Omar (***1/2)

One thing that occurred to me when watching this was that, while I’ve seen plenty of Israeli films that have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s hard to imagine a film about Palestinians that is not also, in some aspect, about the Israeli occupation. Omar (Adam Bakri) has to climb the giant separation wall that runs through the West Bank just to visit his girlfriend Nadia (Leem Lubany), a college student. In another scene, he is stopped and beaten by the Israeli security forces. The film certainly is from Palestinian perspective. But it would be a mistake to see it primarily as an anti-occupation film, even if its main characters, Omar and his two best friends, are involved in an anti-Israel plot. Instead, the film is about conflicting loyalties and self-preservation.

It’s better not to know much about what happens, but it involves the Israeli security forces trying to enlist Omar’s aid in capturing his friend. Omar doesn’t want to do this, but if he doesn’t he may never see Nadia again, let alone marry her as he wishes. Omar is the work of Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now), who gets strong perfromances from a cast of newcomers.
Despite the somewhat drab setting, the film is picturesque, with its shots of the giant wall and chase sequences showcasing narrow alleys; some of the most memorable shots in the film are those in which Omar looks in over the fence at the school his girlfriend attends, wondering whether he can trust her. It is such personal questions, not political ones, that dominate this film, right up to the shocker of an ending.

IMDb link

viewed 2/27/14 9:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/5/14

Jobs (***)

The late Steve Jobs was a classic rags-to-riches success story, an avatar of the tech revolution, and a peculiar, particular individual. This helped make Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography a fascinating read and a runaway bestseller, and it makes him a good film character. This biopic begins with a graying Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) introducing the product, the iPod, that assured that Apple Computer would remain an important company in the new century. However, the rest of the film is set earlier, with Jobs as the scrappy underdog. Director Joshua Michael Stern skips over his childhood and how Jobs’s father’s inspired his interest in technology (and the epiphany he had at age 12 when he realized he was smarter than his old man), or how he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Instead, it begins in 1974. The 1960s were over, but Jobs turned on, tuned in (to Dylan, especially), and dropped out of Reed College while continuing to audit courses he liked, such as one in typography that helped inspired his love of good design.

In nearly every respect, Jobs is a biopic that Jobs would find quite flattering. Even his tantrums seem in service of creating a better product, and ditto his early attempts to deny the paternity of his out-of-wedlock daughter. You can almost hear him saying How can I change the future of personal computing if I have to deal with a kid? And you’ll sort of agree. Likewise, it’s impossible to see Jobs’s foes at Apple — primarily Board Chairman Arthur Rock (J. K. Simmons) and 1980s CEO John Scully (Mathew Modine) — as anything but folks who just don’t get it. Jobs’s later success makes it difficult not to agree with that view, but Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s immaturity had some role in his eventual fallout with the board and makes it at least possible to question his choices. The financial success of Microsoft makes it clear that, as a business model, there was another path rather than the high-control, perfectionist model Jobs espoused. However, the film does bring across that financial success, while important, was not what drove him.

As a longtime Mac user, I may be biased, but despite the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of its subject, the Apple story is a good story. (Other aspects of Job’s life, like his role in starting Pixar Animation Studios, are not mentioned, or de-emphasized.) The film has the chronology about right, Kutcher is made to look uncannily like Jobs and, though I have not seen Jobs on film that much, he seemed to have his mannerisms down pat. (Josh Gad seemed well case as Wozniak.) Kutcher has a cockiness about him that works in the part. Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, and there’s an obvious parallel between the forceful personalities of Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, subject of the Sorkin-penned The Social Network. I expect Sorkin’s version of the story to better highlight Job’s difficult side, or present his story with more complexity. I expect it to have quicker pacing and more snappy dialogue; this one’s most memorable line for me came when Jobs threatens Bill Gates on the phone after learning that Microsoft planned to release an operating system — Windows — that imitated many features of the Mac interface. Like the products Jobs created, Jobs has most of the rough edges smoothed out, but is handsome to look at.

IMDb link

viewed 8/14/13 at AMC Cherry Hill [PFS screening] and posted 8/17/13

Frances Ha (***)

“Meandering” was the word I wrote down while watching this. It refers both to the plot and to Frances (Greta Gerwig), whose last name is not Ha. As it begins, she is an apprentice dancer living with her Sophie, a best friend with whom she is so close they are “like a lesbian couple who don’t have sex anymore.” Asked to move in by her boyfriend, she breaks up with him instead. But then Sophie, having found a nicer place, moves out. In New York City, good apartments are more coveted than best friends. And so Frances, who cannot afford her own place, becomes figuratively, and then literally, unmoored, finding new friends and new places to sleep.

Frances is the creation of writer-director Noah Baumbach and Gerwig, who gets a co-writing credit. Most of Baumbach’s films feature more combative main characters; that was so in The Squid and the Whale, probably his best film, and in Greenberg, his last one, in which Gerwig played the love interest of the title character. In Damsels in Distress, she proved capable of playing a very different type of character, but her affect here seems a lot like in Greenberg, a bit awkward, gangly even. Her voice has a buttery quality, almost a mumbly undercurrent. She is not combative, but falls between sweet and offbeat. (In a running private joke, a male friend calls her “undateable” when she is at her oddest.) Sometimes, mostly toward the beginning of the movie, she is funny.

And she is in every scene, so your response to her and Frances will be your response to the movie, which is about her attempts to find her way into adulthood — or about losing a best friend. Baumbach’s movies are very talky, and that combined with the New York setting (and white, educated characters), will remind you of Woody Allen movies, but unlike Allen’s movies, the characters are almost all in their 20s and living with roommates. That the film is in black and white may be a tribute to Allen’s Manhattan, but where in that case it gave the city an air of glamour, here it seems to render the city a little drab, perhaps symbolic of a woman whose life has lost a little color.

On the whole, I favor Baumbach’s last few films, with their sharper edges. But, as always, the dialogue here sounds natural, and I liked that Frances was a mixed bag of a character, not always acting wisely or with forethought, but finding ways to get by.

IMDb link

viewed 6/10/13 7:45 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/10/13

Beyond the Hills (***)

This drama comes from Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian who made the deservedly acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. That film tackled the subject of illegal abortion. This one is “inspired by” nonfiction books about an incident at an Orthodox monastery. The two main characters are two young women who grew up in the same orphanage but have not seen each other for some time. Meanwhile, one, Alina (Cristina Flutur), has worked abroad, and the other, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), has joined a strict religious order led by a bearded priest and lives an ascetic lifestyle.
 
For a time, I expected Voichita to see this patriarchal set-up for what it is and rebel. But she appears content, whereas Alina appears unhappy and needy. She hopes to resume the once-close friendship — how close is merely implied— and has little sympathy for the religious order. Neither did I, but I appreciated that Mungiu takes what appears to be a neutral approach. It may be too much to say most people will truly understand the nuns’ decision to live as they do, but the filmmaker himself does not appear to impose a strong viewpoint (though the ending, based on an actual incident, leaves less room for interpretation).

Mungiu builds his stories from the accumulation of detail, taking an almost documentary-like approach. These are fixed characters, and we see their inner lives only in watching their behavior. Only Alina, a clearly troubled young woman, exhibits a volatility, but even she does not change much in the course of the story. The tension does not hinge on revelations of secrets, but on the inexorable collision of religious and secular world views. This is a clash of civilizations writ small; slowly, it builds toward inevitable conflict. But…slowly. I admired the realism (there is no musical score) and the precision of the filmmaking while feeling impatient for the story to get where it’s going. I suspect the latter feeling will predominate in most viewers.

IMDb link

viewed 10/23/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East  [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/12–3/28/13

Ginger & Rosa (***1/4)

The more I see films about teens, the more I think they can be divided into films with age-appropriate leads, usually independent films about artistic types, and films in which actors in their 20s play the teens, which are usually more mainstream. But this must be one of very few in which the actor playing the lead is actually younger, by years, than her character. That would be the remarkable Elle Fanning, who just a few years ago memorably played a little girl in Phoebe in Wonderland, and who had a breakout role in 2011’s Super 8. Here she is ginger-haired Ginger, born when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped (as the opening shot lets us know), and now, with the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, worried that others will destroy western civilization, including her home in England. She’s an aspiring poet whose wheelhouse includes deep thinkers Simone de Bouvoir and Bertrand Russell. She plays 45s by the likes of Dave Brubeck on her little record player, with the tics and pops rendered authentically on the soundtrack.
 
Ginger and Rosa are the sort of friends who are so close they can only grow apart. (Rosa is more interested in boys than politics.) Writer-director Sally Potter establishes this with low-lit shots of carefree times that seem inspired by the French New Wave. If this were 1967, these young women might be getting high and listening to psychedelic music, but Potter has chosen to set her story five years earlier, centering the story around a small group of intellectual types (viewers may recognize Annette Bening and Timothy Spall in small roles), of which her estranged parents (Alessandro Nivola, Christina Hendricks) are a part, rather than a larger countercultural movement. Not that the film is especially heady; if anything, it’s about how intellectual pursuits don’t negate earthly desire, or disappointment. And it’s about Ginger’s relationship with a mother she does not respect and a father she idealizes. Potter is known for arty films such as Orlando and The Tango Lesson, but this one is a straightforward narrative that should satisfy those who like sensitive coming-of-age stories. It also announce Fanning as a real talent. She shows the ability to cry on cue and do an English accent, but it’s in a scene where she reacts to learning that her father is an imperfect idol that you can really see her skill — there is heartbreak written all over her face.

IMDb link

viewed 3/14/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/15–25/13

21 & Over (**)

Had this been titled 18 & Under it might have been an apt tribute to the teen boys for whom this may hold the greatest appeal, and for whom this mixture of drunken revelry, potty-mouthed dialogue (“I‘m gonna fuck you with alcohol”), and sexual titillation may seem transgressive. Of course, some of these teens may need to be accompanied by their parents, who are more likely to see this as old hat.

It comes from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the writing team responsible for The Hangover, which I kind of liked, and can be seen as a very loose rewrite, or rehash. Instead of The Hangover’s Las Vegas, the setting is that other center of collective debauchery, the college campus. Instead of four over-30 guys, there are three 20ish ones. Miles Teller  plays the obnoxious one, kind of a pimplier version of the Bradley Cooper character in The Hangover. His straitlaced counterpart is played by Skylar Astin; he makes noises during the movie about the need to grow up. Their friend Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), rather than disappearing a la The Hangover, merely spends much of his 21st birthday in a drunken stupor, just short of requiring medical attention, presumably. This jury rigs a plotline in which his pals are desperately trying to get him home in time for his morning med-school interview.

As with The Hangover, the comedic elements include a series of mishaps, recurring characters, crazy revenge-minded persons (sorority girls, a male cheerleader and his posse), a large wild animal, and, of course, the “one-crazy-night” plot. Yet The Hangover seemed, if not exactly clever, at least a little bit fresh, and if not exactly plausible, then inhabiting its own reality. It had some element of mystery, even. Mostly, this appears composed of recycled parts of teen comedies past, possibly grafted onto a discarded old John Hughes script. Jeff Chang (always referred to by both names) is the most appealing character, except for the projectile vomiting scene and the drunk-driving scene, but he doesn’t speak for much of the time. Given the odd bit of quasi-racist humor in the movie, it’s probably worth mentioning the complete absence, as far as I could tell, of black people. Otherwise it’s barely worth mentioning at all.

 

IMDB link

viewed 2/26/2013 7:30 at Ritz 5 [PFS] screening and reviewed 2/27–28/2013

Ted (**3/4)

Someone described this to be as perfectly geared to the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy, although any such boy might have trouble seeing it without a parent or guardian. This person, neither 14 nor male, wasn’t meaning that as a compliment, yet couldn’t keep from recounting a few of the funny parts. It’s that kind of movie, about what you’d expect with a plot about a man living with a foul-mouthed teddy bear that came to life when he was a boy, especially if it’s directed by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane. I've always found that Fox show more outrageous than actually funny, and some of the humor here, like the mildly homophobic gay jokes and ethnic humor, falls into that category. And some of the humor is basically watching a two-foot stuffed bear smoke pot and talk with a potty mouth…which can be funny, for a little bit. The bear, incidentally, has pretty much the same voice as McFarlane uses for Family Guy’s Peter Griffin.

The main human character is played by Mark Wahlberg. An overgrown child, he disappoints his employer and his girlfriend (Mila Kunis), though he has a good thing going in each case. Basically, he’s Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, but with an animated bear in place of the three roommates and a non-pregnant girlfriend. Adult-male roommates don’t complain about not having a penis, but some of the funnier moments are non-toy related. In one, Wahlberg rattles off about four dozen “white-trash names” in half a minute trying to guess who his best friend is dating. (Thus the complaint about the missing appendage.) Since there needs to be a story arc, eventually Ted finds himself in jeopardy. I suppose McFarlane is trying to pull off the same trick as in Lars and the Real Girl in which the absurd premise — dating a blow-up doll — becomes kinda sorta heartwarming. He doesn’t quite manage that, although it’s kind of sad to see even a non-talking stuffed bear lose a limb. On the other hand, notwithstanding that Lars had a sex doll as a main character, Ted has way more dick jokes. Beats it easily, in fact. If that sounds like a recommendation, you’ll enjoy this.

IMDb link

viewed 7/14/12 8:20 at Riverview and reviewed 7/21/12 and 7/24/12

The Shore [short] (***1/4)

Almost as gentle and lovely as the coast of Northern Ireland it depicts, this half-hour comedy-drama from Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road) reunites old friends who’ve fallen out. One man has moved to America and is visiting with his adult daughter; the other has stayed behind, poor but happily married.

IMDb link

viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12

Bridesmaids (***)

People have made a big deal out of this comedy because the leading role, and most of the significant roles, are played by women. That this is a big deal is kind of sad. Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig plays the lead role and cowrote the script with Annie Mumolo. (The director—a dude—is TV veteran Paul Fieg.) Wiig plays a lot of characters on SNL who talk in odd voices, and movies involving ex-SNL cast members have a tendency to be built around extreme characters, in some cases characters created on the show. However, in this case Wiig plays mostly regular gal Annie, from Milwaukee, whose upcoming maid-of-honor gig sends her into an early midlife crisis. Her engaged friend is played by her former SNL cast-mate Maya Rudolph.

Of course, there are some hijinks that wouldn’t be out of place in an SNL skit. These all involve the titular characters engaging in wedding-related activities such as dress shopping. (The festivities in question are as absurdly lavish as any such portrayal—working-class folks, like the heroine, rarely get married in Hollywood movies—but the comedy as much mocks such excess as fetishizes it.) In some ways these scenes reminded me of The Hangover, also centered around pre-wedding shenanigans. So I had to think about why I generally liked the zany, over-the-top plotting there but not here. And I think it’s that whereas the one comedy is mostly the characters reacting to bizarre events, this movie has the characters themselves behaving bizarrely at time. For example, Annie’s back-and-forth toasting tussle with a fellow bridemaid (Rose Byrne) struck me as ridiculous—I couldn’t see two people (one, maybe) actually doing this (and no one stopping them). I could have also done without the requisite gross-out scene. (I’m not saying I didn’t hear laughs in the theater.)

On the other hand, whereas The Hangover doesn’t try hard to be anything but funny, Bridesmaids doubles as a story of friendship. As the toasting duel suggests, it’s her friend’s possibly preferring another friend rather than her having landed a husband that sends Annie into a jealous tizzy. Maybe Wiig wrote the wacky group scenes and Mumolo the other ones, I don’t know, but I like the movie better in the (semi-)“serious” parts. To my taste, the best scenes are the ones with Annie’s love interest. Chris O’Dowd plays what seems to be the only cop in Wisconsin. His scenes with Wiig are charming, funny and as natural as some of the ladies-only scenes are forced and “outrageous.”

IMDB link

viewed 6/5/11 at Riverview and reviewed 6/5/11 and 6/6/11

The Social Network (***3/4)

It’s a little weird watching Mark Zuckerberg’s rise as a piece of history, since just seven years ago he was just a Harvard sophomore and the word Facebook was just a word referring to an online—or paper—yearbook for a social club. As the film begins, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) ruminates—frequently in the same breath—on the number of geniuses in China, his perfect SAT score, the rowing team, and the difference between final clubs and finals clubs. Dating him is like “dating a Stairmaster” says his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, before dumping him with a hilarious putdown. “Asshole” is the term she uses, and understandably, she doesn’t want to hang out with one. Yet there is almost no one more fun to watch on screen. What is the series House, after all?

Zuckerberg’s patter, and the putdown, are presumably the words of Aaron Sorkin, whose famously fast-paced dialogue graced the television series he created, like Sports Night and The West Wing. Sorkin’s dialogue is full of quotable lines like the above. Keeping the narrative in focus is director is David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac, Fight Club), veteran chronicler of the vagaries of human behavior. Though more or less chronological, the movie is structured around two lawsuits. One pits Zuckerberg against twin preppies, from whom, they claim, he stole the idea for Facebook. In the other the adversary is a former friend. I’ve seen courtroom dramas before, but this is a deposition drama. If the idea of watching someone get asked routine questions by lawyers in a conference room for large chunks of time is not your idea of high drama, you may be surprised. When the deponent is one as extreme as (the movie version of) Zuckerberg, it becomes a fascinating look at the character.

He’s being deposed in both cases at once, and is feeling especially hostile because, as usual, he knows he’s right. And maybe he is. Or not. The law has weighed in on both cases, but the ethics are debatable, and Fincher and Sorkin take the time to present the issues well. One is about the value of an idea. What is the idea of Facebook worth without Zuckerberg’s insights that have made it ubiquitous? The other case asks, What do we owe those who have helped us but are no longer needed?

Otherwise, the movie tells the history of Facebook, from its inception to the point at which it was already spreading globally. I’ve never used Facebook, but it’s still an amazing story. Perhaps Zuckerberg’s key insight was to see that students didn’t just want to chat with each other, but to know about each other. And so the addition of “relationship status” becomes a key moment. Zuckerberg may be an asshole, but he’s also hard not to be impressed by. And although he doesn’t really become nicer in the course of the movie, there is one thing that does make him seem more likeable, which is that Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) comes off like an even bigger asshole. Parker, the onetime founder of the mp3-download site Napster, is the Faustian character who lures Zuckerberg west. Where Zuckerberg is smug, Parker is just obnoxious. Where Zuckerberg is introverted, Parker is a party boy. Timberlake is terrific in the part.

There are a lot of terrific things in this fun, thought-provoking film.

IMDB link

viewed 9/9/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/9–/10

Jennifer’s Body (**3/4)

Screenwriters are the unsung heroes of the film world. Directors usually get the credit for a film’s success. But Diablo Cody is the exception to that rule. Maybe it was the weird name, maybe the stripper background, maybe her slangy teen-speak that helped her parlay a single produced screenplay into an Oscar, an Entertainment Weekly column, a Showtime series (The United States of Tara) and celebrity status befitting a starlet. So this, her follow-up cinematic effort (directed by Girlfight’s Karyn Kusuma) will probably garner this movie a little more attention that a genre flick like this might otherwise get. It fuses the high school drama with a teen horror film, and like Juno features a troubled teen girl at its center.

The troubled one is played by Amanda Seyfried, who gives a versatile performance starting with the opening, in which she's a very angry asylum inmate. We see her two-month journey from halter-topped good girl to orange-jump-suited badass. Semi-mean girl Jennifer, played by Transformers fox Megan Fox, is her BFF who truly transforms after an elaborate accident involving a bar, a band, and flirty banter. An unfortunate, bloody encounter brings out the diablo in Jennifer and, as often happens in this sort of movie, only her BFF can see it. (This requires you to believe that the police and almost everyone else are idiots.) Lots of guys want Jennifer’s body, and, after the accident, she wants theirs, though not quite in the same way.

Diablo’s hand is apparent in some of the dialogue, like the way the two girls refer to attractive guys as “salty,” and a few other elements stick out as original, like the application of the Faust legend to the indie rock band. (Seems it’s devilishly difficult to make it in today’s music scene.) The uneven relationship between the two girls is also a subtext. The scary parts are scary enough, the funny parts are funny enough, but nothing more. Jennifer’s Body would like to be the Heathers of the 2000s, or something along that line, but it’s not even up to the level of World’s Greatest Dad in satirizing high schoolers’ shallowness. Still, you could do worse if light horror is your thing.

IMDB link

Viewed 9/14/09 [screening at Ritz 5] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09

My Dear Enemy (**3/4)

A woman spends the day hounding her ex-boyfriend as he drives around Seoul trying to round up the money he needs to repay what he owes her. The slightly comic drama has a nice, albeit frequently melancholy feel to it, but its episodic structure is a mixed bag. The boyfriend spends the movie bumming money off of other women, and some of these visits are more exciting than others. Meanwhile, the personalities—though only a little of the backstory—of the two characters emerge. Judicious trimming would have improved a decent concept.

IMDB link

viewed 4/5/09 at Ritz 5 (Philadephia Film Festival) and reviewed 5/3/09

Mongol (***)

Here is the epic biopic of Genghis Khan, a man so prodigious as to be the apparent ancestor of millions of current humans, yet presented so purely that he is only seen here sleeping with his beloved wife. As Braveheart is to the Scots, so this myth-like tale is to the Mongolians. However, since the tale ends midway through the life of its hero, rather than giving him a Jesus-like sendoff, the myth is incomplete. Punctuated with period violent episodes, this production from Kazakhstan earned a foreign-language film Oscar nomination, and certainly the production values are there, but it’s the sort of old-fashioned epic where, were it about George Washington, it would mention the episode about chopping down the cherry tree, but not the one where he had deserters shot during the Revolutionary War. Still, not bad, and there’s some impressive shots of the steppes of Central Asia.

IMDB link

viewed 7/9/08 at Ritz East; reviewed 7/10/08

Friends with Money (***1/2)

Nicole Holofcener’s (Lovely and Amazing) latest, an ensemble piece about three couples and their single, poorer friend, continues to reveal a talent for portraying small moments that reveal a lot, and adds an extra dash of humor.

Nicole Holofcener’s third film is, like the others, chatty, personal, and intimate. Like her second one, Lovely and Amazing, it’s an ensemble piece. Catherine Keener (also seen in both of Holofcener’s earlier films), Frances McDormand, and Joan Cusack are the female friends, while Jennifer Aniston, once a Friend, is the friend without money, and the only single one. (The husbands also have significant roles, but are played by less-familiar names.) Having well-known actresses in the leads helps differentiate the characters, but mostly it’s the writing. The plots revolve around mundane activities like building an addition to the house, arguing over a parking space, and so forth. Far from being dull, the familiarity of these characters makes the movie compelling, as does a surprising amount of humor. Holofcener manages to portray women without group hugs, clothes-changing montages, and other things that get movies tagged with the derisive “chick flick” label.

IMDb link

posted 9/4/13