Meek’s Crossing (***)

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.

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

127 Hours (**3/4)

A couple people I know didn’t want to see this because of the one scene. You probably know which one, especially if you remember the story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) from all the media coverage in the summer of 2003. Ralston wrote a book about his experience that director Danny Boyle has adapted with his Slumdog Millionaire collaborator, Simon Beaufoy. Boyle’s films are suffused with a sense of motion and dynamism, and that would seem to be at odds with the story of a guy who, for most of the length of the movie, has his arm pinned down by a large rock in a desolate canyon in Utah.

For the pre-pinned down segment, the whizzing cameras, split-screens, saturated colors and insistent score by A.R. Rahman (another Millionaire collaborator) make it seem like Boyle’s still filming Mumbai instead of a desert. When Ralston gets trapped, he’s left the motion and commotion of civilization. For days—see the title—Ralston tries one thing after another to get free. Unlike Ryan Reynolds in Buried, a straight thriller, we see Franco in flashback scenes, so there’s not quite the same sense of claustrophobia. The wispy flashbacks—in flickering light and shadows—and echoey voiceovers fill in sketchy biographical detail without really telling a story. The voices sound like those cheesy ones where a character in a thriller hears the past played back so the audience will remember key plot points. In other words, it’s more evocative of other movies than of Ralston’s internal experience.

I tend to like movies about characters alone, and I like Franco, but I didn’t love this movie. Ralston seems more interesting when he meets a couple of female hikers before he gets stuck. Yes, Ralston gets to contemplate his own demise, but his litany of regrets—which he commemorates on videotape—is pretty much the same sort of sorry-didn’t-pick-up-the-phone-mom stuff you or I might think about. And the way Boyle handles the scene following the escape seems all wrong to me, full of loud music and more split screens, as if we haven’t realized it’s a happy moment. It’s not all bad. What happened to Ralston was inherently compelling, as all the news coverage in 2003 showed. Boyle provides great visuals in showing how it happened, the predicament Ralston found himself in, and how he tried to escape. Only a little about the aftermath, unfortunately.

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viewed 2/14/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/14/11

Resident Evil: Extinction (***)

The very last of the summer 2007 “threequels” is also the most unassuming. Based on a video game, these future-set actioners haven’t been blockbusters, merely low-key successes. Maybe that’s why this doesn’t come off as overblown and pretentious like so many others. Each of the movies is a little different too. In the first movie, Alice escapes from the scientists experimenting on her. In the second, she confronts the effects of the virus that has spread across “Racoon City” and turned much of the populace into flesh-craving zombies. Now, with the virus spread across the planet, cool, collected Alice (Milla Jovovich) aids a convoy (of which Ali Larter plays the leader) and opposes a mad scientist in a world that resembles that of Road Warrior, only with zombies. All those undead folks gives the opportunity for lots of mayhem without it seeming too gruesome. The virus has also spread to other life forms, leading to sequences featuring mad dogs and birds. Fuel and food shortages represent other obstacles for the few that survive. The whole subplot with the scientist is on the goofy side, and missing is much detail about how the world got to be the way it is. But the strength of the movie is that it doesn’t try to do too much. Some good action scenes—Alice’s signature move is twirling twin knives in each hand before she offs a couple of zombies—enough story to move things forward, and some variation keep things interesting. Probably the other two films are slightly better, but it’s close enough that I suspect many people will disagree. Enough loose ends remain to see that writer Paul W. S. Anderson has some ideas about a fourth entry (though none is planned).

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reviewed 9/24/07

House of Sand (***3/4)

--> --> ? Having been led by her husband across the windy, barren landscape of Northeastern Brazil to a nearly unpopulated coastal area in 1910, a woman (Fernanda Torres) struggles to find a means to leave, or to accommodate. The only other inhabitants are her mother and a few ex-slaves and their descendents. Brazilian star (and 1999 Oscar nominee) Fernanda Montenegro, who is the mother of Torres, plays the same role in the movie. As time goes by, the roles of the mother and daughter shift.

+ This is an absolutely beautiful movie, both in the story it tells and the stunning way the landscape is filmed. I see a lot of movies where the characters’ lives look more fun than mine, but this isn’t one of one of them. Yet other people’s boredom can become compelling when distilled into a two-hour drama. In the way House of Sand observes its main character dealing with enforced isolation, it reminded me of Cast Away, which I loved. As with that movie, when it skips ahead in time I felt almost cheated by not seeing what happened in the meantime. I don’t want to overextend the comparison, because in other ways the movies are very different. There’s no Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball. There’s not much talking at all, which is something I liked in this case. And the time period covered is far longer. When news comes of the outbreak of the Great War, it’s already ended. In a short time, this movie transports you to a place and time when it was possible to be that isolated. The ending is simple and cathartic.

- I did wonder what the woman did all day when she wasn’t scheming to leave. However, I think these parts of the story are intentionally left for the viewer to fill in.

= ***3/4 Not quirky minimalist like the movies of Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers), but haunting minimalist, sort of like those of South Korea’s Ki-duk Kim (3-Iron, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring), this may not be a movie for everyone. It’s not as depressing as it may seem, but there’s no laughs either. Still, I found it a moving piece about the way that the choices we make, and the choices life makes for us, shape our lives.

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