The Judge (***1/4)

The Judge, a slick movie about a slick big-city lawyer and a cranky small-town judge accused of murder, isn’t groundbreaking or even particularly novel, but succeeds via competent execution. And who better to play this father-son pair than Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall? The Roberts seem to excel at taking these iconic male types and turning them into people.
 
The screenplay is almost too well-constructed. (One of the writers is Nick Schenk, previously credited on Gran Torino, another well-crafted story about a cranky get-off-of-my-lawn type old guy.) Like the way Downey’s character, Chicago criminal defense lawyer Hank Palmer, gets the call about his mother’s death at a dramatic moment in court. Or the way one of his two brothers has a penchant for making 8 mm home movies, all the better to supply real-time flashback scenes that fill in the backstory and help explain why Joseph Palmer, the father, is “dead to me,” as Hank explains to his precocious, almost too precocious, young
daughter. Or how, maximizing later dramatic impact, Hank has somehow managed not to find out a single thing that’s happened in the last 25 years to his high school girlfriend (Vera Farmiga), who, it happens, works at the local diner in Hank’s Indian hometown, and seems happy to see him.


The town, where almost all of the story takes place, is one of those nice movie small towns, not the run-down or dull-loooking kind often seen in rural America. But, to the good, the townspeople neither come off as petty and provincial nor as fonts of homespun wisdom. And the eventual trial, while featuring one of those witness-stand shockers that I suspect most trial lawyers and judges will hear only once or twice in a lifetime, has an outcome that makes sense. Most of all, while I wasn’t entirely persuaded that old Joseph was so difficult of a man that Hank would have avoided speaking to him for decades, their differences seemed real, as do the scenes explaining these differences, and his relationships with his brothers (Vincent D'Onofrio, Jeremy Strong).

The murder case, which involves a car accident that may or may not have been intentional, a lapse in memory (by Joseph) that may or may not be real, and some funny moments between Joseph’s two lawyers (Downey and Dax Shepard), is of medium-level interest, but the film is, maybe surprisingly, more than a courtroom drama. Again, possibly a little too perfect, but not false.

IMDb link

viewed 10/15/14 7:30 pm at Roxy and posted 10/18/14

Labor Day (**3/4)

Some movies stand out for their plots, and some for their characters. This drama has a plot —a mother and son taken hostage by an escaped convict — that would tend to stand out, but what in fact makes the strongest impression is the character of Adele, played by Kate Winslet. Winslet has rarely played this kind of character. Adele is a fragile woman, certainly not the kind of woman who would cry out when a quietly insistent man (Josh Brolin) with a wound in his side coerces her into giving him a lift in a department store. This occurs in a small New England town in the year 1987, but a 1987 that seems very long ago, at least the way that director Jason Reitman has filmed it.

The story is not told from Adele’s viewpoint, though. Rather, adopting the approach of the Joyce Maynard novel, it is told as a coming-of-age story for her 13-year-old son Henry. Henry (Gattlin Griffith) is the sensitive, but mostly average, child, of a mother who, according to the narration of the adult Henry (Tobey McGuire), is not so much devastated by the absence of a husband as by the absence of love. Her ex-husband, not a man who knows how to deal with a fragile woman, or a sensitive son, lives nearby with his new wife. And so, as if ordered up for the purpose, the convict shows up to provide a life lesson for the boy and inspiration for the mother. Yes, the man ties them up, but then he cooks for them and cleans up. Of his incarceration, he says, there is more to the story. We learn the truth in a clever way, but if Adele ever asks, we do not see it. The story is told like poetry, prettily, but my non-poetic self asks, Why does she not ask? Why does a man who’s served most of his sentence break out of jail?

I’m of two minds about the use of the present-day narrator. On the one hand, the device provides adult perspective to the confusion of childhood and a voice to an inarticulate character. On the other, as a literary, rather than a cinematic, device, the interruption of the disembodied voice can rob a story of a certain immediacy, and allow us to forget that the present we experience was conditional, not pre-ordained. And it’s a slight-of-hand, placing events decades apart together, pushing the past and present together when in real life memories fade and people continue to chance. The poetic ending of this movie, along with the tough-to-believe plot, pushes it slightly too far into Nicholas Sparks territory. Of course, many people like Nicholas Sparks, the author of Dear John, The Notebook, etc., and if you’re one of them, you’ll probably like this movie also.

IMDb link

viewed 10/25/13 8:00 pm at Prince Music Theater; scheduled to post 11/8/13; posted 1/31/14

Populaire (***)

For those who thought that the erotic possibilities of the manual typewriter had not been sufficiently explored in Secretary comes this tamer French film, set in 1959. Defying her father’s wishes for her to marry the son of the local mechanic, small-town Rose (Déborah François) comes to the slightly bigger town not for love, but to be a secretary. She proves to be a kind of a savant with the typewriter, but not so savvy at other office skills. But instead of firing her, the boss (Romain Duris) presents her with a flyer for a typing competition. When her four-fingered technique proves an impediment to achieving her greatest potential, he becomes her personal trainer, coaching her on the techniques of touch typing. (She types, he touches. Or wants to, anyway.) And so Rose blooms.

Thus this is as much a sports film as a romantic comedy. Director Régis Roinsard swirls the camera around like Martin Scorcese filming a boxing match. The tone is earnest, not satirical. It’s more amusing than funny. I’d have thought that the plot and setting would lend itself to screwball comedy, perhaps something like Down with Love, the Renée Zellweger/Ewan McGregor comedy that tipped its hat to comedies like Pillow Talk, also set in 1959. But François, while very good in the role, is a little too much of a nice girl, though espousing modern feminist sensibilities. And Duris, whose name suggests a French Cary Grant, actually plays a someone brooding character whose reticence supplies the requisite, though not altogether convincing, plot that allows the romantic and competitive portions of the plot to come together at once. The novelty of a typewriting contest and a general likeability counter the lack of originality of the last half hour.

IMDb link

viewed 10/2/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and posted 10/2/13

The World’s End (***)

Some people are calling this the third in a trilogy, because it’s the third movie, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, from the team of Edgar Wright (writer/director), Simon Pegg (writer/actor), and Nick Frost (actor). The only other thing that unite them is their certain brand of bro-centric humor, sometimes smart but rarely highbrow, frequently vulgar but not too low-brow (i.e. a minimum of pratfalls and jokes about body functions). Unlike the other two films, this is not really a genre parody, though it could be argued that there’ve been so many movies about groups of men trying to recapture their lost youth that it constitutes a genre of its own, and it is the expectations of those of those films (Old School, Wild Hogs, The Hangover, etc.) that are being subverted.

In this one, the story centers on five 40-year-olds who set out to re-create a legendary 12-stop pub crawl (the “Golden Mile”) that they failed to complete back in 1990. Pegg plays Gary King, the de facto leader of this bunch. Where the other men, played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan, have moved on with their lives, King has gone from the 12-stop program to the 12-step one, and doesn’t like it. So, he gathers up the old gang to return to his hometown and finish what was started.

The World’s End turns out to be the name of the last pub, the rest of which have names like The Trusty Servant and The Two-Headed Dog.

IMDb link

viewed 9/22/13 2:00 pm at Riverview; posted 9/23/13

The Hunt (***1/2)

It’s been a few decades since western countries began broad public movements to root out sexual abuse. No doubt this has been to the good and has reduced the number of child victims, but some people may also remember a number of false accusations in the 1980s against child-care providers, and a side effect may be that men who work with children become slightly suspect. I didn’t know what this film was about when I saw it, but this slight suspicion was part of my reaction when I saw Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a divorced father working in a small-town kindergarten. And, as it turns out, the plot centers around an accusation that he has abused his neighbor’s little girl.

In fact, he appears to be the victim of a misunderstanding. The first half of the Danish drama shows the steps by which entirely reasonable people could come to believe in the man’s guilt; the second is more about Lucas’s stunned reaction. Annika Wedderkopp sweetly plays the little girl who cannot anticipate, and only slowly comprehends, the impact of ephemeral remarks. The theme of wrongful accusation has been at the center of several classic films, including Twelve Angry Men, North by Northwest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Atonement. This isn’t a thriller like North by Northwest and doesn’t focus on the legal case like the other three; it’s a smaller kind of film, but powerful in its way. Director Thomas Vinterberg is still probably best known for his 1998 feature The Celebration; this film is its equal.

IMDb link

viewed 8/8/13 at Ritz East and reviewed 8/8/13

Barbara (***1/2)

Say “East Germany” to someone and it sounds nearly quaint, like other terms —Y2k, say — that seem in retrospect to have been obviously ephemeral. Other films I’ve seen set in the former German Democratic Republic — Goodbye Lenin,  The Lives of Others, and Beloved Berlin Wall — seem to reinforce that by taking place on the cusp of change, in Berlin. They rely on the fall of the Berlin Wall to provide a happy ending and a dramatic plot point. But, of course, the astonishing events of 1989 would not have been obvious until close to when they happened. This suspenseful drama is set in a rural area and takes place much earlier, in 1982. Its title character (Nina Hoss) is a doctor whose arrival in a remote town stirs the curiosity of her male colleague (Ronald Zehrfeld).

Barbara’s past, and the reason she has left Berlin, are mysterious. Barbara is a reserved person, by nature as much as by necessity, one senses. It would be difficult to make a film about a place like East Germany that does not reflect the near total control of the state over the everyday lives of its citizens. But the film reflects not only the most dramatic aspects of state oppression, but the efforts of decent people to live their lives in ordinary ways. A major subplot concerns a young woman forced into a work camp, but in some ways a scene in which Barbara’s apartment is searched is more unsettling. As government functionaries calmly search the meager space for contraband, Barbara seems almost equally calm (though she is hiding something, and so likely not); their visit is no surprise at all.

Revelations of both character and story unfold in ways that make the quiet film more absorbing as it goes along. Difficult choices lie at the heart of the drama. I wanted someone to be able to tell these people that if they could just hang on for a few years, they’d be fine. But this movie is a reminder that the future is neither assured nor predictable.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/12 7:10 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/25/12–3/7/13

Compliance (***1/2)

Just because something really happened doesn’t mean people will believe it, and that’s the only problem with this movie, which, nonetheless, a lot of people might benefit from seeing. It begins with a giant “based on real events,” which as often as not signals a story that heavily departs from reality, but, based on a little post-movie reading about the case, and ABC News footage from a 20/20 investigation, it would appear that this sticks pretty close to what happened in a McDonald’s restaurant—here styled a “Chick-wich”—in a Kentucky town. The film is done in a quasi-documentary style, and even the first few minutes of it give off the familiar vibe of what it’s like working in a low-wage retail establishment.

It is better not to give too much of the story away, but it begins with the manager of the restaurant (Ann Dowd), an ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman, getting a call. The caller states that he is a police officer, and that a patron has accused the young cashier there of stealing. This leads to an increasingly unpleasant experience for the young woman (Dreama Walker). Without giving more away, it’s worth noting that nothing than happens to her is worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a popular thriller, and yet I suspect that most people will feel as I did, much more squeamish watching this.

I saw the movie at a screening the other night. I was near the front and didn’t see, but the person leading a Q&A afterward said there were a few walkouts. I heard a few cries of “she is so stupid” and such even during the movie. The discussion was polite, though. I made a comment about the Milgram experiments as well as the tricks “psychics” use to elicit information from their marks and then feed the same information back to them to gain trust. The caller does that in the movie. I also disagree that the restaurant manager in the 20/20 piece is necessarily lying. She may be, but people’s memories have a funny way of reconstructing things in a way that makes sense to them. Her doing something so awful doesn’t make sense to her. 
 
But someone wants to know why anyone wants to see this. I would say, why does anyone want to see a movie like Saw III, in which we are somewhat made to identify with the torturer? Here we identify with the victim, and it makes us (me, at least) incredibly squeamish. Yet what happens to the girl is no worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a thriller. Why do we not feel so awful in these kinds of movies? Is it that they don’t seem real, that we are desensitized to that kind of violence, or that those movies attribute most or all of the bad behavior to outright villains, whereas this movie has seemingly ordinary people doing the ordinary things. 
 
I think it would be great if a lot of people saw Compliance, which reminds us that movies can present idealized models of human behavior, and reality is a lot more complex. 
 
By the way, the epilogue to the film [spoiler, sort of] tells us there have been many such incidents.

IMDb link

viewed 8/15/12 7:30 at Ritz Bourse

Bernie (***)

In the stranger-than-fiction category comes this small-town tale. Jack Black plays the title character, an assistant funeral director beloved in his adopted hometown of Jasper, Texas. Shirley MacLaine plays the wealthy widow, beloved by no one except Bernie, who is nonetheless driven to a desperate act. With the help of Skip Hollandsworth, whose Texas Monthly article inspired the movie and who gets co-screenwriting credit, Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, Fast Food Nation) has fashioned Bernie’s story into something like a docudrama. A few dozen actual townspeople appear in the movie in interview segments. (Wait for the ending credits for a glimpse of the real Bernie talking to Jack Black.) It would have been easy to make this into a straight comedy, or give the narrative an air of condescension, but Linklater simply presents the story as it happened, with commentary. It’s a pretty good yarn.

IMDb link

viewed 6/14/12 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/14/12

Turn Me On, Dammit (***1/4)

Movies about horny teen boys are legion in Hollywood, but the subject of teen female sexuality (and, to an extent, female sexuality in general) seems the province of Europeans. Provincial Alma (Helene Bergsholm), nearly 16, narrates this Norwegian comedy. Here’s mountains, here's meadows, she says; here’s her dull town that could be a small town anywhere with mountains and meadows. Alma lives with her mother, fantasizes about a boy, and sometimes calls a phone sex line to aid her fantasies.

If there is any common theme among tales of sexual awakening, it’s humiliation; in this case, a sexual matter makes Alma the undeserved object of ridicule among her classmates. Frank but not crude, this adaptation of a novel succeeds with deadpan wit and the palpable awkwardness and longing of many an adolescent.

IMDb link

viewed 10/30/11 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/11

Bully (**3/4)

Thanks to the ratings controversy surrounding the inclusion of a few words that virtually anyone seeing this would already have heard many times, this documentary from Lee Hirsch (Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony) arrives with more fanfare than most. It’s probable that the subjects of the film, none old enough to see an R-rated movie alone, would have heard the words actually directed at them many times. That’s what’s happening when we watch Alex, the most prominent “star” of the film, get harassed and punched on a school bus. Also prominent are Kelby, ostracized in her high school for being a lesbian; Ja’Maya, a 14-year-old whose bullies drove her to an impulsive, foolish act; and two other boys whose parents or classmate must speak for them, because they committed suicide. (For whatever reason, all of the students profiled are from small-to-medium-size communities in the South and Midwest.)

Alex, whose large mouth has gotten him tagged with the name “fish face,” is unique in that Hirsch was actually able to film him on the bus, in school, and at home, his refuge. His social awkwardness is more apparent than with the others. Besides the scenes with his middle-school classmates, we see administrators failing to address the problem. In a scene sure to provoke the most discussion, the vice principal at Alex’s school tells another boy that his refusal to shake hands with his tormentor means they’re alike. Sensibly, he replies yes, but I don’t hit him.

Would that there had been more insight into the ways in which bullying persists. Hirsch eschews an academic approach and so does not present any “experts” on the subject. But, given that the problem of bullying has been getting increasing attention for a few years now, perhaps he could have visited a community that has truly made an effort to address the problem. Perhaps he could have interviewed the kids who bully, or who did in the past. One kid, the best friend of an eleven-year-old suicide victim, does admit that he was a bully in second grade, but stopped as he saw the effect it was having. But he does not explain what was satisfying about bullying or why he began to feel empathy for his victims.


Bully is film that is sure to provoke empathy, and seems almost wholly directed to that goal. Perhaps even bullies will identify with the victims, should they see the movie. Adults may identify with the grieving/helpless parents, or maybe even the vice principal. She is certainly exasperating, perhaps even clueless, but she is also genuinely at a loss as to how to help. No doubt she is like many other administrators in many schools. (Kelby tells a different story; she encountered outright hostility from faculty as well as students. Although the film does not make this point, combating anti-gay harassment may require another sort of strategy.) In the end, the film is silent as to what, in fact, a sympathetic administrator should do to combat bullying. Its solutions begin, and end, with community awareness.

IMDb link

viewed 4/9/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/10 and 4/12/12

Seven Days in Utopia (**1/4)

I’m always suspicious of titles wherein one of the words is both the name of something and also means something else. Utopia is the name of the tiny Texas town where frustrated golfer Luke (Lucas Black) finds himself after blowing the chance to win his first big tournament, crashing his car, and tossing his cell phone in frustration. That’s another thing I’m suspicious of. Who besides characters in movies like Wild Hogs intentionally chucks a cell phone? Anyway, first person that lucky Luke runs into is also a once-promising golfer (Robert Duvall, Black’s Get Low costar) who just so happens to have settled in this town of under 400. Not quite the second person he meets is the waitress at the improbably bustling local diner, who appears to be the only pre-menopausal woman in town. (Melissa Leo plays one on the other side of that divide.) She’s got an obnoxious quasi-boyfriend, but by about the third day, she saying things to Luke like, “Sometimes I think you might be hopeless.” Seriously, who thinks anything “sometimes” about a person she met two days ago?

It’s nearly the same setup as comedies like Doc Hollywood or the animated Cars, only it plays out like the Karate Kid, if the hero had been a little older, his crush object prayed a bit more, and Mr. Miyagi was an old white guy who taught sport by making his student paint pictures instead of fences. And, inside of a week…well, nothing surprising happens. Duvall, playing basically the only interesting character, comes close to rescuing the movie. When he tells Luke about having “a purpose and calling that went beyond any scorecard,” it only sounds a little corny. Mainly though, the movie suffers from blandness. Even the fish-out-of-water element is pretty mild. Luke’s neither a big-city slicker—he’s from nearby Waco—nor an egotistical big shot. You’d think there’d be more humor given the title and the premise, but about the only funny thing in the movie is the name of Luke’s golfing nemesis, a Korean (or maybe Korean-American—he never speaks) called T. K. Oh.

Those with a taste for a certain sort of old-fashioned wholesomeness (the movie’s rated G and extols faith) may enjoy this, but they’ll likely forget it in about seven days.

IMDB link

viewed 8/29/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/6/11

The Guard (***1/4)

“What a beautiful fucking day,” exclaims Brendan Gleeson at the start of this Irish comedy-drama, and few actors can muster such depth of feeling in uttering such a sentiment. The paunchy actor plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, who finds himself temporarily partnered with an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) when some international drug smugglers, and a murder victim, wind up in his ordinarily quiet hamlet.

There are elements of a mismatched buddy comedy. When Boyle, speaking of drug smugglers who use submarines to avoid detection, says you have to admire their ingenuity, the agent says drily, “No, you don’t.” Quite a lot of the humor is dry here, as when the one of the smugglers, who’s English, corrects the others, who are Irish, on the matter of the nationality of philosopher Bertrand Russell.

The story also has the fish-out-of-water element, as one character actually points out. The FBI man’s introduction to Boyle involves racial insults, and his attempt to do some sleuthing on his own—it’s the sergeant’s day off, which even a murder investigation won’t impede—finds the locals pretending to only speak Gaelic. It’s unclear whether his race or his being an outsider has more to do with this.

The action element is also not neglected, although it’s saved for the ending. But, more than anything else, the film is a character drama and a vehicle for Gleeson. Boyle can seem like a bumpkin one moment, then show another side in the next scene. The agent tells Boyle, “I can’t tell if you’re mutherfuckin’ stupid or mutherfuckin’ smart.” In quoting this, I may falsely suggest that this is a rather broad film, but in general it’s understated and realistic. Boyle, a single man, is prone to insulting coworkers and committing certain victimless crimes from time to time, but has a soft spot for his dying mother, Croatian widows, and Disney World. It takes the length of this brief movie to reveal his true nature, and writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin McDonagh) lets the character percolate until the satisfying conclusion.

IMDB link

viewed 9/8/11, 7:15 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8/11

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

The Warriors of Qiugang (**3/4)

This is one of the five Oscar-nominated short films of 2010, the story of a Chinese village battling a chemical company whose waste water has contaminated the water and food supply. The details of the village, the company (which had been purchased from the government in 2003), or the pollution is less interesting than what the fight shows about modern China. There are laws on the books and a court system that provide a mechanism for change. There is even a national government that does not oppose them, and may even lend them support, if they can get any attention. The impediments are familiar, local officials in cahoots with private industry, although the details are sketchy. The picture I got is not of an ideological battle, but a battle of ordinary citizens against powerful interests, a story not altogether different from the time when the United States first recognized pollution as a serious danger.

The film can be viewed here.

IMDB link

viewed online and reviewed 2/2/11

Tamara Drewe (***)

A small-town setting is a good way to bring together a collection of characters, and a newcomer is usually the best way to stir up some plot among them. Tamara is that character, a duckling-turned-swan journalist who’s returned to the English village where she unhappily grew up. A good Cinderella story is nearly irresistible, and irresistible is what Tamara (Gemma Arterton) has become since her recent nose job. Tamara is not so much the lead character as the one around whom all of the action revolves, though she’s a nice role for Atherton, recently the female lead in Prince of Persia. This particular village is a writer’s colony, currently populated by a pompous, adulterous mystery novelist (Christopher Hitchens lookalike Roger Allam) and his wife, an American with writer’s block, a pair of mischievous teen girls, and the guy who dumped the teenage Tamara. Soon enough, there’s a rock drummer. And there’s cows, lots of cows.

Based on a series of comics by Posey Simmonds, in turn based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd—the American writer is a Hardy scholar—the light comedy is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity). Neither farcical nor subtle, it’s a pleasant romp about a few people whose lives need sorting out. You’ll hardly notice it takes two hours to do so, even though what needs to be done is pretty obvious from the start. No, this won’t be the film at the top of Frears’s résumé. Tamara Drewe is neither Hardy nor hardy fare. It’s more like a piece of candy whose familiar taste makes it no less pleasing.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/10/2010

Mademoiselle Chambon (***1/4)

A married builder (Vincent Lindon) and his son’s schoolteacher (Sandrine Kiberlain, Lindon’s ex-wife) find an unexpected intimacy in this French drama. And it is intimacy, more so than passion, that is the subject. Having hired him to fix her window, she admires his craft; having completed the job, he takes a few moments to look at the artwork in her apartment. Director and cowriter Stéphane Brizé lets the camera linger while the two observe each other, often without dialogue. Some will thus find the movie slow. Others may not care for the sympathetic view of a married man who at least contemplates an affair despite, as far as we can tell, having a happy home life. But it’s exactly this subtle, sympathetic storytelling that drew me in.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed

The Square (***1/2)

Unintended consequences is the theme of this Aussie thriller about lust, greed, and poor planning. The setup may seem familiar—a married man (David Roberts) and his mistress (Claire van der Boom) planning to runoff with her husband’s secret cash cache—but the execution is original. Superficially, the plot recalls Double Indemnity, among others. It has a plot like a film noir, but the execution is less stylized, the mistress is more an impulsive girl than a femme fatale, and the setting, Christmastime in a middle-class town, is a little different. (The setting being the southern Hemisphere, Christmas is celebrated in the summer, with an outdoor festival.) Still, the man’s fateful decision to go along with the plan backfires, and the consequences follow step by step, seemingly inevitably.

This is the debut feature of stunt man Nash Edgarton, from a story by his brother Joel Edgarton, an actor who plays the petty criminal hired to assist the scheming couple. Knowing this may suggest an Australian version of the Coen brothers, whose first film, Blood Simple, was also a thriller about a adultery in a small town. The Edgarton brothers’ effort is, as noted, less stylized, and the plot depends on at least one too many negligent homicides. But I liked the way the husband’s job as a construction supervisor is worked into the plot. The brothers may be ones to watch, in front of and behind the cameras.

IMDB link

viewed 5/20/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/26/10

Terribly Happy (***1/4)

Small towns in movies almost always come in four flavors: quaint, quirky, creepy, and cruddy. The Danish town here looks quaint, but turns out to be creepy, much like the one in The White Ribbon. In both movies, an outsider is the central character. Here, a new marshal (Jakob Cedergren), sent from the big city (i.e., Copenhagen), encounters diffident townsfolk who seem to be hiding secrets. A woman casually mentions some disappearances, like the local bike shop owner. And she tells him that her husband has beaten her, but still she returns to the man, who seems to be feared by everyone. Repeatedly, the marshal is told that he doesn’t know how things are done in the tiny town. It’s all mysterious in the manner of beginnings to a certain type of horror film, and I half expected the town’s mysteries to be explained via murderous ghosts, or aliens in human bodies. (A somewhat similar beginning begets comic mayhem in Hot Fuzz.)

But this is a suspense drama, not a horror film, and as much about the marshal character as about the character of small towns. It’s no allegory, like The White Ribbon, but a smaller-focused (and lower-budget) film along the lines of the Coen Brothers’ debut, Blood Simple, with maybe a hint of David Lynch in his less-outré moments. Director/co-writer Henrik Ruben Genz, who adapted a novel by Erling Jepsen, is no newcomer, but this is his first film to be released in US theaters. He also plans to remake the movie in English. I’m thinking Jason Lee, who bears a mild resemblance to Cedergren, would do as the lead. In any case, one thing that should not be changed is the ending, in which justice is served in a different way than I was expecting.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/1/10

Taking Woodstock (***)

Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee has shown a keen interest in the uniquely American aspects of our culture. Ride with the Devil was a Civil War western, and The Ice Storm evocatively depicted the suburban social climate of the 1970s. His angle into the celebrated 1969 festival is oblique, using as its source a memoir by Elliot Tiber, the motel owners’ son who helped arrange for the use of local farmer Max Yasgur’s land for the three-day concert.

The twin narrative arcs that Lee and his frequent collaborator, screenwriter James Schamus, use are the story of a sleepy upstate New York town turning into a hippie mecca, and the story of Elliot (Demetri Martin) turning into the adult he’ll become. The former is much more compelling than the latter. Elliot may be the storyteller, but even being a closeted gay doesn’t keep him from seeming kind of bland in Lee’s/Martin’s portrayal. (Despite being set in a small town in 1969, there is barely a hint of the pent-up angst depicted in Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.) The supporting players are better—Imelda Staunton, one-dimensional but vivid as Elliot’s bossy, cheapskate mother; Liev Schreiber, letting his fake blonde hair down as a cross-dressing security chief; Jonathan Groff, beatific as young concert promoter Michael Lang; and especially Eugene Levy, rescued from dorky dad roles to play Yasgur.

Lee’s strong visual sense sets a mood for the larger tale being told, of an idealistic youth culture in full flower. True, many of the participants were hopelessly naive. (A poster touting Maoism can be glimpsed.) Many of their hopes for a better world would be dashed. (American participation in the Vietnam War would continue for another four years after the festival.) Lee depicts a beautiful acid trip, but the drug wars of the following decades were still to come. But the festival, notwithstanding the acres of mud and massive traffic tie-ups, was for many as billed, “3 days of peace & music.” The movie is both happy and bittersweet in showing the joyful side of a troubled time. It’s the picture of a dream that can’t last.

Since too much of Taking Woodstock is devoted to Elliot’s quasi-coming-of-age tale, it’s not the be-all and end-all of Woodstock films, let alone films about the era. Lee and Schamus only go so far in placing the event within the greater 1960s counterculture. It’s a bummer that none of the artists or performances is shown. Barely any are even heard, although Lee pays tribute to the Woodstock concert film by intermittently emulating its split-screen effects. But, taking Taking Woodstock for the medium-scale lightly comic tale it is, it’s a limited success.

IMDB link

viewed 8/27/09 (screening at Ritz 5) and reviewed 8/28/09

Surveillance (*3/4)

This thriller by director Jennifer Lynch has just a little bit of the wierdness her dad, David Lynch, is known for, but with much less of a surreal tone and a script that goes downhill fast around the midway point. Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman are FBI agents who take over the investigation of a small-town murder spree. Some flashily edited interplay follows with the local cops, who mostly resent the agents, and with the witnesses being interviewed, who include a precocious girl and a wasted couple. But eventually things get way over the top. Typical are a couple of the cops, who spend their days shooting out the tires of passing motorists, then pulling guns on them. We are supposed to believe they can repeatedly get away with this. The mystery’s solution may or may not be predictable, but it’s not especially convincing, or subtle.

IMDB link

viewed 4/4/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 5/8/09