About Last NIght (**3/4)

So…David Mamet writes this play back in the 1970s — Sexual Perversity in Chicago — that puts him right on America’s culture radar as a master of dialogue, up-and-coming playwright, etc. It’s about two couples, sexual politics, and the rise and fall of one relationship in nine weeks. In 1986, it becomes the movie About Last Night…. Mamet hates it, but it does well and help establish Demi Moore and Rob Lowe as Brat Pack elite. It keeps some of Mamet’s dialogue but adds a dusting of rom-com, multiplex potpourri and sets the drama over the course of a year.

Cut to 28 years later, and the ellipsis is gone from the title, and it’s set in the age of cell phones, in, unfortunately, Los Angeles, which removes the climatic visual element from the seasonally timed segments. But it mostly follows the earlier film’s template; not only Mamet gets a credit, but so do Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, authors of the earlier screenplay. The primary couple, still called Dan and Debbie, are played by Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant. (In one scene, they fondly watch the Moore-Lowe version on video.) Kevin Hart and Regina Hall play the best friends/comic foils/cruder pair (Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins in the 1986 movie).

Further removed from the Mamet pedigree, the movie comes across as perfectly ordinary and pleasant. While the play’s men vs. women 1970s sexual politics are probably dated, this only slightly updates the politics while keeping out any edge to the characters and moving further away from Mamet’s dialogue. (Perhaps this isn’t all bad. Having just watched the 1986 movie’s opening dialogue, which does come from Mamet, I thought it sounded exaggerated and artificial; the replacement scene is a slightly more natural, if more generic, mildly comic story of an extra-special blow job.)

Bryant is a joy to watch, pun intended, but her character is so nice that the inevitable tension that crops up in the relationship seems manufactured. Seriously, her vice is insisting that everyone uses coasters so as not to leave a mark on the table. In this iteration, the plot about the man wanting to hang out with the boys and not be tied down or told where to put his glass is both an annoying cliché and not convincing. The fraught-with-sexual tension relationship between the bickering secondary characters provides most of the humor, although it too is entirely predictable.


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viewed 2/5/14 8:00 pm at University City Penn 6; posted 2/6/14

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (***)

James Thurber is said not to have been impressed with the 1947 version adaptation of his 1939 short story, which starred Danny Kaye. But then, the story itself is barely 2000 words in which Mitty fantasizes about being a flying ace, a brilliant surgeon, and a Navy Commander, all the while running errands with a bossy wife. It ends with Mitty facing an (imaginary) firing squad. Hardly enough plot for a short, let alone a feature. Kaye was well suited to playing Mitty, a “loveable henpecked dreamer,” as the ads for the movie put it, whereas Ben Stiller has usually brought a nervous quality to his characters. He is not a natural choice for the part then, but as the producer and director he had the luxury of casting himself. The screenplay is by Steve Conrad, who has managed to pen among the more creditable movies to feature Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Nicholas Cage (The Weather Man).

Stiller gives a less-showy-than-usual performance in a character that is somewhat underwritten. The story is what most stands out. With Mitty re-created as a bachelor working for Life magazine in the computer-dating age, the only thing tying it to Thurber is the fantasy sequences. Oddly, these are the weakest aspect of the movie, clumsily integrated into the story and seemingly there to provide the special effects crew with something to to. In one, Mitty fantasizes about beating up his new boss (Adam Scott) in a mercifully short sequence that looks like an Incredible Hulk outtake. Fortunately, Stiller must have gotten bored with them too, and the second half of the film mostly ditches them as Mitty abandons his milquetoast ways in a quest to find a missing photograph that will adorn the magazine’s last print issue, meanwhile trying to get the courage to ask out a new coworker (Kristin Wiig).

The odyssey that transforms Mitty is not altogether convincing as to what the character would do (though we don’t know much about him), as to what the character could do, or as to cell-phone reception in remote places. But as the film takes a tone somewhere in the haze between fantasy, comedy, and adventure — with a little mystery thrown in — this isn’t too worrisome. Those expecting the movie to be a pure comedy may be disappointed that it isn’t funnier. But those looking for a departure from the loud fare that dominates the holiday season may well find in this a bit of Christmas cheer.

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viewed 11/26/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 11/26/13

Delivery Man (***)

A lot of Hollywood remakes of non-American films change things for the worse; this remake of a Canadian film called Starbuck, which was released stateside just a few months earlier, changes the title, the actors, and the setting (Montreal to Brooklyn), but not much else, not even the writer-director. I do wonder whether it was boring for Ken Scott to remake his own movie. Virtually every scene is the same as in the original.

Once again, the story follows a happy-go-lucky meat delivery man (Vince Vaughn) whose easy-spending ways are about to catch up with him. At the same time, so are some of the 533 children, now young adults, that he fathered via sperm donations with the code name Starbuck. They’re threatening to sue to learn his identity even as his girlfriend (Cobie Smulders), having conceived with him the natural way, wants him to be just a sperm donor; she’d rather raise the child alone.

Clearly, some life changes are in order. Starbuck, aka David, doesn’t want to become an instant father to hundreds, yet can’t resist seeing what his progeny are up to. (His employment in the family business and previous allowances for incompetency allows him plenty of free time.) As in the Canadian version, this makes for a sometimes humorous, sometimes tender story. Compared to Patrick Huard’s version of Starbuck, Vaughn is a bit less scruffy, but the role of a genial screw-up suits him. (So, apparently, do scene-for-scene remakes: he played Norman Bates in the 1998 Psycho.) The lawyer/best friend character is played by Chris Pratt, who once again urges Starbuck to use an insanity defense when he’s committed no crime. Even the baffling plot points are recycled, but if you didn’t see the original version this one will be just as good, just as this partly recycled review should be just as good as my Starbuck review, if you haven’t read that.


IMDb link


viewed 11/19/13 and posted 11/19/13

Cold Eyes (***1/4) [screening]

You’ve seen movies like this before. (You could have even seen one very much like it, since this is a remake of a Hong Kong film.) A criminal gang with a polished mastermind faces off against an elite law enforcement squad. (A movie like that called Elite Squad is one of Brazil’s biggest hits ever.) The squad specializes in surveillance. They identify; they trace; they tag; they track. But, when it comes time to engage, they call in the tactical team, following protocol. They use tactics that, when employed against Will Smith in 1998’s Enemy of the State, seemed to obviously exceed the possible, and now, with electronic eyes surveying major segments of major cities around the world, seem increasingly plausible.

The heroine of this saga (Hyo-ju Han) is the squad’s newbie — code name Piglet. Perhaps because she is female, she gets to show a broader range of emotion than one might expect. The hero is the squad leader, Falcon, who gives her a stringent memorization test in the type of set piece that’s often a staple of this kind of movie. All of the squad have animal nicknames, and Falcon literally moves them (or wooden representations, actually) around on a chess board that represents the streets of Seoul. They even give their first suspect an animal nickname. Caught on camera buying a soft drink, he becomes a “thirsty hippo.” The movie begins with a bank heist and climaxes with a lengthy chase sequence. They’re quite well done, and while I think I missed a link or two in the chain of evidence that allows the squad to identify the mastermind, the chases are clearly shot, and the two directors have a strong visual sense generally. 

The level of violence is moderate. There’s some humor in the banter between the squad members. Again, nothing entirely new here, but a well-done thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/25/13

Trance (**3/4)

This reminded me of Inception, except that whereas Christopher Nolan’s 2010 thriller used a sci-fi premise, this uses hypnosis as the excuse for the mental jujitsu that supports its puzzle-like structure. James McAvoy has the role at the center of this puzzle; its his forgotten memory that the hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) is trying to get at, on behalf of a quartet of London art thieves whose leader is played by Vincent Cassel. McAvoy’s character, who works for an auction house, has been knocked on the head during the robbery.

Essentially, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 127 Hours), uses the hypnosis idea to keep you wondering about what is true and false, guessing about the characters’ (especially the therapist’s) motivations, and speculating about who will wind up killing whom. The script is by John Hodge, who wrote several of Boyle’s early films, and Joe Ahearne, who made a version of this for British television in 2001. It extremely slick but the imagery is not quite as visually arresting as in Insomnia, and whereas the Nolan film sidestepped questions about unreality by inventing a fictional technology, the hypnotism angle makes, say, Woody Allen’s comedy The Curse of the Jade Scorpion look like a primer on the subject.

This is not to say you won’t enjoy this, provided you accept that the characters will be meaningless appendages to the twisty plot, which itself will be meaningless flim-flammery, the movie equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. There is one thing that is surprisingly believable: for once, when a car catches fire, it doesn’t immediately blow up. So, keep an eye out for that.

IMDb link

viewed 4/18/13 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/18/13

The Secret World of Arriety (***1/2)

In the beginning of this charming tale, Arriety, now turning 14, bravely ventures outside in daylight, returning with a huge bay leaf that her mother says will last a year. But she has also been seen by a boy, though he is around her own age. This will mean trouble, because the boy is a “being” while Arriety, living with her parents in a small corner of a basement, is a borrower. Borrowers, as introduced in the Mary Norton novel of the same name, are tiny people who subsist on what full-size people don’t need, or won’t miss. This is one of at least five adaptations of Norton’s novel, including a 2011 BBC version, but it’s the first to use another title and, perhaps surprisingly, the first to be animated. In this way, the story becomes as natural as a fantasy, one that is also a coming-of-age story, can be.

The look of the film should seem familiar to those familiar with the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Sprited Away, Ponyo), who adapted the novel but left the directing chores to Hiromasa Yonebayashi, one of his animators. It’s less frenzied and has few of the grotesque touches common to Miyazaki’s other work, but the colors are just as gorgeous, and there’s a warmth to it. (The dialogue of the adults, at least in the dubbed U.S. version, is similarly stilted at times.) Incidentally, while the larger humans appear to be Japanese, the borrowers do not. (Arriety’s dad, voiced by Will Arnett, seriously reminded me of a young Harrison Ford. Amy Poehler is the voice of her mom.) They are in a foreign land. Compared to mainstream American animation, this is not necessarily slower, but it’s much quieter, content to carry the story forward visually at times. The plot is simpler than other versions of the story; the tone is sincere, not comedic. (A mildly villainous human, voiced by Carol Burnett, does seem a little goofy, though.) Although it gently raises the subject of death, it should be enjoyable to beings of most ages.

IMDb link

viewed 3/8/12 8:30 pm at Riverview and reviewed 3/8/12 (updated 3/18/12)

Jane Eyre (***1/4)

Haven’t seen the 1943 version with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as wealthy Mr. Rochester. Haven’t seen the 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version with Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt (and Anna Paquin as the younger Jane). Nor have I seen the 1970 TV movie (Susannah York, George C. Scott), nor the three different miniseries versions, nor, certainly, the multiple silent versions, or any other of the 22 versions listed on IMDB. Who knew? Haven’t read the Charlotte Brontë novel for that matter.

So I kind of lump in the Brontës with Jane Austen and English period pieces generally, which all seem to have a giant house—nay, an estate—a plucky put put-upon heroine, and a a lot of genteel, old-money folks, often contrasted with their lesser-born and/or poorer countrymen. Sure enough, Jane is a poor lass, orphaned as a pre-teen, sent away to boarding school by her aunt for being a little too plucky. The film begins with Jane at a literal crossroads—one of several striking uses of imagery by director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), and dispenses with this part of the story (in flashback form) in a few minutes. The main plot follows Jane’s employment as a French child’s governess in, yes, a large estate, and her relationship with its genteel, wealthy, but sharp-minded owner, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). The screenplay is by Moira Buffini, whose other recent adaptation was Tamara Drewe.

It’s notable that so many of these English period pieces are proto-feminist in their way, with convention-defying heroines, yet one of the few ways to express the heroine’s independence is in her choice of man. In fact, though, Jane doesn’t even do that. She states her mind, and he makes the choice to become intrigued by her. In the title role, Mia Wasikowska conveys an incredible expressiveness with her face that shows through her character’s shell of propriety and stoicism.

Although I can’t speak to what was left out of the novel, the movie weaves a credible story line without obvious omissions or the sense of trying to cram too much into the story. The plotting is simpler than Austen, and the movie is devoid of the fancy social functions in adaptations of Austen and others. The role of society and culture is present, but not so prominent. For the most part, though, this was a drama that was what I expected it to be, mostly a good thing.

IMDB link

viewed 3/31/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/4/11

The Housemaid (***1/2)

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” South Korean director Sang-soo Im uses a remake of a 50-year-old film to explore this idea. At the same time, like its predecessor, it’s a psychological drama. Do-yeon Jeon (Secret Sunshine) plays the title character, whose sexual liaison with her wealthy employer begins a surprising and unfortunate chain of events.

When the original version of this movie was made, in 1960, South Korea was a poorer country, and the family the girl works for has struggled to afford a nice house. Here, although we never find out the source of the wealth, it’s clear that the husband has never wanted for it, and that his wife, pregnant with twins, shares his attitude of entitlement. There are a couple of other significant characters not found in the 1960 version. Notably there is an older servant who has been with the family four decades. As the film goes on, we find that she is more than a stock character, but instead a woman with her own resentments and motivation.

The older film is a well-made, but at times campy, melodrama that winds up being a bit like Fatal Attraction. Besides the issue of class being much more prominent here, the other difference is that the maid herself is a much more thought-out character, really a different one altogether. In the original, she veers wildly between heartsickness and vindictiveness in a way that suggests she’s simply a crazy girl. Sang-soo’s film is much more sympathetic to the maid. For her employer, there is another quote, attributed to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, that seems apt: “In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.”

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/24/10

True Grit (***3/4)

Somehow, two of the year’s best movies are both taken from novels set in backwoods Arkansas about unusually self-possessed teenage girls on a manhunt. In Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence plays one looking for her father. In this Coen Brothers adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, Hailee Steinfeld plays one looking for the man who killed her father, then fled.

The posters for the film understandably tout the big names, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. But Steinfeld is the star of the movie, and her feature-film debut is arguably the equal of Lawrence’s performance. Steinfeld convincing renders Mattie’s erudite speech, which includes lines like, “My brother is a child and my mother is indecisive and hobbled by grief.” That’s by way of explaining why she, a 14-year-old, is the one seeking justice. Revenge might technically describe her quest, but “justice” seems more apt for the dispassionate Mattie. She’s not hobbled by grief or much of anything else, and as a character is nearly impossible to resist. Her sly negotiation over some horses her father had agreed to purchase is as entertaining as anything in the movie.

Bridges is Rooster Cogburn, the “pitiless man” played by John Wayne in the 1969 adaptation of Portis’s tale. He also gets some of the choicest dialogue (much of it taken from Portis’s novel), even if, in Bridges’s Nick Nolte-ish gravelly delivery, it’s not entirely intelligible. Rooster, frequently drunk, is the opposite of LaBoeuf, the Texas ranger Damon plays. Seeing his clothing, Mattie deadpans, “We have no rodeo clowns in Yell County.” And off the three of them go, quarrelsomely hunting the same quarry through dangerous country lovingly shot by the Coens and their director of photography, Roger Deakins. Deakins also shot last year’s A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, and other movies for the brothers.

This film lacks the sometimes-studied quirkiness of most of the Coens’ movies and therefore will be among their most accessible. Even if it retains Portis’s grim worldview, it’s tempered by his sense of humor, which is delightful because all of the characters are playing it straight. Thus it’s less of a downer than No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers film to which it might otherwise be compared. I found the setup for Mattie’s adventure more appealing than the more “western” part of the film, but even so this part avoids many of the expected clichés. Ending with an elderly Mattie, absent from the 1969 version, as the movie does, might seem odd, but the flashback structure is taken from the book. Although her narration earlier lets us know Mattie will survive her quest, the instantaneous passage of the decades ends the film on a mildly melancholy note.

IMDB link

viewed 12/15/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/15–23/10

The Next Three Days (***1/2)

You expect from the high-concept plot that this will be a cheesy thriller. Professor (Russell Crowe) seeking justice for wife (Elizabeth Banks) he believes was falsely imprisoned for murder. With no legal options, and her life draining away behind bars, he vows to get her out any way he can. If this were the Russell Crowe from Gladiator or American Gangster you would have one kind of film, an action-packed one in which Crowe muscled his way into the prison and killed off a dozen guards without breaking a sweat. But imagine the concept with the Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, maybe a little less brilliant, and a little less crazy, but pretty smart and every bit as obsessed. In other words, what would it take for a very driven regular guy to pull off a prison break?

While this remake of a French film (reset in Pittsburgh) is essentially a thriller, the suspense is of the sort that keeps you on edge rather than “thrilling” you. (The violence is realistic, but sporadic.) It’s a deeply unsettling film adapted by Paul Haggis. Haggis’s work can seem pretentious when applied to grand themes, as in the racism drama Crash. Here his approach that’s methodical and relentless (and nearly humorless), but never grandiose. Crowe is the picture of the man who is transformed by having the life he knew stripped away, yet does not suddenly become a superhero. In one scene, he’s nearly caught in his preparations. The moment having passed, he vomits. Banks, though her role is brief, does well to suggest the dispiriting experience of prison. (She reminded me of Sam Rockwell in Conviction.)

From Die Hard to Prince of Persia, there are zillions of suspense and action movies about men (or, less frequently, women) facing all sorts of peril to save someone. But unlike almost all of them, this movie really gives you the feeling of what it would be like if you actually tried to do such a thing.

IMDB link

viewed 11/3/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/3–11/19/10

Wild Target (**3/4)

Some fifteen million people went to see a movie featuring Bill Nighy and Rupert Grint this past weekend. For nearly all of them, that movie was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. But a much smaller number, whose fantasies presumably involve hired assassins, like the one Nighy plays, rather than teen wizards, would have seen this lightweight caper film. The essense of the caper film is to make the heroes criminal, if not by trade, then by circumstance, and to make the crime seem fun. Nighy is Victor, the middle-aged professional and Grint the callow “apprentice,” though he thinks his mentor is merely working “undercover.” In between is delightful Emily Blunt, who, though British, has somehow managed not to appear in any of the Potter films, perhaps because she is too young. Her character is neither assassin nor innocent. Having clumsily masterminded an art-forgery scheme, she is in fact Victor’s target.

If a threesome rather than a duo can be said to “meet cute,” and meeting cute can involve people getting shot in a parking garage, then that is how the professional, his target, and the bystander wind up teaming up. The bystander is Grint’s character, and although he is kind of a third wheel—Ron Weasley to Nighy’s and Blunt’s Harry Potter and Hermione—he does show some additional range. In predictable fashion, the other two bicker a lot, then suddenly not. The young lady’s change of heart is too facile, and the film is more fun when they are at odds.

A notable thing about this caper film is that the protagonist is a murderer, even if he is impeccably mannered, as is typical for the caper film. Usually we are encouraged to root for the hero of the caper film via the time-honored technique of making the villains scummy. That’s true here, as the targets are rival hit men, but it’s still unusual for the hero to be seen as having (mistakenly) shot innocent bystanders. In fact, part of the reason we are supposed to root for Victor is that he’s a better hitman than his rival, London’s top assassin. (However, he cannot bring himself to kill a parrot who keeps saying his name after he kills the owner. So he steals the bird.) When the apprentice—who feels bad even upon shooting a man in self-defense—finds out that Victor is not just a detective, one might suspect he’d feel some unease, but that would be more emotional heft than anything on display here.

Nighy, among the most ubiquitous UK actors (Love, Actually, Shaun of the Dead, Pirate Radio), gives credibility to the repressed Victor, who has always been a solo act ever since he took up the trade of his father. The humor is light, but generally on target, in this remake of a French film, but it is inessential.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/24/10

Dinner for Schmucks (***1/2)

The films of François Veber may not be known to most Americans, yet quite a few are indirectly familiar via numerous Hollywood remakes. A mixed bag, these range from the awful Richard Pryor vehicle The Toy (1982) to the better-received Birdcage (1996). (Once, in the case of Three Fugitives, he directed his own remake.) But this version of 1998’s The Dinner Game may be the funniest yet. Just as with the older movie, the plot involves a group who dine together and compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot as a guest. The idiot, Barry, is played by Steve Carrell; the straight man in this buddy comedy is Paul Rudd. Having similarly played a foil to Jason Segel’s goofball in I Love You, Man, Rudd has arguably managed to appear in the funniest Hollywood comedy two years running. (Maybe three, counting his small part in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008.)

On its face, the setup here is blander. Veber was willing to make his straight man less sympathetic, more deserving of the comeuppence he gets. Rudd plays a nice guy hoping for a promotion and feeling forced to go along with the cruel prank to get a promotion. He has a sweet girlfriend who thinks it isn’t funny. But, of course, it is, and while straying a little from Veber’s script, director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) surprisingly manages to make this version about as good. (He’s aided by the writers of the 2006 flop comedy The Ex.) Where the remake has the advantage is in including a few memorable supporting characters, most notably Jemaine Clement as an artsy variation on the Russell Brand rock-star character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Zach Galifianakis (of The Hangover) as Barry’s nutty boss, who thinks he’s mastered mind control.

The opening sequence is also worth mentioning. As lovely as it is funny, it’s a montage of taxidermy mice in elaborate dioramas, with the Beatles song “The Fool on the Hill.” Creating these scenes is Barry’s hobby. (In Veber’s version it was toothpick art.)

As Barry, Carell is like a modern Peter Sellers, tending to play a buffoon or a naïf, but always a different sort than the time before. (His nerdy look here helps.) Barry reminded me of Bill Murray’s character in What About Bob?, not because he’s similar, but because both characters are sympathetic yet annoying. Barry is not as annoying to the audience, but very annoying to the Rudd character. He’s the type who tries to help out but creates havoc. Who ends up being the schmuck is open to debate.

IMDB link

viewed 7/8/10 (PFS screening at Ritz 5) and reviewed 7/11–31/10

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

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

Everybody’s Fine (***1/4)

Back in 1990, when people didn't have cell phones, digital cameras, or e-mail accounts, Giuseppe Tornatore made the follow-up to the classic Cinema Paradiso. Nineteen years later, widower Frank (Robert DeNiro, in the role Marcello Mastroianni played in the orginal) still doesn't have those things, and views his adult children in the hazy glow of their childhood selves. For many years, he has related to them through his wife, who died eight months earlier. And so he sets out on journey that could easily be sentimental, but for most of the movie’s length remains more subtle. Only toward the end, with a present-day DeNiro having an adult conversation with the pre-teen versions of his children, do things start to get sappy. The movie runs on about ten minutes long after everything has been resolved, as if the American audience must be reassured that everything really is just fine.

IMDB link

viewed 11/19/09 [PFS screening at Ritz East] and reviewed 11/19–12/04/09

Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans (**3/4)

“It won’t be better, but I’ll settle for different,” sang the Waitresses in their non-hit “Redland.” So might be the justification for Wener Herzog’s odd reimagining of Abel Ferrara’s brutal 1992 cult drama. It’s odd enough that such a movie would be remade at all, let alone by the director of Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, and Encounters at the End of the World, true-life sagas of men in extreme settings. At first, this version seems like a somewhat ordinary detective drama, though the opening scene, in which cops played by Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer debate about whether to rescue a trapped victim of Hurricane Katrina or bet on when rising water will drown him, gives an indication of things to come. (The setting is transplanted from New York.)

Cage plays the cop that gets promoted to lieutenant and heads up the search for whoever massacred a family of African immigrants. But this ordinary plot turns out to be the device by which we observe the lieutenant aiming to score drugs, illicit sex, and a means to recover from gambling debts. And that, in turn, proves a device for what might be Cage’s most over-the-top performance yet, which is saying something. Drama gives way to farce as he wiggles his way in and out of trouble with his bookie, his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), his alcoholic father, his father’s alcoholic girlfriend, drug dealers, and gangsters. In one scene, the routine search of an amorous couple turns into a wild-eyed Cage trading some blow and a blow job (by the girl, in front of the guy, in a parking lot) for not arresting the couple. And the lieutenant, though bad, is not even the most unsavory character in the movie. There’s enough happening to keep things interesting, and a wacky ending that suggests that life is God’s cosmic joke, but it’s a close call as to whether Herzog’s remake is satirical or just plain dumb.

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viewed 11/23/09 at Prince [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/25/09 and 12/1/09

Easy Virtue (***1/4)

You might have missed the first adaptation of Easy Virtue, a play by the late Noel Coward. Back in 1928 it wasn’t a period piece, as it is now. It’s about a hundred years later than all of those Jane Austen adaptations, but this is the same kind of movie, aimed to appeal to the sort who like listening to well-crafted dialogue spoken by classy actors, watching the English gentry cope with their social inferiors (and money troubles), and imagining themselves living in impossibly large country estates. In this context, any American is a social inferior, and that is the predicament that the heroine (Jessica Biel)—a city girl and race-car driver, of all things—finds herself in when she marries. Her boyish husband’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas, in another fine role) is most dismissive, while her father-in-law, a rakish yet shell-shocked veteran (Colin Firth) is most sympathetic.

Director Stephan Elliott was last seen making the silly Ashley Judd-as-sympathetic-serial-killer drama Eye of the Beholder, but fares better outside Hollywood. He begins with a great sight gag, in which a sister’s dropped telescope falls smoothly into the arms of her father, who casually hands it off to his wife, who spies her son now arriving. Only a few scenes are that clever, but Elliot brings the characters into sharper focus as the plot winds forward, with a bit of suspense as to whether the American will stay with her husband in the country, move with him to London, or lost him to a romantic rival.

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viewed 6/25/09 at Ritz 5; reviewed 7/6/09

Jury Duty (***1/4)

This French adaptation of a 1962 novel begins with a murder, but is more psychological drama than thriller. The killer is a quiet small-town pharmacist who runs a apothecary with his wife. Despite his leaving evidence at the scene of the crime, the police arrest a young Algerian who was sleeping with the deceased. (Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, concluding a violent struggle.) Worries about being caught give way to worries that the druggist himself may wind up on the jury.

Beyond the well-shot courtroom drama, the plot reveals how prejudice can overcome judgment, and convenience can overcome conscience. Surprisingly, the killer is not the one who lacks a conscience.

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viewed at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/1/09

I Am Legend (**3/4)

What does Will Smith have in common with Vincent Price and Charlton Heston? They’ve all played Dr. Robert Neville in adaptations of a novel Richard Matheson published in 1954. The Price version, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, has the most plot-descriptive title. (The Heston version is 1971’s The Omega Man.) Here, we find Smith’s Neville having set up house in a barricaded brownstone in Manhattan. He’s possibly the only person immune to the viral plague that’s killed off most of humanity and turned the rest into aggressive zombies like in 28 Days Later, hence the need for the barricades.

Coincidentally, I guess, Dr. Neville is not only a survivor but a virologist who has been studying a cure. He’s a lot more purely heroic than the earlier Dr. Nevilles, singlehandedly trying to save the world while fighting off computer-generated zombies and still finding time to pump iron every day. Yet he’s not really an action hero, and only in part can this be classified as a thriller. Neville also spends his time chatting with his dog and listening to Bob Marley, whose best-known album title—Legend—and early death from cancer may have inspired the screenwriters, along with his message of peace.

Compared to earlier versions of the story, this is less horror, more science fiction, with the emphasis on what it’s like to be truly alone. Director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) makes good use of quietness and the eerily placid urban spaces. The screenplay is co-written by Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind. It reminded me of Cast Away, the Tom Hanks movie, only with the dog as the conversational volleyball substitute. And yet somehow I found that film more powerful, especially the ending, whose ambiguity this would have done well to emulate. There’s a good deal of flashback about Smith’s missing, presumably dead, wife and daughter that feels too perfunctory to be affecting, yet adds little to the plot. It’s a game effort at a thinking-person’s sci-fi, but one I can only recommend with reservations.

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reviewed 12/26/07

The Heartbreak Kid (**3/4)

The Farrelly brothers, Bobby and Peter, have followed their straightforward romantic comedy Fever Pitch with a return to the zanier sort of thing they do best, or most often at any rate. This is a remake of a 1971 comedy, starring Charles Grodin, for which Neil Simon wrote the script, but no one will confuse this with a Neil Simon movie. Ben Stiller takes the lead role, doing the thing he does best, which is the regular sort of guy who gets himself in trouble by lying.

The original was partly about a guy who can’t commit, but the new version leans much more toward being about a guy who makes a bad choice. Malin Akerman is a versatile comedic actress. She’s sweet in the early scenes and crazy, but still a little sweet, in the later ones. In a typical Farellys touch, she has a deviated septum, so disgusting things come through her nose. She also gets way too sunburned, like a character in There’s Something About Mary. This has the feel of that earlier classic by the Farellys, but it’s less funny and, obviously, less original. Still, it’s fun to watch, and never mean-spirited. (Although some people will probably disagree with the latter.) Just when things seems over the top, it pulls back and has some moments that seem more or less real.

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reviewed 10/12/07