Thin Ice (***)

Like Double Indemnity, another film about an insurance man, or A Simple Plan, another film set in the snowy upper Midwest, this is about a scheme gone wrong, and about how men’s weaknesses can lead to their downfall. Greg Kinnear plays a Kenosha, WI, salesman who never misses an opportunity for a new client, even if the client is an elderly man (Alan Arkin) who doesn’t seem to have much income or property worth insuring. His weaknesses are gambling, professional jealousy, a blonde in a hotel lobby’s bar, and a certain lack of moral conscience. His adversaries are a mild-mannered violin broker (Bob Balaban) and a fairly unhinged (and darkly comic) security system installer (Billy Crudup).

I only noticed a couple of possible plot holes in the story, which comes from director/cowriter Jill Sprechter, last heard from in 2001’s Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. As events conspire against this antihero, I expected a certain kind of ending and got another, one that seems to make Kinnear’s character into an avuncular figure and that doesn’t really seem suitable, since he has previously displayed virtually no redeeming feature. It’s also rather clumsy in requiring the character to re-explain the entire preceding 90 minutes.

Though no doubt the final twist will delight some, and surprise most (but pay attention to the briefer voiceover at the beginning), I’d have just as soon left things more predictable. A surprise ending is, after all, a feat achieved remarkably easy so long one can make it contrived and wildly implausible.  That Sprechter’s film was re-edited without her involvement or consent after playing at festivals may explain why the conclusion seems both wrong and tacked on. Ignore it and you have a decent suspense drama. Replace it and you’d have a very good one.

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viewed 2/29/12 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/29/12

The King of Ping Pong (***)

The title of this Swedish drama portends something a little jollier than a pudgy adolescent’s anxieties. And yet there’s also some lightness in this story about teenage Rille, the older—but more socially awkward—of two brothers. Rille craves the attention of the his intermittently attentive father, who seems to have more of an affinity to the popular Erik, despite, as it turns out, there being some question as to his paternity.

Only while playing ping pong does Rille feel a sense of competence and authority, but even that gets undermined as things develop. Cowriter-director Jens Jonsson goes for a certain quirkiness rather than emphasizing the pathos in Rille’s plight. The story meanders at first, but a well-drawn main character, good performances by the child actors (all first timers), and Jonsson’s strong use of the snowy countryside mostly make up for the deficiencies.

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viewed at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/3/09

Lars and the Real Girl (***)

This is a comedy that’s far less extreme than its odd premise might suggest. Ryan Gosling is Lars, an emotionally stunted office worker living in a garage next to the home of his older brother. His kindly sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) is pleased and surprised to learn that Lars will have a companion for the cold Northern winter, but less so when it turns out that Lars’s new friend is Bianca, a love doll ordered off the Internet. I have to admit, this didn’t seem at first to be a promising plot, but I and, I think, most of the screening audience were won over by the unexpected sincerity with which it’s handled.

Yes, it’s a comedy, and a lot of the humor is exactly what you’d imagine, with the delusional but doting Lars treating Bianca just like, yes, a real girl and going through the stages of a relationship. (Sex, apparently, isn’t part of it; Bianca, though anatomically correct, is rather religious and wants to sleep in the house, not with Lars.) But the most obvious gags can only work for 15 minutes. What makes the movie something more is the sweet tale of a boy afraid of adulthood and the surprising reaction of the townspeople. Gosling, one of the few leading men who is effectively a character actor, crucially makes Lars believable. (Oddly, he has the same name as the other fictional Lars I could think of, Phyllis’s unseen husband Lars Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) Patricia Clarkson plays a doctor/therapist who treats both Lars and Bianca.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/11/07

30 Days of Night (**1/2)

What with vampires being so allergic to sunlight and all, why didn’t they think of this before? Head for Barrow, Alaska, where for a time (not actually 30 days, but never mind), the sun never comes up. That’s the premise of this graphic novel adaptation, which fancies Barrow as a tiny town of under 500 residents, most of whom split when the lights go out. The real Barrow’s population is close to 5000, mostly Eskimos. Maybe the vampires started off with ethnic cleansing, because everyone in town is white like the swirling snow that hinders the townfolk but later provides cover. The sheriff (Josh Hartnett) is the standard-issue leader type, and there’s a side plot where his ex-girlfriend (Melissa George) winds up sharing his space. Nothing like the threat of being bled dry to heal old wounds.

A lot of vampire movies romanticize their subjects, or at least give them a decent backstory. This is more like a zombie movie, though. True, the bloodsuckers are a lot smarter—we hear them scheme in their Eastern European voices (subtitled)—and stronger. But they seem to have few goals other than to wipe out the humans. Hence, as in many a zombie flick, the scared Barrowites who survive the initial massacre hole up in the buildings that they hope will provide the most protection, and the evildoers pick off the weak or unlucky. I kept wondering why it didn’t bother them to have all the blood dripping off their face; they just chow down and leave it there. Guess it looks all badass.

The setting is the one original element here, and more could have been done with that, like making some of the characters Inuit. You don’t get as much of a sense of everyone trying to wait out the days until daylight as I would have thought. It isn't as dark either; I guess all the events take place during the twilight that remains. I realize that it won’t do having it be pitch black the whole time, but a couple of scenes where the characters are truly blinded would have been scary. There’s more interest from a suspense standpoint than if the film is seen from a strict horror viewpoint. The ending, in which the gained knowledge of the vampires’ ways is used against them, is slightly above average, but the movie as a whole isn’t.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/26/07

Why Did I Get Married? (***)

Four and a half couples head for a remote Colorado lodge for a winter retreat in writer-director-actor Tyler Perry’s latest, adapted from his play. The half represents the “friend” one husband’s brought along on the flight, leaving his wife (Jill Scott) to drive there alone. (She’s obese, and the airline was going to charge her for two seats.) With this movie, Perry further establishes himself as the most mainstream chronicler of the black professional (or at least aspirational) class in America. He’s getting better at it too. Madea’s Family Reunion, his last film to date to feature his female title character, relied on borderline stereotyped outrageousness, and Perry’s cross dressing, for a comedy that seemed to exist side-by-side with a soapy melodrama. Daddy’s Little Girls, the one between that and this, leaned more to the latter. But here, the comic and the dramatic seem to ebb and flow naturally.

Naturally, given the title, all of the marriages here need work, and one seems a lost cause. That would be the one involving Scott’s philandered-upon character, whose future is pretty much telegraphed when she winds up lost (metaphorically and actually) in the office of the town sheriff, who lo and behold happens to be black. R&B star Scott brings as much emotionality to her performance as to her singing (which, surprisingly, is absent from the neo-soul-oriented soundtrack). Perry himself plays one of the husbands, a doctor married to a lawyer who’s too busy with her career. Even though he hasn’t had sex for months, he admonishes one of the other men about having cheated. I could sympathize with the other man, though, since his wife is the obvious shrew among the group, bickering with, berating, and embarrassing him (and others) for most of the movie, while providing the film with many of the laughs. One couple seems most idyllic (Janet Jackson plays the wife, a successful author), but a problem lies beneath the surface.

And so, the men talk about the women, the women talk about the men, the women talk to the men, and then everyone talks at once as all of the domestic issues come out in the open. It’s like a Dr. Phil episode dramatized, although, thankfully, without the doctor on hand. There’s not much subtlety here, unless you count the euphemism one of the cheaters uses for the venereal disease he caught. Perry’s tendency to want to wrap everything up cleanly results in pat, forced resolutions to most of the stories. It’s a wishful thinking sort of movie; maybe Perry wants to counteract the prevalent images of black people in cinema as, among other things, in dysfunctional relationships. Although for the most part Perry isn’t didactic, family values are on conscious display here. The couples are all married, of course, and more than one person makes casual references to God and Jesus in conversation. Notably, the women here are strong and independent, even, in a couple of cases, more successful, career-wise, than their men. Still, the men let them do all of the cooking.

While Perry still has room for improvement, he knows how to entertain, and it’s a credit to him that I didn’t have trouble keeping all of these characters straight. Maybe next time he won’t be afraid to screen his movie for critics.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/15/07

Unaccompanied Minors (**1/2)

? Almost assuredly this is the first kids’ flick based (really loosely) on a piece from National Public Radio’s This American Life. Back in 1988, a snowstorm held up all air traffic at Chicago’s O’Hare airport around Christmas. Some kids got put up in hotels; some had to spend the night in the big “UM” room. The fictional part here has the latter group reduced to a quintet of misfits who try to escape, chased by an off-kilter security chief played by Lewis Black. In other words, it’s a junior version of The Breakfast Club, aimed toward those way too young to remember that 1980s touchstone.

+ As directed by Paul Feig, creator of the short-lived TV series Freaks & Geeks, the movie champions the underdogs just like that series. The kids manage to make an airport look more fun than Tom Hanks did in The Terminal as they discover the joys of spare flotation devices and unclaimed luggage.

- On the other hand, the script (not by Feig) has little of the pathos of Freaks & Geeks, although the kids are supposed to be bonding because their mostly divorced parents have neglected them. Nothing here rises above the level of a Saturday-morning cartoon. The kids can all be summed up with an adjective or two. There’s the brainy nerd, the tomboy, the dumb fat kid, the snobby girl, and the normal kid who, for some reason, all the others agree to follow in his quest to pretend to be Santa for his little sister back at the hotel. The required sappy ending is no more believable than anything else. One also fears for the public’s safety if the airport security is as lax as portrayed here. No wonder the airport is fictionally called “Hoover” here.

= **1/2 I’m pretty sure my 13-year-old self would’ve found this to be fast-paced fun; my 42-year-old self found it pretty juvenile, but that’s what it’s trying to be.

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