August: Osage County (***1/2)

This is one of those stories about dysfunctional families coming together that usually take place over a Thanksgiving weekend or at Christmas. In this case, it’s a disappearance, but the elements are the same. Start with the mother, whose pain-pill dependence and freewheeling tongue provide another scenery-chewing role for Meryl Streep. Her husband (Sam Shepard) is a onetime poet who, oddly provides the opening narration, quoting T. S. Eliot, then goes missing. Soon after, the daughters show up. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), the caretaker, has never left Oklahoma. Flighty Karen, the youngest, chattiest, and cheeriest, comes from Florida with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, is the one most resentful of, but most like, her mother. She brings her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and her daughter (Abigail Breslin). If we knew the future, she tells the 14-year-old , “we’d never want get up in the morning.”

The rich dialogue is among the pleasures of this adaptation of the Tracy Letts play; Letts himself provides the script, and it retains a certain play-like quality and structure, although a few scenes are set outdoors. This means lots of dialogue, well-crafted characters, and a lot of confrontational scenes, any of which, in some other movie, might be the centerpiece scene. Many of these are funny, which means the heavy themes — addiction, alcoholism, adultery, to take just the letter A — never seem ponderous. Instead, they provide just the right mixture of pathos and juicy revelation.

IMDb link

viewed 1/19/14 1:00 pm at AMC Marple; posted 1/22/14

The Attack (***1/4)

This movie put me in mind of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013. In that case, many people were surprised at reports that the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was said to be popular and personable. In this adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, a successful surgeon (Ali Suliman), an Israeli Arab whose best friends are Jews, learns that his wife was a victim of a horrific bombing. Told that she was also the suicide bomber, he cannot square that with his notion of the loving wife he knew.

Having lost both a spouse and an ordinary grieving process, he reacts first with denial and then with an effort to make some sense of what happened. His journey, in which he encounters more radicalized Palestinians, is bound to leave him unsatisfied. It left me also unsatisfied in terms of what I would have wanted to happen, but was probably realistic in terms of what might happen. A novel would perhaps have rendered it more understandable why some Palestinians would support suicide bombings; the inconveniences of checkpoints and collateral damage of anti-terrorist operations are spoken of but not seen. Nonetheless, the film capably explores what it means to live as a disfavored minority in a modern state.

IMDb link

viewed 7/10/13 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/10/13

Fill the Void (***1/4)

This confusingly titled Israeli drama takes place in an Orthodox Jewish community. Unlike most films about such closed societies, including Ushpizin and Holy Rollers, set among Hasidic enclaves in Jerusalem and New York, respectively, this is not about encounters with outsiders or about those challenging tradition. Instead, it is about the normal challenges of life, but as experienced through a particular cultural dynamic.

Shira (Hadas Yaron), the character at the center of the drama, is an 18-year-old kindergarten teacher hoping to wed a young man she has seen but not yet met. However, upon the death of her sister in childbirth, she feels increasing pressure to instead marry her sister’s widower (Yiftach Klein), now a single father, though he is significantly older than she. Although this is not something that would likely happen in secular Israel, Shira’s internal conflict, between desire for self-determination and duty, is not unfamiliar.

The cultural context is one in which a high emphasis is placed on marriage; another character, an older woman, wears a head scarf to suggest widowhood, though she’s never wed, simply to avoid questions. Additionally, there is great weight placed on the rabbi as the center of the community, dispenser of charity, and giver of advice on everything from spiritual matters to ovens. Still, the long beards on the men aside, these characters seem like ordinary people.

IMDb link

viewed 6/19/13 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/19/13

Stoker (***)

With this quasi-Gothic horror drama, Korean auteur Chan-wook Park makes his English-language debut. Given that his action film Oldboy is one of the most widely seen Korean films internationally, the move seems nearly inevitable. But where that film (and the Vengeance trilogy, of which Oldboy is the middle offering) relies on kinetic energy, this is quite the opposite. Stillness and quiet are the hallmarks of this creepily mysterious tale of a  family coping with the loss of a husband and father.

Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska play mother and daughter. They don’t talk much, and certainly not loudly. Their new houseguest, Charlie Stoker (Matthew Goode), is the brother of the deceased, and he doesn’t say too much either, but, though he’s been abroad for 20 years, now seems to be everywhere. We presume the mystery will have something to do with the manner of the death, which was not natural, and what kind of character Charlie Stoker is, but it unfolds slowly, though not dully. Art directed to within an inch of its life, Park’s carefully composed shots (mostly in a large house) and the spare dialogue create suspense rather than bore. Wasikowska’s intense stare (and she is the star of the movie) seems to penetrate the screen.

Still, you have to like this kind of thing, where even the characters are stylized, where (for example) an 18-year-old waits days (half an hour into the movie) to ask why she hadn’t known her father had a brother. Park’s lingering close-ups are so artful that one is very conscious of them. The dialogue is not just quiet, but unnaturally so. Where one reacts viscerally to Oldboy, reactions to this are likely to be more detached. In terms of story, there is a reasonable payoff. As a decorative object I much admired this film; Park is obviously skilled, but on the whole I wished he had not displayed those skills so obviously.

IMDb link

viewed 3/28/13 7:10 at Ritz East and reviewed 3/28/13

Amour (***1/2)

Woody Allen once made a comedy called Love and Death. Michael Haneke has made a film called Love that is about death, and is superficially a tragedy, but only superficially. Beginning with the end, the body of a woman alone in a luxurious Paris apartment, Haneke then takes us through the stages of her decline following a stroke. The woman is played by Emmanuel Riva, the 85-year-old whose earliest starring role was in the similarly titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), her husband by the slightly younger Jean-Louis Trintignant, of ...And God Created Woman, The Conformist, and other European classics. Isabelle Huppert, who plays the couple’s daughter in a few scenes, has starred in two Haneke films, Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (Here, Riva’s character was once a piano teacher.) We never see these characters at a younger age, but French viewers may feel that they have known them well via earlier roles.

 

Haneke has strongly resisted the conventions of Hollywood (though he remade his own film Funny Games in English) and mainstream cinema, such as tidy endings. In doing so he has made movies that can seem chilly and detached. Films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and The White Ribbon take a nearly clinical look into dark aspects of human behavior. I’m not sure whether he’s doing anything different here. It may be that simply placing his camera in front of these two characters, one witnessing her own decline, the other transitioning from husband to caretaker, is responsible for the deep empathy we feel for both. His approach is at once minimalist and rich in detail. The camera lingers, sometimes to the point where the viewer may become impatient, but allows us to see the evidence of this couple’s life together, including their well-appointed residence, full of books, art, and old furniture.

 

The tragedy embodied in the movie is that with all the ways modernity has made life easier, it has done little to improve the experiences of death and loss. The way in which it is not a tragedy, is hopeful even, is in its depiction of the tenderness shown by the husband. He does not speak the film’s title. No protestations of ardor, no dramatic medical interventions, no grand gestures (well, not more than one), as in a Nicholas Sparks novel, no mad dashes to the airport attest to his feelings. All that does is his willingness to do for his wife, day after day, what she cannot do and would want done. (In contrast is his daughter, who cannot see the situation through the eyes of her parents.) You don’t expect to see that in one of Haneke’s movies, and that makes it all the more moving.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 1/27/13 4:00 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/18/13 

Delicacy (***1/4)

It would be misleading to call this romantic comedy, because grief lies between the romantic segments, and about half the movie preceding anything significantly comic. Audrey Tautou, pixyish lead of Amélie, gets to demonstrate a wider range of temperaments as she reassesses her life and romantic possibilities following a tragedy. There is nothing unnatural about the transitions between these moods, or at least nothing more unnatural than it would be to anyone who has experienced such transitions. I didn’t care for the jarring music that marks some of them, but I did appreciate not knowing where the story would lead. In addition to Tautou’s very specific character, the film includes perhaps the best portrayal I’ve seen of someone (Francois Damiens, as the most awkward of her three suitors) who thinks that the woman he desires is out of his league.

IMDb link

viewed 3/25/2012 3:50 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/26/12–4/24/12

We Bought a Zoo (**3/4)

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

The Descendants (***1/2)

With his last four features (of five total), Alexander Payne has become our foremost cinematic chronicler of the adult white male self-examination crisis. However, perhaps because he has adapted a series of novels, he hasn’t repeated himself. Those who found Paul Giamatti’s wine snob in Sideways too ornery or found About Schmidt too slow may still like watching lawyer Matt King (George Clooney), imperfect husband and father, muddle through his own difficult time. King’s crisis comes when his wife lapses into a coma following a water-skiing accident. Payne’s faithful adaptation of a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings isn’t as plot-driven or pithy as 1999’s Election, but it’s his most mainstream film 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 of the story. The title alludes both to the state’s unique history—haole money men displacing missionaries and, then, the native aristocracy—to King’s two daughters. As Clooney’s voiceover, which paraphrases the novel, tells us, Matt’s the understudy, now cast as the star parent of his ten-year-old, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. So he gets his 17-year-old, away at boarding school, to help. The older daughter is played by Shailene Woodley, erstwhile costar of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, who’s both terrific and looks the age she’s playing. (First-time actress Amara Miller seems very natural as the younger daughter, a smaller part.)

Clooney is almost too likeable in the lead; only the voiceover and the anger of his daughter (no flashbacks) assure us that King’s been a neglectful husband and father or anything other than the reasonable man he seems here. A subplot about King’s being the trustee of a 25,000-acre parcel of land set to be sold to developers resolves how you’ll likely assume as soon as you’ve seen that first gorgeous shot of pristine coastline. Still, there’s an honesty to the storytelling and a good deal of humor right at the same time as the sad parts, which is as it should be in a movie where a comatose woman features so prominently. Alive yet unavailable, she forces King both to contemplate her 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

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

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

Contagion (**3/4)

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

A Little Help (***3/4)

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

Beginners (**3/4)

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

Secret Sunshine (***1/2)

In this moving South Korean film from 2007, a widowed piano teacher moves with her young son from Seoul to the smaller city where her late husband was born. Where the earliest part of Chang-Dong Lee’s film (adapted from a novel) is light and even comedic in nature, it becomes an unexpectedly dark exploration of grief, even despair. Jeon Do-yeon (My Dear Enemy), whose performance was duly rewarded at Cannes, beautifully depicts the widow’s spiritual journey and struggle to make sense of her loss as well as the events that led her to make a new start.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/21/10

La Nostra Vita (***1/4)

My Brother Is an Only Child director Daniele Luchetti returns with the story of a construction supervisor (Elio Germano, also of My Brother) whose wife suddenly dies in childbirth. Left alone with three sons, including a newborn, he pours his efforts into a large project meant to provide for his family but that instead threatens his financial ruin. Though this isn’t a dark film, it’s a realistic story about everyday struggle. The widowed father is, though likable, flawed, and the inequities of Italian society are a subtheme. Illegal immigrant laborers are used on the construction site, taxes are evaded, and casually derogatory references are made toward foreigners. Yet overall the movie takes a kind view of human nature; ultimately, it’s a story about values and relationships.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/20/10

The Father of My Children (***1/2)

One thing I like about certain (usually) foreign films is the way you don’t immediately know what they’re going to be about. For a would-be blockbuster, this is no good because that doesn’t lend itself to a very exciting description. For example, this can be described as the story of a French film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), his money troubles, and his family. (There are a lot of films about actors, a fair number about writers and directors, but not too many about producers; The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biography, would be one.) What’s pleasing about it is all in the characters and their relationships. That’s not to say nothing happens—plenty does—but that the story isn’t entirely driven by what happens in the first ten minutes, which is the usual case.

After ten minutes, I assumed the movie was going to be about a workaholic who can’t stay off his cell phone as he tries to placate a free-spending Swedish auteur, a group of Koreans coming to shoot in Paris, and his impatient creditors. He is a workaholic—“human spam” to one of his daughters—but also an adored father and husband, and the proud creator of dozens of non-blockbuster films. He cherishes the freedom of being his own boss, but the freedom is threatened by the bank’s threat to pull the plug on his credit. The most significant plot point happens past the halfway point. The emphasis also surprisingly shifts from the filmmaker to his Italian-born wife (hinted at by the title) and his three daughters, the eldest of which is played by de Lencquesaing’s real-life daughter, Alice. A young adult, she has the most complicated relationship with her father.

The second film of the still-under-30 Mia Hansen-Love is a film that is sometimes sad, but isn’t sappy. The lack of melodrama is one reason why such a film doesn’t feel heavy or depressing. The other is that the characters are enjoyable to be around; after 110 minutes, I wasn’t ready for the movie to end.

IMDB link

viewed 8/5/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/6/10

Inception (***1/4)

If Batman Begins and The Dark Knight hadn’t done it, this movie cements Christopher Nolan’s reputation as a creator of brainy blockbusters. With its nine-figure budget, it’s like a steroid-enhanced version of his breakthrough, Memento (budget: $5,000,000). Inception features Nolan’s signatures—a tricky plot intertwined with a heavy psychological component. There are shifts back and forth in time. His use of editing remains breathtaking, and yet the orgy of special effects threatens to overwhelm the human element.

Inception’s plot is literally the stuff of dreams. The high concept is that it’s possible to enter those of other people, and even to shape them. Hence Ellen Page’s role as a dream “architect.” She’s hired by Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, and he’s been hired by a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe). There’s a market for this dreamy stuff. Usually movies like this start out with the simple and build to the complex. For example, The Matrix (a movie of similar appeal, albeit one dissimilar in story) begins with an office worker who knows nothing about the complex virtual world he inhabits. Nolan thrusts you right into his world with barely an explanation. Here he explores concepts (or inventions) like shared dreams, dreams within dreams, and why you should never include real places in constructing dreams. And this is just in the first 15 minutes or so.

Until about then, I had the impression I was watching a sequel to a movie I hadn’t seen. After that, I grasped the basic idea of the story, but one could easily get lost in all the explanatory chatter tossed off by (mostly) Cobb, frequently while he is being chased. Seems that if you stay too long in someone else’s dream, psychological defense mechanisms kick in.

The scenes with Marion Cotillard, as Cobb’s late wife, help explain his motivation, and why he can’t see his children, but she’s more of a plot device than a character. (None of Nolan’s films, possibly excepting The Prestige, have included female characters of any complexity.) Like Memento, this is extremely clever, but unlike Memento, I watched the central character as an action hero, not someone to identify with. Memento made real how our memory makes us who we are. Here, the dream scenes are impressive, even astounding at times, but they feel nothing like real dreams. Nolan aims to bombard the senses, and nearly bludgeons them. Perfect for the video-game generation, the story moves to fast for to you to think about it, although clearly Nolan has. Make no mistake. This is an accomplished film, and my reservations are sure not to matter to someone who just wants a thrill ride. But I still say, sometimes less is more.

IMDB link

viewed 7/29/2010 at Roxy and reviewed 7/31–8/1/10

The Karate Kid (***1/4)

I suppose the title will irritate some, given that Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han teaches the kid (Jaden Smith) kung fu, not karate. The kid’s mom (Taraji P. Henson) confuses the two, and even after watching this movie I’m not sure of the differences myself, but Chan is Chinese and the movie takes place in China, where kung fu is the reigning martial art. Even so, there’s an unmistakable fidelity to the 1984 film of which this is a remake.

Both characters feature handymen who employ repetitive tasks as ways to build strength and discipline. And both save the boy from a bully trained by a cruel master, only to train him for an inevitable showdown. In the 1984 version, Pat Morita’s Miyagi says: “Karate for defense only.” Han says that kung fu is for “making peace with your enemy.” As Han, Chan displays far less of the physicality than in his straight action (or action-comedy) roles, but is extremely likable. In the title role, Jaden Smith has very much the cocky-yet-charming persona of his dad, Will Smith. The only other prominent role, a quasi-love interest for the boy, is charmingly played by Chinese newcomer Wenwen Han.

There’s no getting around that the storyline is still completely formulaic, though that won’t bother the target audience. The message of nonviolence is nice, even if the kids will probably forget about it as the movie builds up to the inevitable revenge ass-kicking. But the novel element that most justifies the remake is the transplanted setting. While the Americans attend an English-language school, and most of the dialogue is in English, you can, more than in most Hollywood films set abroad, surmise that there are interesting places different from the United States, people who don’t speak English, and faraway places worth visiting. (The locations include both Beijing’s Forbidden City and the Great Wall.) Perhaps Chan’s participation—or the Chinese government’s—ensured that the Chinese come off as neither quaintly charming nor wisely exotic, excepting that Han seems to have magic healing powers.

Silly title or not, the new Kid’s all right.

(My rating is kind of from the point of view of a younger person, but the movie was still fairly enjoyable as an adult.)

IMDB link

viewed at UA Riverview [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2/2010

Harry Brown (***)

This is a vigilante movie with artistic pretensions and an elderly hero. Michael Caine, at 77, is half a decade older than Charles Bronson was when he made the last Death Wish movie. But this isn’t hack work. In fact, Caine gives one of his best performances as a grief-stricken widower angered when thugs target his best friend, who lives in a seedy London housing complex. As a portrait of grief and loss, the movie is quite good. There’s an aura of sadness about Caine even as he metes out some rough justice. Director Daniel Barber (working from a screenplay by Gary Young) takes the same spare approach as in his excellent short western, The Tonto Woman. On the other hand, the film can’t quite escape the trappings of its sub-genre. Harry and even the policewoman played by Emily Mortimer are solid characters, but the thugs are standard-issue villains simply put there to arouse Harry’s righteous fury. And ours. Just barely recommended.

IMDB link

viewed 4/11/10 at Prince [PFS Spring Preview Festival] and reviewed 5/18/10

Brothers (***1/4)

Who’d have figured, back in 2004 when Susanne Bier directed the original Danish version of this Afghanistan war drama, that years later a present-tense American version could be filmed? Both version deals with a soldier presumed lost in battle, here played by Tobey Maguire. Like most of the recent crop of American war films, the focus is on the trauma of war to the soldiers fighting it. In this case, it is also on how that plays out with those left at home—the distraught wife (Natalie Portman), the just-out-of-prison older brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s also felt the disfavor of his father (Sam Shepard), the father himself, and the children who adapt quickly as their uncle takes up some of the father role. The audience knows, as the family does not, what has happened to the soldier. So a lot of the movie feels like mere prelude to what will happen in the last half hour or so. Still, the acting is very good, maybe Portman’s best role, and that last part is powerful, albeit showy. It’s a smart tearjerker, for sure, as well as a film about ethics and family dynamics.

IMDB link

viewed 11/30/09 at Ritz East (PFS screening); review written unknown date and posted 4/16/10

The Boys Are Back (**3/4)

Clive Owen plays a sportswriter in this likeable, non-sappy adaptation of Simon Carr’s memoir about losing his wife and suddenly becoming a single parent. It’s partly about coping with loss and partly about finding his own parenting style as he makes a new life with his young son in south Australia. He also tries to bond with an older son from his first marriage who comes for a stay. Some tender moments, and some well-written ones involving a young mother (Emma Booth of Introducing the Dwights) don’t entirely make up for a storyline that mostly goes in expected directions.

IMDB link

viewed 10/1/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening]