Rosewater (***)

You might not expect a comedian-turned-TV host, even the host of a news parody show, to make his directorial debut with a drama about an journalist arrested by the Iranian government. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show played an odd, indirect role in the story of Maziar Bahari, whose memoir was adapted by Stewart. Being an American film, it’s almost all in English, though in real life, presumably, most of the speaking would have been in Farsi.

Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a Newsweek reporter covering the 2009 elections in Iran, was arrested and accused of spying. His interrogator relied partly on an interview Bahari had given to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in which Jones had asked, in the show’s mock serious way, if Bahari were a spy. (Modestly, Stewart doesn’t refer to the show by name.)

The film depicts Bahari’s reporting on the election and, primarily, his subsequent detention and interrogation. (For the squeamish, the violence is fairly minimal.) Though Stewart briefly shows us scenes involving the interrogator and his superior, almost all of the movie is from Bahari’s point of view, understandable given that it’s based on a memoir. This means, though, that the biggest mysteries — did the Iranians truly think Bahari was a spy, what did they expect to accomplish by holding him, and so on — remain so. Instead, the film is a window into the mind of the captive, wondering what he should or can do to save himself. Stewart uses flashbacks and imagined discussions between Bahari and his late father and sister, who had also been held captive, both to depict Bahari’s backstory and to reveal his thoughts while in solitary confinement. At the time of his captivity, the Iranian-born Bahari was based in London, where his wife was pregnant with his first child.

Stewart’s debut is an entirely credible effort, well done but without that many surprises, kind of what you might expect from a film on this subject, if not from this particular writer-director.


IMDb link

viewed 11/10/14 7:00 pm at AMC Loews Cherry Hill and posted 11/10/14

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (**1/2)

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sequel comes nine years after its predecessor, so the most impressive thing about it might be that it got made with the cast members (and director Adam McKay) intact. It’s the tail end of the disco era, and the dawn of the 24-news era. Thus, rather than parodying local news and the introduction of women into the newsroom, it features Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy working for an upstart operation called GNN (Global News Network). Ron thinks 24-hour news is “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” but a paycheck’s a paycheck. Also on board are his pals: the playboy Brian (Paul Rudd), the racist/sexist Champ (David Koechner), and the simple-minded Brick (Steve Carrell). Ron’s nemesis turned spouse (Christina Applegate) is not on board, but is in the movie. They have a son.

McKay and Ferrell’s schtick is to let the jokes fly and see what sticks, with the force of the delivery sometimes compensating for half-funny lines, sometimes merely emphasizing the lame ones. “Who the hell is Julius Caesar?…I don’t follow the NBA,” is the kind of exchange that half the audience will be amused at, and half will groan at. I’m sure the people who like the movie will disagree about which lines worked and which fell flat. One thing I found incredibly tedious was an entire subplot involving Ron’s new boss, who is, somewhat implausibly, a 30ish black woman (Meagan Good). Besides creating another female role, the character seems mostly to exist to provide an excuse for lame jokes about race. Time was when plain old racist jokes were acceptable; the modern substitute is to make jokes about racists. This itself became tiresome years ago. Maybe because the movie takes place in the early 1980s (the hits-laden soundtrack keeps reminding us) it seemed somehow fresh to have a scene with Burgundy, invited by the boss to dinner, trotting out “jive talk” in an effort to seem “hip” and “down with it,” but in fact it was as painful to look at as all the quoted phrases I just used.

The original Anchorman lacked a real satirical bite but was pretty funny. This sequel, with a better satirical target, since the 24-hour news culture is still very much with us, still mostly lacks satirical bite. Burgundy is the Inspector Clouseau of the news world, spontaneously or accidentally coming up with most of the dubious innovations of the post-cable TV news world — traffic chases on camera, Fox-News-style superpatriotism, focus on celebrities, etc. But beyond that the movie doesn’t have anything to say about those developments. It is simply a silly movie.

Now, being silly is okay. Interrupting the story with the odd fantasy sequence can be fun. And if the main characters are caricatures of womanizers, jerks, and idiots, I’m okay with that, too. But then, don’t show me that for 90 minutes and then follow up with a soppy, sentimental conclusion that asks me to have a big soft spot for these people, one that has them suddenly, and unconvincingly, developing a conscience (and/or a brain). And don’t have a big climax, an overblown successor to the West-Side Story style gang fight in the original, that is much more impressive for its guest-star roster than its humor quotient.

McKay and Ferrell are not going through the motions here. Instead, it seems like they may have tried too hard. If you’re into the kind of humor in the first Anchorman, you’ll probably laugh at something or other here. I’d bet there are more punch lines per minute than in almost any other comedy in recent memory (except maybe toward the end). But I’d also bet that, for most people, a lower percentage of them land.

IMDB link

viewed 12/4/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 12/18/13 (revised 12/26/13)

The Great Beauty (**)

“A feast for the eyes” (or senses) and “a love letter to Rome” are the two obvious accolades that came to mind as I watched this lengthy Italian drama, and, sure enough, a Google search revealed both phrases as frequently used descriptors. They’re phrases one might well use on a thinly plotted mood piece such as this, were one trying to compliment it. Or one might compare its auteur, Paolo Sorrentino, to his revered countryman, Federico Fellini. In any case, Sorrentino has a flair for the visually arresting. Whether in long shots of singing nuns in ancient edifices or dizzying close-ups of dancers in a club, as in two lengthy opening sequences, he gives you the sense of being a voyeur. In more than one scene, characters intently watch others for the simple delight of observing. And that is what this film is like.

At the center of all this is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who at 65 is undergoing a self reevaluation. The author of one acclaimed novel in his younger days, he’s made his living since then with celebrity interviews and profiles of weird performance artists. Lots of scenes open with incongruous shots of, say, a nude woman hitting her head against a wall. Jeff himself is a voyeur by both profession and inclination. As to why he has never written another novel, he says it’s because he like to party too much. Not married, he spends his days as a younger man Mike, hanging out in clubs, picking up much younger women, sleeping late, and so on. In the course of several days, he does all of this, has off-kilter conversations with his housekeeper, and meets with old friends.

Parts of this film grabbed me, as when Jep forces his interview subject, the naked head-banger, to explain her meaningless. But this is a self-contained scene; it exemplifies the sometimes brutally candid approach to life but is not a significant plot point. After a succession of such disconnected segments, the movie began to seem long. Also, I don’t necessarily mind a weird movie, or one that mixes in some fantasy sequences, but this movie at times has a kind of studied weirdness that put me off. An example is when Jep gets into an elevator and asks the man next to him about his suit, but the man says nothing. In another segment, Jep delivers a sermon on proper funeral etiquette while watching his love interest try on dresses in the distance. Maybe he’s talking to her, maybe to the audience, maybe to himself, but this seemed odd for the sake of oddness. We are all voyeurs when we watch movies, hoping to see some version of truth, and this movie struck me as a version of something else.


IMDb link

viewed 1/15/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/20/14

Philomena (***3/4)

Britain may not be as class-bound as it once was, but its history gives it a comfort with the topic. At any rate, class is a subject I’ve seen explored far more often in British films than in American ones. Some of the UK’s best known filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and this film’s director, Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen) touch on class themes frequently. The story here is the reverse of the one in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, in which the main character tracks down her birth mother. Here, Philomena (Judi Dench) is trying to find the son she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier. The two films aren’t otherwise similar, except in the way they bring together women who are not sophisticated with characters who are, and who are also better off financially. That other character is journalist Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan. Coogan also co-wrote the screenplay, based on a book by Sixsmith, who really was, as portrayed here, a former BBC reporter who had been forced to resign from a government post and was thus free to research the story of an Irish woman whose child was taken from her while she toiled seven days a week in a Magdalen laundry.

Another such laundry, a place where Catholic “fallen women” provided unpaid labor, was the subject of The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a bleak but moving film. Adding odd-couple humor and a kind of modern-day detective story makes this film much less bleak, but still moving. In the course of the story, Sixsmith comes to respect Philomena. It would be accurate, but make the story seem trite, to say that she has a different kind of wisdom that he does. Better to say that the film respects both of the characters, the cynical, atheistic Sixsmith, and the open-hearted Philomena, whose faith is unshaken by her betrayal by her church. The mystery of her son’s whereabouts is solved, of course, but in a way that is dramatically satisfying, somewhat bittersweet…and not at all trite.

IMDb link

viewed 12/3/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 12/3/13; revised 1/24/14

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

The Company You Keep (***)

Today, “liberal” is used as a slur by conservatives, but 40 years ago it was just as likely to be uttered derisively by those who favored more radical methods of change. Such people would have perhaps been sympathetic to the Weathermen, a radical spinoff of the Vietnam antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen became the Weather Underground, who after a series of bombings in the 1970s mostly disappeared. Some got caught, some went straight, and some stayed underground for a long time. (One who went straight, Bill Ayers, became a controversial figure in the 2008 presidential election.) There’s a very good 2002 documentary (called The Weather Underground) about the group.

Here Robert Redford, also the director, plays an Albany lawyer and, improbably, a single father of a pre-teen girl who’s drawn into the past when an old friend (Susan Sarandon), a Weather Underground member wanted for her role in in a botched bank robbery (resulting in a guard’s death), decides to turn herself in after living under a false identity for decades. For reasons best left unstated here, he winds up on the run trying to hunt down other members. A local journalist (Shia La Beauf) is trying to figure out what’s going on. And both of them wind up traveling around, giving Redford the opportunity to include a variety of locations.

While conservatives may object to the sympathetic portrait of former radicals, it should also be noted that, whereas the actual Weather Underground took care, after a fatal bombing in its early “Weathermen” years, to avoid harming individuals, this film centers around a bank robbery that results in a fatality, an incident that never took place. The script, from a novel by Neil Gordon, is by Lem Dobbs, who has written suspense films like The Limey, The Score, and Haywire rather than morally complex ones. Dobbs and Redford substitute some speechifying by the characters for a more ambiguous exploration of how far it is reasonable to go in service of a cause. The film, never really places you back in the past, when stopping the war seemed like a moral imperative (though the bank robbery is supposed to have taken place later). Instead, the story positions Redford’s character as a liberal exemplar, mounting a defense of liberalism against, not conservatism, but radicalism. La Beauf (an actual investigative newspaper reporter) makes the case for old-fashioned journalistic virtues. This is all subtext and can be easily ignored. As such, Redford has made a good dramatic thriller with an interesting structure and a bunch of famous faces — Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, etc. — in supporting roles.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/13 7:05 pm at Ritz 5

Safety Not Guaranteeed (***1/4)

One of the most original comedies in recent years, wherein an ad seeking a companion for time travel provokes the interest of three journalists, is also one of the funniest. The first feature for its writer (Derek Connolly) and director (Colin Trevorrow), it’s also the first lead role for Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Recreation. If you’ve seen the actress on that NBC show, her intern character, Darius, here will seem familiar. Projecting an unusual combination of sarcasm and sincerity, she’s the mistress of deadpan humor. When a potential employer, a restaurant, asks Darius whether she’d ever gone out of her way to do a little extra at a previous job, she simply says no. She’s equally unenthusiastic about her unpaid position at Seattle magazine, but agrees to tag along when one of the staff members (Jake Johnson, of New Girl) heads to a nearby town to see if the ad is for real. Another intern (Karan Soni) is the trio’s third member, a somewhat stereotypically introverted Indian guy.

 

Mark Duplass plays Kenneth, the guy who placed the ad, who will need to be persuaded to pick someone from the team as his companion. The boss makes the first pitch, but doesn’t pass the test—including questions like “Have you faced certain death”— because he’s kind of an ass. So the intern tries her hand. When asked the crucial question, she says if she’d faced certain death she wouldn’t be there. Kenneth is meant to be off-kilter but sympathetic, and so the snarkiness of the beginning of the film (and the Darius character) gives way to something more sincere while remaining funny. A covert operation to procure supplies becomes a brief but hilarious parody of suspense films.

The ending was not what I expected, and I had mixed feelings about it, but it was in keeping with a comedy that has a cynical shell and a romantic interior.

IMDb link

viewed 6/7/12 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/8–6/24/12

The Sound of My Voice (***1/4)

Some actresses complain about the dearth of good parts for women. Brit Marling writes them for herself. In Another Earth, she was an ex-offender hoping for a trip to an alternative future. In this, one of two film’s she’s written with director Zal Batmanglij, she’s a purported visitor from the future, or charlatan, maybe, preparing a cult-like group of followers to return with her to the year 2054. 

The key characters, though, are a couple (Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius) who’ve been admitted to her circle but are actually aspiring journalists aiming to expose her as a fraud. As Another Earth used its nominally sci-fi premise as a way to explore the guilt felt by its main character, The Sound of My Voice uses its cult story to explore the issue of trust. At the same time, it functions as a tight little mystery.

IMDb link

viewed 5/9/12 7:20 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/10–11/12

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

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

The Help (***1/2)

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 admirable in 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, but in 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 the hook, 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 or not, 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 allowing white 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 peddles racism 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.

* Or the way they speak. Aibileen tells her young charge, “You is smart. You is kind. You is important.” To me, though, this was more unrealistic for its appropriation of 1980s self-help-speak than nonstandard dialect.

IMDB link

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

Sarah’s Key (***)

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

Going the Distance (***)

It occurred to me, watching this, how even though technologies expand possibilities, our lives expand to run up against the limits of the possible. We acquire the ability to travel in cars, then take jobs farther away, saving no time. We can meet people from across the country, then strain to be able to see them. Long-distance relationships must have existed since the first cities were built, but now they are a more common feature among those who aspire to professional lives. It therefore seems like making this the basis of a semi-serious romantic comedy should have happened before now. In movies like Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, and even Gone with the Wind, a couple’s physical separation helps to create the romance. It is the sense of having overcome that separation that cements the relationship. But this movie is about the more practical aspects of being together, yet not together.

Justin Long and Drew Barrymore are the happy-but-unhappy couple in this sort-of-romantic comedy pitched at the same audience as the R-rated Judd Apatow comedies. (Director Nanette Burstein moves on to features after the successful documentary American Teen.) He’s a New York-based pop-star promoter; she’s an aspiring journalist in town for a time-limited summer internship. Recognizable faces form the supporting cast. Perhaps best is Christina Applegate sister character, whose way of quieting her kids—yelling “statue!”—is pretty hilarious.

Compared to a film like Apatow’s Knocked Up, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the humor here is less consistent, and the transitions from mildly raunchy sex comedy to kind-of-serious relationship drama are less fluid. And the film is wobbly when trying to tug the heartstrings. Barrymore may have been dating Long while filming this, but she made a better on-screen couple with her last romantic-comedy partner, Hugh Grant, whose Music and Lyrics character was also in the pop-music business. On the other hand, I did like the way these two meet—she curses him out for making her mess up as she tries to get a high score on an old Centipede video game. This is emblematic of Burstein’s approach, which also balances the male and female views more evenly than Apatow and company.

So, rather than a romantic comedy, this is really about the limits of romance, even with text messaging, Skype chats, and other bits of e-modernity Burstein deftly works into the film. I genuinely wasn’t sure how the story would end. In reality, absence does not tend to make the heart grow fonder. The difficulty of retaining a bond over time and distance more often destroys than cements a relationship. Separation prevents establishing a life together. In depicting that, this movie is welcome.

IMDB link

viewed 8/9/10 at Ritz Five (PFS screening) and reviewed 8/11 and 9/3/10

Crazy Heart (***1/4)

From the moment country singer Bad Blake, personified by Jeff Bridges, steps out of his old truck in front of a bowling alley, you can practically imagine the plaque on his arteries, the tar covering his lungs, and the alcohol saturating his liver. Bad is bad to his body, seemingly a collection of bodily fluids. But he’s very good on stage, even if he has to take whiskey breaks, and the stage is in a bowling alley in the Midwest. Actually, Bridges is very good, sounding like an undeservedly forgotten great from the outlaw heyday (the 1970s) of country music, not a singing actor. As it happens, give him a scraggly beard and he looks a lot like Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson must have been an inspiration to first-time director Scott Cooper, who had wanted to make a biopic about Waylon Jennings but instead adapted a novel by Thomas Cobb. It helps that the songs written by T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton are entirely convincing as old classics, especially the song that’s supposed to be Blake’s signature song. (“Funny how falling feels like flying…for a little while” goes the chorus.)

Blake doesn’t seem like a unique character, but rather someone who feels familiar from the first, even if you may not know anyone like him. (The 2001 movie Jackpot covered some of this same turf, but less successfully, and with lesser singing talent.) The next low-paying gig, the next bottle of whiskey, and the next (hoped-for) record deal keep him moving forward. He resents the success of his onetime backing-band member (Colin Ferrell, who also sings) who now plays His shot at redemption—a romance with a Santa Fe single mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal)—is a fairly obvious plot device, too. Yet the movie, like its central character, has an easy charm about it, and the portrait of life on the road, and Bridges’s captivating performance, make this worthwhile, especially, though not exclusively, if you like rootsy country music.

IMDB link

viewed 1/27/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 1/27–29/10

The Good German (***)

? Continuing his quest to make at least one of every type of movie, Steven Soderbergh turns his attention to the World War II mystery-thriller, utilizing black-and-white photography to give his adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s novel the look of a period film. George Clooney, working with Soderbergh for the fifth time, plays a war correspondent/army captain in bombed-out Berlin at the time of the Potsdam Conference. Tobey McGuire, playing a soldier serving as the journalist’s seemingly chipper driver, plays against type by turning out to be a black marketeer with a wide nasty streak. Cate Blanchett plays a German Jew, known well to both men, whose has managed to do what she needed to do to survive until 1945.

+ Soderbergh is always attentive to detail and has obviously seen a lot of film noir and other old movies, especially Casablanca, whose plot this somewhat recalls. Even the screen wipes used to transition between scenes and the noticeably fake rear projection in the driving scenes are reminiscent of an older style of filmmaking. So is Thomas Newman’s score. Only the language—more explicit than the censors once allowed—is updated. It’s perhaps more true to life, but jarring in such a context. Blanchett commands every scene she’s in, and it’s her character that the story turns on.

- The obvious comparison to Casablanca (whose famous ending is visually replicated here) is instructive. Both stories are about idealism in places where cynicism is the mood of the moment. Both are anchored by the memory of a past affair. Even though it’s conveyed by just a couple of brief flashbacks, the romantic back story in the older movie is enough that you feel as sucker-punched as Bogart when he and Ingrid Bergman are separated. The captain’s affair with his onetime protégé is not rendered with such sentimentality. There is some smart dialogue here, but no “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Replacing Bogart’s weary stoicism is Clooney’s journalistic objectivity, which is not quite the same thing, and is shed more quickly. The journalist is as much an audience stand-in as a full-fledged character. Thus I found myself less invested emotionally with the movie as I might have. Still, being negatively compared to an all-time classic is no great insult, and the thread of the plot still pulled me along, especially in the second half.

= *** On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 6 for the characters, an 8 for the mystery, a 4 for the romantic aspect, and a 10 for the look and feel.

IMDb link

Blood Diamond (***1/2)

 ? A huge stone found in a Sierra Leone diamond mine offers tantalizing possibilities, and danger, for the conscripted laborer (Djimon Hounsou) who found it as well as a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a journalist (Jennifer Connelly) with whom he crosses paths. The African country’s recent civil war forms the backdrop for this thriller that shows how diamonds are used to finance civil wars.

+ This isn’t a sprawling, globe-hopping movie in the manner of Traffic or Syriana. But for a movie that doesn’t try to do too much, it does give a remarkably good primer on the seediest side of the global diamond business while managing, in a subplot, to illustrate how child soldiers are “recruited” and indoctrinated. The corporation that buys the “conflict diamonds” called Van De Kamp, is an obvious stand-in for DeBeers. (It would make a whole other fascinating feature or documentary to look at the history of that company, which virtually created the market for diamond jewels and uses its near-monopoly power to regulate their scarcity.) I should mention that the movie is surprisingly action-oriented. Although Hounsou’s character’s story is the thread that the plot follows, DiCaprio’s character is the pivotal one. With this on top of his recent effort in Departed, the one-time Titanic pretty boy continues to demonstrate his versatility. (It took me a few minutes to get used to DiCaprio’s South African accent, which the South Africans on the IMDB message board seem to approve.) The movie doesn’t work if he’s an unbridled villain, but would also have seemed false if he’d turned into a Peace Corps liberal. Instead, he’s the kind of movie character you can discuss afterward and reasonably come to different conclusions about. Director Ed Zwick (Glory), who shot in Mozambique and South Africa, also captures the natural beauty of the land.

- I’m not sure where it would have fit, but perhaps a minute or so where someone explained the history of the tiny country where the movie is set would have been useful. However, at 143 minutes, the movie feels the tiniest bit bloated.

= ***1/2 This is one of the most powerful movies of the year. It’s a “problem” film that doesn’t come off as preachy. It’s also nice to see this and other recent mainstream films being set in Africa, both for the novelty and because it humanizes a place largely unfamiliar to most Americans.

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The Holiday (***1/4)

? In the US, the title conjures up images of Christmas trees and presents, whereas in the UK it more often indicates a vacation. Both meanings, and both places, come to the fore in this Nancy Meyers romantic comedy, in which an L.A. film trailer editor (Cameron Diaz) and a Surrey-based journalist (Kate Winslet) swap homes and try to forget about the men who’ve wronged them. Jude Law and Jack Black play the potential replacement models.

+ Meyers’s plots can seem too neat, but her women characters especially articulate familiar feelings. In the case of the journalist, it’s the feeling of being hopelessly besotted by one who regards you more as a friend with, or without, benefits. In the case of the editor, it’s worrying that your partner’s betrayal is really your fault, or maybe just that you won’t find anyone decent. All of the performers are engaging. Winslet just snagged a Golden Globe nomination for Little Children, but if I had to pick, I’d give it to her for this. Her expressiveness really makes a fluffy scene, like the montage where her character gets a look at her fabulous temporary quarters, work. Law’s character was so darn charming that it barely seemed sleazy when Diaz beds him minutes after they meet. It was also nice to see 90-year-old Eli Wallach in the role of a retired Hollywood screenwriting legend befriended by his temporary neighbor.

- The things that bothered me about this movie were little things, like the way the women swap homes on just a day’s notice, or the way Wallach’s character supposedly can’t find his own house but otherwise seems sharp. Mostly nothing in this movie couldn’t happen, but such small things heightened my sense that the accumulation of all that happens is, put charitably, wildly implausible.

= ***1/4 Meyers may well have used the title of her earlier What Women Want to describe her specialty, the wish-fulfillment romantic comedy for the professional woman. In WWW, the fantasy was that the chauvinist merely longed to meet a woman who was truly his equal; in Something’s Gotta Give, it was that the aging playboy actually longed for true companionship with a woman nearer his own age. And here, it’s the idea that a quick trip across the Atlantic will lead to long-term romance. But I bought the fantasy here. While keeping the pacing quick and the comedy sprinkled throughout, Meyers invests the movie with genuine emotion that made me gloss over the misgivings that, in truth, stayed pretty far back in my mind.

IMDb link

Good Night, And Good Luck (**3/4)

The title was the signature line of the primary subject, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. Murrow (1908–1965) is a giant in the history of mass media, but one probably at best vaguely familiar to the generations too young to have seen or heard his original radio and television broadcasts, the last of which aired 45 years ago. David Strathairn’s portrayal of the cool, intellectual, chain-smoking Murrow (who died of lung cancer) is brilliant. For George Clooney, who directed, cowrote, and costars as Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, and whose father was a TV newsman himself, Murrow is a personal hero. His movie focuses on Murrow’s See It Now shows about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954; McCarthy himself is only seen in historical footage of both Senate hearings and his See It Now appearance that blends in with the black-and-white film. On-screen text tells us that McCarthy had been targeting alleged communist infiltration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a fact few who see the film won’t already know. On the other hand, a lot of people won’t know about many other figures referenced in the screenplay. You don’t have to know the importance of CBS chairman William Paley in television history to follow the story, for example, but it helps.

The nearly journalistic approach Clooney takes is both the movie’s strength and its weakness. The use of historical footage and dialogue is a good move. The slightly archaic speech patterns portray a time now clearly bygone. The rigorous, methodical way in which Murrow critiques McCarthy is also clearly portrayed. His mixture of passionate advocacy and calm logic was probably not much more common then than now. The scenes with Paley (Frank Langella) are reminders that TV was always a business.

What the movie I think failed to do was make me feel the danger that McCarthy represented. By contrast, I was reminded of Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front. The Front, which starred Woody Allen, took on the related topic of Hollywood blacklisting and showed the effects of the “Red scare” on real people. It’s a movie I’d recommend to anyone. Clooney’s film is worthwhile for people with an existing interest in McCarthy or Morrow, but will probably come off as hopelessly dry to a multiplex audience.

IMDb link

circulated via email 10/27/05 and posted 11/15/13