The Grand Budapest Hotel (***1/4)

For those who know the films of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, , Moonrise Kingdom, The ), there is scarcely any point in reviewing them other than in relation to each other. You already know if you’ll like this, or you haven’t seen Anderson’s work. [A recent Saturday Night Live parody, in the form of a horror movie trailer, is hilarious and specific in a way that, say, a Steven Spielberg parody could probably not have been.] Whether set on a train in India (The Darjeeling Unlimited), in the poshest parts of New York (The Royal Tenenbaums), or inside animated tunnels (The Fantastic Mr. Fox), they all seem to take place in a half-real, half fairy-tale world of pastel colors, secret passageways, and Rube Goldberg-inspired plots. His heroes are the verbose but well-meaning, like the middle-aged concierge Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his young protegé Zero (Tony Revolori) at the center of this period piece.

It does not take place in Budapest but in Lutz, a fictional city in a fictional Eastern European country where people mostly speak English in a variety of accents, but mostly English and American. It is supposed to be 1932, which only matters insofar as it conjures up a world in which conflict and even modernity lie ahead. Technically, it is the late 1960s; the story is told by an older man (F. Murray Abraham) to a younger one (Jude Law), and this only matters insofar as it depicts the 1930s elegance as having long past, the hotel in a long, slow decline, its past  as mythical seeming as a fairy tale, though the cavernous lobby remains.

Save perhaps the anti-climactic ending, the plotting here, involving the mysterious death of an elderly guest, is clever and fun. As always, the humor comes at odd moments and in unexpected ways. For me, one such moment was when Zero is surprised to learn that one way Gustave satisfied his elderly female guests was by sleeping with them. His mentor explains that when you are young “it’s all fillet steak…but as you get older, you have to move on to the cheaper cuts.” Gustave adds that he likes the cheaper cuts. There’s no meanness in Anderson’s heroes, though this movie has a pair of villains.

Anderson is apt to quickly jettison both heroes and villains from his story. For me, his previous movie, Moonrise Kingdom, had an emotional center that differentiated it from his other work, though perhaps that was an individual response. Maybe the tale of an old man recalling his long-ago mentor and long-ago life will bring a similar nostalgia to some people. For others, it will be another solid effort by one of Hollywood’s most distinct voices.

IMDb link

viewed 3/26/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 3/26/14

Man on a Ledge (***)

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

Point Blank (***1/2)

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

Conviction (***)

A movie’s appeal really shouldn’t depend on whether the story it tells really happened to someone, but it probably does help here to know that Betty Anne Waters really did decide to go to law school, not even having finished high school, just to get her brother Kenny out of jail. This is the sort of inspirational role that Hilary Swank seems to have made a specialty of, and having heard the real Betty Anne, I can say she nails both the rural Massachusetts accent and the sense of, yes, conviction that keeps Betty Anne moving forward.

Betty Anne and Kenny were part of a large, unstable family led by an undependable mother, and Kenny (Sam Rockwell) was prone to getting in fights, which is one reason attention was focused on him after a 1980 murder. Director Tony Goldwyn and writer Pamela Gray, who previously collaborated on 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, include brief but effective flashback scenes that provide a sense of the closeness that the two siblings developed. Rockwell’s few scenes show the actor’s range. There is suspense in the way Goldwyn shows us the testimony that convicted Kenny, and then shows how the jury was misled.

The underdog story seems so tailor-made for a movie that it seems almost too perfect. There is a murder, but not a mystery. The good and the evil are clear. Other stories of wrongful conviction often reveal a series of well-intentioned mistakes, cops and prosecutors trying their best but making errors and false assumptions. Here there is only the actions of one reckless cop, who is well played by Melissa Leo, but an unambiguous villain. And Betty is an unambiguous heroine. Therefore we have a well-told story, but without elements that would make the film truly great or surprising.

IMDB link

viewed 9/28/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/16/10

Easy A (***)

For those who loved the high school comedies of the 1980s and '90s comes an homage so sincere that the heroine tells us how she’d like her life to be like one. The archetypical—though not always optimal—high school movie stars college-age actors and revolves somehow around the themes of popularity and sexual awakening. The plot often turns on a main character undergoing some kind of drastic change that usually only characters in high school comedies undergo. Olive (Emma Stone), an unusually smart, virginal girl, undergoes a drastic change, but mostly insofar as her reputation is concerned. Perhaps reassuring to those who’ve paid too much attention to articles about teen “sexting,” being “easy” (for a girl) is still the source of shame in the age of social media, at least at Olive’s middle class California high school, which means there’s some tricky knot-tying to be done, script-wise, so as to have Olive embracing the literal scarlet letter (see the title) she wears. It does not make her popular, especially with the Christian youth group in the school whose snotty leader (Amanda Bynes, heroine of many a high school movie) functions as the stock villain.

Nothing about the plot or theme, including the romantic ending you can see coming an hour away, makes the movie stand above similar movies. While the Hester Prynne allusions and the silly youth group suggest a condemnation of intolerance, in other ways—like part where the youth group leader absurdly becomes buddies with Olive — the film muddies whether the other students are wrong to judge her or just wrong to believe the rumors. Apparently, as in all other teen movies, the moral is—spoiler alert (sort of)—“how shitty it feels to be an outcast.” Has Olive learned nothing from those old teen comedies?

No, what elevates the movie to slightly above average is that Olive has, and Stone gives her, a bit more personality, or maybe reality, than most similar characters. Meaning, partly, that she’s realistically brainy and genuinely witty, which is good since the plot overly relies on her narration. I also particularly liked Olive’s scenes with her teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) and her (non-dorky!) parents, played by and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Their hip-couple banter is amusing without making them into caricatures of ultraliberal parenting. I say amusing; the humor is mild. “Remember to cross ‘watch The Bucket List’ off our bucket list,” is one of the funnier lines. Well, it was funny to me.

IMDB link

viewed 12/10/11 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 12/10/11

I Just Didn’t Do It (***1/4)

There are movies about people being falsely accused of crimes, but probably not many where the crime is not murder, not rape, not armed robbery, but groping. In this drama from Masayuki Suo, the writer-director of the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance?, the main character is falsely accused of having fondled a teenage girl in a crowded subway car. Everyone from the police to the prosecutors to his court-appointed attorney tells him to plead guilty, but, as the title says, he knows he is innocent and refuses. Some of what he goes through is peculiar to the Japanese legal system, notably the way a series of hearings before a judge replaces a discrete trial. In more significant ways, though, the issues the movie brings up suggest problems inherent to any legal system. Both the judges and the prosecutors have vested interests in convictions. Corruption is not required to produce unfair results. Meanwhile, the female lawyer eventually assigned to defend the case struggles with her own feeling that the problem of women being groped on subways has not been taken seriously enough. The movie is methodical, and arguably slow, as it depicts step by step how this seemingly simple case proceeds, but it should be required viewing for those who make simplistic arguments about the need to “get tough on crime” without considering the need to protect the innocent.

IMDB link

viewed 4/8/08; reviewed 4/9/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Lady Vengeance (***1/2)

The third of Park Chan-Wook’s “vengeance trilogy,” reminiscent in tone of Kill Bill: Vol. II, represents an excellent chance for American action fans to see the work of one of Asia’s leading directors.

Movies like this tend to fall between the cracks when it comes to getting released here. The multiplexes bypass them because they’re not in English, and the art houses tend to favor drama. So even though Asian action movies are often celebrated by video buffs, they don’t often get released here theatrically. (The mythical martial-arts subgenre currently represented by The Promise represents a recent exception, the historical settings perhaps rendering them sufficiently high-brow for import.) This is all by way of saying, if you like action films, check this out. It’s actually the last part of what’s been dubbed Park Chan-Wook’s “vengeance trilogy,” but the films are linked primarily by theme, not plot. (The second and most celebrated part of the trilogy, Oldboy, currently ranked #116 on IMDB.com’s list of top films, had a meager run in 2005 in a few American cities, but only played here at the Philadelphia Film Festival.)

Star Lee Young-Ae’s character has been convicted of kidnapping and murder of a child. Beginning with her surreally filmed release from prison, we follow her forward as she seeks revenge on her former mentor (Oldboy star Choi Min-Sik), who’s set her up, and backward as we see the events surrounding her imprisonment. The prison scenes present a motley assortment of women who (mostly) become her allies on the outside. The best American analog to this film is probably Quentin Tarentino’s Kill Bill: Vol. II. (Not coincidentally, Tarentino is a huge fan of Park.) Its mix of toughness, tenderness, and off-kilter humor is rare in American cinema. Granted, in the same way as Kill Bill, it’s probably too strange to be a tearjerker, but there’s an emotional core to the film absent from most action films, and it’s certainly not predictable. This movie should be opening in 2000 theaters, but it’s a happy circumstance that Americans will get to see it at all.

IMDb link