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

Nanny McPhee (***1/4)

Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay for this odd little gem about an odd-looking nanny (Thompson) who magically teaches five lessons to seven unruly children.

Emma Thompson, whose previously screenplays include Wit and Sense & Sensibility, brings a similar degree of literacy to this effort pitched at a younger audience. As well as adapting a trilogy of books by Christianna Brand, she plays the title role, though you might not realize it to look at the grotesque makeup effects applied to her. Colin Firth is the other star. A kind widower raising seven kids alone, he’s proven inadequate to the task. We might now call him overly permissive, but this is back in England, a somewhat art-directed England like the one at the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in a time before Dr. Spock and cosmetic dentistry. The kind widower’s children have driven away 17 consecutive nannies with their appalling behavior. The scenes of hurly-burly that establish this point are not really so different from the ones in Yours Mine and Ours and the Cheaper by the Dozen movies (and that’s three remakes I’ve referenced). Yet I found them so much less annoying here. One thing different, besides the setting, is that this odd little gem is told much from the point of view of the young folks, less from that of the exasperated grown-ups. At the same time, it doesn’t seem like a “kids’ movie.” Adult problems with money and family relations (specifically a half-wicked aunt played by Angela Lansbury) intrude. The adults sometimes use words that kids (the ones in the audience, too) won’t likely know. At the same time, they will be able to easily follow and delight in the story of the mysterious nanny who teaches the children five lessons with the help of her magic cane.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13

The Well-Digger’s Daughter (***1/4)

This World War II melodrama comes by its old-fashioned quality in part because it’s a remake of a 1940 Marcel Pagnol film. Getting the period look isn’t so hard, but the movie’s strength is to remind us that it is values and culture, more than style and technology, that truly separates us from the past. The title character (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is turning 18 as the story begins. She is “as kind as she is pretty” as her widower father and his younger friend agree. But, though she has spent time in Paris, unlike her four younger sisters, she is rather innocent. Her father (Daniel Auteuil) has only lived in the rural south and is rather traditional.

The story, which involves the debonair son of a prosperous shopkeeper, is not wildly original, but  the characters make a a strong impression. The showiest role is the well-digger himself, whose sudden changes of heart bring a measure of humor even as tragedy threatens. A lovely score by Alexandre Desplat captures the overall bittersweet tone. Auteuil, whose breakout role was as the star of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, adaptations of a Pagnol novel, here makes a strong directorial debut. With lush color missing from the original film, he brings out the bucolic qualities of the setting. Moreover, he allows the characters to emerge, especially in the crucial early scenes. Much of the tale hinges on the meaningfulness of two brief meetings of the girl and her young man. In lesser hands, this might seem corny. Mostly, it doesn’t.

IMDb link

viewed 8/5/12 4:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/9/12

The Way (***1/4)

The title refers, literally, to El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, a Christian pilgrimage route through Spain for the last dozen centuries. But Tom (Martin Sheen) is a widowed California ophthalmologist, not a seeker of spiritual truths. When his priest, offering comfort upon the unexpected death of his son, asks him if he’d like to pray, Tom answers simply “What for?” But he says it in the voice of one who has become embittered, rather than a skeptic.

 

Tom is not an expressive man, and he had a complicated relationship with the son. Perhaps it’s in a quest to understand his son’s refusal to settle down that Tom decides to complete the journey his son had begun before falling victim to a sudden storm. Or perhaps it’s simply to honor the dead. The son is played, in brief flashbacks that aren’t overdone, by Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed.

 

The lightly plotted drama strikes the familiar notes you expect it to—the journey being more important than destination, the importance of human connection, the meaning of loss—but it does so subtly. Instead of epiphanies, the movie lets its characters, especially Tom, emerge along the way. I appreciated that Tom remain ornery through much of the movie and quite the opposite of the silver-tongued president he played in The West Wing. As the title suggests, religion and spirituality obviously play a role in the plot, but there is no obvious message. In one scene, Tom and his traveling companions witness a centuries-old ceremony in a famous church. Only the faces of the four—Tom, a burly Dutchman, a bitter Canadian divorcée, and a prolix Irish writer— betray what they might have made of the whole thing. They don't say anything afterward. Estevez does not, in other words, force a particular meaning on the scene. In the end, we don't know how the journey will change the characters; it is enough that they will always remember it.

 

IMDB link

viewed 10/3/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/09/11

La Nostra Vita (***1/4)

My Brother Is an Only Child director Daniele Luchetti returns with the story of a construction supervisor (Elio Germano, also of My Brother) whose wife suddenly dies in childbirth. Left alone with three sons, including a newborn, he pours his efforts into a large project meant to provide for his family but that instead threatens his financial ruin. Though this isn’t a dark film, it’s a realistic story about everyday struggle. The widowed father is, though likable, flawed, and the inequities of Italian society are a subtheme. Illegal immigrant laborers are used on the construction site, taxes are evaded, and casually derogatory references are made toward foreigners. Yet overall the movie takes a kind view of human nature; ultimately, it’s a story about values and relationships.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/20/10

Harry Brown (***)

This is a vigilante movie with artistic pretensions and an elderly hero. Michael Caine, at 77, is half a decade older than Charles Bronson was when he made the last Death Wish movie. But this isn’t hack work. In fact, Caine gives one of his best performances as a grief-stricken widower angered when thugs target his best friend, who lives in a seedy London housing complex. As a portrait of grief and loss, the movie is quite good. There’s an aura of sadness about Caine even as he metes out some rough justice. Director Daniel Barber (working from a screenplay by Gary Young) takes the same spare approach as in his excellent short western, The Tonto Woman. On the other hand, the film can’t quite escape the trappings of its sub-genre. Harry and even the policewoman played by Emily Mortimer are solid characters, but the thugs are standard-issue villains simply put there to arouse Harry’s righteous fury. And ours. Just barely recommended.

IMDB link

viewed 4/11/10 at Prince [PFS Spring Preview Festival] and reviewed 5/18/10

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

The Boys Are Back (**3/4)

Clive Owen plays a sportswriter in this likeable, non-sappy adaptation of Simon Carr’s memoir about losing his wife and suddenly becoming a single parent. It’s partly about coping with loss and partly about finding his own parenting style as he makes a new life with his young son in south Australia. He also tries to bond with an older son from his first marriage who comes for a stay. Some tender moments, and some well-written ones involving a young mother (Emma Booth of Introducing the Dwights) don’t entirely make up for a storyline that mostly goes in expected directions.

IMDB link

viewed 10/1/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening]

Play the Game (**1/2)

This sitcom-style comedy pairs the tired premise of the playboy finding his true love with a mildly novel one about his efforts to score a new love for his widowed grandfather. Eighty-three-year-old Andy Griffith plays eighty-four-year-old Grandpa Joe. It would be nice to report that it’s a great comeback for the Matlock star, but the script isn’t there. Paul Campbell, of the 2008 version of Knight Rider, is the playboy grandson, who also plies his slick moves as a car salesman, not unlike the car salesman/playboy Jeremy Piven played in The Goods: Live Hard * Sell Hard. This writing/directing debut by Marc Fienberg isn’t as crass as that, but it does rely too much on easy gags about old people and sex. And to show us how the playboy has bonded with his true love (Marla Sokoloff), Fienberg relies on the old standby of the stunning coincidence. (They both carry around imported-from-England Curlee Wurlee chocolate bars. Yeah, sure.)

Overall, the movie is breezy and innocuous, and watching old Joe apply his grandson’s how-to-pick-up-girls techniques on nursing-home lovelies is sometimes amusing, if also forced at times. (Decide for yourself which it is when Joe, attempting some newly learned slang, refers to himself as a “chick maggot.”) And speaking of forced, it’s got one of these endings that is so pseudo-clever that it makes the whole movie seem insincere, even if it does surprise you.

IMDB link

viewed 8/25/09 (screening at Ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/28 and 8/31/09

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IMDB link

viewed 7/8/09 at Moorestown

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (***)

This family film spins the Loch Ness monster myth into a gentle family film about a Scottish boy (Alex Etel, of Millions) and his secret pet. Besides that, the story revolves around a British naval company whose commander seems to think a small village might become a major front in the second World War, the boy’s recently widowed mother (Emily Watson), and a mysterious handyman who helps out both mother and child. Despite all that, and the beast given life via 21st-century effects, the movie is at heart an old-fashioned tale of a time and place where a summer, even during wartime, would allow a young boy time to while away freely.


IMDB link

reviewed 1/11/08

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (*1/2)

Adam Sandler stars in this scathing, hilarious satire of American sexual attitudes…is how I’d have liked to begin this review, so I did. Unfortunately, what I actually saw was another dopey Adam Sandler comedy. He and Kevin James, of TV’s The King of Queens, star as Brooklyn firefighters who pretend to be gay to take advantage of a domestic-partners law. Understand, Chuck and Larry are so homophobic that they’d never actually do this, especially for the incredibly phony reason they’re supposed to here, but I guess that’s part of the hilarity.

Notwithstanding the gay twist, Chuck and Larry follow the well-trod path of movies like Tootsie and Soul Man. In the former, Dustin Hoffman learns to be a better man by pretending to be a woman. In the latter, C. Thomas Howell learns to be a better white guy by pretending to be a black guy. Here, Chuck and Larry, but mostly Sandler’s Chuck, learn to be better straight white guys by pretending, badly, to be gay white guys. The gay aspect isn’t all that new either; in 2001’s far funnier The Closet, Daniel Auteil spreads a rumor that he’s gay to avoid getting fired. His character doesn’t change his behavior, but watches others change in response, lampooning both homophobia and political correctness. Possibly the only intelligent sequence here is when James’s Larry confronts his fellow firefighters about their sudden chilliness, pointing out that Chuck was the same person as before. Up until then they’d spent the entire movie reinforcing stereotypes, not objecting to them. They don’t act like people pretending to be gay so much as people pretending to do a sketch comedy show about people pretending to be gay. With a city inspector trying to suss out their sham marriage, they worry that their trash isn’t gay enough. Interviewed by a lawyer (Jessica Biel), Larry says, “we’re big-time fruits,” when asked to reassure her that they’re not just pretending. Apparently, this does the trick. You’ll know the actual gay characters, though, because they’re either hitting on Chuck, wearing drag, or singing “I’m Every Woman” in the shower.

By virtue of being the only non-bimbo female character, Biel serves as the obvious heterosexual love interest for Chuck. Just like Dustin and Jessica Lange in Tootsie, or Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, she and Chuck become great gal pals, and so comes the inevitable moment in every mistaken-identity comedy, where the hero must expose himself as a liar yet convince the love interest that he’s become worthy of her. (It’s always a her; someone should do it in reverse.) Here the script draws upon the deep well of sympathy that Americans have for felons (see also John Q), resolving the storyline in perfunctory fashion. This actually leaves the heroes with the original dilemma that led to the ruse in the first place, but it’s doubtful anyone thought of that.

Surely, some sort of comedy sinkhole surrounds director Dennis Dugan, whose last Sandler comedy was Big Daddy. (In between, he helmed the awful Saving Silverman, the terrible National Security, and the lame Benchwarmers.) As it happens, this closely follows the frequent Sandler formula, exemplified in Big Daddy: two parts Sandler as a loveable jackass, then one part blubbery sentimentality. I have to wonder what the contribution was of Alexander Payne (Sideways), one of the four screenwriters. If you’re one of Sandler’s legions of fans, I wouldn’t want to dissuade you from seeing this. It’s the same sort of broad humor that made hits out of The Waterboy and Mr. Deeds. I’ll just leave you with this litmus test: Rob Schneider, the least of several Saturday Night Live alumni in the supporting cast, dons bad make-up and a bad accent to play a Chinese(?)-Canadian wedding official. If imagining that tickles you, the rest will have you rolling.

IMDB link

reviewed 7/23/07