The Green Zone: Grade D

D
The Green Zone (2010)

Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear; Director Paul Greengrass.

Damon is a US Army officer in charge of finding Iraqi WMDs just after the invasion of Baghdad. He keeps coming up empty and begins to suspect that the intelligence he is being given is bad. He whines to the CIA, which acknowledges something is wrong with the intel, and hires him to look into it. Some unlikely coincidental events occur that lead to the bent politician (Kinnear) to be in pursuit of Damon so he does not uncover the coverup that there are no WMDs. In this, the story vaguely follows the structure of Three Days of the Condor a great 1975 film with the government out to silence one of its own people for some political advantage. But this film is not great. It tries to make up in aggressive sound engineering what it lacks in dramatic tension. Loud crowd noises, featuring people yelling “Hurry,” squealing tires, gunshots, and obnoxious trombones attempt to convince you that you are feeling something. The pace of the story is slow, the acting is terrible, the editing is so cut up you can’t see anything, and the story line itself is just too jumpy to be coherent. If you did not know the real history of the WMD deception you would be hard pressed to make head or tail out of this project. That's too bad because it is an inherently interesting historical drama.

Public Enemies: Grade D

D
Public Enemies (2009)

Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard; Co-writer and Director Michael Mann.

It’s gangsters in 1930’s Chicago doing gangstery things. Have we not seen this before? Street battles with tommy guns, bank robberies, lovely cars and costumes, art deco interiors, tough guy talk, prison breaks, the incorruptible FBI agent in obsessive pursuit, and every other period gangster cliché you can think of – it’s all here. There is absolutely nothing new.

Depp is John Dillinger, notorious bank robber and Bale is his FBI nemesis with a bizarre, ludicrous, and totally unnecessary southern accent. I thought, with all these big stars, what could go wrong? Bad script, that’s what. It is so wooden and unimaginative that the actors have no chance of bringing it to life. Story? What story? FBI pursues bank robber, shoots him dead. There is no suspense whatsoever and the characters are two-dimensional cutouts.

The film’s 2:20 running time is unconscionable, especially since the first hour could be eliminated with no loss. Sure, you would miss a shoot-em-up bank robbery, but there are two others, almost identical to look at later. The only thing that keeps this movie from complete failure is the fine photography of excellent, detailed sets. The pictures are crisp and creatively shot, compelling to watch. The sepia colors are overdone, but pleasant and moody, some even fading to black and white to remind you that this is a quasi-biography “based on” Dillinger’s life (even though we learn nothing about him). When the colors are not sepia, they are through a green filter, which is less attractive, but still interesting. There is some good period music, Billie Holiday and the like, but some of it seems anachronistically modern and unconnected. That’s not much to recommend a film with so much resource behind it, but that’s all there is behind the muzzle flash.

Julia: Grade B

B
Julia (2008)
Tilda Swinton, Kate del Castillo, Aidan Gould; Director Erick Zonca

This is Tilda Swinton’s well-deserved vehicle that proves what a stunningly good actor she is. She is mesmerizing; you can’t take your eyes off her even though her character is an unlikeable, acerbic drunk.

She kidnaps a boy (Gould) and negotiates the ransom, but the plan does not go as smoothly as she hoped. It takes two and a half hours (!) for no plot to develop. Where was the editor? It is easy to see where an hour could have been cut out. Instead of plot, there are arbitrary twists and turns, one damn thing after another, and maybe that idea was to parallel the character’s chaotic life, but it just made for a chaotic story line. Along the way, we see her develop a softer side as she forms a relationship with the boy, but she does not really undergo any great transformation, have an epiphany or learn any great lesson. So the movie is not strong as a character piece and is too drawn out to sustain dramatic tension as a thriller. But Swinton carries every scene with amazing intensity.

Photography is crisp, bright, and unobtrusive. Sets and costumes, in California and Tijuana, are excellent. Lighting is exceptionally good. For example after a drunken night, the harsh light of dawn, actual and psychological, is clearly shown. Directing is flawless. If only there had been an editor on hand! Maybe the filmmakers realized they had a gem of a performance from Swinton and were loathe to cut any of it. That’s understandable, but it was the wrong decision.

Vampire Diary: Grade C

C
Vampire Diary (2007)
Anna Walton, Morvin Macbeth; Directors Mark James & Phil O’Shea.

I have questions about vampires and this movie did nothing to clear them up. Aren’t vampires immortal? So what is their fear of being captured or shot by the police? And how nutritious is an exclusive blood diet, anyway? Don’t vampires need the basic 20 amino acids? This movie introduces a whole new set of questions about vampire reproduction as well.

Vicki is a relatively good-looking young woman, in a dark, Addams Family sort of way. She crashes vampire parties held by Gothic teens who wear false fangs and use loads of eye and mouth makeup. Vicki falls in love with Holly, the host of a vampire party, and eventually confesses that she is a real vampire, that she is pregnant, and that she is hungry. Holly shows about sixty seconds of skepticism then vows to help her lover get what she needs. They start hunting derelict drunks, but Vicki complains about the low quality blood, so they have to move upscale. Details are sketchy, but some members of the party crowd turn up dead. The city-wide hunt is on for the “Vampire Killer.”

But the movie is really about the relationship between the two women and the lengths to which Holly will go to protect and sustain her friend. Most disturbing is how the film justifies and ennobles self-mutilation, which is actually a severe psychopathology. Holly cuts herself with a razor blade to feed her lover. Camera work is dark, grainy, shaky hand-held video, and reflects the fact that many young people have video cameras going all the time, objectifying their lives instead of living them, another disturbing trend. Editing is primitive, directing is clunky. I could not evaluate the music, which is from a youth culture I don’t know. But the acting was actually pretty good. As she hands her new baby to Holly before the police get there, Vicki says that she is not really a vampire, just a psychopathic serial killer. There are no vampires, she says. That would have been a good ambiguity to play throughout the story instead of throwing it in at the last minute. Despite the mediocre writing and very low production values, the result is mildly interesting, not too bad.

Juncture: Grade F

F
Juncture (2008)
Christine Blackport. Director James Seale

A young woman in contemporary New York or Boston (there is no clear sense of place), has brain tumor and only two months to live. With her remaining time she chooses to hunt down and kill “bad people” who have harmed children, and that includes everything from middle aged men who collect kiddy porn, ex-con pedophiles (who have served their time), and neglectful, heroin-addicted mothers. She uses newspaper headlines for her research and whatever they say is enough justification for her to travel to a person’s city and blow their head off.

I love a good revenge/vigilante story but this is a cartoon. The character is not well- motivated. She starts her killing spree even before she is diagnosed, so her motivation seems to be (guessing from a brief shot of some tombstones with her family name) based simply on grief. Nobody suspects her and nobody is after her even though she wears no disguises and has a tendency to stand under bright porch lights. At the end she acts stupidly and is chased by police but there is no dramatic tension The acting and directing are execrable, consistent with the terrible writing.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Grade C

C
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei; Director Sidney Lumet.

Bad editing can completely spoil an otherwise good movie, as this feature demonstrates. Hoffman and Hawke are brothers in contemporary New York, both desperate for cash; Hoffman because he is a junkie who has been embezzling from his firm, Hawke to make child support payments. They conspire to rob a jewelry store, but it goes wrong and two people are killed. For the rest of the movie they have to cover their tracks and deal with the consequences of their act and with their desperate lives. The ending is quite good. Alas, the editing, or lack of it, lets the pace sag to the point of boredom. It would be easy to cut at least 15 minutes (out of an unconscionable 2 hours) just by eliminating non-informational shots of cars moving down highways, people getting in and out of cars, and people walking down streets and hallways. These shots do not establish time or place and are just uninteresting, wasted film. Then entire irrelevant scenes could be cut, if not entire characters. Marissa Tomei does brilliant acting in two very short scenes but is otherwise in the movie only to show her breasts. They’re very nice breasts, but they contribute absolutely nothing to the story or characterization. Several long sequences with Finney and with Hawke should have been cut. The story is tediously spliced into overlapping flashbacks so we must endure the same scene multiple times, each from a different character’s point of view. The characters’ points of view are not important to the story and not that different anyway, so the technique serves little purpose and adds more deadwood. The redeeming virtues of the movie are strong plot and excellent acting by Hoffman and Finney. Hawke can act when there is a gun to his head, but otherwise he is undistinguished. Hoffman, however, gives 100% in every scene he is in and it is a pleasure to watch him.