The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (***1/4)

One wonders about the impetus for adapting a TV show whose last episode aired more than 45 years earlier (though the film rights were sold in 1993). Will the name mean anything to audiences not born when the spy series aired (19964–1968)? I suspect most people will be more reminded of an American James Bond film when they see this, and in fact Bond creator Ian Fleming had a hand in creating the character of Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn originally and Henry Cavill here.  They may also be reminded of other films by director Guy Ritchie, whose work includes Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and two Sherlock Homes movies. Notably, the Cold War-era setting is retained from the TV series, which makes sense given that the other main character is Solo’s Russian counterpart, Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer).

The series (like the Bond films) wildly varied in tone; Richie’s version is less serious than the early episodes while avoiding the camp of the later ones. It’s slickly edited with snappy dialogue and has plenty of action, and some violence, but with a modest body count. In other words, it’s like other Guy Ritchie films, and I liked it. Cavill plays Solo using a voice that sounds like it should be coming out of a 1970s margarine advertisement, and the presence of some familiar tropes — Nazi villains, a nuclear bomb plot, the womanizing spy, the femme fatale, and so on—makes it almost, but not quite, a parody. But it is intentionally funny at times. The plotting is complicated enough that I couldn’t have repeated it back to you right after I saw the movie but coherent enough that I could pretty much follow it while I was watching.

Unlike the TV show pilot, the film provides an origin story for both U.N.C.L.E. (the organization) and the Solo-Kuryakin pairing, including an exciting opening sequence in which Solo recruits an East German auto mechanic (Alicia Vikander) to help uncover a plot involving her estranged father and Kuryakin chases after them. The civilian recruit was also a common element of the series, but, even though the setting is 1963, the female characters get an update. Vikander’s character not only has to pretend to be Kuryakin’s fiancée but also gets to use her mechanic skills. And Elizabeth Debicki plays a wealthy woman who wants to bed the two agents, or kill them, or both.

Probably the first half of the movie is better, because it’s a little more original, but it’s entertaining to the end.

IMDb link


viewed 8/10/15 7;30 at Ritz 5; posted 8/22/15

A Hard Day (***1/2)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from crime films, it’s that lying about a small crime is always a bad idea. At least for movie characters like police Detective Ko (Lee Sun-kyun), who hits someone while driving on a dark highway on his way to his mother’s funeral, trying to cover his tracks creates one problem after another. Perhaps being investigated by internal affairs has messed up his judgment, though it doesn’t seem to have affected his ability to think up clever ways to cover his tracks, including, in one hilarious sequence, the truly resourceful employment of a children’s toy, an air vent, and a casket.

The tone is light and funny at first, but as Ko realizes he’s gathered an inadvertent enemy (Jin-Woong Choi), the thriller and action elements take precedence. Still, the film is extremely clever to the end, and the humor doesn’t entirely disappear even as more violent elements come to the fore. The inevitable car chase has one the oddest, most amusing conclusions I’ve seen. This was a word-of-mouth hit in South Korea, and only the language barrier would prevent a similar success elsewhere, at least with those who don’t equate a high body count with quality.

IMDb link

viewed 10/23/14 9:40 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

Locke (***1/2)

For awhile, screenwriters didn’t know what to do with cell phones. They’d have characters  bizarrely toss them away (e.g., Wild Hogs) or wander improbably into places with no signal, just so the characters wouldn’t be able to escape elaborately concocted predicaments with a call. But, a decade on, whole plots are being predicated on the existence of mobile technology. How different, and dull, would a film like Buried have been if its main character had been buried alive without a phone?

Locke is like Buried in that it features just one actor (Tom Hardy) on screen for the entire length of the film, plus a number of characters who are only heard. Locke is in a car, and is only buried in responsibilities. Driving toward London, he will be missing the football match he’s promised to watch with his son. Also, he will be missing the first day of his company’s most ambitious project, a skyscraper on which he is the construction supervisor. Also, the woman, not his wife, whom he slept with on a business trip is about to give birth to his baby. He intends to be with her. These are the key plot points, all provided in the first 15 minutes.

Imagine you are having an argument with the sort of person whom, no matter how much you yell at him, he continues to speak in a calm voice to the point where it becomes irritating. Imagine it with a Welsh accent and you may well picture the character of Ivan Locke, who imagines that all mistakes can be put to right, and that it is important to do the right thing, even if in doing so he must let down his family and coworkers.

This is the setup for a high-concept thriller, and yet most of suspense is about how Locke will behave, not what, in the larger sense, will happen. The writer-director, Steve Knight, was the screenwriter on some excellent, character-driven thrillers — Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Closed Circuit —and, with Redemption, his directorial debut, gave Jason Statham perhaps his most fleshed-out role to date. Locke may take place on a fast highway, but its title character always drives the speed limit.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/14 7:25 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 5/22/14

Bethlehem (***)

A sort of companion to Omar, the excellent Palestinian film, Bethlehem tells the story of Razi (Tsahi Halevi), who works for Israel’s security agency Shin Bet, and Sanfur (Shadi Mar'i), a Palestinian teenager who acts as one of the informants Razi manages. Over time, the two have developed something like a father-son relationship. But it is Razi’s job to exploit that relationship to catch terrorists, while Sanfur knows that his assistance to Razi places him in danger if it ever became known.

Directed by Yuval Adler, a first-time Israeli director, this isn’t quite as accomplished as Omar, but it is certainly worthwhile on its own. Both films explore the intersection of the personal and the political, and both involve informants, but Bethlehem has a broader scope in some ways, not only showing the viewpoints of its two main characters, but also conflicts among the Palestinian Authority, the more radical Hamas, and the extreme al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Among the actors, almost all of whom are appearing on screen for the first time, the strongest impressions are made by Halevi and Hitham Omari, as a Bedouin who leads a group of al-Aqsa fighters. The subtle tension between the Bedouin and the Arabs adds another element to this suspenseful drama.

IMDb link

viewed 3/19/14 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/14

Stranger by the Lake (**3/4)

Sex and violence and friendship are the subject of this slow-building suspense drama. Directed by Alain Guiraudie, who also plays a small role, the French film makes a virtue of what must have been a tiny budget by making the sole location, a lakeside beach mostly populated by gay men, into a sort of character. The main human character is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who falls hard for a mustachioed man (Christophe Paou) he sees in the woods, then watches the man drown his lover at twilight. He does not call the police, though a police detective eventually comes calling.

On the slow way to a tension-filled, mysterious ending, Guiraudie seems to be at least as interested in depicting a particular kind of cruising scene as in his characters, and much more so than in morality. While some men swim in the lake, or lounge nude (most of them) on the stony shore, others stroll along the path in the nearby woods, where one might find a casual encounter, then look up to find a schlubby voyeur watching with his pants down. With the bright sun reflected off the lake and the overall quietness (the movie has no music), this all comes off as banal more than seedy, although it is worth noting that this probably had the most explicit sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theater.

We learn only so much about Franck or his murderous lover. Actually, we learn more about the other major character, a pudgy man who claims only to want peace and quiet after breaking up with his girlfriend, and whom Franck befriends. The blandly handsome Franck is kind of a blank slate, his major attribute a boyish inability to see consequences.

IMDb link

viewed 3/27/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/27/14

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

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

Cold Eyes (***1/4) [screening]

You’ve seen movies like this before. (You could have even seen one very much like it, since this is a remake of a Hong Kong film.) A criminal gang with a polished mastermind faces off against an elite law enforcement squad. (A movie like that called Elite Squad is one of Brazil’s biggest hits ever.) The squad specializes in surveillance. They identify; they trace; they tag; they track. But, when it comes time to engage, they call in the tactical team, following protocol. They use tactics that, when employed against Will Smith in 1998’s Enemy of the State, seemed to obviously exceed the possible, and now, with electronic eyes surveying major segments of major cities around the world, seem increasingly plausible.

The heroine of this saga (Hyo-ju Han) is the squad’s newbie — code name Piglet. Perhaps because she is female, she gets to show a broader range of emotion than one might expect. The hero is the squad leader, Falcon, who gives her a stringent memorization test in the type of set piece that’s often a staple of this kind of movie. All of the squad have animal nicknames, and Falcon literally moves them (or wooden representations, actually) around on a chess board that represents the streets of Seoul. They even give their first suspect an animal nickname. Caught on camera buying a soft drink, he becomes a “thirsty hippo.” The movie begins with a bank heist and climaxes with a lengthy chase sequence. They’re quite well done, and while I think I missed a link or two in the chain of evidence that allows the squad to identify the mastermind, the chases are clearly shot, and the two directors have a strong visual sense generally. 

The level of violence is moderate. There’s some humor in the banter between the squad members. Again, nothing entirely new here, but a well-done thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/25/13

The Fifth Element (***)

You could be forgiven, after watching the opening sequence of this film, that you’re watching the beginning of some James Bond knockoff. But is Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), founder of WikiLeaks, James Bond or the villain of the story? Or both?

Assange burst into prominence with news that WikiLeaks had obtained the classified information, including hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, provided by Army intelligence analyst Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010. This story begins there, but flashes back two years to Assange’s meeting at a Berlin conference with Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl, of Rush), a German hacker who, in this version, anyway, becomes lured by Assange’s talk of righting wrongs as well as his own story, difficult childhood and all, some of which is true. Pretty soon, the two of them, with just a little help, are spreading news of assassination plots and banking law violations.

Since Berg’s book is one of the sources for the movie, it’s natural that the movie makes Berg the hero of the story, perhaps Assange’s right-hand man, perhaps the victim of his manipulations, like a battered wife. He’s the ordinary guy/audience stand-in contrasted with the charismatic Assange, whose self-satisfaction possibly covers deep self-doubt. Cumberbatch, who also plays the title role in the BBC’s modernized Sherlock series, knows something about playing smug, and he’s memorable in the role.

Director Bill Condon’s (The Twilight Saga) attempt to give this the look and feel of a techno thriller doesn’t disguise that fact that it isn’t, save perhaps in the last half hour, and most of the shots of computer screens don’t illuminate anything important about how WikiLeaks worked. I wondered how David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, the team behind The Social Network, might have approached this story.

A question the film presents, but does not address, is whether we should treat people like Assange as journalists; and, secondarily, does Wikileaks and its online cousins represent a new paradigm for information transfer that governments and organizations will need to adjust to regardless of what the law can do? These questions go beyond the story of Assange, whose ultimate fate remains unclear. The movie does a competent job of presenting that story, despite its annoyingly slick beginning. But it won’t stick with you.

IMDb link

 

viewed 10/9/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

Captain Phillips (***1/2)

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viewed 12/1/13 5:05 at AMC Cherry Hill

Prisoners (***1/4)

This suspense drama deals with missing children, an angry father (Hugh Jackman) determined to get them back, and a possible suspect (Paul Dano) who appears to be simple but may know more than he’s letting on. In other words, it has all the ingredients of a shitty revenge flick, or a Death Wish remake. But it isn’t.

It’s a December day in Pennsylvania when two little girls go missing. (Maria Bello plays Jackman’s wife, and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis play the parents of one of the girls.) A police detective who’s solved all his cases (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a seemingly obvious perpetrator (Dano) suggest that the crime will be solved quickly. But the expected forensic evidence doesn’t implicate the suspect. And the detective’s discovery of a old man’s body in a cellar suggests a more complicated scenario.

As he did in he previous feature, Incendies, director Denis Villeneuve contructs the story like a puzzle and makes the quasi-suburban nowhere-ness of the setting seem as memorable as he did the  Middle Eastern desert in his previous film.  The script is by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband).

There is some violence in the movie, but it is not cathartic. It is difficult, and the movie makes you feel conflicted and a little creepy. Nearly all the characters have moral uncertainty. It’s so well put together that I didn’t mind so much that the explanation for what happened is extremely far-fetched.

IMDb link

Closed Circuit (***1/4)

--> The specter of international terrorism has figured into many a movie plot, but not so much the revised legal framework that has arisen in parallel to the perceived threat. In Britain, we learn from this thriller, the mechanism for dealing with national security-related information involves providing two counselors to an accused terrorist. A Special Advocate, like the one played by Rebecca Hall, is allowed to see the secret evidence against the accused and argue for her fellow barrister’s (Eric Bana) right to use it. A judge decides. The twist here is that the two counselors, who are supposed to have no contact, had formerly been romantically involved. (Apparently, no one had time to investigate, as the predecessor of  Bana’s character had suddenly committed suicide. Hmm.) And there are twists that make both of their jobs difficult, and mysteries, like how the Turkish-born man said to have masterminded a bombing that killed 120 in London, managed to emigrate from Germany to England.
This is too brightly lit to be film noir. but has some of the things people like about noir — clandestine meetings, coded language, things being not what they seem. It also has some of the same tropes as typical thrillers — turncoats, hints of conspiracy, villain (or villains) with nearly unlimited power, etc. — that in this national-security context are more plausible than would otherwise be the case. It doesn’t have any car chases, but, as the title suggests, makes use of security camera footage to build tension. The sexual tension between the leads is expected, but it’s nicely understated, without deep exposition about the breakup or dramatic declarations. The past relationship of the two counselors also figures into the plot. Screenwriter Steve Knight, incidentally, also is credited with Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, two of the better thrillers of the last decade.

Closed Circuit is a notch behind those two. It doesn’t reveal a hidden subculture; nor does it shed on the proper way to fight terrorism. It does suggest that claims of national security can be a pretext to avoid disclosing information embarrassing to government agencies. But mostly it’s just a smart, entertaining thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 8/29/13 7:45 pm at Ritz 5; posted 9/3/13

Drug War (**3/4)

Veteran Hong Kong action director Johnny To doesn’t try to fool you. When he makes a movie about a drug war, he calls it Drug War. To doesn’t waste time on letting you get to know any of the many characters, the better so that you don’t get attached to them. At most they have one key trait, like the one called Haha, who laughs just like that about every sentence. The only surprising thing is that the war is between cops and dealers, not two rival gangs. The movie is slightly confusing at the outset, but the basic idea is that the cops have caught one of the bosses and have him setting up another one.

For most of its length, the story plays out in fairly realistic fashion, with more suspense than action (hidden recording devices play a role), and a modest body count. What happens when the cops finally find their targets is another story altogether. The best thing about the movie is the way that the end both meets and (finally) defies expectations about what should happen in an action movie. Lots of shooting, there is, however.

IMDb link

viewed 6/13/13 at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/13/13

Europa Report (***1/4)

Using a quasi-documentary structure to dissect the aftermath of a voyage to Jupiter, this is sci-fi that, like 2009’s Moon, emphasizes space as a lonely, quiet, place. (The movie pays tribute to another inspiration, 2001, by briefly featuring Strauss’s The Blue Danube, prominently featured in that classic, as the crew boards the spaceship.) Taking its inspiration from recent evidence that Europa, one of the planet’s moons, has an icy surface with, possibly, water underneath, the film follows a four-man, two-woman crew as they travel there in the hope of finding evidence of life. The setting seems to be the current time, or close to it.

As the story begins, it is six months into the voyage, and the crew has lost its communication with earth. The idea is that the public had been following the voyage, but only now has information about what happened after that been declassified. A spokeswoman for the space agency on the ground narrates some of the story, told in flashbacks and flash-forwards that are generally not confusing. One of the crew tells other parts of the story. Is she the only survivor? What happens on Europa? I think you can probably guess, in broad strokes, if you assume that if the crew finds nothing, or all die immediately, there’s not much of a story. Still, this is an intelligent approach to sci-fi that seems fairly realistic.

Director Sebastián Corderouses split screens and typical subtitles to give the impression that we are looking at footage from video feeds, but he only does this for some of the movie. As for the actors, they’re fine. Most likely to be recognizable are Embeth Davidtz as the Earth-bound spokeswoman and Michael Nyqvist, star of the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the characters are not the movie’s strong suit. The visuals are not flashy, but seem believable, and the score by Bear McCreary is effectively moody.

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viewed 8/15/13 7:35 at Ritz Bourse and posted 8/15/13

A Hijacking (***)

This is the Somali pirate version of a police procedural. The particulars of the story are fictional, but everything is realistic enough that it seems otherwise. The story does not offer twists and turns, or any action —even the hijacking itself takes place off camera, experienced from the point of view of the Danish CEO being notified — but the slow buildup of tension on the part of both the captives and their families back home. The ransom negotiations are the main focus, a fascinating exercise in game theory. The CEO (Søren Malling), certainly the most memorable, and intense, character, heeds the advice of the negotiator he hires and lowballs the Somali negotiator (who denies that he himself is a pirate). But as time passes, and the captives suffer further deprivations, he must decide on his own course.

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viewed 6/20/13 7:30 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

The East (***)

Brit Marling is an actress who took to writing in order to create interesting parts for herself. This comes soon after her small role in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, a suspense drama that, like this movie, implicitly raised the question of what actions are justified in opposing injustice. The East, which features Marling in nearly every scene and which she wrote with director Zal Batmanglij, has her playing an up-and-comer at a private intelligence firm. She’s hired to go undercover and find out about “The East,” a collective whose own speciality is giving corporate wrongdoers a taste of their own medicine. (Marling and Batmanglij’s other collaboration, Sound of My Voice, also had her character going undercover.)

The story obviously places the spy in the position of sympathizing with her new comrades, but does it in a skillful way. Probably in a more effective way than the Redford movie, where the radicalism is placed in the past, it puts the viewer in the position of the central character. Their corporate victims are undoubtedly portrayed in a simplistic way. While the viewer is asked to think about whether the drug-company executives in the film deserve their fate, there is no question that they’re villains. The group members themselves, played by Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgård, among others, are not all that complex either, but at least they are diverse in their motivations and level of militancy.


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viewed 6/26/13 7:10 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/26/13

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Mud (***1/2)

Who’d have expected to see Matthew McConaughey in a thoughtful coming-of-age story set on the Arkansas/Mississippi border? The titles of Fool’s Gold and Failure to Launch might almost have been metaphors for his career, although he’s mixed in some good movies too. Still, with his turn as a male stripper in Magic Mike, his upcoming role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and even his small part in Bernie, he seems to a have been choosing a higher percentage of noteworthy projects lately. (The July/August 2013 Atlantic includes the actor in a list of “Once-Discredited Ideas Now Staging Comebacks.”) McConaughey is the biggest name here, and plays the title character, but not actually the main one. Instead, Mud becomes the vehicle through which an idealistic 14-year old (Tye Sheridan), Ellis begins to understand the complexities of adult relationships, and romantic ones.

Ellis’s parents are threatening to split; for him, the primary meaning of this will be having to move from his home by the river and become a “townie.” A more programmatic plot might have made Mud into a wise father figure imparting wisdom. But wise men are not often found living alone on an island, where Ellis and his best friend find him. Why Mud is there, and what/who he’s waiting for, becomes clearer as the movie goes on, even as his true character becomes murkier. (His name stays mysterious.) Mud does impart wisdom, but subtly. The ending is probably less subtle, and less ambiguous, than I’d have preferred, but I suspect I’d be in the minority, and it’s certainly not awful.


IMDb link


viewed 6/13/13 and reviewed 6/14–17/13

The Company You Keep (***)

Today, “liberal” is used as a slur by conservatives, but 40 years ago it was just as likely to be uttered derisively by those who favored more radical methods of change. Such people would have perhaps been sympathetic to the Weathermen, a radical spinoff of the Vietnam antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen became the Weather Underground, who after a series of bombings in the 1970s mostly disappeared. Some got caught, some went straight, and some stayed underground for a long time. (One who went straight, Bill Ayers, became a controversial figure in the 2008 presidential election.) There’s a very good 2002 documentary (called The Weather Underground) about the group.

Here Robert Redford, also the director, plays an Albany lawyer and, improbably, a single father of a pre-teen girl who’s drawn into the past when an old friend (Susan Sarandon), a Weather Underground member wanted for her role in in a botched bank robbery (resulting in a guard’s death), decides to turn herself in after living under a false identity for decades. For reasons best left unstated here, he winds up on the run trying to hunt down other members. A local journalist (Shia La Beauf) is trying to figure out what’s going on. And both of them wind up traveling around, giving Redford the opportunity to include a variety of locations.

While conservatives may object to the sympathetic portrait of former radicals, it should also be noted that, whereas the actual Weather Underground took care, after a fatal bombing in its early “Weathermen” years, to avoid harming individuals, this film centers around a bank robbery that results in a fatality, an incident that never took place. The script, from a novel by Neil Gordon, is by Lem Dobbs, who has written suspense films like The Limey, The Score, and Haywire rather than morally complex ones. Dobbs and Redford substitute some speechifying by the characters for a more ambiguous exploration of how far it is reasonable to go in service of a cause. The film, never really places you back in the past, when stopping the war seemed like a moral imperative (though the bank robbery is supposed to have taken place later). Instead, the story positions Redford’s character as a liberal exemplar, mounting a defense of liberalism against, not conservatism, but radicalism. La Beauf (an actual investigative newspaper reporter) makes the case for old-fashioned journalistic virtues. This is all subtext and can be easily ignored. As such, Redford has made a good dramatic thriller with an interesting structure and a bunch of famous faces — Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, etc. — in supporting roles.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/13 7:05 pm at Ritz 5

Trance (**3/4)

This reminded me of Inception, except that whereas Christopher Nolan’s 2010 thriller used a sci-fi premise, this uses hypnosis as the excuse for the mental jujitsu that supports its puzzle-like structure. James McAvoy has the role at the center of this puzzle; its his forgotten memory that the hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) is trying to get at, on behalf of a quartet of London art thieves whose leader is played by Vincent Cassel. McAvoy’s character, who works for an auction house, has been knocked on the head during the robbery.

Essentially, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 127 Hours), uses the hypnosis idea to keep you wondering about what is true and false, guessing about the characters’ (especially the therapist’s) motivations, and speculating about who will wind up killing whom. The script is by John Hodge, who wrote several of Boyle’s early films, and Joe Ahearne, who made a version of this for British television in 2001. It extremely slick but the imagery is not quite as visually arresting as in Insomnia, and whereas the Nolan film sidestepped questions about unreality by inventing a fictional technology, the hypnotism angle makes, say, Woody Allen’s comedy The Curse of the Jade Scorpion look like a primer on the subject.

This is not to say you won’t enjoy this, provided you accept that the characters will be meaningless appendages to the twisty plot, which itself will be meaningless flim-flammery, the movie equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. There is one thing that is surprisingly believable: for once, when a car catches fire, it doesn’t immediately blow up. So, keep an eye out for that.

IMDb link

viewed 4/18/13 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/18/13