2011-12-09T22:39:00.001-05:00

Sex addiction is a trendy topic in print, but fairly novel as a film topic. Most notably it was dealt with in Choke. That uneven 2008 film took a psychoanalytic approach in depicting a grubby main character, whereas director Steve McQueen (not the late actor, but the Brit who directed Hunger) tries a behavioral approach with a more polished one. Michael Fassbender (also the star of Hunger) plays a New York City office worker whose free time is spent on casual sex, purchased or not, alone or not. It’s about a sex addict, but as McQueen and Fassbender portray him could be any white-collar junkie who’s revolted by his own weakness.

More novel, actually, is the brother-sister relationship explored in the film. The sister, a sometimes singer played by Carey Mulligan, is her own kind of basket case, as well as a nuisance interfering, by her presence, with his habit. His revulsion for her instability (and casual approach to sex) and inappropriate behavior, suggests, besides a kind of self-loathing, a troubled family history, though McQueen leaves this mostly suggested. For a film whose very name is an emotion, it’s rather dry, though stylish. A clinical approach can work, as in A Single Man, where fastidious behavior belies inner turmoil. But here the approach comes off as rather bloodless. The grand show of feeling with which the film climaxes is not heartbreaking, but simply gaudy.

IMDB link

viewed 10/21/11 7:55 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/9/11

Tomboy (***1/4)

2011-12-09T04:40:00.000-05:00

Céline Sciamma’s second film as writer-director follows Water Lilies, an intriguing drama about the vagaries of teenage female sexuality. Moving from sexual identity to gender identity, this one focuses on Laure, a girl of ten or so who moves into a new apartment complex and becomes, at least to the new friends she meets that summer, Mikael. The story is very simple; what stands out is Sciamma’s very neutral way of telling it. By that I mean that one never gets the feeling that there is a message, despite the potentially fraught subject matter. Despite the presence of Laure’s parents, almost the entire film is from her point of view, which is that of a child.

I realized also, in watching this, how few films, even films about children, primarily show them interacting with other children rather than responding to adults. Both Laure’s interactions with her six-year-old sister (Malonn Lévana, who is both adorable and incredibly natural) and Mikael’s play with the new boys (and one girl) are likely to remind you of the sorts of things that mattered when you were a child.

If you have one of your own (well, one who knows French or will read subtitles), the story is so gently told that you could watch this together and have a very unusual conversation afterward.

IMDB link

viewed 12/21/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/21/11

Le Havre (**3/4)

2011-12-02T23:32:00.000-05:00

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11

The Yellow Sea (**3/4)

2011-12-02T00:30:00.000-05:00

I made a point of seeing this at the Philadelphia Film Festival because it was South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s follow-up to The Chaser, one of the best action films of the last decade.

In this case, Chaser star Jung-Woo Ha plays a hapless Chinese taxi driver and gambler offered a contract killing job to pay off his debts. Both the driver and his intended victim are ethnic Koreans, but the driver lives in a Korean enclave just north of the Korean peninsula, while the man he plans to kill is in South Korea.

I strongly preferred the first half, which shows the driver’s being perilous transported into South Korea, stalking his prey, and making inquiries about his wife, who had already left China in search of work. Although only background to the story, it’s an interesting parallel with American immigration issues. The driver has to work so as not to appear like a rube, as immigrants everywhere sometimes do to those more assimilated.

The second half will no doubt appeal to real action junkies. With less time given to sentimental concerns, it ups the violence quotient significantly. One thing different about many Asian action films—versus Hollywood ones—is that films like this don’t mind making the hero unsavory, or the violence seem as brutal as it is. Here, not only are guns a rarity, so you get a lot of murders with knives and other implements (and lots of blood), but even the car crashes feel louder and crunchier, frightening like a real car crash, if you’ve been in one. Technically, the movie seemed pretty flawless, but way too brutal for my taste. Once the main character’s transformation from meek cabbie to fearless killer is complete, I lost some interest, although there are twists and turns as he becomes the target of a slew of Korean and Chinese mafioso. Too bad, because the final sequence is very well done.

IMDb link

viewed 10/28/11 9:15 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/3/11

Hugo (***1/2)

2011-11-23T16:07:00.000-05:00

Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.

With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.

The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.

If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.

IMDB link

viewed 11/22/11 at Franklin Institute [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/28/11

The Descendants (***1/2)

2011-11-18T22:55:00.000-05:00

With his last four features (of five total), Alexander Paynehas become our foremost cinematic chronicler of the adult white male self-examinationcrisis. However, perhaps because he has adapted a series of novels, he hasn’trepeated himself. Those who found Paul Giamatti’s wine snob in Sideways too ornery or found About Schmidt too slow may still likewatching lawyer Matt King (George Clooney), imperfect husband and father,muddle through his own difficult time. King’s crisis comes when his wife lapsesinto a coma following a water-skiing accident. Payne’s faithful adaptation of anovel by Kaui Hart Hemmings isn’t as plot-driven or pithy as 1999’s Election, but it’s his most mainstreamfilm since then, and in this case that’s not a bad thing.

As much as the California wine country in Sideways, the Hawaii of The Descendants is an important part ofthe story. The title alludes both to the state’s unique history—haole money men displacing missionariesand, then, the native aristocracy—to King’s two daughters. As Clooney’svoiceover, which paraphrases the novel, tells us, Matt’s the understudy, nowcast as the star parent of his ten-year-old, and he doesn’t know what he’sdoing. So he gets his 17-year-old, away at boarding school, to help. The olderdaughter is played by Shailene Woodley, erstwhile costar of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, who’sboth terrific and looks the age she’s playing. (First-time actress Amara Millerseems very natural as the younger daughter, a smaller part.)

Clooney is almost too likeable in the lead; only thevoiceover and the anger of his daughter (no flashbacks) assure us that King’sbeen a neglectful husband and father or anything other than the reasonable manhe seems here. A subplot about King’s being the trustee of a 25,000-acre parcelof land set to be sold to developers resolves how you’ll likely assume as soonas you’ve seen that first gorgeous shot of pristine coastline. Still, there’san honesty to the storytelling and a good deal of humor right at the same timeas the sad parts, which is as it should be in a movie where a comatose womanfeatures so prominently. Alive yet unavailable, she forces King both to contemplateher death when he’s still angry at her and to figure out what he values.And yes, it’s a tearjerker.

IMDB link

viewed 11/14/11 at Rave UPenn (PFS screening) and reviewed 11/18/11

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)

2011-11-11T17:55:00.000-05:00

There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.

Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point. Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.

The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.

As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.

IMDB link

viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)

J. Edgar (***)

2011-11-11T14:58:00.000-05:00

J. Edgar Hoover served the United States Department of Justice for over 50 years, the last 48 (1924–1972) as head of what was called simply the Bureau of Investigation when he joined. So it’s a daunting task to sum up that career in a two-hour film, as director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) have tried to do.

Hoover may be better remembered today for clashing with Bobby Kennedy and trying to discredit Martin Luther King in the 1960s, or for his long relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson. But he also created the modern FBI and brought a professionalism to the task of catching criminals, even as the methods he sanctioned stirred controversies that reverberate in these days of warrantless wiretaps and detention without trial. Black and Eastwood devote considerable time to the anti-communist Palmer raids, which made Hoover’s name, and to the Lindbergh kidnapping, which, when solved, solidified his reputation as a crime fighter. A fictional device—Hoover is supposed to be dictating a memoir—frames the 1920s, '30s and '40s segments and gives us Hoover in decline (but still wielding power) while skipping over the 1950s entirely.

The hoary flashback structure doesn’t reveal any notable contrast in the older and younger man, aside from the almost-convincing make-up job on DiCaprio. (In that regard, I thought Naomi Watts, as Hoover’s longtime secretary, and Armie Hammer, as Tolson, were more convincingly aged.) Insofar as Hoover’s view of himself and law enforcement were concerned, he seems to have emerged fully formed in his 20s. Watching the ever-confident Hoover in action is engaging, but rarely exciting. I wonder if a musical score would have helped. Hoover most comes to life in the personal scenes. He seems only to have been close to two people, his mother (Judi Dench), who made him courageous, and Tolson. Tolson, as played by Hammer, humanizes the Hoover character, and even if you have contempt for the man’s self-aggrandizing and legally questionable tactics, the singular devotion of these men seems creditable.

Eastwood takes no clear view on whether Hoover was justified, mostly presenting Hoover as he saw himself. He takes a middle road as to the Tolson relationship. It can scarcely be doubted that these men who dined together, vacationed together, and had no other serious relationships had a romantic attachment, and Black’s screenplay assumes that. However, given how little is known about how they behaved in private, the period of Hoover’s adulthood being an age when privacy was granted to public figures, it shows wise restraint as far as sexual matters. The audience is allowed to assume what they will as regards this while it is suggested that Hoover’s upbringing, his nature, and the times would have made him disinclined to violate propriety. If there is one thing that unites Hoover’s anticommunism, his distrust of agitators like King, and his fierce approach to ordinary criminals, not to mention his careful habits of dress and speech, it seems to be a true distaste for disorder or change.

IMDB link

viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012

Melancholia (***1/2)

2011-11-11T11:45:00.000-05:00

IMDB link

viewed 12/2/11 9:35 pm at Ritz Bourse

Castaway on the Moon (***1/2)

2011-11-08T21:55:00.000-05:00

This Korean gem may or may not be inspired by a similarly titled Tom Hanks film, but it has a unique approach with even more of a fable-like quality. Instead of an island in the middle of nowhere, the luckless hero winds up, after a botched suicide attempt, on an uninhabited islet in the Han River, in sight of the skyscrapers of Seoul. His calamity is also a refuge, and, in a way, unites him with a shut-in young woman on shore. The humor in the early part of the movie is slightly to the goofy side (there’s no talking with a volleyball, but something like that), but the conclusion is heartfelt. An American remake is planned.

IMDB link

viewed 11/8/11 [Netflix streaming] and reviewed 11/8/11

Like Crazy (**1/2)

2011-11-04T11:39:00.000-04:00

I suppose in a perfect world everyone would have one all-consuming love affair, one that, much later, will be recalled in a gauzily lit, cineme verité montage of sexual euphoria, aimless conversation, and clear-skinned smiles. Soft piano music will be the soundtrack. It will seem much like the first half hour of this evocative romance from Drake Doremus.

The problem is, it’s never much more than evocative. The young L.A. college sweethearts (Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones) seem nice enough, but Doremus employs the sloppy shorthand of taste as a proxy for actual character traits. That is, the fact that they both like a certain Paul Simon song (alluded to in the film’s title) doesn’t tell us anything much about these people. Nor does the improvised dialogue, although it’s delivered well. As circumstance requires separation—she has to return to her native England—I had no idea whether I thought they should get back together or not. Or maybe I didn’t care as much as I ought to have.

Doremus’s film also evokes, sometimes effectively, the way feelings fade with separation. As with the separated couple in Going the Distance—a more mainstream, yet actually more substantive, look at a long-distance relationship—technology fails to take the place of being in the same place. The [slight spoiler ahead] his-and-hers side relationships—his with a coworker, hers with a neighbor—that follow seem perfunctory, as if Doremus is trying to balance out things. We never actually see the early stages of these infidelities, where, presumably, the separated lovers try to resist temptation. Or maybe they don’t try. The alternative partners do seem in each case adoring, though they don’t share a taste for Paul Simon and fine whiskey. And taste is important, but, in the case of this tasteful film, isn’t always enough.

IMDB link

viewed 10/20/11 at Annenberg [Philadelphia Film Festival screening]

The Skin I Live In (***1/4)

2011-11-04T05:30:00.000-04:00

This film’s plot should seem as ridiculous as bad plastic surgery; perhaps only Pedro Almodóvar could make it so compulsively watchable. Almodóvar never truly repeats himself yet makes movies that are somehow of a piece. Adapting a novel by Thierry Jonquet, he edges into science fiction territory—his main character (Antonio Banderas) is a surgeon specializing in face transplants and, yes, lab-grown skin—but inside of ten minutes the plot veers into more familiar themes. For Almodóvar, those include obsessive characters who follow their emotions to questionable ends. The surgeon’s own backstory unspools in a one-minute discourse by his housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) that replaces what might have been a 20-minute flashback in some other director’s hands.

The housekeeper is not just the housekeeper, having a history with her employer, and the young woman to whom she’s unspooling (Elena Anaya), the surgeon’s experimental subject, is not just an experimental subject, but we have to wait until well into the movie to learn who she is, how the doctor came to be keeping her locked away in his house, and how she got the burn scars that the doctor is erasing with his artificial skin. The movie’s title emphasizes identity, a theme of many an Almodóvar melodrama, though not in the same way as here. It’s full of the arresting visuals—the girl’s body suit, especially—for which Almodóvar is known. And it’s full of actors familiar from the director’s other work. Banderas had played other obsessive characters in films such as Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Paredes had starred or costarred in four Almodóvar films, including All About my Mother; and Anaya had appeared in Talk to Her. What it’s not is moving; the fast-paced melodrama will suck you in, and your allegiance will shift among the characters, but for all it’s plotting, there’s not enough history to these characters to make us care about them, or perhaps the story is just too creepy for it to be that kind of movie.

Definitely worth watching for Almodóvar fans, but maybe not the place to start, unless you have a taste for something a little twisted. And a pretty good twist it is.

IMDB link

viewed 11/23/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/23/11

Tower Heist (***)

2011-11-04T04:23:00.000-04:00

Ben Stiller plays Josh, the hotshot in this movie. You can tell he’s a hotshot because the movie has one of those hotshot sequences, wherein the character is introduced with a bunch of quick cuts, fast talk, and a bunch of other characters greeting him (rarely her), imploring him, interrupting him, and so on. Also, the movie takes place in Manhattan, where all movie hotshots reside. Josh is a residential building manager in charge of all the other employees who make the lives of the wealthy residents easier. In particular, they make the life of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) easier. Shaw is a big-shot investor, and when he turns out to be a fraudster too—think Bernie Madoff—the big shot and the hotshot become enemies.

Their decision to become criminals is slightly more believable than in Horrible Bosses (which was produced by this film’s director, Brett Ratner), but the execution is much less so, since that comedy reminds us that most criminals, let alone dilettantes, aren’t good at it. Here, the defrauded workers turn, too easily, into some kind of Ocean’s Eleven. Cowriter Ted Griffin wrote the screenplay for the 2001 version of Eleven, so that makes sense.

Call this Stiller’s Six, counting his costars Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Casey Affleck, and Gabourey Sidibe. Murphy, recalling his earliest roles in Trading Places and 48 Hours, plays the petty thief recruited to aid their plan. The comedy is about average (“don’t talk to me for the rest of this robbery” is one of Stiller’s lines). The heist is pretty ridiculous, but it has some great visuals in which the tower comes into play.

IMDB link

viewed 10/12/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/12/11

Race to the Bottom of the Earth (***)

2011-11-02T06:57:00.000-04:00

Nancy Glass, who directed this documentary along with Michele Loschiavo, says she almost laughed when Todd Carmichael told her he was an explorer. It sounded so out of the past. What’s left to explore? That strikes me as the fundamental difference between someone like Roald Amundsen, whose team first reached the South Pole in 1991, and Carmichael, who headed there alone in 2008. That is, while the early explorers were no doubt driven by the will to test themselves, there was also the drive to go where no one had before, to discover. For Carmichael, along with a Finnish man named Teemu, there is only the first thing. They are something closer to ultramarathoners. “We’re out of our heads,” Carmichael says to the camera. It is another gift of the modern age that he can film himself and make phone calls.

Other modern things, like outside assistance and motorized transport, he eschews. The goal was to travel unaided, alone—Teemu traveled separately—the 700 miles from the edge of Antarctica to the pole in record time, just under 40 days. That is, to average more than 17 miles per day on foot, dragging a sled with 250 pounds worth of food and equipment, in subzero weather, through ice and snow. I’d heard Carmichael being interviewed on radio some months ago, talking about frostbite, and eating thousand of calories of butter, and having his ski break the first day, but the video shows what it was like.

Glass and Loschiavo have done a good job editing 70 hours of footage into a nicely paced narrative, mostly Carmichael and Teemu talking to the camera, but also of Carmichael’s wife back in Philadelphia. Most of the footage is inside a tent, but Carmichael does film himself trudging forward. The only flaw might be the inability of film to truly capture the most amazing thing about the journey. That is, the camera readily makes one appreciate a world-class sprinter, a warrior in battle, or even a poker player. But the camera could not make me comprehend what would make someone endure frostbite-inducing cold, lack of sleep, and sore muscles, and yet maintain the will to push on (and pull on a heavy sled) hour after hour, day after day, just to say you did it.

IMDB link

viewed 11/2/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 11/2/11

Patang (*3/4)

2011-11-01T08:50:00.000-04:00

In the heart of old (crowded) Ahmedabad, western India’s largest city, a family gathers on the eve of the city’s annual kite-flying festival. Jayesh, a successful businessman in Delhi, has traveled 500 miles with his college-age daughter to revisit his former home. And…that’s all. It takes over an hour for anything truly dramatic to happen, and even then it would be stretching to call it a plot, but then it’s over in any case. The colorful photography is something to look at, though.

IMDb link

Viewed at Ritz 5 11/1/11 7:50 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 11/1/11

Turn Me On, Dammit (***1/4)

2011-10-30T04:10:00.000-04:00

Movies about horny teen boys are legion in Hollywood, but the subject of teen female sexuality (and, to an extent, female sexuality in general) seems the province of Europeans. Provincial Alma (Helene Bergsholm), nearly 16, narrates this Norwegian comedy. Here’smountains, here's meadows, she says; here’s her dull town that could be a small town anywhere with mountains and meadows. Alma lives with her mother, fantasizes about a boy, and sometimes calls a phone sex line to aid her fantasies.

If there is any common theme among tales of sexual awakening, it’s humiliation; in this case, a sexual matter makes Alma the undeserved object of ridicule among her classmates. Frank but not crude, this adaptation of a novel succeeds with deadpan wit and the palpable awkwardness and longing of many an adolescent.

IMDb link

viewed 10/30/11 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/11

My Week with Marylin (***)

2011-10-29T11:02:00.000-04:00

In 1956, the 30-year-old Marilyn Monroe traveled to England. Then at the height of her stardom, she was there with her newest husband, Arthur Miller, to make a romantic comedy with Laurence Olivier, later released as The Prince and the Showgirl. Like Me and Orson Welles, this adaptation of diaries by Colin Clark is about a big star seen through the eyes of a young showbiz aspirant. But Welles was never uncertain of his own gifts, whereas Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), at least as portrayed here, was confident in her stardom, but not of anything else. Welles tries the patience of his acting company with his arrogance, Monroe with her insecurity. She arrives late on the set and flubs her lines. Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who’s directing the film, cannot hide his impatience, whereas young Colin (Eddie Redmayne), hired as a third assistant director but actually a gofer, can’t hide his infatuation. Her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, is there to prop up her confidence and further irritate Olivier.

Both Williams and Branagh are credible, which is especially good in Williams’s case because, without seeing Monroe as a star, one might simply see her as childlike and immature. Olivier is inclined to the latter view, though he recognizes her onscreen presence. As Colin puts it, Olivier is a great actor who longs to be a movie star, and Monroe is a star who longs to be an actor. Both have dramatic personalities that make this a pleasant, though minor, film.

IMDB link

viewed 10/29/11 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Society screening] and reviewed 10/29/11

Martha Marcy May Marlene (***3/4)

2011-10-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

It would be incorrect to call this a film about a cult (a word the film itself avoids), or why someone would join one. Its curious title meant to evoke the fragile state of one uncertain of herself, it is instead about a transition back to normalcy. If it were a war film one would say it is about PTSD. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) has just left, maybe escaped, after a time with the group, and is staying with her sister (Sarah Paulson).

Flashbacks depict the place she has just left, an upstate New York farmhouse. The dozen or so folks there seem like latter-day flower children practicing a back-to-nature sort of self-reliance. John Hawkes plays the leader, whose palpable creepiness (to me, anyway) is the only sign, at first, of things gone amiss. You’ve seen these kind of flashbacks before, where the scene in the present merges into a similar-looking one in the past. But first-time writer-director Sean Durkin does it about as well as I’ve seen, so that it takes you a few seconds to realize the scene has moved from the sister’s house to the farmhouse. As for Martha, the past blurs with the present, and reality with paranoia.

Durkin gives hints about Martha’s back story in her interactions with the sister, who is living with her fiancé (Hugh Dancy). The story is about family dynamics and Martha’s erratic behavior. But the mood comes close to psychological horror. Or suspense, more than horror. In any case, Durkin and Olsen give us one of the most subtle, yet gripping portrayals of a damaged individual.

IMDB link

viewed 8/22/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

Margin Call (***1/2)

2011-10-21T11:50:00.000-04:00

Imagine you have a live hand grenade and have to decide whether to hold onto it, knowing it will explode, or toss it away, knowing it will kill or maim people around you. There you have the nub of this suspense drama whose entire plot, playing over the course of about 30 hours, would make a very good short story. I’m speaking broadly of course, which is how the characters, Wall Street traders, in the movie speak. They say things like “We’re gonna do this thing” and “Have you ever done anything like this?” Or “At the time there didn’t seem to be much of a choice,” to which the answer is “There never does.” To elliptical (yet pointed, precise) dialogue add a tense score, a dash of grim humor, and the night-time atmospherics of empty offices, and I found my attention held for an hour and a half.

Basically, writer-director J.C. Chandor (in his first feature) imagines a scenario whereby the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers had been given a dire warning just before it was too late. Or maybe it’s based on a firm like Goldman Sachs, which outlasted the financial crisis. Despite a dash of moralizing, Chandor does not paint his characters as a pack of jackals, though Jeremy Irons, as the top man, comes close. Rather, he comes closer to saying that the money involved, all legal in this case, would be hard for anyone to resist. In fact, the two number-crunchers who issue the dire warning (Stanley Tucci and Zachary Quinto) are both engineers who wound up doing what—and here’s the moralizing—they both imply is a less useful, but more lucrative, application of their talents. Tucci’s character makes a big speech that rather hammers home the point.

The film has no one star, but Kevin Spacey, as the immediate boss of the number crunchers and the traders, comes the closest. Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Simon Baker play other higher ups at the firm. That they all seemed to have individual personalities despite the fairly limited screen time helps keep things interesting even though the plot moves slowly. Eventually, Spacey gets to make a compelling speech making the simultaneous case for tossing the hand grenade and holding it. Ultimately, the question is more interesting than the answer, and thus the ending is anticlimactic. If you have no idea what the title means, this movie may bore you. If you’re an expert on, or curious about, the financial collapse, you might wish for more financial nitty gritty. The entire plot hinges on the riskiness of mortgage-backed securities, but only one line in the script actually uses the word “mortgages.” But if you’re looking for a sharply focused, modern parable, this’ll do nicely.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/26/11

Take Shelter (***)

2011-10-21T04:52:00.000-04:00

I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to the supernatural, but I went to see this because I’d read good things about the film and Michael Shannon’s performance. From the plot summaries, I couldn’t get a handle on whether the film is really about the supernatural, which is because the film keeps it ambiguous for a long time. Construction worker Curtis, Shannon’s character, is definitely having some unusual experiences, mostly in his dreams, but some, like the brown rain in the opening scene, apparently in real life.

The other thing that makes me nervous about a film like this, where one odd thing happens after another, is that nearly the whole film winds up being a big question to which the answer has the potential to really lower my evaluation of the movie as a whole. Other movies like this are Close Encounters of the Third Kind—Curtis seems crazy the way Richard Dreyfuss’s character there does—or Frailty, which involved a character who was either a religious nut or a prophet. This is like that a little too, but without the religious angle. Also, Curtis isn’t such a hardass, so his wife (Jessica Chastain) notices quickly when he begins behaving strangely. He himself is caught between wondering if he’s crazy (it runs in the family) or prescient, or both. They have a deaf little girl; her silence in situations where another child would cry out help create tension.

Ultimately, although writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) throws an interesting false ending in, I did feel like the answer to the the movie’s question—is he just nuts?—was a letdown. Another answer might have been also. But there’s enough tension built up, and enough just plain drama, to make the success not completely dependent on the ending. Shannon has the showier role, but Chastain (whose breakthrough roles in The Help and The Tree of Life form the other two thirds of a sort of housewife trilogy for her) has the unappreciated role of reacting to a husband coming apart at the seams. This has only a few special effects, but if you do like a supernatural story, and like it told subtly, you’ll probably like this more than I did.

IMDB link

viewed 11/9/11 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/9/11

The Ides of March (***1/4)

2011-10-07T15:48:00.000-04:00

George Clooney denies wanting to be a politician, but he does play one well on screen. He must have especially enjoyed the parts where, as Pennsylvania governor and presidential hopeful Mike Morris, he gets to make inspiring speeches that’d do any Hollywood liberal proud. Morris’s campaign posters look just like the Obama “Hope” ones, only they say “Believe.” But what does he believe? After a reporter asks, he says that he’s not a Christian. Nor is he a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, etc. No, his sacred text is the Constitution. That director Clooney and his cowriters Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (whose play Farragut North has been adapted here) apparently think a plausible candidate, even one in a Democratic primary, might say this—in a country where half the citizens say they wouldn’t vote for an atheist—might suggest they are a bit out of touch.

Nonetheless, you can probably like this just fine no matter what you think of its fictional candidate. It’s the politics, not the policy, that drives the plot, and the ultimately cynical take on the former may have bipartisan appeal. Political advisors and campaign workers, not candidates, are the main players on this stage. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Morris’s James Carville-like campaign manager, but Ryan Gosling, his number two man, is the pivotal character. Key roles also go to Paul Giamatti, as the campaign chief for Morris’s primary opponent, and Evan Rachel Wood, as the young intern whose blonde locks and flirty banter are enough to lure Gosling’s ambitious consultant into a tryst in a Cincinnati hotel.

As usually happens in political movies, scandal intervenes; the lesson of politics is that one small lapse in judgment can be the downfall of a candidate, or his advisor, or even a 20-year-old intern. I prefer a movie where the cynicism is more balanced with idealism, like Primary Colors, probably my favorite. (Though it’s probably less appealing to conservatives.) There is a superficial resemblance to that in the themes here, but Colors was to me a heartbreaking drama about the disappointment of true believers, not just a good yarn. Certainly the advisors here are not closet Republicans or anything. But they are more jaded, and Clooney’s movie is more straight political thriller than anything. That said, it is a fairly riveting one. Clooney’s storytelling is as economical as in his earlier Good Night and Good Luck (also written with Heslov). Even a Republican could love it.

IMDB link

viewed 10/13/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 10/13/11

Margaret (****)

2011-10-07T11:54:00.000-04:00

I suppose fans of HBO’s True Blood, or at least of Anna Paquin being in it, should be happy this sat on the shelf so long before getting a little-publicized release. The actress had had a few good roles since winning her Oscar in 1993, but not too many leads as a young adult. But I think had this come out around 2005, when it was filmed, it’s easy to imagine she would have been deluged with film roles that might have kept her off the small screen. The film also partly answers the question of what filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, whose other movie was 2000’s terrific You Can Count on Me, has been up to since Gangs of New York (2002), on which he is one of the credited screenwriters.

Given its novelistic sweep—it has just one main character, Paquin’s, and takes place over only a few months, yet there is a lot of stuff stuffed into the film, which clocks in at 160 minutes—I’d want to ask Lonergan several questions if I could. But if I were to pick one, I’d be tempted to ask about one two-second shot in particular. This is after Paquin’s character—Lisa, not Margaret—a Manhattan high school student, tells a young man who’s called her that she isn’t in the mood to talk. Lonergan then cuts away to the suitor, who’s shown breaking down in tears. He’s a minor character who plays no part in the rest of the story. Maybe it’s only there to show what sort of boy she’s rejected. Or maybe it’s there because quite a lot of the film is about how people react to other people. But I kind of think it’s there because Lonergan wants to show us everything. This may have had something to do with why it took so long to finish the film.

If I were to tell you what the movie is about, I would say it’s about this young woman whose chance flirtation with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) leads to a tragic accident. Yet it’s also about her relationship with her divorced parents (she plans to visit her father in California), her classmates (the Jewish Lisa and a Muslim classmate clash over foreign policy in history class), a teacher (Matt Damon), and a woman she encounters as a result of the tragedy. Mired in editing problems for years, the released version has been criticized for being messy, and it is.

IMDB link

viewed 10/19/11 at Ritz East and reviewed 10/19/11

The Way (***1/4)

2011-10-07T01:52:00.000-04:00

The title refers, literally, to El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, a Christian pilgrimage route through Spain for the last dozen centuries. But Tom (Martin Sheen) is a widowed California ophthalmologist, not a seeker of spiritual truths. When his priest, offering comfort upon the unexpected death of his son, asks him if he’d like to pray, Tom answers simply “What for?” But he says it in the voice of one who has become embittered, rather than a skeptic.

Tom is not an expressive man, and he had a complicated relationship with the son. Perhaps it’s in a quest to understand his son’s refusal to settle down that Tom decides to complete the journey his son had begun before falling victim to a sudden storm. Or perhaps it’s simply to honor the dead. The son is played, in brief flashbacks that aren’t overdone, by Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed.

The lightly plotted drama strikes the familiar notes you expect it to—the journey being more important than destination, the importance of human connection, the meaning of loss—but it doesso subtly. Instead of epiphanies, the movie lets its characters, especially Tom, emerge along the way. I appreciated that Tom remain ornery through much of the movie and quite the opposite of the silver-tongued president he played in The West Wing. As the title suggests, religion and spirituality obviously play a role in the plot, but there is no obvious message. In one scene, Tom and his traveling companions witness a centuries-old ceremony in a famous church. Only the faces of the four—Tom, a burly Dutchman, a bitter Canadian divorcée, and a prolix Irish writer— betray what they might have made of the whole thing. They don't say anything afterward. Estevez does not, in other words, force a particular meaning on the scene. In the end, we don't know how the journey will change the characters; it is enough that they will alwaysremember it.

IMDB link

viewed 10/3/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/09/11

Happy, Happy (***1/4)

2011-09-30T16:56:00.000-04:00

Couples living next door face the hard truths of their relationships in rural Norway. One pair, the more sophisticated of the two, have just relocated, but it’s Kaya (Agnes Kittelsen), the wife in the other couple, who unwittingly instigates things with a social invitation. Isn’t she gorgeous, Kaya says to her husband. But does this reflect security or merely doubt about her own sexual attractiveness? Slightly quirky (a men’s vocal quartet introduces each segment of the story), slightly comedic, and slightly unsettling (Kaya’s young son plays master and slave with the other couple’s boy, who was adopted from Africa), the drama never gets too heavy, but satisfyingly shuffles the deck on its characters’ lives.

Moneyball (***3/4)

2011-09-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

Numbers don’t lie, people say, but that doesn’t mean everyone will believe them. Baseball is no doubt the sport whose traditions are most bound up in statistics—batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA and so on—but perhaps also the one whose practices are most bound up by the dictates of tradition. Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, one of the most absorbing works of nonfiction I’ve read, Lewis told the story of how an unconventional general manager, Billy Beane, used the unconventional analysis of people like Bill James to help his team, the Oakland A’s, compete with teams with much larger payrolls. Along with books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, Lewis helped popularize the notion of applying economic perspectives to subjects traditionally thought outside the bounds of economics.

Like the book, this adaptation of Lewis’s book focuses on Beane (Brad Pitt), who in 2002 was facing the loss of three key players after a 102-win season in which his team had been beaten in the playoffs by a team (the New York Yankees) with triple the budget. Slightly fictionalizing the timeline, the movie has Beane then recruiting an Ivy League economist (Jonah Hill) who was working for a rival team. Applying the approach of James, who is not portrayed but is mentioned in the film, the two then go about transforming the team. Beane succeeds not so much because he is smarter than the competition, but because he is willing to try something new. Schooled in the principles of “sabremetrics,” the name coined to describe what James and his followers do, they look for players undervalued by other teams, but who can do the one thing valued above all: get on base, which leads to scoring, which leads to winning. The scouts resist like a creationist who think evolution takes away the mystery of life; to a sabremetrician, understanding the genetics of baseball game only makes its endlessly unpredictable outcomes that much more astonishing. They are, as Beane says, “card counters.”

The script, by Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings, American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network), does a fine job of explaining the nontraditional approach, although I slightly lost track of Beane’s machinations in one scene where he slyly manipulates three fellow GMs at once. In understandably conveying lots of information, it reminded me of The Social Network. Yet compared to Sorkin’s usual work the pace is as unhurried as the ink-jet printer Beane uses in his modestly furnished office. There’s even a kind of wistfulness about him, or the version played by Pitt. As a character drama, this will appeal even to people who would, as does one character, mispronounce “Giambi,” the last name of a player Beane can’t afford. It’s both a unsentimental reminder that a professional sports player is, fundamentally, a commodity and a classic, true underdog story. Here the underdog is the outspent Beane, who had himself been a player but failed to live up to expectations. Unlike the old-school scouts and even the team manager, who talk about the value of intangibles, he knows that intangibles, unless quantifiable as runs, are a distraction. He purposely keeps his distance from the players, knowing that one day he may need to fire them. Hill, referred to as “Google Boy” by one of the old-school scouts, does a nice job of being the egghead intimidated by the jock, yet sure of his facts.

For baseball geeks, Moneyball the book is a must-read, explaining why, for example, stolen bases are overrated. But this, absorbing in a different way, made me do something the book couldn’t: become, for two hours, an Oakland A’s fan.

IMDB link

viewed 10/16/11, 4:05 pm at Riverview and reviewed 10/16/11

Circumstance (***)

2011-09-09T21:40:00.000-04:00

Contagion (**3/4)

2011-09-09T21:27:00.007-04:00

This promised to be better than most other disaster films with all-star-casts, not because of the SAT word title but because it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh. He makes smart thrillers like Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight. And indeed, in a genre where clichés are pandemic (and Pandemic would have also been an excellent title), most are avoided here. Working from a script by Scott Z. Burns (who did The Bourne Ultimatum and Soderbergh’s The Informant, both with Matt Damon), Soderbergh crafts a film that reminded me more of his adaptation of Traffic than of movies about deadly meteors or volcanoes or global freezing, or even of Outbreak, since I didn’t see that one. Instead of being unimaginatively set in Los Angeles, the locations flit between San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Geneva, Hong Kong, and so forth. Instead of evil scientists or crazy genius ones working in home labs, the portrayal of the medical establishment is mostly benign. Laurence Fishburne plays the one with a bit of depth, working at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And, best of all in my view, the film doesn’t take up half the movie with blubbery sentimentality in which a father‘s reuniting with his estranged son, or a farmer’s regaining his faith, as a billion people die is supposed to constitute a happy ending. (Yes, I’m calling out you, Day After Tomorrow and Signs.)

Yet not only is the cheese factor missing, but also some of the excitement of those bigger productions. For a film about a killer plague, it’s kind of…sterile. Some brainy stuff in the beginning—like Kate Winslet’s epidemiologist explaining the ways some disease can spread faster—gives ways to fairly expected, but somehow not visceral, scenes of panic spreading along with the pandemic. That is, it evokes surprisingly little pathos for all its realism (though Winslet does her best), and not that much intellectual satisfaction either. That last is to say, whereas Jaws made me worry about shark attacks, this didn’t make me worry about a new disease, which is odd because the latter is clearly more of a threat. I’d have liked to like this more because you can tell Soderbergh made an effort to make things realistic.

Besides Winslet, Damon as a newly widowed father whose wife just might have been the first victim, brings the most human element to the story. I could, however, have done without Jude Law’s conspiracy-minded, slightly humorous blogger character, who’s meant to represent the crazies who will attract attention in troubled times. Smaller roles go to Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sanaa Lathan, Elliott Gould, and Bryan Cranston, bringing the celebrity total to an epidemic level that slightly distracts in a serious-minded film. Distracting is about the most that can be said of the movie overall.

IMDB link

viewed 9/7/11 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/7–8/11 and 9/12/11

Seven Days in Utopia (**1/4)

2011-09-02T05:45:00.010-04:00

I’m always suspicious of titles wherein one of the words is both the name of something and also means something else. Utopia is the name of the tiny Texas town where frustrated golfer Luke (Lucas Black) finds himself after blowing the chance to win his first big tournament, crashing his car, and tossing his cell phone in frustration. That’s another thing I’m suspicious of. Who besides characters in movies like Wild Hogs intentionally chucks a cell phone? Anyway, first person that lucky Luke runs into is also a once-promising golfer (Robert Duvall, Black’s Get Low costar) who just so happens to have settled in this town of under 400. Not quite the second person he meets is the waitress at the improbably bustling local diner, who appears to be the only pre-menopausal woman in town. (Melissa Leo plays one on the other side of that divide.) She’s got an obnoxious quasi-boyfriend, but by about the third day, she saying things to Luke like, “Sometimes I think you might be hopeless.” Seriously, who thinks anything “sometimes” about a person they met two days ago?

It’s nearly the same setup as comedies like Doc Hollywood or the animated Cars, only it plays out like the Karate Kid, if the hero was a little older, his crush object prayed a bit more, and Mr. Miyagi was an old white guy who taught sport by making his student paint pictures instead of fences. And, inside of a week…well, nothing surprising happens. Duvall, playing basically the only interesting character, comes close to rescuing the movie. When he tells Luke about having “a purpose and calling that went beyond any scorecard,” it only sounds a little corny. Mainly though, the movie suffers from blandness. Even the fish-out-of-water element is pretty mild. Luke’s neither a big-city slicker—he’s from nearby Waco—nor an egotistical big shot. You’d think there’d be more humor given the title and the premise, but about the only funny thing in the movie is the name of Luke’s golfing nemesis, a Korean (or maybe Korean-American—he never speaks) called T. K. Oh.

Those with a taste for a certain sort of old-fashioned wholesomeness (the movie’s rated G and extols faith) may enjoy this, but they’ll likely forget it in about seven days.

IMDB link

viewed 8/29/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/6/11

The Hedgehog (***1/4)

2011-08-26T16:44:00.001-04:00

When someone asked me, before I saw this, what it was about, I said something like that it was about a middle-aged woman who blossoms. To which the reply was, isn’t that what every independent movie is about. Actually, this is a French movie, and while I have definitely seen French variations on that theme, in no case was the story told from the point of a precocious eleven-year-old who plans to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday.

This suicide plot point is lifted right from the Muriel Barbery novel the film is based on, and of course gives the story some measure of suspense. It’s something about how the girl (who’s a year older in the book) is disgusted by the banality of the adult world around her, specifically that of her parents, and sees their elite lifestyle as a trap best avoided by dying. Still, her apparent contempt for the bourgeousie who inhabit her posh Paris apartment building is tempered by the fact that she also seems intensely curious about them.

The building’s newest resident is of the same class as the others, yet that is tempered either by the fact that he is Japanese, or culturedrather than crass. And somehow, the girl, the Japanese man, and the middle-aged woman, who is the building superintendent, form a mutual bond. This is the sort of movie in which the superintendent happens to have seen a 50-year-old Japanese film but never eaten Japanese food and the pre-teen happens to be a knowledgeable player of Go, the chess-like Japanese game that she insists is nothing like chess,nor Japanese.

Even so, the idea that the girl really plans to kill herself is easily the least believable aspect of the story. Insofar as the rest of the plot hinges in some way on the planned demise, the story suffers, but not so much as you’d think. As elegantly told by the director, Mona Achache, the story is almost a fairy tale Where in Barbery’s novel the youngest character can merely seem like a snob, Achache emphasizes the kindness behind the diffident exterior. In embodying both, actress Garance Le Guillermic is a real find.

IMDB link

viewed 9/14/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/15/11–10/11/11

Our Idiot Brother (***)

2011-08-26T09:10:00.002-04:00

If you can’t tell from the title—well, if you can’t tell from the title, you’re an idiot—this is another one in the epidemic of man-child comedies. One of the characters even calls Paul Rudd’s character, Ned, a man-child. That’d be after he’s gotten himself busted for offering pot to a cop. Not an undercover cop, either. There’s been so many of these that Rudd’s been in one at least three years running, only he was one of the grown-up types in Dinner for Schmucks and I Love You Man. (In 2007, however, he was another idiot in Role Models.)

What’s different about this one? For one thing, the sibling focus. Ned’s sisters are played by Zooey Deschanel (the ambisexual comedian, partnered with Rashida Jones, who was Rudd’s fiancé in I Love You Man), Elizabeth Banks (the go-getter/aspiring journalist, whose dark hair reminding me of Parker Posey), and Emily Mortimer (the frumpy/sweet mom, partnered with Steve Coogan). Besides that, instead of being about the need to grow-up, the movie makes kind of a defense of the child within. Unlike so many of his boyish movie brethren, Ned’s not a self-absorbed slacker, but a people pleaser. His lack of guile makes him an unwitting catalyst for chaos. But he means well, so even when his sisters get angry with him, they can’t sustain it.

The same tone carries over to the movie itself. Some foul language and a few scenes with “adult sexual themes” earn the R rating, but really the comedy is much sweeter than its cousins in the Judd Apatow school, and a world away from those in the silly/sappy Adam Sandler school. (Appropriately for a story of family, the writers are a husband and wife, David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz, and the director is Evgenia’s brother Jesse Peretz.) The laughs are small and medium size. Here’s one: Ned’s dog is called Willie Nelson. And, after a plot point involving the dog, Willie Nelson, the singer, comes on the soundtrack. Cute. It’s not a movie with big gags, but then again nothing falls flat. It’s actually a decent story of family dynamics that would be good to see with yours. Even the grown-ups.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East and reviewed 8/31/2011

The Names of Love (***1/4)

2011-08-19T10:55:00.004-04:00

This is one of those romantic comedies where a free-spirited woman gets paired with an uptight dude and converts him to her side. Think Something Wild, or My Sassy Girl, or What’s Up Doc, or at least three Ben Stiller comedies.* But tons of good movies are novel variations on a familiar theme, and this one does that with a nice French twist. Jacques Gamblin is uptight Arthur Martin ( the running joke being, that’s also the name of a well-known appliance brand), a 50ish bird expert, who having agreed to coffee with free-spirited Baya, politely refuses her offer of sex (she always sleeps with a guy on the first date, she explains) because he has to perform a necropsy (animal autopsy). Sara Forestier, with memorably wide eyes and slightly crooked smile, is twentysomething Baya, the product of a hippie’s marriage to an Algerian and a self-decribed political whore, though one with the proverbial heart of gold. It’s more than a metaphor, as she seeks to convert France’s “fascists” to her more left-leaning ways by sleeping with them. Arthur looks like a right-winger to her, but isn’t. She just likes him, she says.

The charm of this comedy is that it’s both quite frivolous and also about something, in particular the need to escape the baggage of one’s past and family background.

*Thanks to tv.tropes.org for a couple of those suggestions

IMDB link

viewed 8/25/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/25/11

The Whistleblower (***)

2011-08-19T01:35:00.000-04:00

In this dramatic thriller, Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who exposed a sex-trafficking ring while working as a contractor in Bosnia during the UN peacekeeping mission. As with The Constant Gardener, for which she won her Oscar, Weicz crusades against a conspiracy. In each case, there is a fairly black-and-white moral issue, but Whistleblower dramatizes that more vividly and personally, and it also gains some force for being a true story. However, it lacks the subtlety and emotional finesse of a movie like The Constant Gardener. With a significant exception being a UN worker played by Monica Bellucci, the characters are either entirely virtuous or clearly villainous, and the plotting is straightforward. To its credit, the story doesn’t seem either sensationalized or sanitized; while it’s certainly not the first movie to dramatize the modern international sex trade (the 2002 Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever did it better than here), it’s perhaps the highest profile film to do so. (I won’t count the exploitation film Taken.)

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 8/11/11 [Women’s Way screening] and reviewed 8/14/11

The Future (**3/4)

2011-08-12T18:07:00.004-04:00

I have seen The Future, Miranda July’s second film as writer/director/star…and it begins with a talking cat. Well, a narrating cat. (July is married to Mike Mills, whose concurrently released Beginners features a dog whose thoughts are subtitles. Kismet, I guess.) The cat, never quite seen, narrates in a voice—July’s mousy voice, but imitating the scratchy, child-like voice you would give to a stuffed animal—that one is bound to find adorable or, more likely, be really irritated by. The cat isn’t in the movie enough to make or break the film, but its presence is some guide to July’s sensibility.

Or, try this: First scene (after the cat), July and her costar, Hamish Linklater, playing a couple with their laptops on a couch. Not wishing to get up to get herself a drink or water, she wishes she had a crane to reach the sink. He points out that she’d need to turn on the water. She replies that she could do that with her mind, and he says it’s a shame her only power is something one could do with one’s hand in any case. His power, he tells her, is to be able to stop time. And he does. Or pretends to. So it’s that kind of movie, whatever that is. Not really comical, but playful, or precious if you prefer, the sort of movie you’d expect a performance artist, which July was, to make. The stopping-time bit shows up later.

The plot, such as there is, revolves around the couple’s realization that they are 35, the age in which one’s life becomes set, particularly if you’ve agreed to adopt a cat, which they have, in a month. (This makes slightly more sense in the context of the movie, but I think it is true that 35 is an age in which most people realize that they have more or less taken whatever path they were going to take in life.) So, with a month to go, they set out to change course, and that goes about as well as it does for most people, although each of them makes a new friend. The need to connect is a definite theme.

July’s other film was called Me and You and Everyone We Know, of which I only remember that it was also teetering between quirky and precious and original, and July played another character somewhere in the space between odd-but-believable and too-weird-even-for-Los Angeles. Also, the person I saw it with hated it. I think this may also be a love-or-hate-it affair. I know this because I was right on the fence, as I tend to be with that kind of thing. I liked several scenes, including the quasi-magical realist stuff, although I think The Science of Sleep, to which I can very roughly compare this, did it better. If done right, a film can be quirky in a way that leads to a lot of feeling. This approaches that place, but kind of blows it with an ending that seemed slight to me.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/18/11

The Guard (***1/4)

2011-08-12T17:11:00.003-04:00

“What a beautiful fucking day,” exclaims Brendan Gleeson at the start of this Irish comedy-drama, and few actors can muster such depth of feeling in uttering such a sentiment. The paunchy actor plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, who finds himself temporarily partnered with an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) when some international drug smugglers, and a murder victim, wind up in his ordinarily quiet hamlet.

There are elements of a mismatched buddy comedy. When Boyle, speaking of drug smugglers who use submarines to avoid detection, says you have to admire their ingenuity, the agent says drily, “No, you don’t.” Quite a lot of the humor is dry here, as when the one of the smugglers, who’s English, corrects the others, who are Irish, on the matter of the nationality of philosopher Bertrand Russell.

The story also has the fish-out-of-water element, as one character actually points out. The FBI man’s introduction to Boyle involves racial insults, and his attempt to do some sleuthing on his own—it’s the sergeant’s day off, which even a murder investigation won’t impede—finds the locals pretending to only speak Gaelic. It’s unclear whether his race or his being an outsider has more to do with this.

The action element is also not neglected, although it’s saved for the ending. But, more than anything else, the film is a character drama and a vehicle for Gleeson. Boyle can seem like a bumpkin one moment, then show another side in the next scene. The agent tells Boyle, “I can’t tell if you’re mutherfuckin’ stupid or mutherfuckin’ smart.” In quoting this, I may falsely suggest that this is a rather broad film, but in general it’s understated and realistic. Boyle, a single man, is prone to insulting coworkers and committing certain victimless crimes from time to time, but has a soft spot for his dying mother, Croatian widows, and Disney World. It takes the length of this brief movie to reveal his true nature, and writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin McDonagh) lets the character percolate until the satisfying conclusion.

IMDB link

viewed 9/8/11, 7:15 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8/11

The Help (***1/2)

2011-08-10T16:44:00.000-04:00

It’s nearly impossible to review this movie without commenting on what its appearance in theaters, and atop box-office charts, says about American culture. On the one hand, the subject lines of some of the busier Internet Movie Database discussion threads—“Black people need to get over it”; “Not racist”; “Honestly Not Much Has Changed In 50 Years”; “Any minority that likes this movie”; “The Help Was Made For White Audiences”—show how divisive a subject race still is. On the other, had this adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel been made 50 years ago, when it takes place, I doubt that it would have functioned, as I think it does, as a feel-good movie for much of its audience.

Aside from those assuming movies about racism are made only to hector whites, many of the objections boil down to criticizing the Mississippi-set drama for not encapsulating the entire African American experience, which is like criticizing The Godfather for not encapsulating the entire Italian American experience. Some criticize the movie for making a white aspiring journalist (Emma Stone) into the heroine, but Aibileen (Viola Davis), one of the black maids she writes about, is also the heroine. Or they don’t like that the black characters are maids. But focusing on maids is a reminder of how limited the opportunities were for black women. And it’s nearly impossible to simultaneously show that a people were denied agency and rights and then have them triumph without any assistance from someone with more power. Ultimately, though, any one movie ought to be evaluated in terms of the story it’s trying to tell, and how well it does it.

Fairly seen, although obviously Stone’s Eugenia, a headstrong college girl returning to her hometown, appears to be admirablein depicting the lives of these women, she is not perfect, or without ambition, and the women themselves, and black people generally, are certainly shown to be the primary victims of the embedded system. This story, in its most general outlines, is probably well known to most people, butin fact by showing how the rigid social structure constrained even whites who saw things a different way, the story shows the more subtle ways a social system can repel change.(The social ostracism faced by another white character [played by Jessica Chastain] seems clearly meant to be analogous to the prejudice faced by blacks.)

It’s true that director Tate Taylor uses the character of Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), petty as well as intolerant, as a kind of living embodiment of Southern intolerance, letting the other characters off thehook, as it were. But there is also the more subtle racism of Eugenia’s mother, and the not-subtle-at-all racism as enforced by the police. In other words, this is not simply a movie about a white savior and one villain, although it is partly that, and, reductive ornot, it’s impossible not to be satisfied by (or laugh at) Hilly’s inevitable, grotesque comeuppance.

So, along with its earnest condemnation of a system that hardly anyone defends anymore anyway, the movie offers a juicy, Peyton Place-style melodrama, complete with romantic subplot, of the sort that will never be dated. It’s gossipy while allowingwhite people to feel — rather than guilt-tripped — superior to their unenlightened forbears and to identify with the forward-thinking, modern-seeming heroine. In that way it peddlesracism in an easy package, but that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t show it in a true light. Perhaps many younger people will be shocked to learn that many towns would routinely require, necessitating considerable time and expense, separate facilities for blacks,even to the point of requiring separate bathrooms in private homes. (Such baroque manifestations of segregation are further detailed in Isabel Wilkerson’s recent non-fiction bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns.) And if Hilly is in part a caricature, Eugenia and Aibileen are given enough dimension (and well acted, as are all the parts) that those of any race should be able to identify with them, even if its not via personal experience.

Last, speaking as one who has not read Stockett’s novel, I’d say Taylor’s done an admirable job of making the story feel complete. Only once, watching Leslie Jordan’s colorful turn as the newspaper editor who hires Eugenia to write a household-hints column, did I think to myself that the book must have had more to say about this character. But even then, it wasn’t out of any sense of something missing, but simply because the hiring scene was so entertaining that I figured there had to be more where that came from.

IMDB link

viewed 9/9/11 at AMC Loew’s Cherry Hill; reviewed September and November 28–29, 2011

Point Blank (***1/2)

2011-08-05T08:26:00.001-04:00

This has everything you want in a thriller and nothing more. It’s a classic wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story. There’s a nurse’s aide in Paris (Gilles Lellouche). He’s a nice guy. His wife is pregnant. That’s all you need to know, and all the story tells us about him. No sappy drama here. There’s another guy (Roschdy Zem), a criminal, who winds up, sort of, in the same mess as our nice nurse’s aide. And then there’s some other cops and criminals, but it’s awhile before we learn who the good guys and who the bad guys are. (I say “guys,” but the cops are male and female.) Anyway, this movie doesn’t even last an hour and a half, but excepting a few minutes at the start and a few at the end, it never lets up. You get enough plot to propel the story—through the streets, metro stations, etc., of Paris—but not so much it becomes convoluted or ridiculous.

Director and cowriter Fred Cavayé previously made a movie called Anything for Her that was remade as The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe. As Hollywood thrillers increasingly rely on spectacle and superheroics, the slightly lower budgets of television (think 24) and overseas allow the story to shine. You like that, you’ll like this.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/14/11

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (***1/4)

2011-08-05T06:35:00.000-04:00

Until close to the end of this movie, you might be wondering what a small sci-fi film about a scientist (James Franco) and his genetically modified chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) has to do with the old film series in which an entire world of intelligent chimps rule over humans. But you’ll keep watching anyway.

Like so many films about scientists, this may be deplored by real one because even the relatively kind protagonist played by Franco comes off as a reckless fool. (His boss is also money-grubbing.) (Unlike Contagion, it also sticks with the usual depiction of scientists as lone geniuses rather than collaborators.) It’s also, essentially, the usual Garden of Eden-inspired morality play about scientists meddling in arenas where they don’t belong. And it’s an allegory about human cruelty that’s only slightly less heavy-handed than, say, Avatar, another film in which the humans are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, the villains. (This criticism is purely a dramatic one; the recent documentary Project Nim shows, in fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking fashion, that, for chimps in capitivity, humans really are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, villains.)

But the saving graces are two. First, it doesn’t confer upon apes some kind of spiritual purity. Instead, the film gives us, in Caesar, chimpanzee as warm and cuddly friend (like Spielberg’s E.T.), then (as Spielberg does with his robot in A.I.) yanks the curtain away from that sentimental view, then kind of balances it out, granting the non-human primates their, for lack of a better word, humanity. Second, unlike the the original Planet of the Apes (1968), or the misbegotten film of the same name from 2001, this is more in the vein of a modest thriller than some sort of epic. Somehow, when I don’t feel like the filmmaker is trying to make a grand statement, I am less inclined to quibble that a non-genentically modified orangutan is supposed to be able to have a complex discussion with Caesar simply because he too was once taught sign language. Or that the scientist’s apparently bright girlfriend can’t figure out in five years that Caesar might not be an ordinary ape.

This Rise, then, is a probably fantastic, but still entertaining extrapolation of the idea of what might happen if these creatures who are so similar to us, yet so much more powerful, got smarter. With the help of Serkis (repeating his motion-captured acting from Lord of the Rings), director Rupert Wyatt creates some arresting visuals to accompany the action-oriented second half of the film. The script from the team of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (An Eye for an Eye, The Relic) apes (pun intended) E.T. and probably any number of other films, but the originality of having a non-human central character mostly compensates.

IMDB link

viewed 9/15/11 at UA Riverview and reviewed 9/16/11

A Little Help (***3/4)

2011-07-29T23:31:00.004-04:00

There’s a lot of things—murder and vampires, for example—that you see in movies way more than in real life. One of those is people changing. There’s even a term for it, character arc. But probably most people you know have their character pretty well arced by early adulthood; different events may confront them, but they stay kind of the same. That is true also of the characters in this movie, notably Jenna Fischer’s lead, and that’s what I liked about it. In the beginning of the movie, she’s a Long Island dental hygienist with a husband (Chris O’Donnell) who’s always working late, a pudgy, pre-teen son, and a somewhat passive disposition, especially relative to her mother and older sister. She smokes on the sly (and fibs to the kid) and drinks a bit too much beer. By the end the movie, she’s become a single mother, but she hasn’t changed much.

If you see this movie, you’ll kind of want her to change, or at least stop letting people tell her what to do. I think some people won’t like the movie for that reason, or because it’s less of a comedy than it seems like from the poster, or from Fischer’s other roles (in NBC’s The Office, or the films Hall Pass and The Promotion). But this was for me the movie this year that most exceeded my expectations. The writer-director is Michael J. Weithorn, who has numerous TV credits as writer and producer on sitcoms going back to the 1980s (notably Family Ties and, more recently, The King of Queens), but has never made a feature film. I can only assume that this story was much more personal than most of the television work. At any rate, the relationships and the characters seemed true to me, as, for example, when the topic of one sister being more attractive than the other comes up, which is something that must be much more of an issue in real life than in movies. Weithorn shows the family dynamic as composed of not so many peaks and valleys but a lot of smaller ups and downs; the one obvious tug-at-the heartstrings moment between mother and son is earned, and is by no means the only affecting moment.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/10/11

Sarah’s Key (***)

2011-07-29T05:57:00.000-04:00

Movies that go back and forth between now and long ago tend, in my experience, to feel a little artificial. They might just as well be straight period pieces; the modern-day parts can seem like just a crap device to make the old story more obviously relevant to modern-day audiences. But see what you think of the one here, which tells a small piece of a somewhat forgotten part of the Holocaust, the French part. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an American journalist working in Paris who a) happens to have earlier written a piece on the role of collaborators rounding up Jews and is writing another one; b) learns just then that she has a family connection with the awful history. She is also just then learning she is pregnant, fifteen years after she and her husband had their only child, a daughter.

Sarah is a young girl who, in the flashback sequences, hides her little brother in a cupboard when the Jews of Paris are rounded up in July 1942. Even though I’ve seen lots of scenes like this on film, they still have a lot of power. The film then embodies two mysteries to be uncovered by the journalist. First, what happened to the boy, locked away as his family was sent first to an overcrowed arena (“like the Superdome, only a million times worse” says one character), then to more distant places that were pit stops on the way to death camps. Second, what happens to Sarah, which takes our reporter across the ocean and back. A third mystery, but less involving, involves Sarah, her husband, and the child she carries.

The connection to the present is integral to the plot and does have some cleverness, but I did find it more clever than authentic. If I hadn’t known already that the story was taken from a novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay), I think I’d have placed odds against it being a true story. There is too much melodrama, and the way it explores moral ambiguity too obvious. When, for example, Sarah’s family and the other Jews of her neighborhood are taken, a neighbor shouts “They had it coming.” Another yells in reply, “You fool! It’ll be our turn” next. The one thing it’s not is sappy. Or dull. A little more 1940s and less 2000s would have improved the balance, though.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/3/11

Project Nim (***1/2)

2011-07-22T08:18:00.009-04:00

I had heard the story of the chimpanzee Nim Chimsky. Born in 1973, he was the subject of an experiment whose ostensible purpose was to see if a chimp raised like a human child would develop basic language skills. As fascinating as that question is, the story of what happened to Nim as an individual is equally so, and certainly both stranger and, at times, disturbing. The decision to place Nim in a New York City apartment with a caretaker— a former student of the researcher living with half a dozen kids—who knew nothing about chimps and little about sign language is only the first of the odd events. She was, however, willing to treat him so like one of her own young children that she breast fed him. And yet, he would be taken from her.

There are several more stops on Nim’s odyssey, and while the jury is still out on how much language apes can acquire—a question explored more in Elizabeth Hess’s book than in this adaptation—it’s hard to come away from this movie with good feelings toward primate experimentation. Yet the tone director James Marsh takes is as even as that in his previous documentary, Man on Wire. He has the benefit of having nearly every person important to the story participating in his film, though most of the story is at a 30 year remove. This includes Herb Terrace, the researcher who oversaw Project Nim, as well as the humans who bonded with Nim. Since Nim was the subject of the scientific research, Marsh also has period footage of Nim, whose signing is helpfully translated on screen.

In the end, Nim shows himself to share many human qualities, but the film also shows that to be not entirely a flattering comparison.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11

Tabloid (***1/2)

2011-07-22T04:58:00.002-04:00

It happens that I saw this when, aside from the economy, the month’s two biggest news stories have been a young woman’s acquittal on charges of murdering her daughter and a British newspaper’s alleged phone hacking. The stranger-than-fiction story that unfolds here is a reminder that stories of young women, especially attractive white ones, have long captured public attention, and that British newspapers have never been shy about pursuing their own version of the truth.

The events that took Joyce McKinney from Wyoming beauty pageant contestant to English headline-war fodder took place in 1977. Her looks have faded, but she seems to be the same person whose magnificent obsession with her Mormon boyfriend (or fiancé, maybe) inadvertently turned her into a celebrity across the ocean. And Errol Morris, who has made biographical documentaries about serious things (The Fog of War) and entertaining things (Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), provides just the right approach to telling her story. While relying heavily on his own interviews, he splashes his screen with old Hollywood footage and splashes pull quotes from his subjects across the screen in giant, old-fashioned letters. Even the background music is melodrama worthy. This approach can seem heavy-handed in a serious documentary (see Michael Moore’s work for examples, or even some of Morris’s), but underscores the humor. And, for certain, there’s more humor here than in most Hollywood comedies.

McKinney might be a tragic figure but seems to see herself more as a survivor. She certainly has a way with a phrase; she compares the unlikelihood of the accusation against her to “putting a marshmallow into a parking meter.” And she has already denounced Morris’s film as a “celluloid catastrophe,” though gently mocking is about the worst that can be said of the director’s presentation. I felt there was a sincerity to her even when I wasn’t sure I believed her version of events.

The one thing thing that hampers Morris’s storytelling is the lack of participation of key principals, either because of death or unwillingness to participate. (The only documentary I can compare this to would be Crazy Love, which tells a more complete story.) McKinney tells the bulk of the tale, and she appears to be an unreliable narrator. And yet the ambiguity that remains is also part of the appeal; the element of mystery is that which nearly all of the greatest tabloid stories have. Morris may not have resorted to illegality, and he is, McKinney’s objections notwithstanding, presumably more scrupulous than The Daily Mail about fairly portraying his subjects (his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line helped free a falsely accused prisoner), but he clearly understands the attraction of what the tabloids are selling.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/18/11

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (***1/4)

2011-07-15T16:56:00.004-04:00

Unlike with other movies, I feel compelled to categorize myself in reviewing Harry Potter films, of which this is, as everyone must know, the last. And so, I declare myself a non-reader of the J. K. Rowling series. I have liked, but not been enthralled by, all of the previous movie adaptations. The series is in good hands in wrapping up, with David Yates returning to direct his fourth one and Steve Kloves, who’s written all but one of the films, again handling the screenplay. And, of course, the familiar faces of the primary cast; for once, no new major character is introduced.

The plot is at once devastatingly simple—Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) must locate the last of the “horcruxes” and finally confront evil Voldemort—and typically complex. That is, the big picture stays in focus, but, without having read the books, or at least having a deep recall of earlier installments, one is confronted with a succession of minor and medium characters with dimly remembered back stories. Once or twice I had the sensation that a character was only present in the film as a sop to fans of the novels, and that there was a back story I was missing.

In temperament, though, the movie is plain spoken. It’s as dark as one expects, but without the sense of ennui and melancholia that pervaded parts of Deathly Hallows, Part 1. The three principals, Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint), though together for a great deal of the film, interact mostly in a functional way. “Brilliant!” and “That’s It!” are the sort of dialogue that most often passes between them. No time for post-adolescent angst when the devil’s afoot. Any emotional heft comes from the cumulative force of nine films in ten years, though also, later, from bloodied children. Yet you can’t help noticing the very “adult-ness” of these actors/characters first seen as pre-teens. It’s perfect that the series should end now.

Visually, the film is stately, emphasizing especially the imposing edifice of the Hogwarts school, where events take Harry, though he’s graduated. Special effects are not lacking, but in service of the plot, and only a few times drawing attention to themselves. There is quite a lot of wizardry, though; it’s a wonder there’s no “kill Voldemort” spell that would quite simplify the plot. Instead, we get smaller versions of this; no sooner does an obstacle present itself than a heretofore unknown spell, substance, or magic object provides a way out. Most magical of all, though, might be Helena Bonham Carter as…Hermione, in disguise, doing an uncanny Emma Watson imitation and supplying the limited comic relief.

The most wicked and satisfying plot turn has little to do with spells, a lot to do with creepy professor turned nasty headmaster Snape (Alan Rickman), and everything to do with human qualities good and not. Harry’s inevitable face-off with evil is almost unavoidably trite, simply for being so inevitable, just as Voldemort himself is trite and unsatisfying compared to the evil in one’s imagination. It’s something like the gun battle in High Noon, both the whole point of what’s come before and not the point at all. Wisely, the film doesn’t quite end there. It ends right, finally.

IMDB link

viewed 8/7/11 at UA Riverview and reviewed 8/7/11 and 8/8/11

How to Live Forever (***)

2011-07-15T16:25:00.001-04:00

If only Mark Wexler’s documentary lived up to the promise of the title, maybe more people would have seen it. But he doesn’t know, and neither do any of the people he speaks to about the subject, although some think they do. (Wexler helpfully flashes everyone’s age on screen.) One of the better-known names—fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne—has already passed on, which is, as he notes, bad for business. Physical activity is a common theme here. Buster Martin, claimed to be Britain’s oldest worker, entered a marathon. (Martin, like LaLanne, died in 2011.) Eating well is another commonality. The Okinawans, renowned for their longevity, eat lots of nutrient-rich but low-calorie foods, and one of the sharper centenarians says she’s a vegetarian. So, by tradition, are the Seventh-Day Adventists, although Wexler doesn’t mention it when he pays a visit to some of them. The universal element, evident among the old folks and advocated, one way or another, by the experts, is a positive attitude.

The organizing principle of the film is Wexler’s own discomfiture about his own mortality. He’s one of the documentary filmmakers who sticks himself onscreen a lot, like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, only without the humor, politics, or even a strong point of view. Frankly, his concerns about aging are no different than most people’s, so the parts of the movie that dwell on them are dull. However, they add up to ten minutes at most. The rest is just a look at attitudes on aging, or extending life, from a lot of perspectives. This includes, but does not emphasize, the scientific. Famed futurist Ray Kruzweil is among those who believe that within a couple of decades scientists will be able to retard or reverse the aging process. It includes the philosophical, like Sherwin Nuland, who believes we have a duty to make way for the next generation. And it includes the nutty, like the founder of Laughter Yoga International (in—guess where—Los Angeles), whose particular brand of anti-aging therapy would, I felt certain, quickly kill me were I forced to engage in it every day. It was annoying enough to watch. I could’ve also done without the man-on-the-street interviews in which Wexler asks folks whether they’d take a pill that would let them live 500 years. This must be the laziest, though common enough, documentary-film technique in existence.

The (really) old folks themselves have the best perspectives. They all have the positive attitude, but they don’t really know why they’ve lived so long. Their good advice is about how to live, not how to live forever. If that inspires you, thank Mr. Wexler for gathering them all in one film.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/21/11

Horrible Bosses (***)

2011-07-08T16:23:00.002-04:00

This buddy comedy overcomes its perfunctory set-up. It doesn’t convince us that these nice guys would really off their bosses, and it’s too reliant on easy sex jokes. But once it gets past that beginning and on to the part where the three pals (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day) try to execute the executions, it becomes a somewhat inspired, and certainly funny, riff on criminal bumbling.

IMDB link

viewed 6/29/11 at Ritz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 7/7/11

Buck (***1/2)

2011-06-24T22:09:00.002-04:00

The easiest way to describe this documentary is to say it’s about the guy who helped inspire the main character in the Nicholas Adams novel, and later Robert Redford film, The Horse Whisperer. Buck Brannaman, who served as a technical advisor to Redford, doesn’t call himself that, which is just as well. It sounds kind of new age-y to me, as if Brannaman is some kind of magician speaking incantations into the ears of wayward horses. In fact, Brannaman makes his specialty—not so much people with horse problems, but, as he says, horse with people problems—seem as down to earth as possible.

He says at one point that he doesn’t so much help people with horse problems as horses with people problems, and it isn’t new age-y because you can see the way he does it, amazing even seasoned horse people. In revealing Brannaman’s own difficult childhood, the film draws an obvious but nonetheless moving parallel between the ways animals and humans alike are mistreated. Brannaman’s gift is not magic either, as his own transformation comes with the help of others. I am not a lover of horses or animal stories, but this human story was unexpectedly captivating.

IMDB link

viewed 6/13/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/24/11 and 8/9/11

Beginners (**3/4)

2011-06-17T22:42:00.000-04:00

It’s usually films about teens that get described as coming-of-age films, but some people wait longer than that to become their truest selves. Seventy-five-years old Hal (terrific Christopher Plummer) waits until his wife’s death to tell his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) he’s gay. And, in a line echoing one that director Mike Mills’s father actually said to him, he doesn’t just want to be a homosexual “in theory.” And so he isn’t. This being set in post-homophobia Los Angeles, Hal’s sudden lifestyle change is only an issue insofar as it makes Oliver rethink his dad’s relationship with his mother. (Flashbacks show her too.)

Oliver, for his part, is 38 and also looking for love, but has a history of bailing on relationships. In the film’s other main storyline, set after Hal’s death though told in tandem, he meets a French actress played by Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds). In a terribly charming “meet cute” scene, she’s both disguised and mute. (It’s a costume party and she has laryngitis.) There are several other charming aspects to the movie, from the use of comic art to show Oliver’s thoughts (he’s an illustrator) to the subtitles showing those of his Jack Russell terrier.

Given the autobiographical nature of Mills’s film, the specificity and authenticity of even the whimsical moments makes sense. Having said that, after the bright beginning, there’s also a certain monotony. I started to notice sounds of saucers on tables and steps on wooden floors, that sort of thing, and the unvaryingly tinkly piano score. I think just altering some of the music to something jauntier would have improved the film a lot. Despite death’s significance as a subject matter, the film seems clearly intended to celebrate life, and yet the tone is a little too precious. That’s an especially subjective criticism, so I feel certain Beginners will be incredibly moving to some and quite dull to others, especially those used to the pace of more familiar Hollywood fare.

IMDB link

viewed 6/8/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/16/2011

Submarine (***1/2)

2011-06-17T05:06:00.003-04:00

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

The Trip (**3/4)

2011-06-17T04:21:00.039-04:00

There should be a name for the modestly burgeoning subgenre of film/movie wherein the stars play fictionalized versions of themselves with the same names. My Dinner with Andre did this 30 years ago. Neil Patrick Harris did it in the Harold and Kumar movies. Larry David does it in his HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Maybe combine all of those (well, not so much Harold and Kumar) and you roughly get The Trip, wherein British TV stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon riff on whatever comes into their heads, especially imitating celebrity voices, as they motor around and overnight in the inns of northern England.

Also, they look at some nice scenery and eat some nice nouvelle cuisine, frequently cut in geometric shapes. They regard the fine food with near detachment, making the loving attention the camera pays to it an ironic contrast. How closely this parallels the real Coogan I don’t know, but there is a somewhat serious side in which Coogan weighs the possibilities of the United States, where a larger market and an American girlfriend beckon. I suspect the film might have worked slightly better in its original form as a six-part television series. In long form the minimal plot makes the movie seem long, but it’s often enough amusing, at least if the notion of 40ish Englishmen bickering in the voice of Michael Caine about which of them has the better Caine imitation amuses you. It also offers a perspective on adult male friendship that’s different from that of a typical buddy film, perhaps because these are such distinct personalities.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

Beautiful Boy (**3/4)

2011-06-10T22:49:00.002-04:00

This is a heartfelt drama about parents grieving for a child, with one difference: their son had, previous to killing himself, shot several classmates at college. The parents (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), already having marital difficulties, go through the expected steps of sorrow, shock (second, because they don’t immediately learn that he was the shooter), self-blame, and blaming each other. Despite the added dimension of learning their son is a killer, the drama plays a lot like the better Rabbit Hole. Even though the couple there are merely dealing with an accidental death, there is similarity in the focus on each partner’s different grieving style, and how it affects the couple’s relationship.

There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.

IMDB link

viewed 5/25/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/9/11

Midnight in Paris (***)

2011-06-03T11:37:00.002-04:00

Peripatetic in old age, Woody Allen has made a romantic comedy Europe’s most fabled romantic city. But it’s the past, specifically the 1920s, that Gil (Owen Wilson) romanticizes. Engaged to a modern girl (Rachel McAdams), he’s writing a novel about a nostalgia shop, hoping to wean himself from his lucrative Hollywood screenwriting career. But his vacation becomes a very literal nostalgia trip when he’s transported, again literally, to the era of Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Porter’s performance (or that of the actor playing Porter) of his own composition “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” and other clues suggest that it is 1929.

Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11

The Robber (***)

2011-06-03T06:23:00.009-04:00

An aloof drama about an aloof character. Though adapted from a novel by Martin Prinz, the main character is based on real-life bank robber and marathoner Johann Kastenberger, called Rettenberger in the film. Rettenberger/Kastenberger (Andreas Lust) uses his running skills (and a mask) to evade the police, and so there are a number of chase sequences. But director Benjamin Heisenberger takes such a clinical approach to his subject that it’s hard to call this a thriller. Whether or not the real Kastenberger was like this I don’t know, but the character here comes off as nearly emotionless, and it’s as if the robberies are done more for the jolt of adrenalin than the money, which he doesn’t use. As such, this is something like a psychological drama about someone whose psychology is obscure. The girlfriend character is also difficult to understand; the source of her devotion is uncertain.

IMDB link

viewed 6/7/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/7 and 6/8/11

Incendies (***3/4)

2011-05-20T03:24:00.020-04:00

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which I saw the night before this, includes William Faulkner’s famous quote, “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.” Probably that’s why it came to mind while watching this harrowing mystery, which proves the point. It also proves that it’s not only science-fiction films and action-thrillers that deliver mind-blowing conclusions. (Yes, the one here involves a big coincidence, but it’s a coincidence that mostly explains subsequent events rather than too-conveniently wrapping up a messy plot.) What starts out as a slow-paced drama about French Canadian twins asked to carry out their late mother’s last wish—find their lost father and brother—becomes increasingly compelling. For me the point at which I started becoming involved was when, in flashback, the mother (the very fine Lubna Azabal) finds herself facing a Christian death squad in Lebanon’s civil war of the 1970s. Thinking quickly, she not only shows them her cross to prove she’s not a Muslim, but also tells them that a young Muslim girl is her daughter, hoping to save the child.

Alternating with the mother’s story, her daughter (but not her twin brother, less inclined to carry out the will of a mother he somewhat resents) travels from Montréal to Lebanon and slowly uncovers her mother’s unfortunate past. Director Denis Villeneuve, who’s adapted the play by Lebanese Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, keeps the actual violence off-screen while showing its effects. The flashbacks and the modern scenes move toward the same conclusion, but the contrast couldn’t be greater. It’s not only that the twins live in a world of cell phones and air-conditioned vehicles, but that they live in a world where they have the luxury of being able to forget the past.

This was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar. It’s nearly a toss-up whether this or the winner, In a Better World, is better. But the twist at the end of this one, and Villeneuve’s natural-seeming presentation of a tricky structure, gives this the edge.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/23/11

Meek’s Crossing (***)

2011-05-19T22:33:00.003-04:00

This is a western like no other, but something like director Kelly Reichardt’s earlier work, which includes Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. That is, it is a very quiet movie, where you actually need to watch, and not just listen, to understand what’s happening. I noticed this, for example, when the traveler played by Michelle Williams is listening to her husband confer with another of the men traveling with them. Reichardt doesn’t let us hear what they’re saying, just lets us watch her watching them. There are three couples traveling by covered wagon in the Oregon Territory of 1845. We can only guess what has led them to make the dangerous trip, or how they came to rely on the uncertain advice of an unsavory character played by an unrecognizably bearded Bruce Greenwood.

Williams starred in Wendy and Lucy, but this movie really has no star (although possibly recognizable names Will Patton, Shirley Henderson, Paul Dano, and Zoe Kazan play other members of the group). Though the landscape was prominent in Reichardt’s other movies, here it’s something like a main character. I am no expert about westerns, but I’ve not seen one that so captures the frighteningly empty mystery that the traveler would have experienced, with no communication, no roads, no map, and no stranger to guide them. The way that some of the actors speak seems modern to me, but otherwise I was transported to this setting where an encounter with an Indian, one who spoke no English, could represent real danger, and where you could die in the desert for not knowing where to refill empty water tanks. It does take awhile for the conflicts to develop, and you never find out too much about what happened before, or what next, after the film ends.

IMDB link

viewed 5/11/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/9/11

Bridesmaids (***)

2011-05-13T22:28:00.001-04:00

People have made a big deal out of this comedy because the leading role, and most of the significant roles, are played by women. That this is a big deal is kind of sad. Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig plays the lead role and cowrote the script with Annie Mumolo. (The director—a dude—is TV veteran Paul Fieg.) Wiig plays a lot of characters on SNL who talk in odd voices, and movies involving ex-SNL cast members have a tendency to be built around extreme characters, in some cases characters created on the show. However, in this case Wiig plays mostly regular gal Annie, from Milwaukee, whose upcoming maid-of-honor gig sends her into an early midlife crisis. Her engaged friend is played by her former SNL cast-mate Maya Rudolph.

Of course, there are some hijinks that wouldn’t be out of place in an SNL skit. These all involve the titular characters engaging in wedding-related activities such as dress shopping. (The festivities in question are as absurdly lavish as any such portrayal—working-class folks, like the heroine, rarely get married in Hollywood movies—but the comedy as much mocks such excess as fetishizes it.) In some ways these scenes reminded me of The Hangover, also centered around pre-wedding shenanigans. So I had to think about why I generally liked the zany, over-the-top plotting there but not here. And I think it’s that whereas the one comedy is mostly the characters reacting to bizarre events, this movie has the characters themselves behaving bizarrely at time. For example, Annie’s back-and-forth toasting tussle with a fellow bridemaid (Rose Byrne) struck me as ridiculous—I couldn’t see two people (one, maybe) actually doing this (and no one stopping them). I could have also done without the requisite gross-out scene. (I’m not saying I didn’t hear laughs in the theater.)

On the other hand, whereas The Hangover doesn’t try hard to be anything but funny, Bridesmaids doubles as a story of friendship. As the toasting duel suggests, it’s her friend’s possibly preferring another friend rather than her having landed a husband that sends Annie into a jealous tizzy. Maybe Wiig wrote the wacky group scenes and Mumolo the other ones, I don’t know, but I like the movie better in the (semi-)“serious” parts. To my taste, the best scenes are the ones with Annie’s love interest. Chris O’Dowd plays what seems to be the only cop in Wisconsin. His scenes with Wiig are charming, funny and as natural as some of the ladies-only scenes are forced and “outrageous.”

IMDB link

viewed 6/5/11 at Riverview and reviewed 6/5/11 and 6/6/11

Everything Must Go (***1/2)

2011-05-13T19:08:00.006-04:00

There seemingly comes a time in every comedic actor’s career when he or she (well, usually he) must essay a serious dramatic role. That time has come for Will Ferrell. This adaptation of a Raymond Carver story doesn’t completely lack humor, but its the humor of pathos, specifically of a man who has lost his job and his marriage on the very same day, and whose lawn sprinkler has suddenly become his alarm clock, wetting his face on a dry Arizona morning. Getting fired from his sales job and having his wife place all of his belongings on the front yard (and change the locks, and freeze the joint accounts) have something to do with his drinking problem. The coincidental timing of those events and the nice new, and temporarily single, neighbor (Rebecca Hall) moving in, is kind of a contrivance. Still, maybe that’s why the movie wasn’t depressing for me. I think the real experience would have felt lonelier. Or maybe it’s because having everything go all at once can be liberating as well as depressing and frightening. At least on film.

At any rate, I don’t think this felt like a bleak film about an alcoholic. (He is, in fact, not drunk much, as the story develops.) Ferrell plays the role, and first-time director Dan Rush has written it, more like an everyman character, and the alcoholism his particular cross to bear. At least that’s how it seemed to me. And so, as he sits on his lawn for days, with the lonely fat kid he’s paid to watch, or sell, his stuff, it doesn’t seem so bad, although one scene in particular choked me up. The period covered is only a few days, and Rush doesn’t make the mistake of having the alcoholic turn his life around too much. But he believably suggests there’s hope for him, and all of us.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/19/11

13 Assassins (***)

2011-05-13T04:39:00.001-04:00

This samurai adventure from the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike starts off being slightly confusing, with a bunch of characters being quickly introduced. But it actually follows the familiar formula, pioneered by The Seven Samurai and followed by The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, and so on, of having a cast of heroes join together to defeat a common enemy. That enemy is also a samurai, one poised to wield political power cruelly, but that’s of secondary performance once established. The second act is sort of a road movie, albeit one without motor vehicles, or any vehicles at all, as the assassins plan to meet the enemy. It’s occasionally gruesome, but with a minimum of actual battle scenes. The third act, the finale, is the payoff, at least if you like watching spectacular mass battle scenes with the dirty dozen plus one vastly outnumbered. Besides lots and lots of swordplay, some novel battle techniques aid the underdogs.

The film’s most notewortthy aspect is serving as an antidote to many of the mythic Asian period films that make warriors and aristocracy into larger-than-life figures, not to mention the sentimentalizing Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. (It suggests that many samurai weren’t really great fighters, and least one of the warriors turns out to be scared of bugs.) This is set a few decades earlier than the Cruise drama* but also explicitly deals with the impending decline of the samurai. Despite having samurai protagonists, it also depicts the flaws of Japan’s feudal (pre-1867) system. The main characters, in fact, are explicitly violating the code of loyalty in order to protect the people. As the bloody finale foreshadows, that code would soon outlive its usefulness.

*in 1844, coincidentally just one year before the recently released Meeks Cutoff

IMDB link

viewed 5/22/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/11

Double Hour (***1/4)

2011-04-29T20:24:00.001-04:00

This quasi-romantic Italian thriller begins with a woman in a Turin hotel room. When the maid comes, the woman tells her to come in and makes a comment about her hair. But the guest, who commits suicide, is not the main character; the maid is. This minor deflection of our attention presages the plot as a whole, which begins with a meeting at a speed-dating session. The gentleman who most intrigues the woman, a security guard, seems kind but distant, and an unlikely tragedy seems to end the romance just as it begins. The unusual, contradictory events that follow are satisfactorily, yet unsatisfyingly, explained by a plot twist that may be guessed by some. And then there is a smart third act, which recontextualizes clues from the second. It becomes clear before then that we really don't know about either of these characters. And so the thrills exceed the romance. If it were a novel, it’d be a page turner, though.

IMDB link

viewed 5/24/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/25/11

Exporting Raymond (**3/4)

2011-04-29T19:04:00.000-04:00

Americans, whether they know it or not, have gotten used to a steady diet of remakes of foreign films and television shows, whether it’s The Office or American Idol. But the process works the other way too. For example, 1990s American sitcom The Nanny was exported to many lands and, according to this movie, the Russian version became the country’s first sitcom back in 2004. So when Everybody Loves Raymond creator Philip Rosenthal got the call from Moscow a few years ago, off he went to see if the show’s title was true, even if Raymond got turned into Kostya. And he got someone to follow him with a camera. It’s hard to tell whether the problem is the Russians’ different concept of what’s funny, or merely what the Russian creative folks think they’ll watch. But Rosenthal quickly determines that getting them to see the humor in the trivia of everyday life will be a tough sell when the costume designer would prefer to have Kostya’s wife do housework in designer dresses.

In addition to directing, Rosenthal does the sing-song-y voiceover and comments for the camera during filming, having clearly arrived in in Russia already with the idea that this will be a comic documentary. “Isn’t this the scene where the mafia comes?” he asks (us) when his driver momentarily leaves him alone in his car. His comments border on the condescending. But, in the end, he learns the valuable, yet trite, lesson that there are good and bad people everywhere. It’s entertaining enough, and a useful if slender primer on television’s creative process. And it is kind of funny when the Russians rewrite an American script about the Fruit-of-the-Month Club (unheard of there) into one about the water-of-the week club. (It’s more funny if you like the show, I’d think.) But this fairly slight effort, essentially Rosenthal’s travelogue, seems more in the category of something that would make a worthwhile extra on the Raymond DVD box set.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/4/11

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

2011-04-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today (***1/4)

2011-04-29T10:04:00.011-04:00

This documentary was compiled in 1948 but qualifies as new based on the addition of narration by Liev Schreiber. (The text is by the late writer Budd Schulberg and his brother, Stuart.) The subtitle is misleading*, as the film simply summarizes the celebrated 1946 trial of 19 accused Nazi war criminals. Footage of the proceedings is intercut with documentary evidence of the case being made. The first half mainly shows how the Nazi conquests were planned well ahead of time, and systematically accomplished. On screen we see, for example, letters signed by Adolf Hitler in 1939 stating Germany's peaceful intentions toward nations such as Denmark, or Switzerland. Then we see footage of the invasions, Poland first, then much of Europe by the end of 1940. Those on trial are referred to as “Defendant Goebbels,” “Defendant Goering,” and so on. Collectively they are simply “the conspirators.”

The second half of the film concentrates on the war crimes and the idea “total war” that allowed no sympathy for the enemy, whether that was Soviet POWs, resistant villagers, or, above all, the Jews. Any educated person has seen images of emaciated Jews, dead and alive, from the concentration camps. (Indeed, even in the ghettos there were starvation conditions.) In 1948 undoubtedly they would have been altogether startling to most people, and even upon repetition seeing such disregard for human life does not lose the power to shock.

The film ends by drily reciting the verdicts. Indeed, it is a dry presentation of facts, which is actually its strength. Such truths need no dramatic staging. In clips of several of the final statements, the defendants apologize, or state their ignorance of most of what happened, or blame Hitler for betraying Germany and themselves. Of the four prosecutors, the American, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, perhaps most effectively summarizes the collective case against them by essentially ridiculing the idea that, despite holding high positions of authority, each had virtually no knowledge of the horrible things the others were doing. Despite this, the focus is not the individual guilt of each defendant, but the actions of the Nazi regime collectively. I can only guess how I would have reacted had I been learning about these things for the first time.

* Though it’s correctly spelled with no apostrophe, which is nice to see.

IMDB link

viewed 5/18/11 at Roxy and reviewed 5/19/11

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (***)

2011-04-22T17:18:00.005-04:00

If you know someone’s trying to exploit you, are you still being exploited? That’s the question Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) asks of both himself and the audience in this, his third documentary feature. Spurlock’s thing is to make movies that are about both a serious topic and himself. Or, to explore what one marketing consultant describes as his “mindful” side and his “playful” side, both at once. This worked best in Super Size Me, which told us, or reminded us, how bad fast food was for you while depicting what would happen to someone—himself—who ate nothing else for a month. Applied to a weightier subject, like terrorism and world piece, the approach made for the amusing but shallow Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

Here, Spurlock has found a subject—product placement—that’s explored in the very process of making the movie. Essentially, the movie is the director going around seeking sponsors for the movie, right up to the one million dollars for the above-the-title sponsor, whose name I haven’t included in my review, but the clever conceit of naming rights, as so many sports teams have discovered, is that it makes even the unpaid media, even the general public, participants in the marketing process. Very clever, just like the way Spurlock works in references to and examples of his sponsor’s products even as he interviews people like Ralph Nader delivering a counter message. We the audience are in on the joke, and it’s funny, but does this excuse the fact that Spurlock is nonetheless delivering a corporate message to a captive audience?

Besides Nader, Spurlock has a few other experts and celebrities, even Noam Chomsky, to offer their takes on the ethics of product placement. He indulges his playful side by making a running gag of a shampoo whose gimmick is that it’s intended to be used on both horses and humans. My preference would have been for a little more on the “mindful” side of the equation. Surely there must be some actual research into the efficacy of product placement versus other forms of advertising, or the effects of advertising on our product choices generally.

Spurlock does tell us that $412 billion gets spent in the United States on ads and marketing each year, and it’s fair to wonder what we as a society get for it, and how it changes our preferences. I think we’d be much better off without most advertising, and at least one metropolis has made a small experiment in that direction. Peripheral to the theme of product placement as it may be, perhaps the most fascinating part of the film for me was the side trip to São Paulo, a city of ten million where all outdoor ads have been banned. Does anyone really miss them?

IMDB link

viewed 4/20/11 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/20 and 4/21/11 and 4/24/11

The Princess of Montpensier (***1/2)

2011-04-22T06:19:00.000-04:00

It took just under 350 years to make a film out of this tale by Marie de La Fayette, perhaps the first French novelist. De La Fayette wrote of a time still earlier, beginning her story in the midst of the religious wars that began in the late 1500s. Two prominent battle scenes, with swords and only the occasional gun, typify the attention to historical detail employed by director Bertrand Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country, Daddy Nostalgia). Perhaps even more noteworthy in that regard is the depiction of the wedding-night rituals apparently employed by the nobility. These are even less romantic than would befit the marriage of the princess, who has been pried away from her beloved in an arrangement economically suitable to her father.

The earliest part of the drama is slightly confusing—it took me a bit of time to figure to ascertain the allegiance (in the war) of the (more or less) male lead (Lambert Wilson), who is neither the princess’s beloved nor her husband, but the count who mentored her husband in the art of war and has now, disgusted by battle, laid down his sword. The princess (Mélanie Thierry) is a comely young woman with a keen mind, and the attention she draws, and her own thwarted desire, propel the action of the latter half of the film. This is more straightforward, but elegantly plotted. (Notwithstanding the setting, the course of action could easily be transplanted into a modern drama, or even a farce, though it’s not told that way here.) Of necessity, the philosophical elements of the novella are only present in small amounts, but the narrative and location filming make this adaptation a case of much better late than never.

IMDB link

viewed 4/28/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/29/11

The Conspirator (***)

2011-04-15T21:27:00.001-04:00

It may be the JFK assassination that has captured the public imagination of the generations since. But of the four presidential assassins (or seven, counting those who shot at but did not kill a president), only John Wilkes Booth is known beyond doubt to have been part of a conspiracy. And of the eight alleged conspirators tried via military tribunal in the immediate aftermath of President Lincoln’s killing, only one, Mary Surratt, was a woman. As the mother of another suspected conspirator and the owner of a boardinghouse where the Booth and other plotters had held meetings, she was either an abetter of the assassins or merely the victim of unfortunate associations. Robert Redford’s film allows for both possibilities, which makes it a fairer, if less exciting, film than, say, JFK.

This account of Surrat’s trial starts off slightly shakily. It’s a minor point, but how strange to begin a Civil War movie with soldiers telling a joke whose punch line involves a freezer. The first soldier (James McAvoy) never gets to the punch line, but still, between that and his friend being played by Apple Computer pitchman Justin Long, I was taken out of the (1863) moment. The young actors, including McAvoy, who turns out to play the main character, make no attempt at period accents. The assassination itself is staged in unexciting fashion, and the plot advanced via the newspaper clipping techniques so we can get to where the movie really begins. McAvoy is the lawyer asked to defend Surratt.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/1/11

In a Better World (***3/4)

2011-04-15T15:26:00.004-04:00

This was the winner of the Foreign Language Film Oscar, and it’s better than the Best Picture winner, The King’s Speech. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the latter, but it settles for being a well-told drama without ever surprising the viewer in any way. Danish writer-director Susanne Bier likes to tell harder stories, of people caught between conflicting loyalties. She is best known for her features Brothers (faithfully remade as an American film in 2009) and After the Wedding. Those films and this one (all written in collaboration with Anders Thomas Jensen) have the common element of a male main character who has returned from overseas. Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is that character here, a doctor who spends much of his time away from home, treating victims of violence in a refugee camp in Africa. He is separated from his wife, with whom he has a young son.

The parallel story concerns Christian, a taciturn boy who has just returned to Denmark from London following the death of his mother. Christian takes the side of a boy who’s been bullied and helps him take revenge upon his tormenter. Yet at the same time we applaud this as justice, the anger from which it stems is unsettling. The story of the boy and of the man both intersect and parallel each other, though it takes a bit of time to see how. The obvious point, though, is that whether it’s in civilized, modern Denmark or a country ruled by warlords, the dark heart of man lies only a bit beneath the surface. It is only because most people in places like Denmark submit to the rule of law that keeps the one sort of place from becoming the other. Returning to Africa, Christian must operate on a different set of values.

In the end, Bier veers from this theme and more toward those of family and loss, which is less difficult. In the way it is also about these things, it becomes more broadly accessible. One might quibble with the tidiness in which this plot unfolds, but for the most part her and Jensen’s script is a model of good storytelling. In a better world, there would be a larger place for thoughtful films like those of Bier.

IMDB link

viewed 4/20/11 at Ritz Five and reviewed 5/10/11

Potiche (***1/4)

2011-04-15T09:25:00.000-04:00

“Trophy housewife” is how the title gets translated in the English subtitles of this breezy French import. Catherine Deneuve, who’s won some trophies of her own, plays the title role. As the wife of a 1970s umbrella magnate, she’s learned to live with being ignored, condescended to, and probably cheated on by her wealthy spouse (Fabrice Luchini). Unfortunately for him, while she tolerates his ill treatment, his factory employees won’t, and their threats to strike will have unexpected repercussions on his family, which includes a left-leaning son who sympathizes the workers and a right-leaning daughter who doesn’t. Turns out, the housewife is the only one who can step in and make peace.

This of course would be a creaky storyline today, but director and screenwriter François Ozon has kept the setting of the play he’s adapted, and he’s also filmed it in a style that will remind viewers of a time long ago, when feminism still seemed new, young women had Farrah Fawcett haircuts, and communist mayors of small French cities were, presumably, common. He’s co-opted the bright look of 1970s television, utilizing a groovy font for the credits, a period-sounding score (reminding me of Marvin Hamlisch’s in The Informant!), and even touches like a split-screen scene.

Ozon’s movie occupies the territory between homage and parody, not unlike his 8 Women, which also featured Deneuve. Thus, while well-plotted and relatively realistic, it’s also whimsical and comic in its retro stylings and acting. The communist mayor, by the way, is played by Gerard Dépardieu, the onetime leading man who’s made a Brandoesque transformation, weight wise. The potiche turns out to have a past. Deneuve fell for Dépardieu 30 years ago in The Last Metro, but here, she turns him down. Complications ensue, all in good fun.

IMDB link

viewed 4/23/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/24/11

The Human Resources Manager (***)

2011-04-13T16:11:00.002-04:00

In this unusual road movie, a burned-out Israeli HR rep finds himself unexpectedly involved in a family saga half a world away. Ostensibly, the manager is trying to honor an employee killed in a suicide bombing, but burials are always about the living, not the dead. Shot mostly in Romania, the film mixes light comedy, light melodrama, and a bit of adventure in a very picturesque manner.

IMDB link

Viewed 4/13/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Cinefest] and reviewed 4/13/11

Beloved Berlin Wall (***1/4)

2011-04-12T22:46:00.001-04:00

Sure East Germany was a ruthless police state, but there were things there to be nostalgic about, like the way a West German woman living near a checkpoint could cross into East Berlin and get some very fairly priced groceries. So it is that the perky heroine (Felicitas Woll) of this unusual romantic comedy winds up spilling her packages in view of one of the East German guards (Maxim Mehmet), who quickly descends his tower and comes to her aid.

Unlike an ordinary courtship, theirs is one of carefully arranged meetings and the frisson of danger. A single woman frequenting East Berlin could be a spy, could she not? It is 1989, and the democratic contagion in Poland and Hungary would soon spread west, but meanwhile the Stasi still went about its business. This is all explored with a good deal of cuteness, not entirely different from that in Goodbye, Lenin, the popular film that also displayed a certain kind of nostalgia about the communist era. But when someone does discover the whole affair, there is a stronger reminder of the truly nefarious nature of a totalitarian state. Yet the tone manages to stay light, and the last third of the film becomes a nearly farcical comedy of mistaken identities, questioned loyalties, and bureaucratic bumbling. Bordering on the contrived, it’s kind of clever and charming too.

IMDB link

viewed 4/12/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/12/11

Lapland Odyssey (***1/4)

2011-04-12T12:54:00.000-04:00

If you see only one Finnish comedy this year, make it this genial comedy about one slacker’s overnight quest to finally get the “digibox”— digital TV converter—his wife has been asking for. Besides fitting into the slacker-comedy subgenre, it’s also a road movie. The humor is not especially culturally specific, but there does seem to be just a bit of the melancholy that hangs over a lot of Scandanavian films I’ve seen, like 101 Reykjavík, which paints winter in Iceland as a similarly dark force that dampens the soul of men, though not so much women. Beginning with the tale of a tree where five generations of men have hanged themselves is a bit bleak for a comedy, even if it happens to be told with gorgeous photography. But the hapless hero (Jussi Vatanen), traveling with his two pals and trying not to (again) disappoint his wife, brings the story to light and rather funny ending. I would have barely recommended the film but for the delightful…Finnish.

IMDB link

viewed 4/11/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011] and reviewed 4/11/11

Living on Love Alone (***1/2)

2011-04-10T19:44:00.006-04:00

Julie (Anaïs Demoustier), age 23 and just beginning her first grown-up at a Paris PR agency, is the subject of this drama. Although her looks attract men to her, in most ways she’s kind of an ordinary young woman, which I liked about the story. Probably had the job, or the people there, been a little different, it might have gone better. Perhaps in another life she’d have become the mistress of the 41-year-old guy she picks up in a club. Instead, there is another job and another man, one who provides an alluring and possibly dangerous alternative to the dull existence she sees before her.

The English title seems unsatisfactory, more suggestive of a romantic film, although the original French title, which translates as Of Love and Fresh Water, isn’t that helpful either. But what it suggests after seeing the film relates to the weight of reality and that adulthood is a series of choices, compromises, and consequences.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/10/11 and 4/17/11

Hanna (***1/2)

2011-04-08T16:57:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, a girl was raised in the woods in a land where winter covered the forest in white. The man she called “Papa” taught her everything he knew, and he knew a great deal. He taught her hunting and other survival skills, but also books and literature, like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. He taught her to speak in the tongues of many lands. And finally, he taught her to want to leave.

IMDB link

viewed 4/24/11 at Riverview and reviewed 4/25

Certified Copy (**1/4)

2011-04-01T21:42:00.001-04:00

The minimalist Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami uses his first feature shot outside his home country to examine the meaning of “original” in art. One of the two main characters has written a book questioning why we want art to be original at all. If we like a painting, why does it matter if it is a duplicate? Discuss. And off we go as the English author (opera singer William Shimell) spends an afternoon with a French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche), in Italy. The woman has a young son, who in one of the earliest scenes badgers his mother for french fries and generally tries to push her buttons as they sit down for a bite. Their conversation exhibits a playfulness nearly absent from the rest of the movie, which, plotwise, simply involves a man and a woman driving through Tuscany to a quaint town, walking, sitting, and, above all, talking.

Unlike many of Kiarostami’s other films, it isn’t quiet and contemplative. Binoche flutters effortlessly between French, Italian, and English, while Shimell has an easier time, as the author doesn’t speak Italian. Despite the location shooting, even the scenery takes a back seat to the dialogue. While they drive through the countryside, Kiarostami has the camera focused on the windshield with the lines on the road reflected between their faces, a metaphorical dividing line made literal.

The discussion of art flows into the personal, but in an abstract way. The last, I don’t know, 40 minutes of the movie are an extended extrapolation of a mildly amusing segment in which a café owner misunderstands the relationship between the two. This goes on far past the point where it would seem natural. Anyway, if you want to watch a couple of people have a pretend argument for half an hour, this may be your film. Maybe it’s a real argument along with the pretense, but it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that explains why these near-strangers who don’t seem to be having a good time together keep at it. If I were either one, I would’ve gotten in the car and driven back. Any movie is a pretense of reality, but this never lets you forget it.

IMDB link

viewed 10/16/10 at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/16?/10

Win Win (***1/2)

2011-04-01T01:40:00.002-04:00

Thomas McCarthy’s thing seems to be scooping together unlikely strangers. In The Station Agent it was the loner title character, a gregarious hot dog vendor, and a depressed artist. In The Visitor, it was a depressed professor and a pair of illegal immigrants. Here, it’s Paul Giamatti and a runaway teenager. Giamatti’s character here is not depressed. He’s just been getting panic attacks lately, due no doubt to a struggling legal practice. He specializes in poor elderly clients. He and his wife (Amy Ryan) have a family to support.

And it’s these circumstances that lead him into some shaky ethical territory as well as into the path of the young man who might also be able to help out with the inept high school wrestling team he also coaches. (Jeffrey Tambor plays his assistant.) In his other two films, McCarthy carves paths of connection for his lonely male main characters. This one, on the other hand, plays out the main character’s internal struggles, not only about his treatment of a client with mild dementia (Burt Young) but also about how to deal with the unexpected arrival of the man’s grandson.

McCarthy handles this with a lot of humor, deft plotting, and a minimum of preachiness. Anyone who liked his other movies should like this one too, but the pacing is probably a little faster. It has strong characters and good acting—wrestler-turned-actor (Alex Shaffer) gives off a nice laid-back vibe as the young man who quietly seethes with anger toward the mother he ran away from. Bobby Cannavale, The Station Agent’s extroverted snack-cart vendor, plays a more suburbanized version of the same character. The men get most of the screen time, but Melanie Lynskey’s fairly brief role as the mother allows her a lot of range. Yet the film is not as self-conscious a character study as The Station Agent or The Visitor, and so might appeal to a wider audience.

IMDB link

viewed 4/27/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/3/11

Jane Eyre (***1/4)

2011-03-25T14:56:00.001-04:00

Haven’t seen the 1943 version with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as wealthy Mr. Rochester. Haven’t seen the 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version with Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt (and Anna Paquin as the younger Jane). Nor have I seen the 1970 TV movie (Susannah York, George C. Scott), nor the three different miniseries versions, nor, certainly, the multiple silent versions, or any other of the 22 versions listed on IMDB. Who knew? Haven’t read the Charlotte Brontë novel for that matter.

So I kind of lump in the Brontës with Jane Austen and English period pieces generally, which all seem to have a giant house—nay, an estate—a plucky put put-upon heroine, and a a lot of genteel, old-money folks, often contrasted with their lesser-born and/or poorer countrymen. Sure enough, Jane is a poor lass, orphaned as a pre-teen, sent away to boarding school by her aunt for being a little too plucky. The film begins with Jane at a literal crossroads—one of several striking uses of imagery by director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), and dispenses with this part of the story (in flashback form) in a few minutes. The main plot follows Jane’s employment as a French child’s governess in, yes, a large estate, and her relationship with its genteel, wealthy, but sharp-minded owner, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). The screenplay is by Moira Buffini, whose other recent adaptation was Tamara Drewe.

It’s notable that so many of these English period pieces are proto-feminist in their way, with convention-defying heroines, yet one of the few ways to express the heroine’s independence is in her choice of man. In fact, though, Jane doesn’t even do that. She states her mind, and he makes the choice to become intrigued by her. In the title role, Mia Wasikowska conveys an incredible expressiveness with her face that shows through her character’s shell of propriety and stoicism.

Although I can’t speak to what was left out of the novel, the movie weaves a credible story line without obvious omissions or the sense of trying to cram too much into the story. The plotting is simpler than Austen, and the movie is devoid of the fancy social functions in adaptations of Austen and others. The role of society and culture is present, but not so prominent. For the most part, though, this was a drama that was what I expected it to be, mostly a good thing.

IMDB link

viewed 3/31/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/4/11

Kill the Irishman (***)

2011-03-25T12:35:00.001-04:00

You’d think they’d run out of true-life gangster stories to tell, but they never seem to. Just last year brought the excellent two-film French saga Mesrine, which isn’t that much like this one, but begins the same way, with someone trying to kill the title character, then flashing back a couple of decades to see how it all went down. Jacques Mesrine moved around a lot, but Irish American Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) stays in Cleveland, his hometown. His rise from poor boy growing up to longshoreman to union boss is probably the best segment of the film and depicts the mixture of characteristics (a loan shark enforcer who worries about cholesterol—in the 1960s!) that made him such a force of nature. The second half of the movie covers the turf wars and deal-making that are typical of the genre.

As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.

The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.

These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11

Paul (***1/4)

2011-03-18T07:55:00.001-04:00

What if all of our clichéd notions about aliens—elongated bodies, flying saucers, government cover-ups, anal probes—well, not anal probes—are all based in reality? That’s one premise of this genial comedy from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who were behind the parodies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The British duo wrote the film (with Greg Mottola directing) and star as nerdy pals vacationing in America, attending Comic-Con and hitting the road in an RV.

This doesn’t some much parody sci-fi films themselves as our notions of aliens, nerds, and possibly British people. The alien, Paul, with whom they have a close encounter seems a lot like a regular guy, or like Seth Rogen, anyway, who provides the voice. (He looks a lot like E.T., but there’s a reason for that.)

IMDB link

viewed 2/24/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11

The Last Lions (***1/4)

2011-03-04T11:56:00.002-05:00

Most animal films have a disclaimer at the end stating that no animals were harmed in the making of the film. Not so here. National Geographic Society veterans Dereck and Beverly Joubert merely state that it wasn’t their fault. Following a lioness and her three cubs in Botswana for several months, the Jouberts capture close-up views of the hunt. At the start of the documentary, they’ve become victims of a battle for territory and exiled themselves onto an island with no other lions. Although, an adult lioness may be the queen of the jungle, her cubs are another matter. Not much larger than housecats, they’re easy prey for crocodiles and other animals. The challenge will be going on the hunt while protecting them. Prey arrives in the form of buffalo, but their larger numbers make it difficult to attack.

The narration (read by Jeremy Irons) does its best to shape this into a story of family, but no amount of poetic phrasing (“a life lived by tooth and claw” can turn this into March of the Penguins, although even that depicted cruelty. Phrases like “the little hunter’s heart did skip a small beat” and “triumph…feels a little hollow” do come close to anthropomorphism but are reasonable, if metaphorical, inferences from the evidence. The Jouberts, having followed lions and other animals in Africa for 20 years, ought to know. The narration mentions human encroachment and begins and ends by informing the audience that the number of lions has decreased from an estimated 450,000 to 20,000 in a few decades. However, the story is focused. Excepting the Jouberts themselves during the closing credits, no humans are seen, and, for much of the time, only the one lioness and her cubs. The information content here is medium, and the narrative pretty good, but the photography is stunning.

IMDB link

viewed 3/17/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/18 and 3/20/11

Poetry (***1/4)

2011-03-04T07:22:00.005-05:00

Fifteen minutes into this South Korean drama, Mija (Jeong-hie Yu), a well-manicured widow of 66, has been told to get tested for Alzheimer’s, observed the distraught mother of a teen suicide, decided to enroll in a poetry class, bathed the elderly gentleman for whom she keeps house, and cooked for the sullen teen grandson she’s raising. I’d have expected it to be a predictably touching, poignant, maybe dull drama had I not seen Secret Sunshine, writer-director Chang-dong Lee’s previous film. That one throws a startling plot twist into the second half hour that the rest of the film a lot different. Sure enough, there’s more to the story here, a moral dilemma that relates to the girl’s suicide.

Lee takes a lot of time to portray his main character, whose calm exterior masks careful deliberation, not impassivity. I mostly didn’t find the movie slow, but some will. However, Yu, a lovely actress coaxed out of retirement by Lee, held my attention during the quiet passages. (Lee’s camera work does too.) And right up to the end, I wasn’t quite sure how Lee would end things, or relate the different plot elements. (Mija’s early-stage Alzheimer’s is a surprisingly subtle element.) It’s not as unsettling as Secret Sunshine, whose main character lacked Mija’s even temper. It is a touching, poignant drama. But not predictable.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/24/11

Adam's Oscar Predictions 2011

2011-02-27T19:20:00.003-05:00

Well, not my best year at predicting.

Cedar Rapids (***1/4)

2011-02-18T21:45:00.001-05:00

Ed Helms stars as the milquetoast hero whose only daring act has been the affair he’s having with his onetime seventh-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver). But even that represents the timid act of a small-town boy who still maintains his child’s eye view of the world, which doesn’t include potty-mouthed salesmen, cheating, lying, or death by deaths by auto-erotic asphyxiation, all of which he comes to grips with in the kind-0f-big city in Iowa. (The city and state are played by Michigan, which gives bigger tax breaks to filmmakers.) In many ways Tim Lippe is the same sort of relative innocent as Helms played in The Hangover. And, structurally speaking, the movie is a lot like that farce, in that it involves a diverse foursome going a little wild on a trip, in this case an insurance conference.

But this comedy will also appeal to people who found that movie a little on the silly side. Yes, there’s some unlikely plotting, but director Miguel Arteta (Youth in Revolt) and writer Phil Johnston keep the focus as much on the characters. Besides Tim, unexpectedly asked to represent his agency at the conference, these include his temporary roommates, foul-mouthed Dean (John C. Reilly) and reserved Ronald (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who confesses a fondness for “the HBO program The Wire” in a tone suggesting one who’s discovered a hidden gem. Ron also amusingly shocks Tim by being…black and also garners perhaps the movie’s biggest laugh line when he later uses racial stereotyping to his own advantage. Lastly, there’s a female in this buddy quartet (Anne Heche in a great comeback role), who’s the right mix of flirty and down-to-earth to lure Tim out of his comfort zone.

Creating strong characters is why this movie is a cut above its buddy-comedy brethren. Even Dean is not simply a wild-and-crazy guy, but might also be like someone you’ve met. And while Tim is naive, your sympathies are still with him. The comedy is not about in Tim being so dumb he thinks Cedar Rapids is a big city, but a coming-of-age story about a guy who’s just waited awhile to come of age.

IMDB link

viewed 2/9/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/19/11

The Housemaid (***1/2)

2011-02-18T19:58:00.000-05:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” South Korean director Sang-soo Im uses a remake of a 50-year-old film to explore this idea. At the same time, like its predecessor, it’s a psychological drama. Do-yeon Jeon (Secret Sunshine) plays the title character, whose sexual liaison with her wealthy employer begins a surprising and unfortunate chain of events.

When the original version of this movie was made, in 1960, South Korea was a poorer country, and the family the girl works for has struggled to afford a nice house. Here, although we never find out the source of the wealth, it’s clear that the husband has never wanted for it, and that his wife, pregnant with twins, shares his attitude of entitlement. There are a couple of other significant characters not found in the 1960 version. Notably there is an older servant who has been with the family four decades. As the film goes on, we find that she is more than a stock character, but instead a woman with her own resentments and motivation.

The older film is a well-made, but at times campy, melodrama that winds up being a bit like Fatal Attraction. Besides the issue of class being much more prominent here, the other difference is that the maid herself is a much more thought-out character, really a different one altogether. In the original, she veers wildly between heartsickness and vindictiveness in a way that suggests she’s simply a crazy girl. Sang-soo’s film is much more sympathetic to the maid. For her employer, there is another quote, attributed to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, that seems apt: “In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.”

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/24/10

Outside the Law (***)

2011-02-18T09:09:00.003-05:00

Three Algerian brothers (Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila) emigrate to France but get caught up in their native country’s fight for independence. Though the story begins with colonization in 1925, the bulk of the film takes place between 1956, after France’s defeat in Vietnam, and 1962, when Algeria became independent.

Writer-director Rachid Bouchared previously made a film called Days of Glory that followed North African soldiers who join the French Resistance. (The film starred all three of this film’s stars as characters with the same names as here, yet this is not a sequel.) Pointedly, one brother, talking with a French police officer, tells him that while during World War II he was a resistance fighter, now he is on the wrong side of justice.

Though it weaves in questions about whether terrorism is acceptable in fighting for a just cause, in other ways the movie is the functional equivalent of a gangster film. Certainly, the violence to punish traitors is similar. The eldest brother is something like a solemn Malcolm X figure, eschewing alcohol and tobacco so as to avoid paying taxes to the hated French government, and women because, well, there’s no time. The youngest is the one who just wants to make money and disappoints his mother by becoming a bandit. The middle brother joins his brother in the movement, but regrets not seeing his wife and child, and has qualms about killing.

Nothing about how this Oscar nominee (foreign-language film) plays out should surprise, whether you know about French colonialism or not. Still, the brutality employed by the seat of Enlightenment culture is somehow shocking, though it shouldn’t be.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/22/11

Unknown (***)

2011-02-18T03:33:00.002-05:00

The thing with a thriller like this one is that its success hinges on what happens near the end. If the plot does a good job explaining why Dr. Martin Harris—or should that be “Dr. Martin Harris” (Liam Neeson either way)—wakes up after a taxi accident in Berlin and finds another man in his place, great. If it turns out to be something stupid—like the dream sequence that erased a season of the TV show Dallas—or absurd, well, you’ll have felt like you wasted 113 minutes.

Dr. Harris, bearing an American accent, has arrived in Berlin for a medical conference with an American with his prim young wife (January Jones). Berlin was Paris in the Didier Van Cauwelaert novel on which the movie was based, but in any case the good doctor is out of his element when he awakens, which probably explains why he never calls his mom/dad/sister/best friend to verify his identity to the police, who understandably don’t believe his story. Since his wife doesn’t seem to recognize him, there’s only the cab driver (Diane Kruger) to help. Her and an ex-Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz) now working as a missing-persons expert. Ganz, though his role is brief, is certainly the most memorable character in the movie. Reviews suggest that the book had a deeper focus on memory as the locus of identity, and the agent character seems to be the chief remnant of this philosophical aspect.

So this is no Momento, but as conspiracy thrillers go, it’s not bad, and while not truly believable, the explanation does indeed explain all. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) does all right with a couple of car chases, and, unlike Neeson’s last thriller Taken, there is no gratuitous torture scenes or even that much violence. You could do worse for a diverting suspense drama.

IMDB link

viewed 2/15/11 at Ritz East and reviewed 2/22/11

Oscar-nominated shorts—Animated (***)

2011-02-11T09:17:00.000-05:00

viewed 2/17/11 at Ritz Bourse