Movies in a Nutshell

Best Movies I saw in 2011

2011-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

Best Movies I saw in 2011

Movie	Grade	Find the review archived in 2011: Month/Day
Machete	A	1/5
RED	A	1/29
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger	A	2/19
Welcome to the Rileys	A	2/20
Revolucion	A	3/1
Jack Goes Boating	A	3/19
Fair Game	A	4/18
The Man Who Wasn’t There	A	6/5
My son, my son, what have ye done	A	6/20
Midnight in Paris	A	6/27
Rango	A	8/9
The Beaver	A	8/28
Driver	A	11/5
The Mill and the Cross	A	11/14
The Turin Horse	A	11/14
Melancholia	A	12/6
The Social Network	B	1/14
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work	B	1/31
Howl	B	2/1
Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity	B	2/6
For Colored Girls	B	2/11
The Last Circus	B	3/8
The Last Three Days	B	3/12
Conviction	B	3/12
The Secret in their Eyes	B	3/17
Mock Up on Mu	B	3/26
Please Give	B	4/24
Cave of Forgotten Dreams	B	5/29
Rabbit Hole	B	6/6
The Company Men	B	6/19
Small Town Murder Stories	B	8/23
Bridesmaids	B	8/23
Source Code	B	8/23
Moneyball	B	11/5
Dream Home	B	11/14
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life	B	11/25
Inside Job	I	6/5

The Smell of Success: Grade C

2011-12-20T09:14:00.001-08:00

C

The Smell of Success (2009)

Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leone, Ed Helms, Kyle McLachlan; Co-writer and director: Michael Polish.

This is a silly trifle of a movie, but I wanted to review it because it has been so thoroughly ignored, despite having some hidden virtues. It is about a group of salesmen in Kansas, led by Thornton, who work for Rose’s Manure, and sell the stuff to farmers. Old Man Rose dies and his daughter (Leone) from New York City, takes over the company, with the aim of pumping up sales then selling it.

The film is an example of screwball comedy, a genre characterized by witty repartee, usually a romantic relationship, a satirical emphasis on social class distinctions, with farce and slapstick. It was a style of movie popular in the 1930’s during the Depression, so ordinary people could watch the upper crust get their comeuppance and have a laugh at their expense. Perhaps the filmmakers thought it was time to revive the genre during the current Great Recession.

That intuition might have been right, but they made two critical mistakes. One is that the manure theme is pitched too low to be socially or politically satirical, or even, really, very funny. Most of the gag lines are pretty obvious: “Rose’s Manure: We’re number one in number two!” And worse, much worse. I admit, some of the joke lines made me laugh anyway. When the beautiful and sophisticated Tea Leone, in frustration, calls one of her salesmen “Shit-For-Brains,” I laughed, not because it is an original epithet, but because of the way she said it. But the relentless poop jokes wear you down, and even if they do make you chuckle, you realize there isn’t going to be any artistic point to the humor.

Secondly, the relationship between Thornton and Leone just isn’t. They are the romantic leads, and they even go to bed together (just wrestling, no sex). But there is no suggestion of a romance. Why not? Even if the movie was aimed at children 5 to 8, (and I don’t think it was), that should not rule out a romance. Maybe the omission was a far-too-subtle reference to the censorship codes of the 1930’s that forbade portrayal of any kind of sex. If that was the intent, it failed.

The film does have strong redeeming virtues. The cinematography is excellent, as are costumes (the period seems to be early 1960’s). The bluesy music is attractive. The artistic direction is distinctive, with a kind of sepia palette, reminiscent of O Brother Where Art Thou, that is perfect for the surrealistic scenes. And those are fantastic. The competitors, a chemical fertilizer company, parachutes crates of their product, and themselves, into cornfields and the imagery there is stunningly surreal. A kind of World War II theme emerges, and although it is not developed, it is a very creative twist. Acting: MacLachlan and his team, dressed like Men In Black, do a fair parody of evildoers, though not arch enough. Ed Helms is an inherently funny guy. Leone, I’ll watch in any movie. Same for BBT. So this movie has plenty of virtues and deserves to be seen, by adults, even though, as an overall artistic effort, it falls short.

Melancholia: Grade A

2011-12-06T08:25:00.000-08:00

A

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Alexander Skarsgård, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling; Writer-Director Lars von Trier.

This film is perfection of the art in every respect except one: editing. Its 2 hour, 15 minute runtime is not justified by the material. Not that I was ever bored, because the visuals took a grip on my eyeballs from the opening scenes and never let go. But the first half, focused on an elaborate wedding, verged on repetitive and tedious.

In the first half, Justine (Dunst) marries Michael (A. Skarsgard) in her sister’s home, so luxurious it would make royalty blush. Throughout this long segment, Justine is withdrawn and melancholy and finds no happiness in the wedding. But she is there, after all, in the appropriate costume, so she is conflicted. She arrives 2 hours late, then during the festivities, disappears to take walks on the grounds, retires to take a nap, and even takes a bath. She finds no pleasure in the social rituals of dancing, drinking, cutting the cake, exchanging the vows. Is it because she is clinically depressed? Maybe, but it is more like she just doesn’t see the point of the ridiculous ceremony. Her mother (Rampling) is explicit about contempt for all aspects of marriage, but Justine seems ambivalent. She can’t decide if she wants to be a member of the social community, with all its stupid, contrived rituals, or whether she is an existential monad, alone in the world, finding her own meaning. Her vacillation goes on far too long. I wanted to scream at von Trier, “Okay, we get it!” But I think he was trying to make the viewer feel Justine’s conflict, the endless, intellectually empty tedium of well-worn social ritual, and attraction to fabulous costumes, bright lights, fine food, and excellent music. I felt it, though I didn’t need such a long dramatization.

In Part 2 the story focuses on Clair, Justine’s sister, married to Jack (Sutherland). Justine stays on with her sister’s family after the wedding because she alienated her new husband on the wedding night and he left in confusion. Claire is worried about a new planet, called Melancholia (get it?) hurtling toward Earth, threatening total destruction. Jack assures her that all the scientists predict it will miss, and that “Melacholia will pass us by.” In other words, Justine’s rejection of the social rituals we live by will not hurt us, and death itself will pass us by, because we are together. Justine tells Claire however, that we will all die because the Earth is evil. Her melancholic diffidence now seems like stoic acceptance of humanity’s inevitable fate.

The themes in the film are thus the most fundamental existential questions facing us, the inevitability of death, the meaning of society, the vagaries of fate, and the survival of the planet, making the movie intellectually and emotionally engaging, much more than mere eye candy. Acting by Dunst is phenomenal, and von Trier takes advantage of her beauty in some stunning, if gratuitous, shots. Acting is also very strong from the other main characters, especially Rampling. Sets, costumes: superb. CGI: perfect. Directing: flawless. It’s a masterpiece.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life: Grade B

2011-11-25T07:15:00.000-08:00

B
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones; Writer-Director Joann Sfar (French, subtitled)

Serge Gainsbourg was a pop singer-songwriter in France who enjoyed enormous fame in the mid 1960’s. Though virtually unknown in America today, this biopic is worth seeing because it is a visual feast, an auditory feast, and an acting feast.

Writer-Director Joann Sfar is a creator of comic books (or “graphic novels,” as they are reverently known) and his uninhibited, surrealistic visual sensibility dominates the film, especially in the first half, which covers the childhood of Lucien Ginsberg (real name) in Nazi-occupied Paris. The boy’s alter-ego is a huge balloon with tiny arms and legs, that follows him around, mocking his self-image as an ugly kid, and his Jewishness. The anti-semitism of the Vichy regime is noted, but the story line is really about the boy’s irreverent, iconoclastic, precocious, artistic soul, as he develops his talent as a painter. At times, his alter-ego is represented by an animated figure that swoops around Paris. These early scenes get an A+ for creativity and visual attractiveness.

But it is nominally a biography, so the boy becomes a man (suddenly, without incident), a piano player and song-writer who works sleazy bars and hopes to succeed as a painter. His alter-ego is now played, wonderfully, by a costumed icon with huge nose and ears (Jones), who follows him around and seems to represent his grounding, his center, who he really is (in his mind). Gainsbourg (the adult stage name) is played brilliantly by the relatively unknown actor Elmosnino. His presentation, always through a blue cloud of Gauloises smoke, is simply eye-gripping. In his own voice he sings in the style of ‘60’s chanson, and the songs are great. He cavorts with multiple women, including Bridget Bardot, wonderfully played by Casta, a sensation in her own right. He performs a fabulous reggae version of the Marseillaise, and as he becomes a huge star, also becomes a drunken fool who loses his compass.

During the last half of the film, the visual creativity that was so stunning earlier, fades, and the movie focuses on the psychological development of the artist as he loses his center but never despairs that, though others around him do. The last half runs far too long and dwells too closely, without insight, on basically an unattractive person, diminishing the overall effectiveness of the movie. Nevertheless the film is a work of art worth seeking out.

The Turin Horse: Grade A

2011-11-14T15:51:00.001-08:00

A

The Turin Horse (2011)
János Derzsi, Erika Bók; Directors Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, (Hungarian; subtitled).

I only discovered Bela Tarr in 2006 when I saw his 1988 movie, Damnation (reviewed in this blog 11/27/06). Turin Horse was his last film. Like Damnation, this one is long (2.5 hrs), extremely slow, shot in beautiful black-and-white, and ultimately about the desperation of life under totalitarian (communist) rule in Hungary. It is utterly mesmerizing, depressing, and beautiful, but only recommended for viewers who are committed to film as an art form.

A poor, elderly, and disabled country farmer in Italy, about 1900, makes a meager living carting goods, his horse an old, gray, sickly mare. He lives with his daughter in a fieldstone house in a cold, windy, treeless land where a howling gale rages for most of the movie. It’s always winter, cold, and bleak in a Bela Tarr movie, because that’s how life was under communism. The storm is the harsh and relentless politics blowing through the land, the dust making the simplest movement a challenge. The man and his daughter eat boiled potatoes, fetch water from the well, stoke the wood stove, gaze numbly out the dirty window, and sleep. She spends a lot of time dressing and undressing her father, who has a bad arm. They both spend a lot of time harnessing up and unharnessing the horse. This goes on and on, repeatedly.

Scenes are re-enacted in excruciating detail, every day. After about three cycles, I inwardly screamed, “Please, God, no! Not another boiled potato!” But yes, it was another boiled potato, and we again watched it being prepared, served, and eaten, in almost real-time. The same for all the other daily chores. Over and over with tiny, tiny variations, sometimes only in the camera movements or angles.

But this is exactly the point. The audience literally feels, viscerally, the hopelessness, the meaninglessness, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of that life. We understand experientially, in a way no narrative description could ever convey. That’s what makes the film an unforgettable artistic triumph. Yes, it takes a difficult 2.5 hours of nothingness to “get it,” but that’s a lot less than a lifetime.

A few things do happen, though. The horse gets too sick to work, and finally, the well goes dry. So they are doomed. They gaze numbly out the window into the winter storm. The final scene, of the two characters sitting at the table (over potatoes not boiled – no water), is pure visual poetry. They look somehow Christlike at that point.

The blurb for the film says that this old horse was the exact one that Nietzsche famously encountered in Turin in 1899. But that is a red herring that should be ignored. If the ads told you what the movie was really about (existential nothingness), you wouldn’t go.

The cinematography is extremely interesting and beautiful, the music hypnotic – deep bass and cello, repetitive, droning, beautiful, and soporific, in keeping with the tone. The visual images burn into your brain as you stare into the face of a human condition reduced to a mechanical numbness that strangely still retains its dignity. The portrayal is not completely realistic (e.g., who chops the firewood and cuts the hay for the horse; who maintains that stone house, etc.? Surely not the woman alone, and surely not the one-armed man). So there is a theatrical element to the storytelling, but the realism of the life somehow comes through that artifice brighter than actuality.

The Mill and the Cross: Grade A

2011-11-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

A
The Mill and the Cross (2011)

Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling, Michael York; Director Lech Majewski. (Spanish; Subtitled)

This is a stunningly beautiful film by a legendary director, based on a painting by the Flemish master, Peter Bruegel, his 1564 painting, "Way to Calvary." You can see the painting online. The film is the story of how Breugel designed the work as he watched people and events in his medieval village, which had been occupied by hated Spanish mercenaries. So there is political commentary in the painting and in the film.

The painting shows Jesus carrying his own cross to Calvary, but somehow this scene takes place in Flanders in the 1500’s. The director uses a combination of CGI, green-screen, location shooting, and live actors to move seamlessly in and out of the painting, with fantastic effect.

A windmill on a towering rock is a metaphor for heaven, God as a miller, the massive wooden gears and wheels of the mill showing how heaven grinds humanity down, down, down, into flour-like dust.

Hauer plays Breugel, who explains his painting’s design to wealthy patron York. Rampling is Jesus’s mother, Mary, who keeps saying “I don’t understand,” as she watches the crucifixion. She represents a modern voice perhaps, speaking for the audience, who sees humanity of that time devoid of intellectual understanding, only passive acquiescence to senseless hardship. There were only the tasks of staying alive, until you were finally ground to dust. Nothing made any sense, not even religion, according to this painting and film. Only art might have made sense.

Dream Home: Grade B

2011-11-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

B

Dream Home (2010)

Josie Ho, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Eason Chan, Hee Ching Paw, Kwok Cheung Tsang; Director Ho-Cheung Pang (Cantonese Chinese; Subtitled).

There is a movie in theaters now with Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz called “Dream House.” A family becomes the target of a serial killer in that movie. I haven’t seen it.

This film is called Dream Home, and is from the point of view of a serial killer. A young woman has scrimped and saved for a lifetime to afford the perfect apartment by the sea. But alas, the building is fully occupied and nothing is for sale. Solution? Kill some occupants, creating instant vacancies.

In fairness, I need to say the victims are not just “killed,” for that sounds tidy. No, these victims are violently, bloodily slaughtered, using knives, boards, fists, and garrotes. This is an extremely violent, bloody, Hong Kong horror/slasher film. Nevertheless, I found it enjoyable.

One reason is that there is a balance between the young woman’s ordinary everydayness, at work, with her friends, with her family, versus her forays into serial murder, so you don't overdose. There is no attempt to provide psychological continuity between those two halves of herself. The movie plays it as if the gory murders were the most reasonable thing in the world for a person to do. There is no suggestion that she is a conflicted Jekyll/Hyde. So realism is out the window, but still, the story is marginally plausible.

Also, the murders are very creative, almost humorous. What I mean is that they are so gory and brutal, you can’t for a moment take them seriously. They are just real enough to make you gasp, and you will. For creative murders in the filmic art, you can’t beat these. I doubt that you have seen murder by vacuum cleaner, for example. Finally, the acting is better than not bad. So if you can get past some extreme violence and blood and guts, this is one of the better in the Hong Kong slasher/horror genre.

Drive: Grade A

2011-11-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

A
Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac; Director Nicolas Winding Refn.

Gosling is a young, impoverished, ex-con Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for burglaries. He befriends a single mom neighbor (Mulligan) and maybe there is a romantic interest there too, but her husband comes home from prison and it is tense. Nevertheless, when the husband gets caught in an extortion deal, the driver agrees to drive for him on one last heist, which, predictably, goes wrong. But Gosling ends up with the money so now the mob is after him and Mulligan too. He fights to freedom in several gruesomely bloody scenes, but realizes he is “no good” for the girl and drives away into the sunset (severely wounded).

What makes the movie good is Gosling’s very quiet performance, which I attribute to excellent directing as much as excellent acting. The book is extremely terse, with not a single spare word, and that economy is transferred to the screen in spare dialog, a perfect artistic choice. Gosling has hardly any dialog, expressing his moods and thoughts through subtle facial gestures and big dramatic actions, like decapitating a guy by repeatedly stomping on his neck. Usually, it is only mature actors who have the skill and the courage to act quietly though. It is a pleasure to watch Gosling perform. Albert Brooks, who usually grates my nerves, does a completely believable job. Mulligan has a terrible, passive role, so she doesn’t have much to do but look beautiful, which she does well.

The photography is outstanding, including the difficult inside-the-car shots, and the music is tense but not too intrusive. The director keeps the action tension very high. The car chases are not too clichéd, but at times hard to follow, like how, exactly Driver got undetected to the freeway underpass to hide from the helicopter. The cars look and sound good, too, Bullet-esque for the Mustang. The main problem is the driver’s character, which unaccountably drifts from earnest, sensitive mechanic and friend, to cold-blooded psychopathic killer. In the end, he apparently realizes his own psychopathy and that’s why he leaves town, but that doesn’t explain who he was when we met him. It’s a violent, bloody movie, not for everyone, but a thoroughly entertaining action film.

Moneyball: Grade B

2011-11-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

B

Moneyball (2011)

Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright. Director Bennett Miller.

Pitt plays Billy Beane, the real-life manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team in the early 2000’s. The team doesn’t have enough money to hire good players, so they rarely win. He discovers from an ex-stock broker/securities dealer (Hill), that it is possible to cheaply hire players with specific skills, rather than “all around” talent, much the way one evaluates derivative securities against specific screening criteria. Applying that formula to rebuilding the team, Beane came up with a winning A’s team, confounding all the traditionalist critics and skeptics (including field manager, Hoffman). Today, all major league teams use this method to evaluate players.

The story is told well, as a human story, not a technical one, showing how the self-doubts, risks, and courage of the characters plays out. Jonah Hill is a revelation as a serious dramatic actor. Pitt is not as good, playing his usual smart-ass Brad Pitt persona, and strangely, stuffing his mouth with junk food in almost every scene, to the point where it is disgusting, and simply not believable for a guy who still trains and looks buff.

Like junk food, this movie makes you feel good at first, but unfulfilled. There is not enough time given to the individual ballplayers and how their lives are affected by the mathematical strategy. They are hired and fired like the chattel they are, but they think of themselves as people. That’s a story in itself, but soft-pedaled here. There is surprisingly little baseball action in the movie, so it's not really a traditional baseball film. There isn’t much technical stuff either, few details on the method used to rebuild the team. It is nominally the Billy Beane story, but it is not a real biopic either. So what is left? A human drama with lots of nice pictures, nice music, good acting, dramatic scenes, but no actual nutritional value. Still, a must-see for baseball lovers.

The Beaver: Grade A

2011-08-28T10:23:00.001-07:00

A

The Beaver (2011)

Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence; Director Jodie Foster.

Whatever you think of Mel Gibson personally, you have to admit the guy can act. In this surreal comedy, he demonstrates that, by playing an American suburban husband who suffers from depression. He is unresponsive to his family and especially his wife (Foster). Finally she boots him out of the house and he drunkenly attempts suicide in a cheap hotel room. By chance he regains consciousness next to a beaver hand puppet that was among his personal goods (for reasons never explained). He talks to himself about his disorder by using the beaver as an alter ego. Thus his depression morphs into a dissociative disorder, which would not happen in reality, but hey, it’s a movie.

By speaking through the beaver puppet, he is able to reestablish emotional contact with his family. He tells his wife it is a new kind of therapy and she goes along with it. He regains his dynamism as CEO of a toy company, again by talking through the puppet. The employees accept the puppet device, and the company becomes more successful than ever. Eventually though, the wife becomes impatient and demands the elimination of the puppet. The ending is grim yet satisfying.

The movie is not believable in any realistic sense. Rather you have to take it as an allegory for mental illness, but even at that, it is not accurate enough to be informative or helpful. So in the end this is just a dark, goofy comedy with a mental illness theme. As such it is quite successful, mainly because it is so original. The writing is excellent and acting by Gibson and Foster make it well worth watching. Especially entertaining is Gibson’s working class English/Aussie accent (think Geico Gecko). The substory of romance between teenager Yelchin and his high school girlfriend (Lawrence) seems like a different movie. Maybe it was an ill-advised attempt to add a note of realism to the strange tale of the man with the puppet. If so, it only partially works because it is not well woven. Foster’s directing is impeccable.

Bridesmaids: Grade B

2011-08-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

B

Bridesmaids (2011)

Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Jill Clayburgh, Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Chris O'Dowd; Director Paul Feig.

This movie should be called “The Kristen Wiig Show,” because she carries the whole thing. She is in every scene and owns the screen. She also co-wrote and co-produced. The story, such as it is, is about her character (Annie) whose best friend (Rudolph) asks her and four other women to be bridesmaids at the forthcoming wedding. But Annie brings disaster wherever she goes, to the wedding shower, the rehearsal, the bachelorette party, and the wedding itself. Along the way she has a couple of disastrous romantic relationships. But in the end, all is well.

The story is an excuse for Wiig to invent and perform sketch comedy routines similar to what she does on Saturday Night Live, only with far more detail and intensity. Her brand of humor is unique. It is no trouble to identify exactly which scenes she wrote and which she didn’t. Many of them are truly memorable, largely because she is such a great physical actor. She has a rubber face to equal Jim Carrey’s and a thousand expressions to put on it. I laugh even now thinking of some of those scenes. There is one exceptionally crude and raunchy bathroom scene where the women all suffer food poisoning and compete for the toilet. The movie could have done without it, but I also know it will go down as a classic in comedy movie history.

Wiig is the star of this feature, which would be nothing without her, not even very funny, but there are some other outstanding performances, especially from the snooty rich girl (Byrne) and the coarse chubby girl (McLendon-Covey), and her romantic interest (O’Dowd). Directing is flawless and so is editing. Wiig said on Charlie Rose she hopes the movie is a success so she could consider a career as a writer. Well, the movie is a huge success, but she will need a broader range, because while her gags are truly and deeply funny, they don't go beyond obvious situations and stereotypes and their success depends almost entirely on her own incredible performance.

Source Code: Grade B

2011-08-23T14:13:00.001-07:00

B

Source Code (2011)

Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga; Director Duncan Jones.

Groundhog Day meets Matrix in this derivative sci-fi thriller. And throw in scenes, images, and ideas from Taking of Pelham 123, Unstoppable, Inception, and Apollo 13. It’s a pastiche, not original, but good looking and interesting enough to watch.

Military scientists have discovered a way to capture the brain’s brief post-mortem afterglow, and they can augment it with special software (the Source Code) into the illusion of full life for a brief time (8 minutes in this case). So Gyllenhaal does not understand that he is dead. Further, the computer reanimation can be assigned to different times and places (since it is just software, after all). Gyllenhaal is “sent back” in time, to right before he died, on a train heading into Chicago, where he lives a memory as if it were real (per Matrix, Inception, etc.). The train has a bomb on it. Can he find the bomb and the bomber? (Take a guess). He has only 8 minutes. On the train he meets Monaghan and tries to save her, but the train blows up anyway. No problem. He can be sent back again by the army scientist (Farmiga). He goes back repeatedly and blows up repeatedly, but learns a few new details each time, just as in Groundhog Day. Finally he does catch the bad guy, reports his identity to Farmiga, who arrests him in real time.

Gyllenhaal and Farmiga are a pleasure to watch. However, the CGI shots outside the train cabin are so bad they bump you completely out of the story. The explosions are explosive and the music is ordinary. The ending is highly predictable but I won’t give it away in case there are viewers new to this genre. The story is fundamentally weak nonsense, as sci-fi stories usually are. But this one is done well enough to hold frame-to-frame interest and is above average for its type.

Small Town Murder Songs: Grade B

2011-08-23T14:09:00.001-07:00

B

Small Town Murder Songs (2010)

Peter Stormare, Martha Plimpton, Stephen Eric McIntyre; Writer-Director Ed Gass-Donnelly. (Some archaic Mennonite German translated in subtitles).

In a small Mennonite town in Ontario, Canada, Walter (Stormare) is chief of police. He is old, slow-moving, slow-talking, but we get the sense he is highly experienced. A dead, naked woman is found by the lake and circumstances point to lowlife Eric (McIntyre), who lives with the chief’s ex-love-interest, Sam (Plimpton).

In brief flashbacks we get the idea that they broke up because the chief had committed some extremely violent act or acts in the past. We don’t know what they were or what the context was, but he has rejoined the church and believes his temper is now under control. But when it seems like Sam is lying to him, he goes right up to the brink of violence again. So the larger story is about the ability and the determination to change one’s character.

This Canadian film is very well acted and directed. The script is original and the cinematography stands out for its thoughtfulness. The only sour note is the dreadful sound track which I gather is authentic Mennonite church music. To my ear it was quite unpleasant, and not because it was unfamiliar. I like the unfamiliar. Rather, it sounded simplistic, droning, arrhythmic, repetitive, narrow in range and tone, and incomprehensible (in German). It did not add “atmosphere” as the Okie singing did, for example, in Brother Where Art Thou. But I guess that’s a matter of taste. Othewise, the film is well-constructed and executed, worth watching.

Rango: Grade A

2011-08-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

A

Rango (2011)

Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy; Director Gore Verbinski.

The animation in this feature is as good as anything out of Pixar or Dreamworks. It is done by Industrial Light and Magic and puts them in the first tier of animators. The characters are fully rounded wire-frame animals, with excellent emotional capture. ILM animators have completely mastered the computationally difficult rendering of fur, water, glass, and other supposedly impossible textures and flows. The film is a triumph of animation technology if nothing else.

But there is much else: it's a good film. The characters are desert-dwelling animals living in a run-down western town called Dirt, where the economy is based entirely on water. Their taps have gone dry and even the reservoir in the bank is desperately low. No consideration is given to rainfall or aquifers – they seem to be on city water of some kind, but never mind that.

A histrionic chameleon named Rango (Depp) wanders into town, strutting and bragging about having killed the whole Jenkins gang with a single bullet. He ineptly and luckily saves the town from a killer hawk with a tin beak. He is acclaimed and named sheriff. But the evil mayor (Beatty), who is diverting the water for his own project, hires Rattlesnake Jack (Nighy) to kill Rango. There is a showdown. Meanwhile a romantic interest develops between Rango and Beans (Fisher).

The story line is formulaic, a pastiche of dozens of westerns. There is no dramatic tension, not even the manufactured kind in Cars, for example, and the romantic relationship is unconvincing, nothing like the one in Wall-e, for example; there isn’t even cheap sentimentality, as in Finding Nemo. I don’t know if kids care about those things. For adults, though, what makes the movie great is its sheer creativity. The script is funny and the excellent voice acting (the range of Depp's vocal expression is astonishing) is a treat. Also to appreciate are the beautiful and witty animations, enjoyable music (Los Lobos), and wink-wink allusions to other movies, from Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, to Star Wars, The Fugitive, Chinatown, and many others. Those references are enormous fun for movie lovers.

Because it lacks a good dramatic story, the movie might not catch on with kids, but because of all its other virtues, I think it will become a classic in the animation genre.

Midnight in Paris: Grade A

2011-06-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

A

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Cathy Bates, Carla Bruni, Corey Stoll, Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody; Writer-Director Woody Allen.

I confess, I saw this film in a cinema. No doubt It will be out on DVD later this year. It is a very traditional fairy tale, complete with a simplistic moral, “there’s no place like home,” or maybe “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” A rich American family visits Paris on business, along with the daughter’s fiancé (Wilson), an aspiring literary writer who loves the magic charm of Paris so much he wishes he could live there, preferably in the 1920’s. The shots of all the major Paris landmarks are stereotypically beautiful, stunningly so, as lovingly done as in Allen’s portraits of New York and London in his other movies.

Drunk and lost in the streets at midnight, Gil (Wilson) is invited into a 1920’s car and finds himself inexplicably at a 1920’s party, where he meets Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald while Cole Porter plays his tunes on the piano. There are some good jokes as he realizes that he has been magically transported back in time, a fact he comes quickly to accept without question. He promises Ernest Hemingway (Stoll) that he will bring his manuscript for a critical reading, but Hemingway insists that Gertrude Stein (Bates) would be a better reader.

On successive nights, Gil goes walking at Midnight and is picked up and taken back in time again. He meets Picasso, Bunuel, T.S. Eliot, Dali, and many other luminaries who populated Paris at the time, including one of Picasso’s girlfriends, Adriana (Cotillard), with whom he falls in love. During the day he returns to his hotel, becoming ever more estranged from his fiancée (McAdams) and obsessed by the possibility of living in 1920’s Paris permanently. Eventually he realizes that wouldn’t work out, but also realizes he will not marry his fiancée, leaves her, and stops the midnight time-traveling to live realistically in modern-day Paris.

Allen gets magnificent performances out of his actors. Wilson is his stand-in and has the confused, defensive stuttering and stooped posture down perfectly, but Wilson does much more than mimicry. He turns in an impressive, serious dramatic performance that I didn’t know he had in him. Cotillard is also stunning, literally unrecognizable compared to her dreadful role as Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose, for which she inexplicably won an Oscar). Stoll as Hemingway and Bates as Stein are scene-stealers. So the performances are excellent, even if the subject matter is light and frothy silliness.

The story is a fairy tale, so does not bear scrutiny, but still, I yearned for more interior life in Wilson’s character. Surely he would doubt his sanity, just a little? He would have a few questions? He would be tempted to say interesting things to 1920’s characters about life a hundred years hence? Show a digital wristwatch maybe? The comic possibilities are endless, but Allen passes them all by. As close as we get to time-travel humor is when Wilson wonders if he could pick up a few Mondrians for 500 Francs, or when he gives a first-hand explanation of the meaning of a Picasso painting in the modern-day Louvre.

But it’s not that kind of movie. What kind is it? An airy fairy tale, no more. A trifle. A throwaway, with mesmerizing cinematography and several gripping performances, but no insight and only a light dusting of humor. But for all that, it was a very pleasant diversion on a hot Sunday afternoon when an air-conditioned theater sounded like a good idea.

Adjustment Bureau: Grade C

2011-06-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

C

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Terence Stamp. Co-Writer & Director George Nolfi.

Maybe there is no such thing as science fiction and that’s why there are so few good sci-fi movies. Science is about logic, and cause-and-effect, whereas fiction delves into areas that are impenetrable to science, such as love.

This is actually a love story, with a sci-fi backdrop, and it works as long as you don’t try to make sense out of the sci-fi part. Damon is a New York congressman. He briefly meets a woman (Blunt) in a hotel men’s room, in strong opening scene. But despite his wish to see her again, he can’t because he lost her phone number.

Well, he didn't really lose it, it was taken from him by thugs from the “adjustment bureau,” a group of heavies wearing felt fedoras, who are divine caseworkers sent to enforce “the plan” of human predestination. The Big Guy (known as “the Chairman”) has decided that humans can no longer be trusted with free will and every life must be completely managed. In the master plan, Damon is designed to become President someday and a romance with Blunt would throw that off track. How that could happen, if free will is nullified and life is predetermined, is one of many logical lacunae that must be overlooked. Just like the fact that, since he is a well-known congressman, it would not be much trouble for her to contact him, but never mind that either.

Anyway, he persists in trying to find her, despite warnings and threats from the angelic thugs, and he even does find her once “by chance” (whatever that is, in a predetermined world), but he is again separated from her. The movie then devolves into endless chase scenes, with Damon dragging her around the city by the hand, to prove finally that love conquers even Fate. Wow, so individual free will (which supposedly does not exist) is greater than God’s plan for all humanity? Hmmm…

Nonsense aside, the relationship story between Damon and Blunt is interesting enough to keep the movie going. Damon is more than just Jason Bourne here, he actually shows some acting chops, not as good as in The Informant, but very watchable. Blunt’s role is teary-eyed, passive-submissive but she executes well. Cinematography is crisp and the city looks good.

My son, my son, what have ye done: Grade A

2011-06-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

A

My son, my son, what have ye done (2010)

Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon , Chloe Sevigny; Grace Zabriski; Co-writer and director: Werner Herzog.

This very non-traditional, and very Herzoggian film is not for those who insist on a conventional story. It is a collection of creative scenes and stunning cinematography, loosely held together by the story of a police hostage situation in San Diego. And I emphasize “loosely.” But for Herzog fans, and David Lynch fans, this movie is exciting and challenging.

Shannon plays an insane stage actor who kills his mother (Zabriski) with a sword, then retreats into his house with hostages. Dafoe is the police detective who tries to talk him out, but eventually calls in the SWAT. But that story is just a framing device for other characters to fill in the background with flashbacks, as the detective interviews them. Sevigny is the killer’s fiancé and does most of the talking. She reveals that the suspect became “strange” after he returned from a trip to Peru, and after that he was disruptive in the play rehearsals (the classical Greek Tragedy, Electra, in which a man kills his mother) that they were both in (the fiancé playing the part of the mother).

We in the audience see immediately that the man has gone schizophrenic, hearing voices and speaking madness, but the fiancé must have never taken a psychology class, because she tolerates him. But this movie is not about realism. It’s about creative filmmaking. The so-called “story” is just an excuse to shoot fantastic scenes, such as a stampede at an ostrich farm, and an extremely good Greek chorus singing in the Electra play. There are too many other non-sequitur scenes to mention, but each of them is challenging, and thrillingly creative. Herzog channels Lynch, who was an executive producer but apparently did not have a hands-on role.

It’s not a perfect movie. The acting is wooden and the speeches contrived. The characters are symbols, not people. There is no dramatic tension, because we don’t care about the hostage situation or any of the characters. There are some obvious and distracting green-screen shots.

But the music is wonderful, some kind of Spanish language singing, and the scenery and sets are perfect. I tried to find the meaning of the San Diego matricide within the ancient Electra story, but the parallel is no more than a loose analogy. A study of insanity, it isn’t: Guy goes nuts, the end. A cop show, it isn’t. Good storytelling, it isn’t. The movie is only about exploring the creative boundaries of filmic, visual language, and by that criterion, it is an artistic triumph. But not for everybody.

The Company Men: Grade B

2011-06-19T07:16:00.001-07:00

B

The Company Men (2010)

Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Tommy Lee Jones, Craig T. Nelson; Writer-Director John Wells.

In Boston, a big shipbuilding company downsizes radically. Affleck, a senior sales executive, is unexpectedly fired. He expects to be in the “corporate relocation center” for only a few days, but after three months the Porsche is gone, the golf club has ejected him, the million-dollar house is foreclosed and the family moves into his parents’ basement. He takes a construction job with his brother-in-law (Costner). The story of his humiliation is a little overripe, but somewhat interesting for showing the trauma in a serious, dramatic way, not the tongue-in-cheek view taken by Up In The Air with George Clooney.

The idea that physical labor is somehow more honest, more noble, than being a sales manager is a melodramatic cliché, and the movie is rife with those. Affleck’s boss, TL Jones, represents "conscience" and is wracked with not-believable anxiety. After a while he loses his job too, but with stock options, he retains his wealth and social status.

Chris Cooper, a colleague of Affleck’s, also gets the axe and his reaction is to drink, curse, throw rocks, and eventually do the Willy Loman thing (from Death of a Salesman). His character adds only cheesy melodrama to the story told by Affleck’s character. But Cooper gives a fine performance. The CEO (Nelson) spouts big boss slogans about share price and mergers. Several times it is noted that his compensation is 17 times that of workers, although in fact, CEO compensation in America is closer to 400 times that of workers, so filmmaker Wells softened that harsh reality for some nefarious reason. So how does it all turn out? Ridiculously. A quick and implausible “happy ending” is tacked on just to bring the story to a close. Affleck has lost his high-flying lifestyle but has rediscovered the love of his wife and son. Aaaawwww!

What makes the movie work is not the screenplay, which is mediocre at best, clichéd at worst. It is the fine performances given by all the male leads, especially Costner, who in a smallish part, is far, far better than in any of his leading man roles. Affleck is strong but stays within himself, opening no new territory. Jones can speak any line well, but his character is not well developed and not believable. The women in the movie are all airhead placeholders. The music is terrible, intrusive and distracting. The theme hits a sympathetic chord but is larded with morality lessons and fails to address the substantive issues it raises, such as the enormous pay disparities, treating people as "human resources," and the need to separate personal from work identity. But on the plus side, besides strong acting among the male leads, the cinematography is thoughtful and noticeably good, and the set designs are perfect in every detail, making the film a little better than average.

True Grit: Grade C

2011-06-11T09:48:00.001-07:00

C

True Grit (2010)

Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld; Co-writers and co-directors: Joel and Ethan Coen.

This remake of the iconic 1969 western starring John Wayne is actually better than that original. I was never a fan of Wayne, nor am I fond of Jeff Bridges. Even so, you have to respect an actor who would attempt a redo of such an iconic role, and Bridges does pull it off. I was always aware that I was watching Jeff Bridges (same reason I didn’t like Wayne), but his character, a whiskey-sodden US Marshall, was strong and almost believable, so he gets away with it.

Fourteen year-old Steinfeld plays a well-educated and articulate (and well-dressed) girl on the Oklahoma frontier who would avenge her father’s killing, so she hires lawman Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to track down the villain with her. Her stylized language is formal and slightly Shakespearean. She uses no contractions and sprinkles her speeches with Latin phrases and legal terminology. It’s not a believable character, but it’s fun. Damon is a bounty hunter also after the killer, played by Brolin, and the two hunters argue and fret over who is responsible for the girl. The Marshal, despite his crude gruffness, develops some affection for the girl, but while the characters are entertaining, none is actually convincing.

I was surprised and disappointed with this movie. I expect a Coen brothers film to be quirky, edgy, and above all to raise sharp existential themes, but this was a straight ahead dusty western with no tricks. And it wasn’t even very dusty. All the sets, props, and costumes were brand new and spotlessly clean, even the train that goes through town in an opening scene. Everyone is in robust health, even the horses. So just like the characters, the settings and scenes are meticulously crafted, but never convincing. So it’s hard to determine what the intent of this movie was. Was it a remake just for the sake of remake?

The cinematography is so incredibly bad in the beginning scenes that I was ready to give up. I knew I just couldn’t endure a movie that bad. Improbable lighting, orange filters, and cameras swooping and panning like a cheap television drama. On top of that was a mind-numbing, content-free voiceover, and an insipid piano track reminiscent of a Ken Burns documentary. I’m glad I stuck it out because after 20 minutes, the filmmaking turned competent, and the narrator and the piano disappeared, as did the strange lighting and camera work. All that nonsense reappears momentarily in the closing scene however, so I now believe that those bookends were shot after the main part of the film and tacked on later. Why? Were they a Coen brothers joke? Those two are known to be tricksters. Or maybe somebody thought the film was “too dark”– literally dark, not metaphorically, with many scenes shot at night or on dim interior sets. But whatever the reason for the opening and closing sequences, they are horrible, horrible. The movie overall is not horrible though, just average.

Rabbit Hole: Grade B

2011-06-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

B

Rabbit Hole (2010)

Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Miles Teller, Sandra Oh; Director John Cameron Mitchell.

Kidman and Eckhart play an affluent suburban couple trying to deal with the death of their 8 year-old son in a car accident. They react differently to the loss, Eckhart seeking comfort in group therapy, Kidman with solitary anger and bitterness, then finally by striking up a relationship with the teenager who drove the lethal car (Teller).

It is easy to imagine that loss of a child could put enormous stresses on a marriage, as it does in this case, but despite all the shouting and gazing blankly into middle distance, I did not feel the pain. Maybe that’s just me, but there was nothing interesting said or shown. The characters react in the ordinary way that you would expect people to react, and say and do things ordinary people would, so in all, the story line of the movie is hackneyed, fundamentally boring and plays to cheap melodrama.

But it’s not all bad. The acting is superb, especially Kidman, and Wiest who plays her mother. Kidman lives up to her reputation as an extraordinary actor, and with guts too, appearing without makeup in several scenes. Despite all the work she’s had done, she is aging well. Eckhart turns in a better performance than I’ve ever seen before and is mostly convincing. Sandra Oh, a friend “at group,” is always a pleasure to watch. I wish she were in more features. But the real surprise was Teller, the kid who drove the car that accidentally killed the child. He has an intensity that reminds me of young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I hope he follows a similar acting trajectory.

The script is also spot on, with dialog that rings true and is often subtly, darkly funny.The casting was creative and a real strength. Sets and costumes are perfect. Music is inoffensive. Except for the overly sentimental, dead-end story premise, this is a film well worth watching.

The Man Who Wasn't There: Grade A

2011-06-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

A

The Man Who Wasn’t There (2002)

Billy Bob Thornton, Francis McDormand, James Gandolfini, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Jenkins, Tony Shaloub; Writers and Directors Joel and Ethan Coen.

This movie came within a hair’s breadth of qualifying as one of the most perfect movies ever made, right up there with Casablanca, North By Northwest, and Citizen Kane. Only the bloated, dithering ending spoiled it. If it had ended when BBT’s wife (McDormand) died, it would have been perfect, but that would have been too “noir” apparently, so an entirely new theme was introduced at the 11th hour, which seems to be from a different movie, in order to engineer a morally “pat” ending. Too bad.

BBT is a small town barber in 1949 California. We see him cut hair, but it is in the voiceover narration that we understand his character. He is laconic, a man of few words, reminiscent of the narrator in Camus’ Novel, The Stranger. Normally I don’t like voiceover but it works in this case because it is not a substitute for good, filmic storytelling. BBT meets a fly-by-night entrepreneur who needs a $10K investment to establish an innovative new business, “dry-cleaning.” To get the money, BBT commits a crime and the rest of the story is about the consequences of that act. The pace is slow, but not saggy, and the humor is sardonic.

The film is shot in glorious black-and-white, with sharp high-contrast, and loads of creative lighting and camera angles. You really do get the sense of time and place, although I think that sense is derived from watching old Bogart movies, not because the era actually looked like that. Still, it is wonderful. The mystery tale is well-told and the characters are convincing. McDormand gives a very fine performance, but Thornton is mesmerizing. That guy really knows how to smoke a cigarette! Gandolfini (before he blimped out), looks good and acts competently. Johansson is extremely cute but her role is just eye candy. The score is mostly excerpts from Beethoven piano sonatas, especially numbers 8 and 32, which give me the chills. So this stylistic thriller is completely successful as an homage, yet at the same time original, but comes up just shy of perfect.

Inside Job: Grade I

2011-06-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

I (Incomplete)

Inside Job (2010)

Matt Damon (narrator); Co-writer and director, Charles Ferguson.

I had to give this documentary of the U.S. Financial collapse a rare “Incomplete” grade because I couldn’t finish watching it – not because of any fault of the film. It is excellent. But the material is still too fresh, too raw, for me to consider without getting seriously upset.

What I did see was measured, balanced and facts-based, but it told a very familiar, tragic story. Greedy, sociopathic big bankers raked in mountains of money through deception, lies, and criminal behavior, ruining the lives of many millions of Americans. They were aided and abetted by corrupt and stupid government officials, who, like the bankers, walked away free and fat, while everyone else suffered. I can’t bear to re-live that American tragedy yet. Maybe later.

Too Big to Fail: Grade D

2011-06-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

D

Too Big To Fail (2011)

William Hurt, James Woods, Billy Crudup, Paul Giamatti, others. Director Curtis Hanson.

This HBO adaptation of journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s nonfiction account of the Wall Street meltdown is lifeless. Despite all the big name actors, they all just speak their lines without emotion. Giamatti is made to look a bit like Ben Bernanke, but aside from that, you would need subtitles to tell which actor is supposed to be which real-world player, because without that information, there is no drama. It is just a bunch of stuffed shirts announcing their cryptic lines.

The story centers on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (Hurt) and his efforts to save Lehman Brothers and then AIG from bankruptcy. But while Hurt, and most of the other players, are fine actors, they have a terrible script, which captures neither the human drama, nor conveys much information. The result is, paradoxically, that one of the most dramatic cataclysms in world financial history comes across as deadly boring.

Accidents Happen: Grade C

2011-06-03T09:22:00.001-07:00

C

Accidents Happen (2009)

Geena Davis, Harrison Gilbertson, Harry Cook. Director Andrew Lancaster.

This is supposed to be a comic tale about a suburban family in the 1950’s who suffers from exceptionally bad luck. A tragicomedy then. The film opens with an elderly neighbor man accidentally setting himself on fire at his barbeque and lunging into the family’s lawn sprinkler in desperation, but no good, he burns up. The voice-over narrator makes ironic remarks. This prolog tells us everything we need to know about the movie: it is neither comic nor tragic, has nothing to do with being unlucky, only tangentially involves the main characters of the family, and is badly written (voice-over is used when a screenwriter is unable to tell the story properly).

Next there is a horrible car crash (well-filmed) in which the family loses the father and a daughter and one of the sons goes into an irrecoverable coma, leaving only the mother (Davis) and her two teenage sons. The mother becomes depressed, bitter and foul-mouthed, and Davis’s electrifying performance of that character is the only reason to watch this movie. Her lines are mostly vulgar and insulting, not that funny, but she delivers them with such deadpan aplomb and perfect timing, you can’t help laughing. She is a great actor, and although no longer the stunning beauty she once was, she has aged well. Every scene she is in is a treat.

Alas, the rest of the film is painfully lifeless. The two teenage sons become distant and irresponsible, one a druggie and alcoholic, the other a chronic prankster with a neighbor kid. Their antics give Davis something to curse about, but other than that, are meaningless. There is no story and no ending. Sets are interesting, but weird. It looks like 1950’s suburbia, but not convincingly. So the movie is overall a failure, or would be, except for Davis’s performance, which is so strong, it is reason enough to watch.

Micmacs: Grade C

2011-06-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

C
Micmacs (2009)
Dany Boon, André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié, Yolande Moreau; Co-writer & Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. (French, subtitled).

This is a very strange film and probably worth seeing for that reason. A bomb squad member is blown up by a land mine, and his son notes the manufacturer of the weapon. As an adult, the man (Boon) is accidentally shot in the head by a handgun but survives. He becomes childlike and goofy (if he was not already), a homeless beggar and street performer. He finds his way to a family of trashpickers living in a scrap metal dump. They’re all as goofily eccentric as he is. When he decides to attack the weapons manufacturer (conveniently located nearby), he enlists their aid and they mount a sort of Mission Impossible set of tricks and operations to wreak havoc. The revenge story is somewhat fun because the team uses gizmos they found or made from their scrapyard pile, and their unique talents (they have a former circus performer who was a human cannonball and a woman contortionist who can fit herself inside a small box, etc.).

There isn’t much dialog and most of the humor is visual, giving the film a flavor of the old silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin or Keystone Cops. There are other visual allusions to film history as well. There is a slight, but trite political theme: Weapons manufacturers are evil. Sets are amazingly complex and clever, and cinematography is inventive – perhaps distractingly so. The characters are eccentric and aggressively whimsical. In fact the whole movie adds up to whimsy for the sake of whimsy. Neither the characters nor the story are coherent enough to engage the viewer so you are left with just sheer goofiness, which is not LOL funny, but you say to yourself, “that’s cute,” or “that’s charming.” But overall it’s like eating birthday cake: there is no food value.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Grade B

2011-05-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

B

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste; Writer-Director Werner Herzog.

Iconic director Herzog somehow gained permission from the French government to film the painted walls inside the famous prehistoric Chauvet cave discovered in southern France in 1994. This 3D documentary is stunning as a technical achievement and because of the cave drawings themselves. The drawings and etchings on the cave walls were made by humans living at the end of the ice age, about 32,000 years ago. There are horses, reindeer, rhinoceroses, bear, lion, mammoth, bison, hyenas, and much else. It’s difficult to imagine that world, with all those animals living alongside humans in France at that time.

Some of the drawings, made with charcoal, are incredibly sophisticated and beautiful by any artistic standard. The 3-D effect gives you a compelling sense of place. In all, the headache is probably worth it, because this film is really about the artists who made the pictures, not the pictures themselves, so you want to have a feeling for the spatial layout of the cave, which the 3D gives.

On the down side, the tone of the documentary is academic but not very scientific, so the information given, mostly in Herzog’s voice-over, is mildly interesting but not too informative. There are interviews with scientists who show what the ancient humans wore, how they hunted, and how they played tunes on a tiny, carved ivory flute that was found in the region. But there is little scientific information about climate, diet, trade, migratory patterns, housing, ecology, and so on. There is not even much technical information about how the pictures were actually made.

Instead, Herzog shows a nearby heated biodome housing albino alligators and suggests that maybe they are not really alligators but ghosts, mere reflections of the real alligators, just as the cave paintings are reflections through time of a way of life we can no longer understand. That’s a stretch, but I indulge it, because he is Herzog. So even though I am grateful to glimpse inside the Chauvet cave (which is sealed up to avoid the kind of damage that occurred at Lascaux), I would have better enjoyed a proper scientific documentary, as opposed to this sentimental approach which tries to convey the eerie mystery of our prehistoric ancestors. Still, there’s no denying that the cave is mysterious, and the drawings are incredibly beautiful.

Get Low: Grade C

2011-05-01T08:54:00.001-07:00

C

Get Low

Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black; Director Aaron Schneider.

You should see this movie because Duvall has never been better. The man is a master of the art of acting. He just possesses the screen whenever he is on it, even when most of his face is hidden by the long, ratty beard of the old hermit who is his character. And you should see the movie because Bill Murray is a great comic actor who does not need to tell jokes to get a laugh. All he needs to do is raise an eyebrow at the right moment, or toss an offhand remark. Put together Murray with Duvall, and you have an entertaining movie.

But that’s all there is. The rest of the actors do not perform well. Black in particular struggles unsuccessfully against something, maybe the director’s instructions? The story itself is exceptionally weak. The old hermit (Duvall) wants to throw a funeral party for himself, ostensibly so he can learn what people say about him. Funeral director Murray agrees to set it up, but then the old guy changes his mind after the invitations have already gone out. Anxiety follows, but predictably, the big event occurs, at which time, for reasons unclear, the old hermit reveals a dreadful family secret that does not amount to a hill of beans, but Sisssy Spacek cries, so it must be important. That is consistent with the poor writing that substitutes cheap sentimentality for characterization.

On the plus side (besides the great acting mentioned above), the bluegrass music is quite good and the costumes, sets and props for early 1930’s rural south are thoughtfully done, even though everything is brand new and shiny. But since the story line is so weak, the movie is, alas, instantly forgettable.

The Dukes: Grade F

2011-05-01T08:49:00.001-07:00

F

The Dukes (2007)

Chazz Palminteri, Robert Davi, Peter Bogdanovich; Co-writer and director Robert Davi.

It is generally not worth my time (or yours) for me to review movies that don’t meet minimum standards of watchability, but this one is interesting because it clearly demonstrates how bad directing (assisted by bad writing) can ruin a movie that looks promising. Chazz Palminteri is one of my favorite B-list actors. He is an archetypal Italian mobster, has a great sense of comic timing (e.g., Analyze This), and some pretty good dramatic chops too (e.g., Yonkers Joe). Bogdanovich, acclaimed director and actor in his own right, is enjoyable too. Lay on a plot of three old former doo-wop singers pulling off a safe-cracking gold heist, and what could go wrong? Writing and directing, that’s what.

The writing wants to be comedic but is so lame it could not appeal to anyone over 5 years old. Have the three men dress up as tomatoes to sing a commercial ditty. Har, har, what could be more funny? The safe was open but they accidentally locked it? Omigod, hilarious! The dialog is so stilted it doesn’t sound remotely like real people, and the principals are reduced to hammy overacting because there is nothing else for them to do.

The directing is so clunky that the actors sometimes actually stand there like mannequins waiting for their cue. The cameras alternate among straight head shots according to who is talking. It has the stink of television, only not as good. Plotting is jerky and hard to follow. Secondary characters are confusing and irrelevant. And tragically, the doo-wop music is terrible. So even though the film is unwatchable for entertainment value, it could be instructive to students of film who are interested to see how badly wrong filmmaking can go.

Please Give: Grade B

2011-04-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

B

Please Give (2010)

Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt, Sarah Steele, Ann Morgan Guilbert; Writer-Director Nicole Holofcener.

This film is almost a remake of Holofcener’s “Friends With Money,” another talky-comedy, which was set in LA. This one takes place in Manhattan and has a Woody-Allen feel. Two families are neighbors in a condo. The Keener-Platt couple (and their daughter Steele) have bought the neighboring apartment but allow the old lady living there (Guilbert) to remain as a tenant until she dies. She is tended to by her daughters Hall and Peet.

So what happens? Nothing. In the end, the old lady dies and the Keener-Platts take possession of her apartment as expected. There is no dramatic story line running through this film. Instead, it is about the characters, but they do not develop much over the course of the film. So what that leaves you is a set of little portraits or vignettes. But these characters are ordinary, white, affluent, moderately educated, generally uninteresting people. So this seems like a setup for an extremely boring movie, except that the acting is stellar and the script is moderately witty.

All these actors are so strong that you don’t really care that there is basically no story, no dramatic tension. Little quotidian things do happen, such as the two sisters, Hall and Peet bickering, Platt cheating on Keener, the daughter Steele wanting expensive jeans her mother won’t buy, the anxiety of how much money one should give street people. None of it builds story or character, and none of it contributes to a contemporary theme you could name. But again, the writing is sharp and the acting mesmerizing, and that’s enough to carry the picture.

Fair Game: Grade A

2011-04-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

A

Fair Game (2010)

Sean Penn, Naomi Watts. Director Doug Liman.

I give this movie high marks because I am a sucker for political thrillers, and this one is not bad, although somewhat disappointing. Penn is Joe Wilson, the ex-ambassador to African countries who investigated the White House claim that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Niger. Wilson found that not to be true, but George W. Bush went ahead and gave it as a justification for invading Iraq, in his State of the Union of 2001.

Outraged by the lie, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the NY Times explaining what he had NOT found in Niger. In retaliation, the White House “outed” his wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame (Watts), in clear violation of the law. Her career was ruined, their lives were ruined, and the marriage went on the rocks. Should they fight back? How can you fight the White house?

The film clings closely to documentary form, careful to show actual television broadcasts featuring Bush, Cheney, Rice, and “Scooter” Libby, all hewing to party line and basically lying through their teeth. A sub-drama is that when Plame is fired, her operation of rescuing informants in Baghdad is abandoned, leaving all her personal promises to those people broken and their lives in peril. Just another hardball day at the CIA.

Watts gives a scintillating performance; best I’ve ever seen her, and the movie is worth watching for that alone. Plus, she looks a lot like Valerie Plame, which adds realism. Penn has a few moments, but the brilliant actor we know he is, cannot be seen. I gather he was interested in putting his name and reputation behind this polemical movie, but not much interested in acting. He’s good: He’s Sean Penn, after all, but he is mostly a placeholder here. This is a Watts vehicle and she fills it.

The directing and overall storytelling are slightly disappointing. The movie sticks to the historical facts, but unless you are well informed on American political infighting, it will not come across as a suspenseful tale. There is little personal peril, and little drama, as there was in All The President’s Men, for example, or in the fictional Absolute Power. The story is strictly focused on political machinations. The relationship between Wilson and Plame is mildly interesting, but mundane, and clearly secondary to the political story. For me, the political story was gut-wrenching, and it was very unpleasant to re-live the nightmare of that time. But I think for most people, the story will seem flat, not a “thriller” at all.

I Love You Phillip Morris: Grade C

2011-04-17T09:20:00.001-07:00

C

I Love You Phillip Morris (2010)

Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor. Co-writer and director Glenn Ficarra.

Carrey is Russell, a Texas family man who suddenly comes out of the closet and moves to Florida where he can be openly and flamboyantly gay. He discovers that “being gay is really expensive,” so he resorts to identity theft and other scams. He ends up in prison where he meets Phillip (McGregor) and they fall in love.

Upon release, Russell vows to spring Phillip so they can be together, which he does, by implausibly changing some documents to win early release for Phillip. For finances, Russell turns to conning again, this time using unlikely impersonations along the line of Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. That movie, like this one, was “based” on a true story, but that does not make either one of them believable. Russell is busted again, but escapes from jail, in yet another unconvincing impersonation, and that con-bust-escape cycle repeats about four more times until the movie just runs out of steam and ends, with Russell in jail.

On the plus side, Carrey is an enjoyable, if predictable actor. We’ve seen all his rubber face mug shots before, but they’re still funny. He has aged well. The dialog has a few really funny moments, but mostly the script is broad farce and gags. The movie helps normalize gay relationships, for example, by showing the two men dancing together romantically and hugging in bed. On the other hand, the romance between the men was never convincing, as it was in Brokeback Mountain, for example, so all you’re left with is some scenes of men touching, hugging, and kissing. That just does not add up to romance, so if the movie is trying to normalize gay relationships, it falls short.

There are some funny situations and lines, and Carrey is genetically funny, but the movie isn’t. It’s all predictable gags and implausible skits. Nor does the movie work as a drama, because the jailbreaks are not believable (whether they actually happened or not is irrelevant), and neither of the characters shows change, nuance, or development. McGregor gives a sensitive and courageous performance, but the character is so flat that we don’t care about him. Directing is good, costumes and sets outstanding. The music is very well selected, and cinematography is bright and clear. So the movie is worth watching, but ultimately not very entertaining.

Casino Jack: Grade C

2011-04-16T09:51:00.001-07:00

C

Casino Jack (2010)

Kevin Spacey, Barry Pepper, John Lovitz, Rachelle Lefevre, Kelly Preston, Graham Greene. Director George Hickenlooper.

Spacey is Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist convicted in 2006 of fraud, conspiracy, and corruption. He was recently released from prison, after serving only half of his six year sentence (how does that work?). The movie wants to be a biopic of Abramoff, perhaps with the goal of humanizing a figure who, to many, is little more than an amoral, money-grubbing beast. That goal is mostly realized, thanks to Spacey’s trademark intelligent, smiling mendacity. His performance carries this otherwise weak movie. His right-hand man (Pepper), and his hired front man (Lovitz), are humorous and enjoyable cartoon characters that cannot be taken seriously, although those actors give a hundred percent.

The movie is a tragically missed opportunity. The really interesting part of the Abramoff story is not the guy’s personal life and character. There is nothing distinctive or interesting about him as a person. He is an ordinary, megalomaniacal parasite who doesn’t understand why “the law” singles him out for arbitrary punishment. We’ve seen that character in the movies a hundred times, and the dialog here is accordingly stale, cliched, and deadening.

The really interesting story is not how Abramoff brushes his teeth or likes to quote Michael Corleone, but the culture of Washington corruption and big bucks lobbying. The movie makes a few allusions, showing Abramoff’s close relationship with Tom Delay (without mentioning that Delay is now in prison for corruption and money laundering), and it takes a few vague potshots at John McCain. There is nothing at all about his numerous meetings with George W. Bush, the conviction of several White House staffers for bribery and corruption, and few details about the fraud he perpetrated on several Indian tribes.

You cannot see in this movie any actual crimes being committed, investigated, charged, or prosecuted. So in the end, the viewer is just as mystified as poor Jack about why he is in jail. That’s bad writing, and it’s a shame, because this story could have been as gripping as All The President’s Men, or any other political thriller. To get a more comprehensive view of the Abramoff scandal, one would be better off with Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a nonfiction documentary and a better movie.

The Tourist: Grade C

2011-04-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

C

The Tourist (2010)

Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Rufus Sewell; Writer-Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Good acting by Johnny Depp and Paul Bettany save this movie from total disaster, but it is pretty bad. Jolie is “statuesque” and well-costumed, but her face is painful to look at. I guess she is considered beautiful, but I see her distorted face as frighteningly grotesque. Depp plays a straight, for-real character in the first half, a real treat, before he goes into his trademark ironic shtick near the end.

Jolie is some kind of undercover agent (it’s not clear what kind) in Venice and she is pursued by bad guys, from her point of view, although they later turn out to be cops, including Bettany. Why? Because they want her elusive husband for tax evasion. She attaches herself to a simple math teacher from Wisconsin, a tourist on a train (Depp), so the baddies will think that’s her husband. Convincing? Not for an instant. From then on there are interminable and unconvincing boat chases through the canals of Venice. There are some crude CGI shots of Venice, which makes me doubt the film was even made there. There are a few funny lines (far too few) and some of the sets are done up in sensuous detail.

Gunshots are fired, but they all magically miss so nobody is hurt. In the end, there is a hidden safe, and missing money, and I can’t even remember what all. Basically, nothing was ever at stake in this movie. It was just Keystone Cops. And unforgivably, the ridiculous ending, which anybody could see coming a mile away, undercut and contradicted everything you have seen so far, making the viewer a sucker for watching it.

All Good Things: Grade D

2011-04-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

D

All Good Things (2010)

Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella; Director Andrew Jarecki.

This movie gets an A for acting. It is outstanding, really quite riveting, by all three principals and also by Kristen Wiig, who plays a small, unnecessary part. However, the movie is a failure in all other aspects: screenplay, script, directing, music, costumes, sets, and even sound engineering (volume unaccountably varies by at least a factor of three). What a waste of superior acting talent. I do acknowledge that makeup was done well.

The most obvious reason for the failure is a familiar one: the story is based on an actual unsolved mystery that took place in New York in the 1970’s, so the filmmakers could not decide whether to do a documentary or a work of fiction, so they did both, badly. And when you think about it, how dramatic a story can an unsolved mystery make? It is unsolved!

Gosling plays a rebellious son in an obscenely rich New York City business family headed by his dad, Langella. Gosling rejects the family business, smokes a lot of weed, and takes up with a “commoner” (Dunst), to open a health food shop in Vermont. That part of the movie seems to work fairly well, but it doesn’t last. Shortly after, the son suddenly decides he needs a lot of money to survive, and goes back to the city to join the family business. We peasants manage to make our way in the world without a wealthy family, but that was apparently not an option for this guy. In shades of The Godfather II and III, the wife is neglected and becomes extremely unhappy in the city. The couple becomes estranged.

At the midpoint of the movie, the husband goes borderline psychotic, becoming incommunicative, almost catatonic, and generally creepy. No explanation for the change in behavior from the first half of the movie is given. It is implied that he has been traumatized by having seen his mother die when he was young, but I guess he only remembered that trauma halfway through the movie? Then the wife inexplicably disappears, and remains missing for the rest of the movie. No foul play is indicated and no one is charged with any crime. Is that a great ending, or what?

Despite the film’s title, there are Hardly Any Good Things in this movie.

Never Let Me Go: Grade D

2011-04-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

D

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield; Director Mark Romanek.

This film represents a failure of execution, not story, because the novel is a subtle and powerful exploration of unfulfilled love. Author Ishigura’s deeply interior work can be successfully filmed, as demonstrated in The Remains of the Day. But in this case, the director and screenwriter could not find the cinematic language to express the story (despite Ishigura himself being an executive producer). We can only imagine what went wrong.

Three children are raised with dozens of others in a bucolic English boarding school, in an opening section that could easily have been edited to half its length. When they are preteen, the children are informed that they are clones, not real humans, and their purpose is to donate their organs upon maturity. For reasons unknown, they accept this fate.

As the three friends reach young adulthood they begin to fulfill their mission. They seem intelligent, well-educated and articulate, but inexplicably, never question their self-sacrificial mission, nor do they discuss what it means to be a clone “rather than” a human.

The worthy sci-fi theme of the story then is, would a clone have a soul? But this theme is not explored, hardly touched upon. Instead the focus is on the love triangle among the threesome. That could have been a good story, but the pace is so slow and the dialog so deadening that we just don’t believe in it. A final theme arises from the threesome’s belated self-awareness that they are ambivalent about their mission. That could have been a great story also. But despite their doubts, the characters unaccountably plod on.

Even if a decent editor had trimmed the prodigious deadwood out of the movie, I don’t think the remaining scenes would be sufficient: the story is just not well told. The cringeworthy maudlin music is unable to disguise the movie's lack of dramatic tension.

Keira Knightly, in a ridiculous jet-black wig (which the marketing people obviously tried to tone down on the DVD cover) is inert. She does not live up to her acting reputation. That is inexcusably bad directing. Mulligan (who was fantastic in An Education) has such an expressive face that she fills the screen even when she has no lines. Garfield (buddy to Zuckerman in The Social Network) turns in an admirable performance. Those acting virtues (barely) save this movie from the tragic failure it need not have been.

Mock Up on Mu: Grade B

2011-03-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

B

Mock Up on Mu (2008)

Stoney Burke, Damon Packard, Michelle Silva; Writer- Director Craig Baldwin

This experimental film is a collage of clips of films from the 1950’s mostly, and mostly from bad sci-fi films of that era, but also including a few good ones. Gort, the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still appears briefly. There are also clips from dusty westerns of the period, and some dramas as well, such as Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. These hundreds, if not thousands of short clips are arranged into thirteen loose categories, such as westerns, sci-fi, scenes shot in the Sonoran desert, cave scenes, rocket launches, press conferences, and so on. Mixed in are some of live shots with about four actors in ironically bad scenes, who provide a small amount of narrative cohesion for the collages.

The result is amusing and entertaining, sort of a cross between What’s Up Tiger Lily and Mystery Science Theater 3000. I think it would be especially enjoyable if one were stoned. I watched the film twice, the second time without the sound, and I enjoyed it more the second time. With the sound on, the overall themes seem to be that humans should be mining resources, reprocessing nuclear waste, and generating energy on the moon, should not be spending tons of money developing military weapons, and finally, that L. Ron Hubbard, sci-fi writer in the 1950’s and founder of Scientology, and his closest friends, were mad and/or evil.

None of that makes much sense, and it’s not very funny, so the film is just as interesting (and a lot less noisy) with the sound off. This is a very creative effort, well edited, with some good humor. With better writing, this collage approach to film could be significant.

Jack Goes Boating: Grade A

2011-03-19T08:59:00.001-07:00

A

Jack Goes Boating (2010)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, Daphne Rubin-Vega, John Ortiz; Director Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Jack (Hoffman) and Clyde (Ortiz) are a couple of 40 year old limo drivers in New York City who like reggae music. Clyde fixes Jack up with Connie (Ryan), a woman who works as a telemarketer with his wife, Lucy (Rubin-Vega). The date goes well, a relationship evolves, and Jack makes two promises, to take Connie boating next summer, and to cook a dinner next month at Clyde’s apartment (because Jack lives in his parents’ basement and has only a hotplate). Jack learns how to cook, and also how to swim, in preparation. The dinner party goes well at first, then turns to disaster when the food is burned and a fierce argument erupts between Clyde and Lucy. Jack and Connie make a hasty retreat and presumably will go boating next summer. That’s it. Eighty four minutes.

Now, why isn’t that the most boring movie you've ever heard of? One reason is the excellent writing. The dialog is completely original, interesting, witty, natural, and flows from the wellsprings of the human condition. (The story is from an off-Broadway play by Robert Glaudini that Hoffman starred in.) Add to that, remarkable, riveting, heartfelt acting, especially by Hoffman and Ryan. Hoffman never ceases to amaze me with his courage. He can do embarrassed vulnerability like no other actor. Ryan does vulnerability almost as well, but her character is more psychologically complex, so she adds a touch of fearful paranoia, which works extremely well. Ortiz and Rubin-Vega (also from the original stage performance) give fine performances, if not quite as nuanced. Ortiz’s voice and diction sound so much like Denzel Washington that it is distracting at first.

Then you have to consider the excellent directing, by Hoffman also. It is his directorial debut and clearly he has the knack. The overall feel is kind of stagey and a bit claustrophobic, but so are the characters’ lives, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The tone is Woody-Allenesque – nothing terribly original there, but the way Hoffman gets the camera right into the faces of his performers, including himself, is just as courageous as his own acting is. Finally, add in a first rate job on other elements of the movie, from the infectious reggae and Bill Evans soundtrack to pitch-perfect costumes and sets. It all adds up to a tour de force and a mesmerizing adult relationship drama that has not a minute of slack.

The Fighter: Grade D

2011-03-18T09:53:00.001-07:00

D

The Fighter (2010)

Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale , Amy Adams. Director David O. Russell.

A couple of brothers, Micky and Dicky, are young Irish boxers in Lowell, MA (Wahlberg and Bale). Mostly they are losers. Micky got beat and can’t seem to recover his momentum. Dicky also had a high point but then turned to drugs and alcohol. Dicky acts as Micky’s trainer, their mother is their manager, and they all have delusionally optimistic hopes of winning “the big fight” someday. The theme is Rocky, and the setting is low-class suburban squalor.

I tried hard, but could not find anything to like about this film, with the exception of Amy Adams, who, even in a stereotypical role, manages to shine. Otherwise, everything in this movie, from the casting to the costumes is the most brain-dead cliché you can imagine. Even the makeup is cliché and that's hard to do! Needless to say, so is the dialog and the cinematography.

The boxing scenes are utterly unconvincing. At no time did I believe Christian Bale’s character, a skinny little smart-ass runt, was a boxer. Wahlberg has big muscles, but does not move like a boxer. The story line is loosely connected scenes of blatant melodrama mixed with even more clichéd sets. Any dramatic tension that might be identified is completely contrived.

To my astonishment, Bale won Best Supporting for his over the top, hammy parody of a real person. His performance is so bad, I would say it is unintentionally humorous. That just shows what I know! USA Today called this “One of the year’s best films.” Maybe here on Earth it was, but on Mars, where I live, we are still trying to get the smell out of our living pods.

The Secret In Their Eyes: Grade B

2011-03-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

B

The Secret In Their Eyes (2009)

Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil ,Pablo Rago, Javier Godino; Co-writer and director Juan José Campanella. (Spanish, subtitled).

This academy-award winning Argentine film is a beautiful, thoughtful mystery story that doesn’t know when to end. A retired federal agent (Darín) is writing a mystery novel based on a case he ran 25 years ago. He discusses the manuscript with his boss (Villamil) who was his boss back then too. The movie cuts away to dramatize what happened in the past.

It was a rape-homicide and by examining the victim’s photograph albums, the detective has the intuition that one creepy guy (Godino) who appears in numerous pictures with the dead girl, is a prime suspect. But a nasty superior just wants the case closed so arrests a couple of street thugs and closes the case. Nevertheless, the detective persists and does capture the real bad guy. But the nasty superior lets him go, and worse, puts him on the payroll as a street informer. Meanwhile, everybody but the detective himself realizes that he is falling in love with his boss.

The story goes on and on, with several more endings beyond the two mentioned above. The romantic story, maybe the most compelling of the several strands, gets short shrift. Nobody, not even a detective, could be that dumb about women. But another interesting theme, rather subtle, at least for Americans, is allusion to Argentina’s “Dirty Wars” of the 1970’s. The nasty superior who jails two innocents and hires the killer on his staff represents the corrupt Peron government and the sense of helplessness that ordinary people feel in the face of such abuse of power is palpable. The multiple endings may also reflect that theme.

The acting is very strong, especially by the two romantic leads, and the directing and writing are excellent, especially, again, in the scenes with romantic connections. Cinematography is beautiful and costumes are outstanding. Despite its over-long runtime, this is a consistently engaging film.

Conviction: Grade B

2011-03-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

B
Conviction (2010)

Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Melissa Leo, Juliet Lewis; Director Tony Goldwyn.

Rockwell plays an impulsive, perhaps psychopathic, ne’er-do-well, working class guy in rural Massachusetts. When a woman is found stabbed to death, the police pick him up because he has a record and is one of the “usual suspects.” But when his wife and a girlfriend both testify that he confessed that he did it, he unexpectedly goes to prison for life.

His sister (Swank) is desperate, convinced that he is innocent, but she has no resources to help him. All appeals are lost. So she goes to law school, struggles, alienates her husband, and eventually becomes a lawyer, along with her buddy, Minnie Driver, who is an eyeball magnet. As a lawyer, she discovers that DNA evidence could exonerate her brother (this is set in the 1980’s-early 1990’s when DNA evidence was just coming into use in the law). A long, drawn-out scramble follows while she tries to locate the 15 year old bloodstain evidence from the case, but eventually her brother is freed.

At 2.5 hours, this movie needed some serious editing. As with most fictionalizations of a true story, the filmmakers cannot decide if they are doing a documentary or a piece of fiction, so they do both, to the detriment of both. There are tons of irrelevant and saggy scenes that needed to go.

It is an inspirational story of one woman’s tenacity fighting an uncaring, flawed, legal system. The acting is very good, but I confess that I am not a huge fan of Swank. She is good, yes, but she just does not have the emotional range of, say, Juliet Lewis or Minnie Driver. She is either “on” or “off.” Those seem to be her only two emotions. But that is not to say she is bad – she is a good actor, just noticeably limited, and I did not get involved in her character. Juliet Lewis, now, there is a fabulous actor. In her two brief scenes, she is just electrifying. Sam Rockwell is convincing and consistent, and conveys the emotions extremely well. So despite the bloated and overly sentimentalized nature of this picture (don’t get me started on the sappy piano music –barf!), the strong acting makes it a worthwhile see.

The Next Three Days: Grade B

2011-03-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

B
The Next Three Days (2010)

Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks. Writer-director Paul Haggis.

Banks is riveting as an ordinary office worker who is unexpectedly accused of murdering her boss. The evidence is pretty shaky but good enough for the movies. Her fingerprints are on the blunt object, although an omniscient cutaway shows us that she just moved it out of her way in the parking garage. And oh, yeah, it had some victim’s blood on it which she managed to pick up as well. That's a life sentence in Hollywood.

She goes to prison, all appeals are lost. Her husband, Crowe, is an ordinary college professor who doesn’t have the money for high priced lawyers but believes in his wife’s innocence. He is frustrated and helpless. Being a bookish kind of guy, he researches the heck out of how to accomplish a prison break. Then he carefully executes his very detailed and tricky plan, and that is the fun part of the movie.

What makes this extremely implausible story worth watching is the fine acting from the two principals. Crowe is capable of a lot more than swishing a sword around. He really can act and this is among his best performances, well worth the price of admission. He does not step out of his seething, mumbling, slit-eyed, laconic persona – he is still Russell Crowe, (nor does he go very long without the aviator sunglasses), but still, he is a compelling screen presence. Against Banks, the acting makes this thriller for ordinary people seem more reasonable than it is.

The Last Circus: Grade B

2011-03-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

The Last Circus (Balada Triste de Trompeta) (2010)

Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang; Writer-director Álex de la Iglesia.(Spanish, subtitled).

This is one of the strangest movies I have seen in a long time; a dark, violent, horror movie; a bloody splatter picture; also a farce, a cutting political satire, and a sweet romantic comedy. It is so mind-blowingly, creatively original that I have to give it high marks. Its 107 minutes grind on too long however and the story degenerates into meaningless chaos as it comes to its prolonged, tragic finale, so it gets graded down for that.

Set in the 1930’s and the Spanish civil war, a group of circus performers is forcibly drafted into Franco’s army, but the head clown refuses and ridicules the nasty officer. For his efforts he is imprisoned, tortured, and killed, but not before he advises his confused young son to be a sad clown, not a happy clown, because life is no longer happy. The son grows up and joins a circus as an incredibly incompetent sad clown. He is so bad that he actually makes people laugh. Ironically, the circus’s happy clown is actually a psychotic woman-beater who lords it over him just as the fascist soldier humiliated his father. The pathetic, dumpy and weak sad clown naively falls in love with the happy clown’s girl, the beautiful trapeze artist, and is consequently beaten to a pulp. Retaliating, he attacks the happy clown, ripping his face apart with a farrier’s hook, in one of several extremely violent, bloody scenes, that are yet somehow squirmingly comedic because of the costumes and sets.

The sad clown escapes the police by running into the forest and living naked in a cave like an animal. A hunter finds him and takes him home as a curiosity, and you’ll never guess, the hunter is the very army officer who killed his father. The sad clown plots his revenge, but first he improvises a fantastic clown costume out of draperies and props suggestive of papal garb.

But suddenly the happy clown reappears, not dead after all, but horribly disfigured, in a fantastic makeup job. Further tragicomic-horror clown battles ensue, including a chase up a church steeple reminiscent of the chase up Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. There are also visual allusions to Picasso’s Guernica, Puccini’s Pagliacci, and to other historical and cinematic landmarks.

The original title, A Sad Trumpet Ballad, may have some significance that escapes me, but is otherwise just the name of the musical sound track. The cinematography, and especially the lighting, are exceptionally striking throughout the movie. Costumes and makeup are unbelievably creative, as is the writing itself. Directing is excellent and well paced, until the last act. Violence and sexuality are integrated into the allegorical civil war theme and used well. Ultimately, the movie does not present a single, easy to grasp political message, or comedic tone, or horror theme, but is a dizzying pastiche of many of those, engaging the viewer on multiple levels of relentless creative turmoil.

Revolucion: Grade A

2011-03-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

A

Revolucion (2010)

Unknown (to me) Mexican actors; Unknown (to me) Mexican directors. (Spanish, subtitled).

You will have to search for this DVD, but it is well worth looking. Netflix claims to have it. It was shown last fall at the New York Film Festival and I caught it at the 2011 Portland (OR) film festival.

The government of Mexico, through its National Mexican Institute of Cinematography, commissioned ten well-established directors to produce short films for the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. The ten shorts are not directly about that revolution in the sense that they do not attempt to document what happened. Rather, they are works of art, about the theme of revolution in general, and Mexican experience in particular.

So for example, the first one shows a small town brass band rehearsing a welcoming tune for some big forthcoming arrival, unspecified, in the manner of Waiting for Godot. The music is amateur and terrible, but the players mean well. The film focuses with compassion and humor on the tribulations of the tuba player as he prepares for the big event, but in the end, Godot never arrives. It’s a terrific piece of film in its own right, but under the umbrella concept it is also a strong political comment: “Revolution? What revolution? We are still waiting for the revolution.”

The other nine are equally beautiful, well-crafted, moving, and thought-provoking. Some comment on the futility of violence in general, some on its absurdity, some on the meaninglessness of political revolutions where nothing really changes. Two took up the theme of how the memory and “celebration” of the revolution only trivialize the suffering and passion of those who took part in it. There are as many ideas about revolution as there were directors. Every one of the pieces is a gem of filmmaking.

Welcome to the Rileys: Grade A

2011-02-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

A

Welcome to the Rileys (2010)

James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, Melissa Leo; Director Jake Scott.

I never saw The Sopranos series, so I don’t have Gandolfini typecast in my mind. That’s a good thing, because in this movie he is completely believable as a middle-aged plumbing supply merchant from Indianapolis. He and his wife of thirty years (Stewart, who strongly reminds me of Patricia Clarkson, in look, acting style, and talent), are distant from each other because they lost a 15 year old daughter in a car crash. The wife blames herself because she was following the girl, and the husband tacitly agrees to that by letting her blame herself. She is traumatized and never leaves the house. At a conference in New Orleans, he calls home and says he is not coming back “for a while.”

In New Orleans, he meets a 16 year old stripper/prostitute (Leo), and informally adopts her, fixing up her derelict flat and giving fatherly advice. He claims he does not know why he is doing this but the viewer can see he is trying to resurrect his daughter. Eventually, his wife joins him in there, “mothers” the girl but has the sense to realize the situation is unhealthy. The girl finally runs from them, claiming “It is way too late for me to be anybody’s little girl.”

The writing is very strong (Ken Hixon) and true. Every line of dialog is on target. The acting is superior, especially by Gandolfini and Stewart. Stewart’s character takes a while to get going because there’s only so much acting you can do as a stunned, near-catatonic recluse. But late in the film she shows real depth. Leo has a stereotype character, really just a foil for the adults to work out their relationship, but there are several scenes in which it is clear that she has serious talent.

There are technical problems with the cinematography. Many scenes are so dark and muddy, it is impossible to make out what is going on. Sure, they are nominally night scenes, but still, memo to the cinematographer: photography requires light! In one scene, the picture actually drops in brightness by 50% as if there had been a power failure, but it is just a technical goof-up. The director pulled some terrific performances out of these players, but there are far too many “dead zone” scenes of people driving or sleeping. Seriously, how interesting is it to watch somebody sleep?

The story itself is not very original (grief over a lost child), but the main characters are so well developed and their acting is so outstanding, that despite its flaws, the movie is highly watchable anyway.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Grade A

2011-02-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

A

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas; Writer-Director Woody Allen.

An elderly married couple breaks up (Hopkins-Jones) when he realizes that his wife “has let herself get old.” He hits the gym and takes up with a young, beautiful, airhead, gold digger prostitute. Meanwhile their daughter (Watts) breaks up with her husband (Brolin), a failed writer. Each of the four is soon attracted to other potential mates. Everyone is haunted by failed relationships and struggles to start a new life.

It took me a while to get into this movie. It starts out with dreadful acting, a stilted script, noticeably mechanical directing, and a dreadful, intrusive narrator. I thought, "This is aggressively bad!" About halfway through, some real acting begins to show, although the characters never do become well developed. Finally I realized what Allen was trying to do. He did not want us to get involved with these characters. They are symbols, or archetypes for the lives in our culture, not real people we should care about. That’s why the plot line is practically nonexistent, the romantic relationships stereotypes, and the acting hollow. None of that matters. He is forcing us beyond the particular characters into universals. We are being shown the archetypes of modern, Western, sophisticated urban life, so that we might reflect on its meaning, or lack of same. Ultimately this is an existential movie that says, your life has no meaning, despite today’s passions and angst that seem so gripping. That is the human condition.

What makes this approach work is the superlative film making, especially the sets and costumes. Every detail, and I mean every one, is absolutely perfect. Colors, camera angles, framing, lighting, movement, rhythm, jewelry, hairstyle, buttons, every tiny detail is done to loving perfection, and the movie is worth seeing just for that exercise of craft. But as a bonus, you get the subtle existential message, and the pleasure of seeing some familiar faces on the big screen. You could watch this movie as a mildly interesting romantic comedy/drama, but you’d be missing the point. It is so much more if you look a little deeper.

Stone; Grade C

2011-02-13T14:18:00.000-08:00

C

Stone (2010)

Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Mila Jovovich; Director John Curran.

I love Edward Norton, and he does not disappoint in this movie. He is an almost-crazy convict pleading with his parole officer (De Niro) for early release. His hyperactive delivery, just barely under control, is electrifying. It is as good a performance as he has ever given.

De Niro shows the cynical, burned out prison employee, just a month from retirement. He deftly conveys his tiredness, confusion, and vulnerability, right alongside his trademark “tough” persona. Jovovich also performs well, although her character doesn’t make much sense, so it is hard to tell what she is trying to convey. She is the wife of the prisoner and tries to seduce the parole officer to affect his decision. She only gets stereotypical lines to speak. She has aged well since I last saw her as God, in The Fifth Element. Of course she doesn’t look as good as she did then, but nobody could.

Despite the phenomenal acting by the two men, especially Norton, the movie doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no prison break, no character development, no tricky developments. It’s just talky, talky, talky. Norton wins early release, then De Niro changes his mind, but it’s too late, so la dee dah, he just retires anyway. It is difficult to understand why a major movie, with a major budget, and with such star power could not afford a couple of savior writers, or why some producer did not see the thing drifting. Hollywood is a world where common sense does not hold much weight.

For Colored Girls: Grade B

2011-02-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

B

For Colored Girls (2010)

Kimberly Elise, Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Tessa Thompson; Writer and Director Tyler Perry.

These are vignettes from the lives of nine black women living in New York. Some of the lives intersect as the movie develops. There is not much dramatic tension, either in each life-story, or overall in the movie; it is strictly a “slice of life” approach. The stories are loose representations of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 set of poems and dances, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf. The original had only seven characters, whereas this movie has nine, making the movie confusing and hard to keep track of. Passages of Shange’s work are read by actors in several scenes and their lyrical beauty leaps out at you. It is a harsh transition back to Perry’s mundane script after those segments.

Overall, the message of the movie is simple: Men (black men anyway) are immature, lying, cheating, disease-ridden, alcoholic, thieving rapists who want only one thing. They smile and sweet talk women while betraying them, murdering their children, ruining their lives. Black women, on the other hand, are gentle, sensitive, caring souls who seek love and understanding, and tragically, that need is so great it causes them to spread their legs when they shouldn’t, and blindly trust their lives to the aforementioned male ratbastards. The thematic content of the movie is so exaggerated that it verges on tragicomedy despite all the maudlin tears. And at well over two hours, repetition soon becomes boring.

But you should watch the movie anyway. Why? For the stunning acting. Most of these women give performances of Shakespearean proportions. Thandi Newton, Kerry Washington, and Kimberly Elise – wow! It’s acting like you haven’t seen in one place before. Janet Jackson acquits herself, but she’s had so much bizarre cosmetic surgery that she looks like Michael, and that’s all I could think about. Whoopi is the weakest character but she had to be included because of her role in The Color Purple. Kudos go to Perry’s directing and writing. I did not know he had this kind of thing in him, judging from his other broad, farcical, slapstick movies. This was a revelation in that regard. Good cinematography, good music, tight editing. Despite the melodrama, it’s worth seeing.

Frenemy: Grade C

2011-02-08T09:47:00.001-08:00

C
Frenemy (2009)

Matthew Modine, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Adelstein, Callum Blue; Director Gregory Dark.

In this extremely low budget film, a porn video store in LA is held up and two customers (Modine and Blue) are temporarily hostage, along with the owner (Galifianakis). The chatty burglar (Adelstein) engages the hostages, in the funniest scene in the movie, in which the store owner objects to all the talk, “What is this, My Robbery With Andre?”

That is the best line in this off-beat comedy, and the allusion characterizes the rest of the film which is far less interesting and funny. The two customers are otherwise seen walking all around LA, having lunch, coffee, and parties, all the while talking about the meaning of life, love, fate, death, and so on. That dialog is very mildly amusing but not really funny or insightful. Woody Allen it is not. And the acting is mediocre, at best. However, overall, the movie is original, and well-photographed, and a respectable effort.

Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity : Grade B

2011-02-06T09:57:00.000-08:00

B
Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity (2002)

Sandra Oh, Valerie Tian; Co-writer and director Mina Shum. (Chinese and English, subtitled).

A working class single mother in a Chinese neighborhood of Vancouver (Oh) struggles to raise her extremely cute twelve-year-old daughter, Mindy (Tian). Mindy finds a magic book and begins to practice spells that will help her mother fall in love (no clue where the missing father is ). The magical-fantasy thread of the movie is that the childish spells really do work, but because Mindy is inept, they do not seem to. When she tries creating a winning lottery number for her mother, she goofs up the spell and the butcher wins instead, but Mindy never knows what happened. There are other charming episodes of that nature, and these give us a loving and intimate portrait of life in that community. In the end, Mindy’s mother does find love, and the other characters’ stories are resolved as well, not all of them happily.

The plot is pretty weak, depending on our acceptance of the magic, but the characterizations are strong, and the acting is excellent, especially by the principals, Oh, and Tian. The writing is sharp and Oh stands out as a fine actor. Cinematography is marvelous and Vancouver never looked so good, even in winter with its bare trees and gray skies. There is practically no dramatic tension in the script. It is instead an almost documentary exploration, with magical realism and humor adding spice. It is a lightweight, but heartwarming, family story that is affecting without being melodramatic, insightful without being voyeuristic.

Howl: Grade B

2011-02-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

B
Howl (2010)

Allen Ginsberg, James Franco, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, David Strathairn, Treat Williams, Jon Hamm, Bob Balaban; Co-writers and Co-directors Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman.

Ginsberg’s long poem, Howl, was published in 1957 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The book was promptly seized by the San Francisco police, and Ferlinghetti, not Ginsberg, was arrested for obscenity. The subsequent trial, dramatized in this film, discusses aspects of the poem and the obscenity statute via trial lawyers Strathairn and Hamm, before judge Balaban. That dramatization illustrates what sorts of arguments were made in defining obscenity in literature back then. Supposedly all the dialog in this movie was really spoken by the original players. While the acting is quite good, the sequence says more about 1950’s morals than about the poem.

The courtroom drama is intercut with a documentary style interview with Ginsberg, played brilliantly by Franco, in which he explains and defends the poem and discusses his artistic process and his awakening as a homosexual. Another intercut thread is a set of faux-archival shots of Ginsberg (again Franco) reading the poem at a coffee shop, and of scenes from Ginsberg’s young life (he wrote the poem when he was 29). And finally, there is an intercut thread of surrealistic animations, mostly human figures swooping about like Tinker-Bell, streaming stardust behind them, to the soundtrack of Franco reading the poem. So all four of these threads are chopped up and re-woven so you don’t get bored just listening to the poem straight through. As a cinematic technique it is brilliant. Somebody should do the same for Eliot’s The Wasteland, and other difficult modern poems.

Yet despite the clever construction of the movie, I was often bored, because the poem itself is just plain tedious in long stretches, and the film insisted on re-reading sections of it, which only increased the pain. There are brilliant passages in the poem, to be sure, both thematically and acoustically/musically. I love “Boxcar, boxcar, boxcar” as a line, for example. It sounds great, looks great, and it is very satisfying to say, and who could think of that?

So there is no denying that the poem has its brilliance. But it is over a half-century old now, and is no longer shocking. Nobody cares any more if you are homosexual; nobody cares if you say “asshole” a lot. In its time, though, the poem was extremely radical, and still worth reading today. The movie covers the poem pretty thoroughly so it is not necessary to know it beforehand.

Ginsberg himself was not that interesting of a character, so the biography aspect of the film is not riveting. Sure, he struggled with his sexual and professional identities and with drugs, but a lot of people have done the same. So while Ginsberg was probably the most celebrated poet of the twentieth century, that doesn’t make the poem better than it is. Conclusion: great movie making, okay subject matter.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work: Grade B

2011-01-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

B

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010)

Joan Rivers; Directors Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg.

This documentary follows Rivers for one year, her seventy-fifth, as she tries to get performance dates, performs, and frets over her career and her relationship with her daughter. She is chronically anxious about getting engagements because, she says, she needs the money, and that’s not surprising, considering how she lives. She has an enormous apartment in New York City with more square footage than my house, and it looks like a replica of the Palace at Versailles. It is truly bizarre.

She seems sharp for 75 years old, although the film is edited to give only limited access to her life. She relates a superficial autobiography revealing only the mundane: marriages, children, and showbiz gossip, trials, and tribulations. We learn about her mainly by watching her behave in this film, and what we learn is that she is an ordinary, neurotic, insecure, slightly scatterbrained person, and not a particularly interesting one, except for the way she wastes mountains of money (with no explanation). She is a great comedian though, and I would have much rather watched an hour of her performing or at least talking about how she writes. Still, you have to give respect to someone who is still doing standup after a half century.

Red: Grade A

2011-01-29T08:17:00.000-08:00

A

RED (2010)

Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Karl Urban, Richard Dreyfus; Director Robert Schwentke.

This lightweight, action-comedy is an homage to genre and some well-loved movie stars, more than a well-told story. The story is that the VP of the U.S. is using a CIA hit squad (you know the type: black ski masks, machine guns) to eliminate the now-retired members of a CIA operation that in the 1980’s saw the VP massacre a village of civilians in Guatemala. Naturally, the retired folks don’t care for the current operation and set out to discover who is trying to kill them and to stop it. The story is too silly to count as a real political thriller, so it must be taken as a comedy, maybe Space Cowboys meets Ocean’s Eleven.

Willis still looks good and still has great comic timing. The stunt doubles do the hard fighting for him, but he retains his indestructible image. However, he doesn’t look that good, and Parker is far too young to be his romantic interest. The difference of thirty or forty years is off-putting and unnecessary. I’m sure there were dozens of age-appropriate women who would have agreed to work across Willis. Parker does a fine job acting her part, but the relationship is dead as a dishrag from the beginning.

The retired team effortlessly zips around the US to investigate and confront. Willis and Parker drive from Kansas City to New Orleans, then to New York, back to Florida and then to Washington, all in the blink of an eye. No time passes while they travel and they show no sign of fatigue from those trips. The emphasis is on the locations, not on the characters and their journeys. All the characters are caricatures anyway, so there is no point trying to explain who they are or what they feel. The movie works because of its witty script, good acting, and familiar faces. Who would not enjoy Helen Mirren in a white evening gown shooting a 50 caliber machine gun? Malkovich does his demented weird guy thing to hilarious effect. The actors obviously have a good time in this movie but they play it straight, not hammy (except for Dreyfus, who cannot help himself), so there are none of the sly cultural and cinematic self-references you would get in a tongue-in-cheek approach.

The movie is a lot of fun, with good directing, good cinematography, tight editing. And though it is silly Hollywood fluff, in the end it is emotionally satisfying as well.

Salt: Grade D

2011-01-25T10:40:00.001-08:00

D
Salt (2010)

Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor. Director Phillip Noyce.

Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a CIA spy and action-figure. A random Russian “defector” waltzes into CIA headquarters (as if he could!) and claims that Salt is actually a Russian mole. Naturally, everyone believes this guy, despite absence of any evidence, so Salt does the only sensible thing, break out of CIA headquarters (piece of cake) and go on the run. Schreiber and Ejiofor pursue her for the rest of the movie.

At least there are some good foot chases instead of just the stereotype highway chases involving black SUVs, although there are plenty of those, too. But then we see Salt with the Russian bad guys and she suddenly develops a Russian accent in her English! Oh, no, she really is Russian! But wait! Maybe not! She becomes a good guy again, but then a bad guy, and then, and then… The story is hopeless.

The stunts are weird also. Jolie (who is allegedly 35 but looks much older), jumps from the roof of one high speed highway semi to another (despite being shot in the abdomen) and leaps down an elevator shaft from wall to wall and so on. Of course. These and other crazy stunts are apparently intended realistically because they are not quite ridiculous enough to be ironic or comic. She is not spider-woman, just an ordinary person with amazing athletic ability? Not even Tom Cruise would be believable here.

Acting is noticeably poor all around, even by Schrieber and Ejiofor, who we know can act, so that has to be the fault of the writer and director. Music is loud and annoying, as you would expect. The Salt character is a decent premise, and will probably be back, hopefully in a more intelligent form.

Takers: Grade D

2011-01-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

D
Takers (2010)

Matt Dillon, Paul Walker, Jay Hernandez, Michael Ealy, Tip Harris, Idris Elba; Director John Leussenhop.

This is a poor man’s version of Ocean’s Eleven. A group of professional crooks who wear white shirts and ties and try to act cooler than they are, knock off, not a glamorous casino, but a grubby armored car. They do this with lots of C4, of course because every vehicle they come into contact with must eventually be blown up, as a matter of principle, even if it makes no sense.

Dillon is the cop who hunts them. I think some of them get away, I don’t remember because I lost interest after the first hour. There is nothing to distinguish this movie or justify its existence. Acting is mediocre at best, although Tip T.I. Harris is a standout. The script is derivative, the stunts ho-hum, the music stereotypical, loud “action” music and the explosions cliche. The story is seriously dumb in several parts, such as Dillon on a high speed car chase with his young daughter but not wearing seat belts, armored cars dropping 25 feed through a hole and nobody inside is injured, cops without Kevlar vests, and so on. The best that can be said about this movie is that it moves along under its own power.

The Social Network: Grade B

2011-01-14T08:59:00.001-08:00

B
The Social Network (2010)
Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake; Director David Fincher.

Eisenberg is Mark Zuckerman, founder of Facebook, and this is his story. In his Harvard dorm room he builds a web site showing pictures and bios of Harvard women, ostensibly for guys to rate their “hotness.” It evolves into the Facebook we know today.

Sound boring? It does, but it isn’t, because of the excellent writing (Aaron Sorkin) and acting. The drama alternates between a present-day legal hearing, in which several of Zuckerman’s classmates are suing him for stealing their idea for Facebook, and the historical unfolding, from Zuckerman’s point of view, of what actually happened. The movie is ambiguous about blame, but generally favors Zuckerman.

As the story unfolds, we see immature college antics, obsessions with sex, alcohol, getting into good social clubs, and pretentious displays of intellectual cleverness. Among these stereotypes, no one takes school seriously. The dialog is witty-smart-ass-intellectual, salted with plenty of authentic technical mumbo jumbo. Everyone speaks in zingers, so characters never say anything serious or sincere (Garfield’s character, Zuckerman’s roommate, is an exception).

There is no attempt to understand the meaning of Facebook or the motivation of people who use it, or how it has affected modern communication. The movie is essentially a bio-pic of one monumentally egocentric jerk (Zuckerman) who happened to get monumentally lucky, but there is no insight into who he is. What makes the film work is our knowledge and awe of the Facebook phenom and our fascination with it. If the movie were about the development of an industrial pump company, it would be a flop. We bring our own interest so the movie doesn’t have to generate any.

Machete: Grade A

2011-01-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

A
Machete (2010)

Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Steven Segal, Don Johnson, Robert De Niro, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Lohan; Co-writer and co-director Robert Rodriguez. (Spanish and English, with subtitles).

Trejo is Machete, a violent, machete-wielding, Mexican police officer, expert at decapitations, who was double-crossed by a drug lord (Segal). His wife is murdered before his eyes and he is beaten, stabbed, and left for dead in a burning building in Mexico. But like Bruce Willis in the Die-Hard series, Machete can’t really be killed, or even seriously injured. He survives and escapes to Texas as an illegal day laborer. There, a shady lawyer (Fahey) hires him to kill a U.S. Senator (DeNiro), but he is double-crossed on that deal too and again barely escapes with his life.

It turns out the senator is actually in the employ of the drug lord, manipulated by his chief of staff, and in cahoots with murderous border vigilantes. But Machete finds allies in “The Network,” an implausible group of legal and illegal Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are ready for armed revolution, led by a young, attractive woman who runs a taco truck (Michelle Rodriquez), and from an equally unlikely ICE agent (Alba), working alone to track down The Network, then Machete, then the Minutemen, then the Senator’s aide, then the drug lord. After an hour and a half of nonstop knives, gore, cars, guns, and breasts, the world is made right again.

The violence is intentionally ludicrous, a comic form following Tarentino’s Kill Bill. (Rodriquez and Tarantino have collaborated in the past). This film alludes to the violent and vulgar exploitation movies of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, in the US and Australia, so there is the faux scratchy film stock and many of the same cinematic and dialogic conventions, but I don’t think this is supposed to be one of those films. This movie is very self-conscious, to the point of irony, about its violence, and even the vulgar language and gratuitous female nudity is comic-ironic. So I classify it as a comedy, despite its theme of blood and violence. The final gun battle should be proof enough of that, when a fleet of low-rider cars with jumping hydraulics attacks the bad guys’ fort. I think this movie is part of an emerging genre, the comedic, ironic slasher movie, “slashironcom”.

Besides great stunts, creative photography, and comedic violence, Machete also has a serious political message, namely that US immigration policy is ineffective, unfair, and small-minded, even though the US economically depends on illegal labor, and so immigration policy should be overhauled. It’s a message I happen to agree with, and although it is delivered with hyperbole, I’m glad to see it out there.

Casting is a notable feature of this movie. Trejo is a big, mean-looking, scar-faced tough guy, reminiscent of Mickey Rourke in some of his roles. That’s interesting. DeNiro may have been in the film for political reasons, but it is always a pleasure to see him. Alba and M. Rodriguez are easy on the eyes, but look too much alike to both be playing alpha females. Alba’s role however is courageous for her, and may be a career changer, from just another pretty face to someone with ideas and commitment. Segal is an unintentionally humorous self-parody, especially when he knife-fights Trejo. Lohan, in a tiny role, is so vacant that she evokes only sympathy. Cheech Marin is a standout as a priest who puts aside his vow of nonviolence. For viewers who are not freaked out by (fake) blood and unrelenting (fake) violence, this film is a pleasure, start to finish.

Best DVDs of 2010

2010-12-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

Best DVDs I saw in 2010

Movie	Grade	Find the review archived in 2010: Month/Day
Moon	A	1/15
Summer Hours	A	1/18
American History X	A	2/4
A Serious Man	A	2/12
Up in the Air	A	3/11
Good Hair	A	3/27
Bliss (Mutuluk)	A	5/12
Fraulein	A	8/14
Police, Adjective	A	8/14
The Ghost Writer	A	8/30
The Good, The Bad, The Weird	A	9/12
Winter’s Bone	A	11/16
The Believer	A	12/7
The Wedding Song	A	12/24
The Hangover	B	1/7
Sex and Lucia	B	2/25
The Informant	B	3/1
As it Is in Heaven	B	3/7
Precious	B	3/14
Bad Lieutenant	B	4/8
Endgame	B	4/22
44 Inch chest	B	5/1
You Don’t Know Jack	B	5/12
High Life	B	6/2
Pontypool	B	6/14
Tetro	B	6/29
Unthinkable	B	7/7
Shall We Kiss?	B	7/17
The Killing Gene	B	8/28
A Prophet	B	8/28
$5 A Day	B	8/29
The Killer Inside Me	B	9/6
Leaves of Grass	B	10/23
Disappearance of Alice Creed	B	12/14
The Town	B	12/23
The Other Guys	B	12/26

The Other Guys: Grade B

2010-12-26T10:56:00.001-08:00

B
The Other Guys (2010)

Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, Eva Mendes, Steve Coogan; Co-writer & director Adam McKay.

I am not a big fan of Will Ferrell’s loud and obvious comic style, but this movie was LOL funny for me. I’ve never seen Wahlberg in a comic role before but he has good timing and made the part a success.

The two cops are ridiculed NYPD officers assigned to desk jobs. Ferrell’s character likes doing paperwork because it is quiet and happy work and nobody shoots at you. Wahlberg craves action, but has been confined to the desk ever since he accidentally shot Derek Jeter in the leg. Jeter has a cameo for that scene. Throughout the movie Wahlberg is introduced as “the cop who shot Jeter.” A typical response is “You should have shot A-Rod!”

The jokes are often wordgames and cultural allusions, which I enjoy. And there are some just plain loopy scenes, like Ferrell's story of a band of tunas attacking a pack of lions. The writers have a worthy successor to the Leslie Nielsen brand of screwball humor. The visual and situational gags are usually silly, sometimes satirical. I especially enjoyed the Prius-related jokes and gags. The exasperated police captain (Keaton) has a second job at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The two deskbound cops finally get out on some assignments which leads to “buddy cop” jokes reminiscent of the Lethal Weapon franchise, with a dash of Inspector Clouseau bumbling to success. I think what makes it really work, besides good writing, is Ferrell’s deadpan delivery, great face acting, and impeccable timing, traits that Wahlberg copies admirably, if not to the same degree of perfection. Coogan also shows excellent comic form in his role as a crooked financial wizard.

Music is quite good, and there are plenty of loud, colorful explosions for the kids. Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson appear in a brief opening segment that is not necessary and not funny, but burnishes the film’s action credentials. You must appreciate goofy humor to like this movie, which is above average for its genre.

The A-Team: Grade D

2010-12-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

D
The A-Team (2010)

Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson, Jessica Biel;Co-writer and director Joe Carnahan.

This action-adventure explosion movie is apparently based on a television series I have never heard of. I thought the movie might be good because of Neeson and Biel, both actors I enjoy. However, while Biel showed some acting talent, Neeson was just hammy and blustery, completely uninteresting. Perhaps that’s what was expected from the TV role.

Four tough-guy Army Rangers are sent into Baghdad to rescue a set of engraving plates used to print counterfeit money. When they get back, their commanding officer is killed and the plates are stolen, so it looks like they absconded. They are all court-marshaled and sent to prison, but fear not, they manage to break out, bent on revenge. They are hotly pursued by CIA agent Biel, who once had a romantic relationship with one of the men but is now estranged. Needless to say, after much chasing about and a plethora of bullets and exothermic chemical reactions, the double-crosser is found, the plates are recovered, and the soldiers have their reputations restored. And also Biel’s character is reunited with her former lover, just for the sake of completion.

There are some good action sequences. The script is moderately funny at times. Production values are high and photography is sharp and clear. The sound track is composed of deafening noise. The plot is outlined in bold, black crayon so you never get confused about who is good and who is bad. Overall, the movie is nothing but recycled scenes and lines we have seen and heard dozens of times; the acting is only competent, the characters flat, and the story predictable. You have to ask, why did this movie need to be made? There is no answer for that.

The Wedding Song: Grade A

2010-12-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

A
The Wedding Song (2008)

Lizzie Brocheré, Olympe Borval, Najib Oudghiri; Writer-Director Karin Albou. (Arabic and French; subtitled).

The Nazis have occupied Tunisia in the early 1940’s and have begun rounding up the Jews. In Tunis, two young women have formed a deep friendship, one an Arab Muslim (Borval), the other a Sephardic Jew (Brochere). The middle class but economically stressed, French-speaking woman is betrothed to an older, wealthy physician, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Paris, but she hates him. The servant-class Arabic woman carries on a torrid sexual affair with her fiancé, but marriage is forbidden by her father until the young man gets a job, which he finally does, as a Nazi informer on the Jews. Can the girls’ friendship survive the stresses of matrimony, religion, social class, colonialism, and wartime occupation?

In addition to the compelling story of friendship, the movie is highly instructional about Tunisian Arabic and French colonial culture, especially with regard to the tribulations of female sexuality in both cultures. Naked females are starkly exposed on screen but the nudity is neither glamorized nor prurient. Rather it is used to make intimate and disturbing comments on the plight of the women and on the meaning of marriage in general.

Writing and directing (Albou) are both excellent in this zero-budget film, but the cinematography suffers from what is probably low budget technology, so many of the movie’s images are dark and muddy, to the point of being difficult to see. Nevertheless, individual scenes and sets are well-composed and photographed, when you can see them. Acting is very strong by all the players, and overall, the complex, intimate, and emotional story line will keep you glued.

The Town: Grade B

2010-12-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

B
The Town (2010)

Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, John Hamm; Co-writer and director Ben Affleck.

This is a tour de force for Affleck, who plays a sensitive gangster in Charlestown, the tough Bunker Hill district of Boston. He is the mastermind of a group of crooks who have done a string of successful bank and armored car holdups. The gang includes a childhood friend, now psychopath (Renner) with themes borrowed from 2003's Mystic River to suggest that they are sociological victims, trapped in Charlestown.

Affleck’s character starts a relationship with a woman the gang briefly abducted from a bank holdup (Hall), and eventually she learns the truth about his criminal ways. The dramatic question is, will she still love him anyway? The relationship story is strong, even though there is no natural chemistry between Affleck and Hall. That part of the story is well-written and both actors are extremely good.

I haven’t seen Hall since her outstanding performance in 2008’s Christina Vicky Barcelona, where she played memorably alongside Scarlett Johansson, who she slightly resembles. In this movie she delivers an authentic, convincing performance.

Affleck is a fine actor too, despite his mumbling, but his character in this movie is not believable: a career criminal who is intelligent, has a steady job and a jailbird father, but can’t resist the life of crime; a cold-blooded, violent thief and murderer who has an emotional, intuitive, sensitive relationship. It doesn’t add up and when his character does several things that seem “out of character,” you realize, you don’t really know the character.

Renner steals every scene he is in with his labile intensity. The plot is basic cops and robbers, with a sappy manufactured ending. Directing is very attuned to the actors’ talents but there are at least two long, slack segments that should have been edited out, fallout from trying to mix an action shoot-em-up with a tender relationship movie. But the plusses far outweigh the minuses for this enjoyable crime drama.

Wall Street-Money Never Sleeps: Grade C

2010-12-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

C
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Frank Langella, Josh Brolin; Co-writer & Director Oliver Stone.

This sequel is a huge disappointment for anyone who enjoyed the 1987 original morality play. Back then, when Gordon Gecko (Douglas) declared, “Greed is good,” we understood exactly what he meant and who he was. He got his comeuppance when his young protégé (Charlie Sheen) got a strange attack of conscience that switched him from greed to revenge. Sheen makes a fun but meaningless cameo appearance in this movie.

Gecko is released from prison, broke and alone. His estranged daughter (Mulligan) won’t speak to him, but her fiancé (LaBeouf), a young, ambitious trader, strikes up a relationship. In this version, Brolin is the greedy powerhouse financier and there is talk (but no solid story) that he is the one who put Gecko behind bars, so he is clearly identified as “bad” and we know he has to go down by the end of the movie. But it will be because of Wall Street infighting, not because of the self-destructive self-blindness that made the original Gecko such an interesting character.

Before his fall though, Brolin destroys Langella’s company (supposed to stand for Lehmann Brothers) by front-running and shorting the stock, as if that explained the collapse of Lehmann. LaBeouf, who worked for Langella, is thus out of a job but improbably falls into the employ of the evil and hated Brolin (under not-very-believable circumstances).

There are many scenes of bigwigs sitting around huge conference tables deciding the fate of the financial world. Certain actors were obviously cast to look like Hank Paulsen and Timothy Geitner, but the financial chatter they speak is drivel. Either the writers didn’t understand the extremely dramatic personal and financial dynamics of that crisis or they despaired of explaining it and resorted to obfuscatory babble instead. It could have been so good. But that would have been a different story. But at least it would have been a story.

Instead, that theme is dropped and out of the blue, Gecko reveals to LaBeouf that he has a secret $100m trust fund set up for his daughter and all she has to do is sign it over to him and he will give it to her early. Why she would go along is not explained. Predictably he keeps all the money, invests it, and gets rich again in a few days (somehow). How this is related to the Brolin character is, …well, it’s not related. The writers simply lost their way and the story line becomes scrambled in a tremendous lost opportunity.

Acting is strong throughout, especially by Mulligan and Langella. Douglas shows his self-confidence and presence in a fine performance. But all the characters are cartoony, so there is not much acting opportunity. Music is mostly dreadful, but probably aimed at a different demographic than me. What do I know from pop music. Photography is at times striking, such as oversaturated cityscape scenes. There are a few cinematic effects like split screen telephone calls that add nothing. I enjoyed all the actors but hated the movie so the average is a middling score.

Knight and Day: Grade C

2010-12-16T17:07:00.000-08:00

C
Knight and Day (2010)

Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard; Director James Mangold.

Cruise is some kind of a government spy “gone rogue” because he is trying to protect a young inventor (Dano) and his world-changing invention, basically a better D-sized battery. “The government” (FBI or NSA or CIA – it’s not clear, but does it matter?), led by Sarsgaard, and an endless supply of wide-shouldered, sunglass-wearing G-men and black SUVs, is after him, to reclaim the D-battery, and as a late afterthought, the boy genius as well.

Cruise uses a perfect stranger in an airport (Diaz) to mule the battery through security (although it is not clear why she would get it through if he couldn’t, but that’s not the point). On the plane, a half dozen passengers (all of them) turn out to be baddies and attempt to kill Cruise, but he dispatches them all, and the evil pilots of the plane too, all of this while Diaz is in the bathroom. The best part of the movie is when she comes out to an apparently peaceful plane and he must explain that he had to kill everyone and now must land the plane. She takes it as a joke (at first). Both actors lay on their best charm here, and the relationship develops.

As a relationship movie, really a romantic comedy, it works in the first third. Both actors are photogenic and Cruise really puts out a good comic performance. His acting is as good (at times) as in the overlooked 2004 film, Collateral. He really can act if a director puts the thumbscrews on him.

However, the filmmakers soon retreat from the relationship story and devolve into predictable gunfights and exploding vehicles. There are planes (both fixed wing and rotary), cars, trucks, car-carrying trucks, SUVs of course, boats, trains and motorcycles. Everything must blow up! Between explosive chases, hooded men dressed in black rappel down ropes into omnipresent deserted warehouses to face additional gunbattles (and slaughter – their bullets all miss, none of his do). It’s all cliché schlock, but I have to say the production values are high and the photography is very good. Music, of course, is very noisy.

There are structural similarities to the 2005 movie, Mr & Mrs Smith, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. This movie has more going for it than that one ever did. Despite mind-numbing repetition, an incoherent story line, and unimaginative visuals, there is just enough wit in the relationship between the two principals to leaven mud into mudpies, and enough acting to keep you watching. For mindless pleasure, it's not that bad.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed: Grade B

2010-12-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

B
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)

Martin Compston, Eddie Marsan, Gemma Arterton; Writer-Director J Blakeson.

Two U.K. thugs (Marsan and Compston) kidnap the adult daughter (Arterton) of a millionaire. They chain her to a bed in an apartment they have converted to a prison by boarding up the windows and installing soundproofing and lots of locks. The father agrees to pay. The tricky part of any kidnap job is the exchange: cash for person. There’s no foolproof way to do it, and this one does not turn out as expected.

The film was apparently made with a near-zero budget, so there are only the three actors, and essentially one set, the prison apartment. That does make the presentation slightly claustrophobic and the action restricted mainly to words, but the script is so well-written and the directing so extremely tight, and acting so good, that instead of claustrophobic, one could say the presentation was just more theatrical than cinematic in tone.

The acting is quite strong by the two men, especially Compston, who has great facial gestures reminiscent of Edward Norton. The story is an inconsequential genre piece, but the writing keeps you engaged by forcing repeated reconceptualization of the characters’ relationships. There are a couple of weak spots where characters are not true to their motivation, but overall, one’s attention never flags in this solid crime drama. For three players and one set, that is a remarkable achievement.

Inception: Grade C

2010-12-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

C
Inception (2010)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Elen Page, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger; Writer-Director Christopher Nolan.

DiCaprio is a corporate espionage thief who specializes in stealing secrets from people’s minds when they are dreaming. The technology for doing this is sketchy, involving some wires running from an aluminum attaché case to the wrists of the dreamer and the thief, along with implied training in lucid dreaming (although that term is never used). Teams of dream-thieves can wire up and dash about together in somebody’s dream, although, as in The Matrix, there is always some confusion about whether it is a dream or reality, and if a dream, whose dream it is. I was surprised that all the dream invaders could fall asleep and begin dreaming immediately upon sitting or lying down, an amazing skill.

The redemptive “final big job” for the head thief is to plant an idea in an executive’s dreaming mind, rather than steal one from it. So he hires a “dream architect” (Page) to establish the parameters of the target’s dream. That idea is nonsense, since everyone is the author of their own dreams, but this movie is full of nonsense. Lots of rules of dreaming are declared, such as, if you are killed in a dream, you wake up. If you lose your balance in reality, while dreaming, you wake up. There are dreams within dreams within dreams. And so on. And there are many assumptions that have to be accepted, such as that you remember all your dreams, that they are meaningful, and that they influence your waking life.

It is impossible to make sense out of the movie’s chaotic 2.5 hour narrative, but the point is the special effects anyway. The filmmakers can show absolutely anything and none of it has to make sense, because dreams don’t make sense. So streets turn upside down, sidewalks, buildings, and vehicles explode. Actually a lot of things explode. These characters all have very explosive dreams. Nonsense though it is, you will see things that you have never seen before on the screen.

The acting is notably poor by DiCaprio and Cotillard, but riveting by Page, who is completely compelling no matter what blither she is made to utter . Other standouts are Berenger and Murphy. The script is so banal that the actors have little to work with. You could enjoy the movie just watching the pictures with the sound off, since that is the only thing that keeps this movie afloat.

The Believer: Grade A

2010-12-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

The Believer (2001)

Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix; Writer and Director Henry Bean.

A Jewish boy in contemporary New York defies his Rabbi, questioning whether the teachings of the Torah are meaningful. He accuses God of being needy, moody, and selfish and defies God to strike him dead on the spot if this is not so. Fast forward to the young man in his twenties (Gosling) who has become a Nazi skinhead and spews hatred for all Jews, denies the holocaust and reveres Hitler. He and his thug buddies go around intimidating Jewish shop owners and plotting to blow up a synagogue. He becomes an articulate anti-semitic spokesman among his friends and even for a shadowy political fascist group in the city. But as each anti-semitic plot and incident develops, we see him showing thoughtful reverence, almost longing, for the Torah, for the Hebrew language, for Jewish ritual and custom, and for an integrated self. He becomes increasingly confused about his self-identity but remains oblivious to his own self-hatred. In the end, he makes a dramatic choice that is nevertheless driven more by pragmatics than by any insight or conversion of belief.

This picture is a close remake of the 1998 American History X that starred Edward Norton in the lead role, and it is just about as good. Gosling is a major acting genius and carries the role as well as Norton did his. This film is more psychologically nuanced, showing the character’s inner conflict extremely well, whereas American History X was more external and obvious. However, for this movie to work, you have to accept the almost psychotic self-hatred and identity confusion of the main character, which is a leap of imagination. The movie does not even try to explain the development of the character’s confused thinking, and the flashbacks to childhood do not help in that, so we just have to take it as it is. Once you get past that however, the acting is superb, and the script excellent – not one false note. Here is another case where I was rewarded for going into the stacks of older films when I could not find an attractive current release.

Winter's Bone: Grade A

2010-11-16T11:16:00.001-08:00

A

Winter’s Bone (2010)

Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Garrett Dillahunt; Co-writer and Director Debra Granik.

This is a dark, depressing story of a seventeen-year-old woman (Lawrence) living in abject poverty in the Ozarks. Her mother is mentally ill, on meds, so the girl tries to raise her two young siblings.

The father has been arrested on a drugs charge. The sheriff (Dillahunt) tells her the father put the property up to make bail, and if he doesn’t appear in court next week, they will lose the house. She vows to find him before that happens, but everywhere she goes, hostile neighbors and relatives tell her to butt out.

Her scrawny, coke-snorting older brother (Hawkes) reluctantly investigates and reports that their father is dead. But unless she can produce the body, there is no proof and the house will be lost anyway. She asks everyone, but only succeeds in getting herself beat up.

Acting is very strong by these unknown (to me) players, and the movie is well-made and well-directed. The basic story line is not tremendously compelling (save the farm), but that weakness is more than compensated by the strong sense of place.

Scenery, sets, and costumes are on pitch, and we feel the cold dirt, the grime, the hunger, poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness of the people. Actually the sets are overdone. In their zeal to project squalor, the set designers overexaggerated. Unpainted wooden houses are in ill-repair, outbuildings are in ruins, roofs collapsing, mildew covering the walls. The winter trees are bare, the ground is frozen, the air is blue, and every house has a rubbish fire burning in a steel barrel, sending dirty smoke onto pathetically worn clothing hanging on a line. Every house has empty or partly empty five-gallon plastic buckets lying around multiple derelict vehicles.

It is all too much. These cliches are interesting at first, but strain credulity with repetition. Grungy costumes have the same effect: they’re good, but relentless.

But these are minor flaws. Despite the weak and slow-paced story, strong acting and interesting visuals make this movie linger in your mind for days.

The Girl Who Played With Fire: Grade C

2010-11-14T09:06:00.001-08:00

C

The Girl Who Played Who Played With Fire (2009)

Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist , Lena Endre; Director Daniel Alfredson. (Swedish, subtitled).

Rapace still has her dragon tattoo in this cinematic installment of the wildly popular Stieg Larsson series of novels. She is Lisbeth, a young gothic woman recently released from a mental institution, where she was held for setting her father on fire. Lisbeth is wealthy, living off a trust fund, and she is an expert computer hacker. And oh, yeah, a master kick boxer too. She seems to be on the lam in Stockholm, doing what, we do not know.

But the story begins elsewhere, when Nyqvist, a reporter and publisher, is about to expose a government sex scandal. His informants are murdered and Lisbeths’ fingerprints are on the murder weapon. Suddenly she is hunted by the police (which she learns about by seeing a poster tacked to a phone pole. Maybe that’s what they do in Sweden). Nyqvist does not believe she did it, because of his relationship with her going back to Dragon Tattoo, but I can’t remember what that was. So the race is on: can he find and exonerate Lisbeth before the police get to her? (Yes, of course).

The character of Lisbeth is much stronger than the acting by Rapace, but she fills the role adequately with her chain smoking, furrowed brows, and multiple nose rings. Not much else, though. None of the acting is strong in this movie. The plot is always on the verge of confusion, but can be followed. Lisbeth doesn’t actually play with fire, and the shot on the DVD cover does not occur in the movie. That must be a trait that was in the book (which I haven’t read) that did not make it to the film.

Characters are cartoony, not realistically motivated, but you kind of expect that in a thriller. Scenery, sets, and costumes are excellent. It’s nice to see several views of Stockholm, a gem of a city I have visited only once. You see the stunning beauty of the area around the old town, but also some of the gritty neighborhoods. The directing / cinematography has the deadening syntax of television. The pace is slow, as most European movies are for Americans. If you edited out all shots of people getting in and out of motor vehicles and driving them around, the movie would be shorter by 10 minutes. Cut all shots of people walking on sidewalks, down hallways and across fields, and you have saved another 5 minutes. Save 10 more minutes by cutting out shots of people staring into computer screens and watching data scroll past. In the end, I didn’t care about the story or the characters, but overall, the film was mildly interesting and easy to look at.

Awake: Grade C

2010-11-14T08:33:00.001-08:00

C

Awake (2007)

Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Terence Howard, Lena Olin. Writer-Director Joby Harold.

Christensen is a young business tycoon with an international, multi-billion dollar empire, but a defective heart. He needs a heart transplant. While he waits for a donor, he falls in love with the domestic help, his mother’s secretary (Alba). Mom (Olin) does not approve, but what can you do. The donor heart comes through and the young tycoon (way too young to be even close to believable in that role) goes under the knife of transplant surgeon Howard, the only one in this movie who is a good actor. For reasons unknown and unexplained, the patient experiences a rare (actually disputed) condition called anaesthetic awareness, in which his body is immobilized but he retains full consciousness during surgery. He hears everything that is said in the operating room, much to his own surprise and panic. What he hears is a plot against his life. Improbably, he is saved at the last minute and the bad guys get their due.

Reported cases of anaesthetic awareness are rare in the medical literature, mostly anecdotal and not well documented, and strongly denied by both anaesthesiologists I happen to know. In the most credible reports, patients have post-surgery memory of snippets of conversation, from which we can deduce they were, at least partially, awake. Full waking consciousness during anaesthesia has never been documented, to my knowledge. That the patient could do crime-solving problem-analysis under anaesthesia is not believable. Other facts depicted, such as the idea that the patient feels pain or might cry, are virtually impossible. But hey, it’s a movie.

The crime story is just barely believable but it hangs together better than the central biological premise. What makes the movie worth watching is that it is well made. The open heart shots are very good, very realistic. When the patient is supposed to be awake, we see him walking, running, and hovering around the hospital corridors like a ghost, trying, in vain of course, to convince other players to save him. That was a creative approach. Alba does a reasonable acting job, but I couldn’t stop wondering about all the cosmetic surgery she has obviously had, at such a young age. Hollywood is extremely harsh on women. Unfortunately, Christensen, playing the main character, was the weakest actor. Music was inoffensive, editing notably good, directing competent. Worth watching on DVD or on TV.

Women in Trouble: Grade C

2010-10-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

C

Women in Trouble (2009)

Carla Gugino, Adrianne Palicki, other relative unknowns; Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez.

Ten women in LA are chronicled for one day. Some of them know each other, some lives intersect spontaneously, but there is no organic narrative connection among most of them, only the movie itself. So this actually boils down to six or eight vignettes, ruthlessly intercut. All these women are obsessed with sex and speak of little else. Two are hookers, two pornographers, two adulterers, one masseuse, and so on. These women talk about cocks, pussies, oral sex, anal sex, and just about every imaginable body function and body fluid.

Nothing much of interest happens however. One woman learns she is pregnant. One learns her husband is cheating, two are stuck together in an elevator for a couple of hours, and so on. The women spend an incredible amount of time prancing around in their underwear, but there is no nudity in the film, and no sex. A few men appear in the film for brief supporting parts.

The dialog and the story are intended to be comedic, and mostly the movie is a comedy, except for the last 45 minutes when everything inexplicably goes emotional, teary, sentimental and maudlin. As a comedy, the movie is pitched to an adolescent taste, not necessarily a bad thing, but this is all girl-talk, lots of reminiscing and telling, no action, and with no character development. For an adult male it is pretty lame, with some exceptions. There was just enough witty writing to keep me engaged, such as, “No I’ve never been to Canada, but I like the food.” There are not enough really funny lines or situations, which is a shame because the writer clearly has the capacity for a better grade of humor.

A serious problem is that all the women look more or less the same: light hair with dark roots, big lips, symmetrical face, strong chin, slim bodies, big boobs; white skin and large, perfect, too-white teeth, all speaking unaccented English with the same level of diction. There are minor variations, but basically they are cookie-cutter Hollywood actors, and with only a few exceptions, were difficult to tell apart. The only interesting casting was a teenage girl, the daughter of one of the women. Despite all their sameness however, they are very good actors, a fact that raises this film above drudge.

Leaves of Grass: Grade B

2010-10-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

B

Leaves of Grass (2009)

Edward Norton, Keri Russell, Tim Blake Nelson, Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon. Writer-Director Tim Blake Nelson.

Edward Norton displays his remarkable talent by playing twin brothers, one a professor of philosophy at a Northern university, the other a pot-growing redneck in Oklahoma. The professor escaped his steamy southern hometown and his eccentric (if not crazy) brother and mother (Sarandon) years ago, and has made a name for himself, when he is tricked by a false report of his brother’s death into returning to “Daisyville” or whatever the town’s name was. But his brother is alive and wants the prof to show himself to the locals to provide an alibi while he, the pot-grower is in Tulsa dealing with a problematic drug lord (Dreyfuss). Needless to say, the plan does not go well and disaster ensues.

The story is not believable, and the characters unconvincing. For example, the redneck brother convinces the professor to suck on a bong, his first day there, and he agrees. Believable? Not to me. Likewise the prof agrees to the wacky impersonation scheme because, well, because I don’t know why. Then he falls in love, and who wouldn't, with an enigmatic teacher (Russell) because she quotes Walt Whitman. Then a random orthodontist suddenly turns sleuth, discovers the impersonation, and buys a gun to threaten the brothers, for reasons never made clear. Right: an orthodontist would do that. It’s just bad writing.

The dialog is stilted and unimaginative ( “I can’t believe I’m doing this”). There are some redeeming story virtues, such as having the two brothers use distinct vocabularies and grammatical constructions (and accents, too, of course). There are some really funny lines, though far too few, and all the performances are strong, despite the weak material.

Cinematography is traditional and unobtrusive. Music is twangy Okie tunes, presumably genuine, but they drove me up the wall, forcing emergency >>FF. Pacing is unreliable, with lots of sagging dead space, such as cars and trucks driving around (so the dreadful songs could play).

Despite these serious flaws, I recommend the movie just because Norton is so unbelievably good.

Solitary Man: Grade D

2010-09-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

D

Solitary Man (2009)

Michael Douglas , Susan Sarandon, Danny Devito, Mary Louise Parker, Jenna Fischer; Writer and co-director Brian Koppleman.

Douglas is a former car dealer in New York who was apparently once super successful and wealthy from a chain of dealerships (this is all told to us as backstory) but he committed some unspecified fraud and spent everything he had staying out of jail. Now he is near destitute and tries to get a new start, but alas, he suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder that makes him obnoxious. He sleeps with women and girls of any (legal) age, although it is not credible that an 18 year old college student would agree to sleep with a 70 year old geezer, especially if he is her mother’s current boyfriend. Everyone rejects him on general sleazeball principles, even the bank, and he can’t get a restart. DeVito, an old college pal, gives him advice he ignores. He is irresponsible to his grandkids, and an all around, immature jerk. Supposedly we watch him degenerate into self-destruction but in fact, he is just plain unlikeable, and has a police record. He doesn’t do drugs or drink, gamble, or contemplate suicide. He’s just an ordinary baboon and it is difficult to feel sorry for him or to even be interested in him. At the end, he conveniently tells his ex-wife (Sarandon), that he is afraid to die and that is why he is a jerk. Right. That explains everything.

Granted, Douglas is a powerful screen presence, and Sarandon does more acting with one eyebrow than a dozen other people, but that’s not enough to redeem this dead weight of a movie. Directing is significantly terrible, with good actors just woodenly announcing their lines. Everything about the film is bland and familiar and uninteresting. The script is so incredibly boring, it stands as an example of what happens when a writer-director has too much control with no pushback. A lot of talent is wasted in this project.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird: Grade A

2010-09-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

A

The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)

Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun Lee, Woo-sung Jung; Co-writer and Director Ji-woon Kim. (Korean, Japanese, and Chinese: subtitled).

This violent and bloody Korean action movie is also a comedy. There is an ancient treasure map that several parties want. There is no compelling evidence that it is a real treasure map, but it is the “McGuffin,” as Hitchcock would say, that motivates all the frenetic chasing about. Late in the movie, there is a hint at another layer of meaning when it is suggested that it is really a political map for use in organizing a rebellion against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (the movie is set in the 1930s). However, the political theme was either not developed or was edited out, leaving only a violent, bloody, yet madcap comedy. A shame, that.

Nevertheless, the humor, mostly visual, is effective, from broad farce to subtle parody. The acting is hard to evaluate because the characters and the story line are so offbeat that there are few standards to judge against, but in general, I would say it is quite above average.

However, what makes this movie a real standout is the fantastic cinematography. The pictures are stunning, and in many cases I wondered how they even got them. The narrative descriptive shots are best, for example very long dolly shots through narrow, twisting alleys that seem impossible. The sets and scenes are exquisite, and only enhance the fine camera work. I thought the action shots were less good, on the whole, because they were done with hand-helds, so the camera is jerking all around and the action is blurry, and the shots are in very close and the editing is so short that you can’t see anything, so you come away with only a sense of “action” that is not satisfying. There were some martial arts acrobatics that tried to capture the wit and grace of Jackie Chan’s work but fell short. And there were some wonderful surrealistic action shots reminiscent of Batman or maybe Matrix. It does say "weird" in the title.

The stunt work in this movie was phenomenal. Characterization was extremely creative. I especially liked the Johnny Depp-like evil killer in a pressed white collar. Many shots and the music too, harkened back to the spaghetti westerns, as the title clearly acknowledges. In fact this movie’s overall mood and tone is reminiscent of another weird Asian ersatz spaghetti, Sukiyaki Western Django (2008) which had the Tarantino imprimateur.

The silly, disjointed story line and the absence of offsetting character development are serious flaws, but because of creativity and sheer enthusiasm, I have to give this movie an A.

Harry Brown: Grade C

2010-09-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

C

Harry Brown (2009)

Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer. Director Daniel Barber.

This is a close remake of the Charles Bronson vigilante movie Death Wish (1974). Caine is a pensioner living in “the projects” in south London, where he and his chess playing buddy are constantly harassed by lawless, drug-dealing, youthful hooligans. When they kill the chess buddy, Caine goes on the rampage, hunting them down and killing them. The police become aware that they have a vigilante on the loose and gradually sniff out Caine. The investigator played by Mortimer is sure it his him, but nothing can be proved. In the end all hell breaks loose.

Acting by Caine is very good. He has always been one of my favorite B-grade stars. Mortimer is actually a better actor, but this is not much of a role for her. I like the vigilante theme, and Caine executes it with aplomb, but the directing is only so-so and the villains are so completely clichéd that it is humorous. Likewise the inept police. The first 10 minutes of the film dealing with the vigilante’s dead wife could be excised with no loss at all. When the predictable ending begins – the big gunfight and big explosions, the movie is basically over. So there is about one hour of good material in the middle that makes the film worth watching.

The Killer Inside Me: Grade B

2010-09-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

B

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Ned Beatty; Director Michael Winterbottom.

Casey Affleck is a revelation in this crime drama set in the 1950’s. His superb acting animates the main character, Lou, a psychopathic small town sheriff in the south, a well-worn cliché, to be sure, but he breathes life into it. The story gets off to a shaky start when he is ordered to run a prostitute (Alba) out of town, but decides to kill her instead, by beating her to death with his fists. (There is plenty of bloody brutality in the movie, especially directed toward women – another tired cliché we don’t need repeated). Why does he do that? There is some sketchy backstory about how a certain guy in town may or may not have facilitated the death of his brother years ago, in a construction incident that may or may not have been an accident. So when this other guy shows up at the prostitute’s place as arranged, Lou shoots him with her gun then places the gun in her hand, thus achieving revenge. But a detective from out of town is not satisfied with the evidence and relentlessly sniffs around until the predictable revelation and conflagration at the end.

So if this movie is just one predictable cliché after another, why give it such a positive rating? Acting is the main reason. It is riveting throughout, especially Affleck’s version of a calm, polite, friendly, cold-blooded psychopath. Directing is excellent. Sets and scenes are perfect. Cinematography is perfect. Costumes are perfect. The old cars are lovely. And the music is fantastic, mostly authentic period country, like Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, etc., but also with some very fine operatic interludes (Puccini, I think). This movie is so well constructed that you just have to give it a break and overlook the dreadful misogyny and clichéd story.

The Ghost Writer: Grade A

2010-08-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

A

The Ghost Writer

Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson; Co-writer and Director Roman Polanski.

This is a well-made political thriller, as you would expect from a big name like Polanski, but it is the strong acting and cinematography that carry it. It is not an edge of your seat thriller and the dramatic tension is never very high.

McGregor does an amazing job portraying a ghost writer hired to re-write the memoir of a former British Prime Minister, who has a retreat on an island off Massachusetts. The ghost writer is the second to try, as the first was found dead in mysterious circumstances. McGregor plays the part of “the ghost” extremely well. His character has no family, no political ax to grind, no strong emotions, no strong motivation of any kind. Yet he has enough curiosity to dig in and uncover the truth about the ex-PM that explains why he acted like the U.S. president’s poodle during his tenure at Number 10.

The plot has more tension if you care about such recent politics. As written, it is hard to care about the story on its own merits. As it happens, I do care about politics so I found the story quite enjoyable, though not everyone would.

The acting is so good, though, and the sets and scenery are photographed so well, that my attention never flagged over the two hour film. Besides the lightweight plot, the only other serious flaw was the annoying music, unnecessary and twice as loud as the dialog, usually high pitched, repetitive violins designed to suggest high tension when there really wasn’t any. I would rather have listened to the rain pounding on the ground.

$5 A Day: Grade B

2010-08-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

B

$5 A Day (2008)

Christopher Walken, Alessandro Nivola, Sharon Stone, Amanda Peet, Peter Coyote; Director Nigel Cole.

This is a silly, sentimental road movie about an old guy (Walken) who has a terminal brain tumor and wants to reconnect with his adult son (Nivola), ostensibly to be driven from Atlantic City to Mexico for treatment, but actually because he wants some love before he dies. The father is a harmless hustler and a con man who gets his morning coffee from a nearby hotel’s lobby service for guests, his free breakfasts at IHOP, where he shows one of his many driver’s licenses “proving” it is his birthday, and drives a PT Cruiser wrapped in pink Sweet N Low advertising (company provided). He ingeniously lives in America for only $5 a day and the movie is ingeniously well-financed with product placements.

His son is an ex-con trying to go straight who is alternately horrified, disgusted, angered, and compassionate with the old man. As on any road trip, situations develop, complications arise, and secrets are revealed. The sentimentality is well leavened by the witty dialog and clever story to make the movie an enjoyable comedy rather than a maudlin family drama. But the bottom line is that Walken is a surprisingly subtle actor who is incapable of uttering a line that does not make you at least smile, and in this movie, usually laugh out loud. That’s not because he “tells jokes” but because he is fundamentally a funny person, with impeccable timing and tone. The movie is well worth seeing just for him, but all the major players (even Stone) do fine work here.

A Prophet: Grade B

2010-08-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

B

A Prophet (2009)

Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Hichem Yacoubi; Co-writer and Director Jacques Audiard. (French and Arabic; subtitled).

A young North African Arab (Rahim) is sent to prison in Marseilles, for what I can’t remember, and begins his prison career as a naïve innocent, subject to the brutality and racial gangs that are endemic. The Islamic gang is ineffective and unable to protect him but an older Corsican gangster (Arestrup) admires his strength and independence and offers Corsican protection if he will kill a troublesome foe in the prison. The youth agrees and becomes a sort of mascot to the Corsican gang.

As a model prisoner he is eventually let out for a day a week on a work-release parole, during which time he accomplishes various gangster tasks for the Corsican mobster, including drug trafficking and murder, but always, it seems, working first and foremost for himself. After nearly 2.5 hours (!), he has become the “Godfather” of all the gangs in Marseilles by the time his prison term is up.

The plot is a little too complicated at times to keep the players and their mutual grievances straight, but that’s not too important because they are just gangsters acting gangstery anyway. This is not Coppola’s Godfather as blurbed on the video box, where characters were well developed. These are not. But the acting is terrific by these non-professional actors and the viewer gets a palpable sense of gritty, violent, amoral prison society, an exotic and alien society that exists invisibly within our mainstream one. For all that, it is a worthwhile film.

The Killing Gene: Grade B

2010-08-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

B

The Killing Gene (2007)

Stellan Skarsgård, Barbara Adair; Director Tom Shankland.

This British crime drama is violent, bloody, and brutal. There is torture, mutilation, rape, and lots of blood. I generally dislike gory violence and especially, torture, because it is almost invariably gratuitous – blood for the sake of blood. Pure sensationalism. But not in this film.

The idea is that a rape and mutilation victim who recovered and survived into adulthood wants revenge on the police detective and several others who failed to capture her tormentor. But the interesting thing about revenge is that it does not work. Let’s say you track down and kill the person who did you wrong. The perpetrator gets little or no satisfaction from that, and the victim of revenge typically feels anger but not remorse. Nobody is satisfied, nobody learns anything, and the project is a failure.

What if you just beat up and mutilate your tormenter? Same thing: It does not make you whole, and it is not a situation in which the tormenter has an inclination to remorse. Again it fails. I had thought that the perfect revenge movie could not be made therefore, but this one comes close.

The vengeant woman’s strategy is to capture her victim and, somebody that person loves. Then she tortures that person until they agree to kill the person they love to end the pain. That’s her revenge, to watch her tormenter suffer both physical and emotional pain the way she did. That might work, psychologically.

In this movie, she kills the victim after the victim kills the loved one, whereas it seems it might be better to let that person live with the psychological pain of what they did. That would be better revenge. And she not only kills them but mutilates them by carving messages into their flesh (before or after the torture is not clear). What sense does that make in the context of the revenge theory? Not much, so that mutilation aspect borders on the gratuitous.

Nevertheless, there is an overlaid story that she is or was a mad scientist of some sort who had studied the genetics of altruism and was interested in finding out if the genetic predisposition to care for your loved ones can be overcome by torture. That is a pretty weak experimental question, and in the final scenes, the victim and the loved one are not even genetically related. So overall the story does not make a lot of sense, but it is well acted, well photographed, thought-provoking, and I liked its new theory of revenge, so I give it a paradoxical B even though I dislike blood and guts movies as a rule.

Police, Adjective: Grade A

2010-08-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

A

Police, Adjective (2009)
Dragos Bucur; Writer & Director Corneliu Porumboiu. (Romanian, subtitled)

A police detective (Bucur) in a small town in Romania tracks a teenager who occasionally smokes pot, hoping to find his supplier. Actually, he does not hope that because he thinks the whole investigation is stupid, but he has been assigned to the case by the police chief. He reminds the chief that nobody in Europe gets busted for smoking a joint but the chief tells him that it is the law, and asks him, “Are you above the law?” The theme of the movie is really not about drugs, but about morality, the nature of authoritarian power, the tedium of everyday life, and Romanian politics. (Consider examples of how the word "police" is used as an adjective, to appreciate the subtlety of the political commentary). In illuminating these values, it succeeds completely.

It also succeeds as a masterpiece of cinematography. Every shot is visually perfect, even though it is obvious in many scenes that a building has been painted a certain way for the shot or a post has been whitewashed to bring brightness to the drab, wet, autumnal scene. The camera often lingers, unmoving for long minutes, so we can absorb the stillness of time in that town, in that country, in that character’s life. Several interior shots are through doorways and having the shot framed by the door jamb gives a startling sense of intimacy.

Caution, however: This not an American style film. It is extremely slow, even by European standards, and absolutely nothing happens. There are no guns, no car chases, no naked women, no drug deals, no violence of any kind. There is nothing going on but a detective walking the grubby streets, smoking, talking in the office. The beauty and the mastery of the picture is entirely “inner.” If you are not an inner person, there is nothing here for you. But if you liked Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), you’ll understand what this one is about.

Fraulein: Grade A

2010-08-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

A

Fraulein (2006)
Mirjana Karanovic, Marija Skaricic; Director Andrea Staka. (Serbian & German, subtitled).

A young woman (Karanovic) who lived through the Bosnian war, makes her way from Sarajevo to Zurich to seek her fortune. She gets a job at a tiny restaurant/cafeteria run by an older woman(Skaricic) who migrated from Belgrade. The young, happy-go-lucky woman gradually softens the gruff and unemotional older one until they eventually form a close friendship. There is a tragic theme that brings sharp drama to the story, but basically it is about the friendship, set against the background of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and the fact that technically, the two women were on opposing sides of one of the nastier struggles. But you don’t really have to know that history to appreciate how beautifully and lovingly this film portrays these characters and their friendship.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Grade D

2010-08-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

D

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

Michael Nyqvist, Noomie Rapace; Director Niels Arden Oplev. (Swedish, subtitled)

I have not read the international blockbuster bestseller, but that’s OK because a movie has to stand on its own two feet, but this one barely can kneel. A disgraced newspaper reporter (Nyqvist) hires out as a detective to solve a 40 year old cold case, the murder of a young childcare nanny who, as it turns out was his own caretaker. Working for a wealthy industrialist, head of a large wealthy clan of families, he sniffs around until he gets a few clues.

Meanwhile, the eponymous “Girl,” a sort of hip goth type, (Rapace) helps him out with data she has hacked, although they don’t know each other and we don’t know her motive for helping. We learn that she lives on a trust fund but must beg (and worse) for her allowance from an evil executor (who gets a grisly comeuppance at her hand eventually). She does have a fabulous dragon tattoo on her back however, for reasons unknown, but that is quite irrelevant to the story. Her little drama with the fund administrator has nothing to do with the decades-old murder mystery, but it is actually the interesting part of the movie.

The murder mystery rambles on and on with various twists and turns, all of which seem manufactured and not integral to the plot. The “evidence,” such as it is, is mostly pictures of pictures: photographs, newspapers, and computer screens, all of which we see repeatedly, in case we are losing the thread of the story, which is easy to do. That is poor directing, poor basic storytelling even, but consistent with the equally weak technique of telling the audience the story with line after line of endless dialog instead of showing the story by having characters react to conflict. You really have to be a fast reader and can hardly take your eyes off the subtitles to watch the movie, because the whole screenplay is so incredibly wordy.

In the end, the bad guy is caught and his/her motive is utterly lame, but that is consistent with the quality of the rest of the screenplay. Some fairly good acting, especially by Rapace, redeems the film from complete failure.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: Grade C

2010-07-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

C
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Wynona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Julianne Moore; Writer-Director Rebecca Miller.

Robin Wright’s acting is the star of this little domestic drama. She is married to a much older man (Arkin) and moves to a retirement community with him, where she is somewhat lost. She sleepwalks, takes speed and takes a pottery class. Her husband has an affair. She has an affair. Her daughter becomes a photojournalist. The dog gets hit by a car. Everyone eats cake.

There is absolutely no plot, and as far as I can tell, not much of a story either. It is just a bunch of rich people bumping around, acting stupidly, lacking insight, motivation, or purpose. Wright’s performance is truly stunning, but the character she plays is so dirt-boring that it is even hard to appreciate the great acting. Reeves and Ryder also give excellent performances, and Moore, in a smaller role, is riveting as always. Arkin acts like Arkin, nothing new there but still enjoyable. So the movie is an opportunity to see some first class acting, if you can stay awake through the brain-dead script.