Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


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viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

The Monuments Men (**3/4)

I’ve usually enjoyed George Clooney’s acting roles, but his directorial projects (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads) have mostly seemed more admirable than winsome. So it is with this one, which takes a solid subject, art treasures looted by the Nazis, and renders it more drily than I’d have hoped.

Not surprisingly, the cast is full of big names: Clooney himself plays the leader of a middle-aged band of art experts who don uniforms in order to keep the treasures out of German hands, or get them back before they’re destroyed. His recruits include Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, and Bob Balaban. But the best role is Cate Blanchett’s, an employee of the Nazis in occupied Paris who is happy to betray them, but also suspicious of the motives of the American (Damon) sent to enlist her assistance. Hers is by far the most complex character. Clooney has the biggest role, but his most significant function is to make a few speeches saying that art, the cornerstone of civilization, is what everyone was fighting for, so the mission is worth it. How more meaningful, I thought, it would have been to include a glimpse of the art before the war, rather than first encounter it in warehouses and similar settings, in bulk.

In terms of plot, this is a true-story version of National Treasure. In form, though, it’s mostly an old-fashioned adventure film. Put a bunch of colorful characters together, have them troupe around Europe, let fun ensue. But the tone seemed to me downbeat, yet without being especially emotional. Even when the monuments men come upon a cache of gold teeth removed from people sent to concentration camps, the moment seems perfunctory. Also present are multiple scenes in which the art men confront the enemy, or those who are potentially the enemy. I thought of Inglorious Basterds, in which similar moments crackle with tension. Of course, Clooney is a thoughtful man who is unlikely to make a truly awful movie, or an unintelligent one. Here he works with his longtime writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, and everything is executed with competence. But little pizzazz.

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viewed 2/12/14 7:30 at Roxy; posted 2/12/14

Man on a Ledge (***)

For at least its first half, this fun little thriller kept one step ahead of me. Why has a guy (Sam Worthington) about to step out the 21st-story window of a New York City hotel wiped off his glass and silverware? Why has this ex-cop been sentenced to 25 years in prison (from which he escapes in an early sequence)? Why does he ask for a particular officer (Elizabeth Banks) to be the one to talk him down? What’s going on with the brother he fought with at his father’s funeral? And what does a rich real-estate mogul (a deliciously nasty Ed Harris) have to do with it?

By the time a crowd gathers on the street below, it’s clear that this is not an ordinary suicide threat, but not what it is. Only when that’s all clear do things slightly unravel, when action gets substituted for smarts, the hero pulls a couple of unlikely superhero moves, and weapons are discharged, though the violence quotient stays low. I could talk about a couple of plot holes, but I hate to spoil things, and they don’t mar the main plot, which maintains the tension even though, of course, the guy’s not going to jump and ruin the whole movie.

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viewed 1/4/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/4/12

Fantastic Mr. Fox (***3/4)

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viewed 1/2/10 at Ritz Bourse

No Country for Old Men (***1/2)

Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

Everyone’s Hero (**1/2)

-->? Back in the old days when baseball was segregated, a Yankee groundskeeper’s young son, named Yankee Irving, undertakes to recover Babe Ruth’s stolen bat, aided only by a talking baseball called Screwie. It’s animated. The voices include Rob Reiner as Screwie, Whoopi Goldberg as the bat, Brian Dennehy as the Babe, and Robin Williams as the villainous owner of the Chicago Cubs. Chris Reeve gets a posthumous co-directing credit, and the late Dana Reeve is a featured voice. There’s some mild humor, like the way the scout who steals the bat keeps getting hit on the head.

+ Not surprising for a big-budget cartoon, old New York and the railroads that carry Yankee away are expertly rendered. Nobody ever says the words “Negro Leagues,” but at least the inclusion of a player for the Cincinnati Tigers might spark kids to ask about this interesting chapter of American history. The emphasis on rail travel helps evoke the era.

- Just because it’s a kids’ film is no excuse for an ending as schmaltzy as the one here. Yes, yes, if you keep trying you can do anything, it says. Okay, but no, you can’t. Not really. For example, the Tigers ballplayer who helps out Yankee won’t get to play in the same league as the Babe for another 15 years. And even if it’s a kids’ movie, I still think it’d have been nice to include some period-style music and avoid dialogue about giving kids a “time-out.” Personally speaking, I also had trouble with the idea that I was supposed to be rooting for the Yankees.

= **1/2 For kids under 10 or so, this G-rated movie should be fairly diverting, perhaps slightly above Saturday-morning cartoon level, but more like a solid single than a home run. A more authentic story might have added more adult interest, but escapist fantasy with a heavy dose of positive-thinking preachiness is the whole ball game here.

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The Protector (**3/4)

? A pissed-off Thai guy (Tony Jaa) heads for Sydney to recover his stolen elephants and kick some Aussie butt.

+ The obviously incredibly skilled Jaa uses fists, feet and the occasional weapon to face off against an amazing array of opponents, including the seven-foot Nathan Jones, who appears concurrently in Jet Li’s Fearless. All of the very many apparent broken bones mustn’t be real, but it looks close enough. The stolen-elephant idea seems novel.

- There’s a back story mentioning some family lore and explaining how the elephants are supposed to provide power to the king and are supposed to be protected and all, but basically everything else is just an excuse for the numerous fight scenes. Jaa is great at fighting but not the most expressive actor. Half of the Aussies sound more like Americans. The villains are supposed to have half the Sydney police force in their pockets but can’t even find a gun to shoot the hero. The editing is clumsy. And so on.

= **3/4 Nothing to recommend except the fight scenes. But the fight scenes are very impressive.

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The Pink Panther (**1/2)

Steve Martin reprises Peter Sellers’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau character. He’s not bad, but the screenplay he coauthored eventually falters.

The only comedy album I ever bought was Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy back in 1978. One bit I still remember is Martin imitating a Frenchman saying, “We don’t even have our own language. All we have is this stupid ac-cent.” I guess there’s still something funny to me about the idea, so well promulgated by Hollywood movies, that everyone in the world speaks English, badly. Who knew that Martin would be using his earlier-perfected bad ac-cent nearly three decades later to essay a role made famous by Peter Sellers. Given that Sellers, who last played bumbling Inspector Clouseau in that same year of 1978, is dead, Martin does a pretty good job of getting the laughs to be had, as does Kevin Kline (with an even worse accent) in Herbert Lom’s old role of Inspector Dreyfus.

Reprised from the Sellers films (all directed by Blake Edwards) are Henry Mancini’s famous theme, the plot revolving around the stolen Pink Panther diamond, the slapstick humor, and Dreyfus’s contempt for Clouseau. The uneven screenplay, cowritten by Martin, is new. The gags feel strained when they get too elaborate. The simpler ones are better. For example, when Clouseau learns that a dying man’s last words, before being shot, were “It’s you!” he tells his right-hand man (Jean Reno) to find everyone in Paris named “Yu.” The film falters in the second half for two related reasons. First, Clouseau is made to suddenly realize he is a laughingstock. Then, he is made to wise up and quite cleverly solve the crime. The idea behind the character, and the humor, is that he is always confident but never competent.

IMDb link

posted 9/11/13

The Ice Harvest (***)

A subdued film noir (with mild comedy elements and good dialogue) starring John Cusack as a Wichita mob lawyer who steals a couple of million from his employer.

John Cusack stars in this downbeat Christmas tale, which probably won’t linger in theaters until the holiday. He, an attorney, and Billy Bob Thornton have just swiped a couple of million dollars from the local mob in Wichita, Kansas. (Even if the movie does take its setting from the Scott Phillips novel on which it’s based, and even if it makes it look it like a small town consisting largely of strip joints rather than a city of 300,000 people, I have to give an extra quarter of a star just based on this novelty.) The director is Harold Ramis of Caddyshack, Ghost Busters, and Groundhog Day fame, but this isn’t much like those, or like Thornton’s other Christmas cheer-down, Bad Santa. In fact, it has the feel of the last movie on which writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton collaborated, Twilight with Paul Newman. It’s a subdued, old-fashioned film noir, complete with a femme fatale (Connie Nielsen). It’s probably boring if you’re looking for much action or even scenery, and the story elements are familiar, at least if you’ve seen some old detective films, but it does have well-written dialogue, suspense and some humor. Oliver Platt is amusing as Cusack’s drunken friend, who tells anyone in earshot that he’s pals with a mob lawyer (i.e. Cusack), though Thornton has movie’s only real laugh-aloud line.

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circulated via email 12/15/05 and posted online 9/20/13