Watchtower (***1/2) [played at screening only]

This intriguing Turkish drama brings two self-exiled characters together. A quiet man in a quiet place (in a quiet movie), Nihat (Olgun Simsek) has taken a job manning a mountaintop guardhouse. Seher (Nilay Erdonmez), the other main character is a college student who has left school to take a job as an onboard “hostess” for a struggling bus company. Part of her story becomes apparent when she suddenly becomes sick during a trip, but the first half of the movie is largely a careful set-up for the inevitable part where their stories intertwine.

However, what could devolve into a predictable storyline, in which two lonely souls find each other, is instead handled with subtlety and complexity, though with ambiguity that may frustrate some. For most of the movie, these are not talkative characters; there is no music to telegraph what we are meant to feel. Further, writer-director Pelin Esmer, a former documentary filmmaker, favors long takes where we simply watch the characters behave. So the movie is apt to frustrate those who favor quicker pacing or clear resolutions. On the other hand, those who appreciate character-driven stories will find a thoughtful drama that sheds light on the changing roles of women in Turkish society (but in a conservative region).

IMDb link

viewed 9/18/13 7:30 pm at Gershman [PFS screening] and posted 9/18/13

The Silence (***1/2)

A horror-movie gimmick of a plot—nearly identical crimes separated by 23 years—instead makes for a fine German mystery. We know what happened in 1986 — two friends, out for a drive, follow an eleven-year-old girl. One rapes her. The other, though shaken, says nothing. Now a small police force is looking for another girl whose bike was found in the same field as the other girl’s. Despite the premise, there is virtually no violence after the opening sequence, and only a couple of scenes are suspenseful in the manner of a straight thriller. Instead, director Baran bo Odar (adapting a novel by Jan Costin Wagner) holds your attention (and builds a lingering suspense) by following the eclectic troop of officers trying to solve this unusual crime as well as the parents of the missing girl, and the mother of the 1986 victim.

There are too many characters to truly flesh out all of them, but Sebastian Blomberg and  Wotan Wilke Möhring stand out as two haunted men. One is a cop who, grieving for his wife, seems barely able to function; the other is haunted by guilt and disgusted by his own desires. The film is as much about grief and loss as about what happened. A miniseries might better have developed the many briefly explored characters and subplots — like exactly what happened to the cop’s wife, the animosity between the retiring police chief (who still wants to investigate the new crime) and the incoming one, the way the marriage of the girl’s parents strains after she disappears, etc. But Möhring brings an eerieness to the storytelling that makes it mostly riveting.

IMDb link

viewed 4/3/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/3/13

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

Poetry (***1/4)

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

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

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/24/11

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (***3/4)

A mystery-thriller where the emphasis is as much on the mystery part as the suspense, this adaptation of Stieg Larrson’s bestseller satisfies on every level. A disgraced journalist (Michael Nyqvist), recently convicted of libel, takes a job investigating a long-ago disappearance at the request of a wealthy old man. His investigation draws in an equally troubled female computer hacker (Noomi Rapace) even as it stirs up the old man’s family, some of whom reside on the same Swedish island where the girl disappeared.

Beyond the whodunit, and the reason, are the characters at the center of the story. (They appear in two sequels by Larrson, although the movie’s ending is not the same.) Tattooed and punky looking, the young hacker is particularly compelling as played by Rapace, although an unconventional heroine. She and the journalist have complementary skill sets and personalities. The island becomes a kind of third character. At least once, or twice, the pair get out of a scrape that maybe they shouldn’t, if strict realism were being observed. But the movie makes up for that slight lapse by saving a twist for after we find out the guilty party. There’s also an emotional component to the characters that goes beyond most suspense films.

The Hollywood remake by director David Fincher awaits a 2012 release, but for those who can read subtitles this adaptation by Dane Niels Arden Oplev will be hard to beat.

IMDB link

viewed 5/5/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/26/10

Tyson (***1/2)

I admit I only saw this because I was invited to. But James Toback’s documentary was an unexpectedly revelatory portrait of the boxer who, after taking the heavyweight world by storm, increasingly came to seem like a human cartoon. Toback, known for features like The Pick-Up Artist and Black and White, built the film around five lengthy interviews with Mike Tyson. Aside from extensive footage of Tyson’s bouts and some news footage, chronologically ordered segments of these interviews form the entire film. But while the movie is in no sense objective—and Toback is Tyson’s longtime friend—it doesn’t seem like hagiography either.

While the champ, who became the youngest heavyweight champion (aged 20) in 1986, isn’t exactly articulate—his recounting of the time he performed “fellatio” on a woman in a toilet elicited snickers—he is able to speak with a perspective on his past that he lacked at the time. He chalks up his celebrated, brief marriage to Robin Givens to mutual immaturity. He dismisses Desiree Washington, of whom he was convicted of raping in 1992, as lying “swine,” while admitting to other bad sexual behavior, such as the “extracurricular” activity during hs marriages. The infamous ear-biting incident involving Evander Holyfield is also addressed. Yet the less sensational moments, such as the worshipful way he speaks of his first manager, Cus D’Amato, are most revealing. Whatever you think of Tyson, this unexpectedly fascinating film turns the cartoon into a human being.

IMDB link

viewed 3/29/09 at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/31/09

Nanking (***1/4)

If you know anything about the Chinese city of Nanking, you probably mentally precede its name with “rape of.” In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China, and by November its army had overrun Shanghai and began marching toward the then Chinese capital city, 150 miles away. Already the thriving city had been heavily bombed, but when the soldiers arrived, the real devastation began. This American-made documentary uses the recollections of elderly survivors as well as actors reading letters and testimony from the post-World War II war crimes trial. Surprisingly, there are several former Japanese soldiers on camera, at least one of whom seems rather nonchalant as he explains how married women made better rape victims. They tended to resist less, and the experience wasn’t much good unless there were two participants, he says. A Chinese man, on the other hand, weeps 70 years after the fact as he recounts watching his mother and baby brother get bayoneted and die slowly. There’s a good deal of period footage evidencing the cruelty inflicted, although most of it is in short clips. The bright side of the story, if one can say that, is the efforts of the few remaining westerners, most prominently American nurse Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), to protect the poor people who had not been able to flee the city prior to the occupation. Nanking doesn’t try to explain why the Japanese decided to invade China, or what made the Japanese commanders encourage such inhumanity, but it provides an easy-to-follow summary of one of the several great horrors of the 20th century.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 1/31/08

Rambo (**1/4)

Following by a few months the revival of his long-dormant Rocky franchise, Sylvester Stallone has done the same for action hero John Rambo. The simple title of this numberless fourth entry might suggest Stallone, who directed, was intending to recapture the feel of the beginning of the series, as with Rocky Balboa. But no, this is much more the straight action movie of the second and third films than the character drama of the original First Blood. As the story begins, the gruff, incredibly buff Rambo is a snake wrangler in Thailand who’s persuaded to escort some missionaries up the river to neighboring Burma. Thanks to brutal footage that precedes the opening credits, we already know about the government soldiers who have been brutalizing the countryside, hunting for rebels.

Stallone has called this an antiwar movie, but the anti-violence missionary leader comes off as a well-meaning but naive nincompoop. Rambo himself has become fatalistic and so does not interfere in the mission, but when the spectre of white womanhood being violated arises, his remaining shred of idealism is awakened. “Live for nothing or die for something,” as he puts it, thus expending a good portion of his dialogue. We are meant to deplore the soldiers’ thirst for violence, while at the same time the movie’s raison d’etre would seem to be to satisfy the audience’s thirst for violence. This is accomplished with stunning savagery, as Rambo and a team of mercenaries, but mostly Rambo, machine gun, stab, slice, chop, strangle and (it appeared) nuke their way through hundreds of mostly interchangeable baddies. Disemboweling one of the soldiers, Rambo’s delight seems to match their earlier debauchery. But hey, he’s a good guy, delivering the goods.

IMDB link

reviewed 1/27/08

The Kite Runner (***1/2)

Having seen Atonement the day before this, I thought the title could well apply to this adaptation of another best-seller, Khaled Hosseini’s semiautobiographical story based on his childhood in Afghanistan. The first hour mostly tells the story of young Amir’s friendship with a shy boy who was, nonetheless, his fierce protector. Also vividly portrayed is Amir’s father, a sophisticated, literate, man who nonetheless cannot repress his contempt for the boy’s cowardice. Although the father is only a supporting character, he is surprisingly multidimensional, and I wound up feeling that I understood him.

The relationship of the boys and their fathers (one works for the other) is not particular to the time and place. On the other hand, it may come as a shock to see the re-creation of 1970s Kabul, a place that, if not a sophisticated place, was nonetheless a place where a sophisticated man could find a niche. Also particular to the setting are the kite battles alluded to in the title. Director Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction, Stay) wonderfully captures this colorful custom of Hosseini’s youth. (He again collaborates with Stay screenwriter David Benioff.) It is before the Soviet invasion, before war, before the Taliban. Knowing about these things, the viewer awaits devastation that turns out to be as much emotional as physical.

The adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla), who has wound up in California, is a less vivid character, and plot and the prospect of returning to Afghanistan must sustain the film’s second half. Like Atonement’s Briony, Amir feels guilt but cannot undo the past, and so crafts an ending to his own story that will allow him to live with himself.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/24/08

The Proposition (***1/2)

 A morality play about brutal rape and murder set in the  frontier of Queensland, Australia, is the subject of this gorgeously shot, deliberately paced western, the debut screenplay by rocker Nick Cave.

A couple hundred years ago mostly British newcomers settled a new continent. There were some people there, but these they displaced, killed, or made servants of. In the dusty, rough-and-tumble interior, where a small-town sheriff might be judge and jury, they made a new civilization with little regard for outside authority. So it was on the Australian frontier. Nick Cave, the UK-based, Australian-born rocker whose dark albums include one called Murder Ballads, has published a novel, but this brooding western represents his first screenplay. Centering around a brutal rape and murder, it’s a kind of mystery whose relevations are mostly about motivation, not what happened, which turns out to be roughly straightforward. There are several well-known faces. Guy Pearce (Memento) is the anti-hero who, as the title alludes to, is offered the chance to save one brother by killing another. Ray Winstone is terrific as the lawman who offers him that chance, and Emily Watson is the loving wife whom he tries to protect from the ugliness of his work. The film is gorgeously shot, and, even though it may falsely set the viewer up for a more action-oriented movie, the shootout that begins the movie crackles with a frightening realism.

IMDb link

posted 8/16/13

Derailed (**3/4)

Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston star in this forgettably enjoyable thriller, set in Chicago, about an affair that leads to lies and blackmail. The romantic aspect isn’t much. The plot (adapted from a James Siegel novel by of Collateral scribe Stuart Beattie) has some decent twists, but relies too much on Owens being a) an idiot and b) willing to sacrifice everything for a woman he doesn’t know very well. The villain (Vincent Cassel) is so wily and versatile he’s hard to believe, but easy to despise.

IMDb link

circulated 11/24/05 and posted and slightly revised 9/24/13

The Bedroom Window (**3/4)

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