Old Boy: Grade B

B
Old Boy (2003)
Min-sik Choi, Hye-jeong Kang, Ji-tae Yu; Director Chan-wook Park. (Korean, subtitled)

A middle aged man (Choi) is imprisoned in a windowless hotel room and he does not know why. Food appears under the door, and each day the room is filled with gas that puts him to sleep while the staff cleans the room. Predictably, he goes nuts, but he recovers (more or less) upon release without explanation or context after fifteen years.

He meets a sympathetic waitress (Kang) and develops a relationship with her, but he is consumed by desire to know what happened and for revenge on his captor (Yu), who he discovers through careful research. There are many twists and turns and a surprising ending.

The film is beautifully photographed, well directed, and the music is outstanding. The picture is extremely stylish and good-looking. It is also drenched in blood. Tartan Films (Tarantino’s outfit) “presents” the movie, so you should know what to expect. I just fast forwarded past the most violent scenes.

Acting is outstanding by Choi and Kang and it is fun to get a glimpse into Korean culture. A sense of modern, urban, existential alienation comes through although the ultimate theme of the story is fairly pedestrian, not as shocking to an American audience as the actors’ reactions suggest. I recommend it on the basis of excellent filmmaking.

Triangle: Grade C

C
Triangle (2007)
Simon Yam, Honglei Sun, Ka Tung Lam, Kelly Lin, Yong You, others.
Directors Ringo Lam, Johnnie To, Hark Tsui; (Chinese; subtitled)

In this contemporary Hong Kong crime drama, three men discover a buried treasure worth 8 million dollars. A suspicious detective hovers about as they try to fence it, but he is also sleeping with the wife of one of the men. They lose the treasure, recover it, lose it again, recover it again, and so on, until there is a long, drawn out gun battle at the end. The story is pretty silly, and anyway, it is not clear that the men committed any crime so why were they on the run from the police?

Oh, well, never mind that, because what this movie is really about is the three directors. Each director takes a 30 minute segment, and the different styles of work is what makes the film interesting. The first third is like a typical thriller, with the men skulking about at night, then digging up the treasure, and with the theme of the unfaithful wife. The style is atmospheric and the photography is high contrast, self-consciously dramatic. The story is a bit hard to follow because it took me a while to catch on that the cop’s girlfriend was a wife of one of the diggers. Without transition, you gradually realize that you are in the second segment, because the style has changed so radically. Now it is a psychological drama with the main treasure hunter obsessed by his wife’s infidelity and becoming violent, unpredictable, even crazy as he tortures the cop. There are vignette scenes that mix his imagination with reality. It is interesting and artistically done, but disconnected thematically from the thriller format that had been developing, so the character doesn't make psychological sense. The cop gets away from his tormenter and the chase is on, and before you know it, it is a madcap chase worthy of the Keystone Cops. You realize you are now in the hands of the third director who turns the film into a farcical comedy.

Basically it is three different 30 minute movies, loosely stitched together. But none of them bothers to give a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. The result is like some experimental novel where different authors write succeeding chapters. It is neither a set of short stories, nor a coherent novel. So it is fun to see the directors’ styles, but as a movie, it is unsatisfying. A format like that used in The Driver (2001) works better, where the same short story is told in its entirety by different directors.

An American Affair: Grade C

C
An American Affair (2009)
Gretchen Mol, Cameron Bright, James Rebhorn, Marc Pellegrino; Director William Olsson.

The only reason to watch this picture is Gretchen Mol, whose performance is a beacon in a dim terrain. She is a wealthy artist and divorcee in Georgetown (Washington, D.C.) and also one of JFK’s many mistresses. Mol’s ex-husband (Pellegrino) is CIA and he is pressured by his boss (Rebhorn) to get Mol to warn Kennedy of vague imminent danger just prior to the assassination (an allusion to the Oliver Stone thesis). We are to believe that JFK has cut off contact with the CIA so Mol is “the only remaining line of communication.” However, she wants nothing to do with that, and anyway, JFK has dumped her and she can no longer even get into the White House. Add a rich Georgetown youth next door (Bright) who is infatuated (mostly hormonally) with Mol, and steals her diary, which implausibly looks like a schoolgirl's. The CIA must have the diary, they suspect the boy has it. This is all afterthought to lend some conceptual direction to a rambling story. Characters do not change over time, and there is no plot development other than pursuit of the diary in the last 15 minutes, so the movie is plodding and uninteresting. The boy’s search for a sexual coming of age is 100% cliché. There are numerous linguistic anachronisms. Only Mol (and to a lesser extent Rebhorn and Pellegrino) keep you awake. She captures the big screen in every scene she is in. Costumes and sets for 1963 are perfect – too perfect, not a seam out of place or a lampshade deviating from level, or even the tiniest suggestion of dust or disorder. Everything looks like museum tableaux not places people inhabit. The movie is setbound and there is no attempt to recreate the Washington of a half century ago, which would be a formidable task. Instead, cliché news clips of Kennedy are shown on TV, but that is a weak convention that doesn’t convey us to another time.

Duplicity: Grade C

C
Duplicity (2009)
Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti; Writer-Director Tony Gilroy.

Just like Ocean’s Eleven, which it apes in style, this movie is coruscation without content. Owen and Roberts are easy on the eyes, no question about that, but two hours of them is more than an eyeful. They are ex-government spies now employed in corporate espionage. Wilkinson is head of a big consumer products company that has a new “game-changing” shampoo, all very hush-hush. Giamatti is his opposite number who must have the secret formula to the new product. I find it impossible to get past Giamatti, into the character. He is full of arbitrary mannerisms and manufactured intensity. His acting seems desperate, without direction, and not funny, a contrast to his performance in Shoot 'em Up. Anyway, both corporations have substantial security departments to protect their secrets. Owen works for Giamatti while Roberts works for Wilkinson. So far so good, other than the ho-hum McGuffin.

But actually, Roberts also works for Giamatti’s team. She is a mole on the other side, and Owen is her “handler.” In a series of time slices we learn that the two have a long history as competitors and lovers and each has a difficult time trusting the other. That interaction, repeated without mercy, is cute and funny the first few times. The dialog is all clever phrases and snappy comebacks, unrealistic but reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man. The happy talk and pretty faces glide us over the choppy story. There are plenty of unexpected twists, lies, bluffs, and ambiguous loyalties to consider but there is no real dramatic tension because the writing depends on withholding information from the audience so you can’t really tell what’s up. The story itself has no inherent suspense. And unforgivably, it doesn’t add up. The ending is just a twisty turn for its own sake that is inconsistent with what already happened, a crash landing for a story on autopilot.

Cinematography is strong, with sets in such sumptuous detail you can almost touch them. Orange and blue filters are overdone, but the lighting is generally thoughtful and mood-setting. The acting is nondescript because the characters are only cartoons. That style can work for a caper movie, like The Thomas Crowne Affair, but in this case the writing was not up to the challenge, so we are left with a two hour fluff that is not unpleasant.

While She Was Out: Grade F

F
While She Was Out (2008)
Kim Basinger, Lukas Haas; Co-writer and Director Susan Montford.

Basinger is an ordinary suburban housewife who can’t find a parking spot at a shopping mall at Christmas. She is annoyed by a big old car taking up two spaces and leaves a hostile note on its windshield. When she comes out of the mall, the owners of that car are waiting for her, four young punks who surround her with hypermacho lip. A mall guard intervenes and they shoot him dead. Basinger jumps in her car and for some reason flees to an uncompleted housing construction project, where she grabs the metal toolbox from her car and hides in some framing. The toolbox miraculously has no mass and she carries it effortlessly. The punks chase her into the nearby woods, improbably a mature Northwest rain forest. As they pursue her through the inexplicably well lit night forest, she manages to ambush them one at a time, killing them with tools far too large to have come out of the box. On the last bad guy, she uses her feminine wiles to get him sexually distracted, which works, despite the large difference in their ages.

Basinger has had some amazing cosmetic surgery that makes her appear thirtyish if you don’t look too closely at the grotesquely sculpted features or at her 55 year old hands. Still, she is far from being a female Bruce Willis, which I guess is what I was hoping for. The acting is abominable, especially by the young men, in keeping with the brain-dead story. Costumes, sets, music, directing, scenery, cinematography – all are so bad that you keep watching in horrified fascination, but that doesn’t make it worth your time.

21: Grade C

C
21 (2008)
Kevin Spacey, Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Lawrence Fishburne. Director Robert Luketic.

Kevin Spacey is a physics professor at MIT who puts together a team of students to learn a simple card-counting system to beat the Las Vegas casinos. In blackjack, every card played is shown so you can count how many aces, face cards and 10’s have been played. Since you know how many of those are in a deck, you adjust your betting according to how many are left, beating the house odds.

On the team, Sturgess develops a passionless relationship with Bosworth. Fishburne is the casino security manager who spots the scam after it becomes apparent that the casino is losing money. There is no explanation why the team stupidly plays the same casino night after night, week after week. Nor can we understand why Sturgess doesn’t open some bank accounts instead of stashing wads of cash over a ceiling tile in his dorm room. For a bunch of smarty-pantses, the team is weak on strategic thinking.

Despite the intellectually engaging story, the movie is very slow. “Filler” scenes of cityscapes, neon lights, people boarding airplanes, driving, walking, sleeping, eating, shopping, burn up most of the screen time. The characters are not well developed or emotionally engaged. Finally, 90 dead minutes into the movie, new writers must have been brought in, a genuine plot develops and it’s pretty good, although the ending, which suddenly turns the entire story into a flashback, is lame. Spacey is always enjoyable to watch, as is Fishburne, but the rest of the cast was unremarkable.

Death Sentence: Grade D

D
Death Sentence (2007)
Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlund, Kelly Preston, Aisha Tylor, John Goodman. Director James Wan.

Bacon is an insurance executive whose son is murdered by a gang. He loses confidence in the legal system and goes out for vigilante justice. Murder and mayhem ensue. Charles Bronson played the same part better in Death Wish (1974), even though Bacon is a much better actor, and that’s because this movie is so badly written and directed. A great deal of screen time is devoted to assuring us that Bacon is an ordinary family guy who celebrates birthdays with his kids. But that’s boring: we assume it and the message could have been conveyed in 60 seconds. When he turns vigilante, he acts without planning, is unsure and even horrified at himself when he “accidentally” stabs a kid with a garden knife. What kind of vengeant resolve is that? There is none of Bronson’s grim determination or the besieged perseverance of Die-Hard’s John McLane or the revenant fury of Rambo. Bacon’s back is never up against the wall and he seems clueless throughout. As he waits (!) for the gang to come after his family he makes sure the windows are locked in his nice suburban home. There are many other stupidities that detract from the story. What kind of head wound justifies gauze bandages wrapped around the forehead to look like Ray Milland in The Invisible man? Why would you choose a two-shot shotgun to go after a gang of 25 killers? What kind of street thugs bounce up on their toes with each step? The movie tries to make the moral point that personal revenge is not worth it, but that platitude is lost on Bacon. What raises the movie above complete failure is the excellent cinematography, especially in the chase scenes.

Eastern Promises: Grade A

A
Eastern Promises (2007)
Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortenstern, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl. Director David Cronenberg. Mostly English, with some subtitled Russian.

It’s Russian mafia trafficking in women vs. Chechen criminal gangs, all in modern London. Into that dark, cold, extremely violent world stumbles Watts’ character, after a young, pregnant Russian girl arrives at the hospital where she works. The girl dies, the baby survives, and so does the girl’s diary, which reveals incriminating facts about the Russian gang’s operations. Before the diary is translated, Watts tries to find a relative, to prevent the baby from going into foster care, and discovers “godfather” Mueller-Stahl’s restaurant. He learns of the diary and sends thug Mortenstern to get it. Meanwhile there are murders and retaliatory murders between the Russian and Chechen gangs. There is more than a little allusion to the Godfather series, but this movie actually reminds me a lot of 1994’s Little Odessa. I kept expecting Tim Roth to appear. There are many unexpected events and shocking scenes that jolt you upright in your chair. There is a fight scene in a public bath house where Mortenstern, completely naked, defends himself against two assassins with knives. The vulnerable flesh against the hard tile is almost more painful to watch than the bloody slashing. It is a memorable scene that held me breathless. But there is more than violence and gore here. Both Mortensterns’ and Watt’s characters develop plausibly as events continue, and the intellectual thread of the plot is engaging. Although the ending is a little too pat, it works. Watt’s character often behaves in the infuriatingly stupid ways that characters do in cheap horror films. There are some loose ends, and that always bothers me, but they are minor. While not for the queasy, the movie is a memorable masterpiece of filmmaking.

The Bourne Ultimatum: Grade C

C

The Bourne Ultimatum
Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen. Director Paul Greengrass.

This third of the Bourne series is actually a Superman movie. Damon doesn’t have the cape and tights (our loss) but otherwise is invulnerable. He drives a car off a building to the concrete below and just hops out (none of the cars in this movie has airbags). He is shot in the leg, limping badly, but still manages to jump from a moving train and outrun the Russian police. He has no trouble beating up 3 or 5 big muscular guys at once. If someone has the drop on him with a gun, he just takes the gun. He does leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can he fly? We’re not sure. We see him jumping 20 foot alleys on rooftops, but we never see how he gets from Turin to Madrid to New York in a single afternoon. Stiles has some minor powers, such as taking a full force bad guy elbow in the face that knocks her across the room but does not damage her cute nose. The evil CIA has omniscient powers, as you would expect, such as being able to control all the CCTV cameras in London from their offices in Virginia, being able to read the handwritten papers on someone’s desk in another country, by technology unknown. The story is literally incredible, an unintentionally humorous parody of the paranoid chase thriller. None of it makes any sense and none of the characters is realistically drawn or motivated. Acting is uniformly wooden, to put it kindly. On the upside, the chases are mostly on foot, unlike other such films that depend on vehicular action.

There are some virtues. One fistfight scene is edited into second and subsecond disconnected segments, giving it a good-looking martial arts grace. I think that is a cinematic innovation for a western fight scene. The filming locations are compelling, with big colors and big sound (especially around 20 Hz where you can feel it in your belly), including all the slamming metallic door sounds you could hope for. Note to sound designer: it has been a very long time since any computer emitted a little tone with each letter appearing on the screen. I analyzed several long chase scenes into cuts lasting an average of 2 seconds with a standard deviation of 1 second. These incredibly short cuts combined with shaky hand-held cameras make a dizzying experience, a strain to watch. Nevertheless, I think editing a 2 hour movie into thousands of disconnected 2 second scenes also counts a cinematic innovation, although to what end I cannot say. Three Days of the Condor (1975) is the same movie at the languid pace of a pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-video game, pre-cell phone, pre-GPS world, yet holds vastly more tension.

Live Free or Die Hard: Grade C

C
Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Bruce Willis, Justin Long. Director Len Wiseman.

If you suffer from ADHD, you will love this kinetic, guns, chase, and explosions thriller. Bruce Willis, who must be 55 years old, looks remarkably good as the invulnerable John McLane, NYPD. He and prisoner-in-custody Long (the “Mac” side of the well-known Mac Vs. PC commercials), escape from, then ultimately find and destroy a group of cyber-terrorists who want to shut down the US information infrastructure just because they are bad, and oh yeah, he also needs to save his daughter who the baddies have kidnapped, as required by the formula.

Explosions are big and frequent, and the FX and music definitely exercised my surround sound 5.1. You wouldn’t think there could be any vehicular stunts that haven’t already been done, but there are a couple in this movie. One must suspend all belief in reality to enjoy action for the sake of action. Willis gives his trademark wisecracks, although they are less frequent and witty than in the past. There is no dramatic tension, no acting, not even a coherent story, only stunts and explosions. Sets tend to green or blue, not attractive. As a member of the “Die Hard” series, this film stands as a highly impressionistic encapsulation of the vehicular-action crime genre without crossing over to parody. For that it’s worth seeing.

Conejo en la Luna: Grade A

A

Conejo en la Luna (2006)

Jesús Ochoa, Adam Kotz; Writer, Producer & Director: Jorge Ramirez-Suarez. Spanish (subtitled)

Truckloads of grit fill this urban crime thriller. Set in Mexico city and London, it is a dark, creepy story of government corruption at the highest levels. To cover up an assassination, an innocent couple and their friends are picked as suspects, but all does not go as planned. There are high suspense chases, paranoid suspicions, evil henchmen, and scenes of dark desperation. The body count is high, but guts and gore minimal, as vics are shot off camera. It’s also a cultural commentary about the helplessness and hopelessness that corruption visits on ordinary citizens. The ending is realistic but not entirely happy. What makes the film great is the intricate plotting, full of entirely plausible surprises, no red herrings, and edge-of-seat tension throughout. I love a tight plot. Acting is good, music is strange but interesting, more sound effects than music, but the editing is terrible, to the point of being jerky. Film noir doesn’t get better than this.