Sin Nombre: Grade A

A
Sin Nombre (2009)
Paulina Gaitan, Kristian Ferrer, Édgar Flores; Writer-Director Cary Fukunaga. (Spanish, subtitled).

A father and two youths from Guatemala make the long journey north to escape the poverty and hopelessness of their lives. They walk, and boat, and travel through Mexico riding on top of freight trains, dodging the border patrol, scavenging food, shelter and water as they can. It is a well told story, very realistic, not over-sentimentalized, but sympathetic. As they cross Chiapas in southern Mexico, a young man (Flores) jumps on the train with a few fellow gangsters. They are members of one of the notorious Latino gangs similar to the mafia. They start robbing the hundreds of migrants at gunpoint, but when the mean, ugly, psychopathic gang leader attempts to molest the young girl from Guatemala (Gaitan), his fellow gang member has an attack of scruples and slashes the leader's throat with a single slice of a machete. He knows that makes him marked for death. He continues on the train north, but the gang is international and will not forget about him. The Guatemalan girl befriends him and as they jointly dodge border patrol and gangsters, they develop a relationship. The young man realizes the futility of the gang life, but it is too late for him. The girl seems oblivious to this darker side of life, but maybe not. It’s ambiguous. The ending is realistic, but definitely not Hollywood Happy.

Acting by the young people is excellent. Scenery and music are excellent. Photography is excellent. This is a compelling movie without a false note. It would have been easy to slip into melodrama, like Slumdog Millionaire did, but this picture is completely honest. It conveys a palpable sense of the reality of the Latino gangs and shows how easy it is for youngsters to get involved with them. The title means “without a name,” perhaps a reference to the nameless millions who attempt the journey to El Norte each year. There is perhaps a secondary political statement, but this is primarily a love story that illustrates a world alien to most of us.

Rudo y Cursi: Grade F

F
Rudo y Cursi (2008)
Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna; Writer-Director Carlos Cuarón. (Spanish, subtitled)

I like foreign films, other languages, other ethnicities; I like seeing how people live in other cultures, what they assume about life, what the world looks like to them. But this film might be just too ethnic, even for me, because I could not get a thing out of it. Granted, I am not a huge soccer fan and this movie focuses on two brothers from a poor village in southern Mexico who aspire to become professional soccer stars. They achieve their goal when an unconvincing talent scout implausibly “discovers” them in their village and whisks them off to the big leagues, though even to my untrained eye, they aren’t very good players. So they make a lot of money, get a fancy apartment, a big white SUV, are on TV, and have lots of women and champagne. Woo-woo. They visit their village as heroes but also as aliens, no longer able to relate to village life or even to their families. Finally there is the inevitable “big match” where everything is at stake, and it all comes down to a penalty kick with one brother kicking and the other the goalie. What drama!

This is all predictable, without an ounce of real tension. The acting is hammy, dialog uninteresting, story unbelievable. The relationship between the brothers is not well developed. Directing and cinematography are unremarkable. It is nice to see village life in southern Mexico, but that is only a small part of the film. I’m sure I am being culturally insensitive but for me, this wasn’t even adequate soap opera.

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.

Goodbye Solo: Grade D

D
Goodbye Solo (2008)
Souleymane Sy Savane, Red West; Writer-Director Ramin Bahrani.

A pathologically cheerful Senegalese taxi driver (Savane) picks up an angry, misanthropic old man (West) in contemporary North Carolina. They agree that the driver will take him to the mountains in two weeks. They see each other several times before that and the driver realizes that the old man is depressed and possibly considering suicide. Gradually the men form the barest thread of a connection that could possibly be construed as friendship. There is no plot, no motivation, no outcome, no point to any of it. Each man denies his loneliness to himself and the other, but finds a tiny solace in caring. (I am generously attributing or imagining a theme that may not really be there.)

Acting by the two principals is very good, but without anything to hang on to, the story is just a set of unconnected scenes. At least 20% of the movie is composed of long shots of the taxi driving around, and short shots of the driver driving it. The rest of the movie is about as interesting. The relationship does not develop so much as creep along, so little is revealed about either character. Bahrani is expert at portraying the circumstances and struggles of hard-working immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart), but this project doesn’t come up to his standards, either narratively or photographically.

Big Man Japan: Grade A

A
Big Man Japan (2007)
Hitoshi Matsumoto. Co-writer and Director Hitoshi Matsumoto. (Japanese, subtitled)

This bizarre film can only be recommended to the adventurous. The protagonist, “Big Man Japan” (Matsumoto), is a middle aged television actor in contemporary Tokyo. His terrible, low-budget sci-fi show, on at 2am, struggles to keep sponsors. In the show, a giant (“Big Man”) as tall as the buildings of downtown Tokyo, fights evil monsters just as big. The CGI effects are purposely clunky to recall classic Japanese sci-fi of the 1950’s. The monsters are the most creative you will ever see. Forget giant ants, lizards, and moths. These monsters are direct from the id but at the same time hilarious, more so, I imagine, if you were high.

Adding complexity, the premise is that the actor is being interviewed in documentary style, so a camera crew follows him everywhere, into his crowded apartment, a restaurant (where he only eats “super-noodles”) and on a visit to his estranged wife and beloved daughter. We learn that he endures large blasts of electricity which transform him into the superhero giant. He complains that he is getting old and the electric jolts are hard to take, but he is the only one of his type left. His ageing grandfather (Big Man the Fourth) has dementia, he believes, because he took too much electricity in his youth. The realities of the actor’s life and of his superhero character are so skillfully blended that we become unsure what kind of a movie we are watching. Is he really a superhero and not an actor? Or both? What is the deal?

Then there is a third layer of meaning in which we discover that as a child the actor was abused by his father (now dead), but was saved by his grandfather. The worst monster, a sort of red devil, thus represents the actor’s inner demon, his unforgiving memory of his father. In a final scene too strange to describe, a family of justice encourages him to find peace with the past. He does overcome his demon, but in yet another twist during the credits, we discover that coming to terms with the past is not a state of bliss.

Then we start to rethink the other monsters as symbols. Are they actually complaints about life in ultra-crowded Tokyo: crushed by the sheer press of people, stepping on them and being stepped on, having no privacy from peering eyes, enduring the stink of living so close, and so on? A whole new social meaning emerges to what we have been watching. Was this story a representation of the actor’s mental state all along, the monsters actually dream symbols? What is the reality? There are also historical and cultural dimensions I have not mentioned.

While reaching to the edge of delightfully, hilariously confusing madness, the movie demonstrates how to use the medium to its maximum capacity and not waste it photographing stage plays. The colors and effects are brilliant, exciting, and extremely creative as visuals. Photography is first class. The layers of allusion are dizzying. The music is terrific. However, if you like straight Disneyesque fables, you should skip this one because it will make no sense to you.

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.

The Informers: Grade C

C
The Informers (2009)
Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Wynona Ryder, Mickey Rourke, Rhys Ifans; Director Gregor Jordan.

Four stories are about life in LA during the early ‘80s, that is, life of the rich and irresponsible, or criminal and irresponsible. The stories are intercut so we follow all four at once, but they are only tangentially related. In all of them, uneducated, undeveloped, egocentric characters drift along without self-awareness -- not very interesting.

Ifans leads a punk/rock band. Band members are enormously wealthy, stay only in luxurious hotels, smoke weed, snort coke, and engage in continuous orgiastic sex with all manner of youth, both male and female. What a life. But they are mean-spirited, cynical, bored, and clueless.

Thornton is a wealthy music producer, separated from his wife (Basinger), who is some kind of neurotic recluse who occasionally sleeps with one of the band members. BBT is having an affair with a news announcer (Ryder), who remains in mannequin mode even when not on TV. The producer is a generic self-centered bastard/asshole but we find out late in the movie that he also shoots up drugs when Basinger loans him her syringe after they attempt a reconciliation.

Rourke (pre-Wrestler) is a criminal lowlife who kidnaps a boy to make some quick cash for his heroin habit. He and his drifter girlfriend share needles too. The kidnap payoff does not go well and he has to skip town in a hurry.

The briefest story is of a young man who might have been part of the Informers or just a groupie, who inexplicably accepts an invitation to go to Hawaii with his estranged father, a conventional dimwit square. Between them is icewater that remains even in Hawaii.

The “ending,” if it can be called that, is that one of the band’s promiscuous groupies develops Kaposi’s sarcoma, a pre-AIDS condition and lays dying on a California beach in her bikini. The message seems to be wistful: ah, for the good old days, when there was unlimited sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, and nothing to worry about! AIDS was identified about 1980 and is not known to these characters. Therefore what? If only they had known about AIDS, they would have had a strong moral sense and been upright citizens? AIDS is their punishment for debauched lives? This movie doesn’t know what it is trying to say.

On the plus side I could watch Thornton, Basinger and Rourke all day. They’re great. Hard punk/rock music was beyond my taste. Otherwise, the scenes, the script, the directing, the cinematography are mechanical and cliché. Despite these serious shortcomings, the movie does give the sense of a rich, ignorant and aimless lifestyle that is interesting, and it does make you wonder how social life would have evolved without the AIDS epidemic.

State of Play: Grade B

B
State of Play (2009)
Russell Crowe, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Ben Affleck, Robin Wright Penn; Director Kevin MacDonald.

Crowe and McAdams are investigative reporters at a Washington, D.C. newspaper sniffing around a congressional scandal. The story is loosely an update of All The President’s Men, although the stakes are somewhat banal in this case: scandalous behavior by a young congressman from Pennsylvania (Affleck). The story starts with grander ambition, considering the question of whether outsourcing of military security to private firms is ethical, constitutional, or even good policy. This issue is topical and has gravitas. But disappointingly, it fades away, leaving a garden variety sex scandal.

Crowe is investigating the suicide of the congressman’s assistant, and a back alley murder, when he unexpectedly finds a connection between them. There is a moment of realization every bit as good as when Robert Redford heard the Watergate burglars name a white house official in court. Times have changed since the 1970’s, especially the newspaper business, but this story pretends that newspapers and their reporters still shake the world. They don’t, so the tension feels contrived here, despite Crowe's anachronistic haircut and corduroy sports jackets.

It is a star vehicle for Crowe. He is in almost every scene, to the detriment of the other actors and characters. McAdams holds her own against him, but her cub reporter character is not as important. Mirren, the newspaper boss, is a master of exasperation, but she only has one good acting scene. Affleck’s performance is bland. Maybe that was what the character called for but it produced a placeholder not a narrative force. Wright-Penn is a pleasure to watch, although her part is small.

It is a low-key “talkie” thriller where the excitement stems from the information we (and Crowe) have and don’t have. There isn’t much action except in the opening scene. There are plenty of loose ends and internal contradictions, including a very unlikely final confession blurted out by the congressman when confronted with vague innuendos. Despite these faults, it is a relatively tight thriller with superior acting, directing, photography, editing, and music, and terrific sets.

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.

Surveillance: Grade C

C
Surveillance (2008)
Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Ryan Simkins; Co-writer and Director Jennifer Chambers Lynch.

Pullman and Ormond are FBI agents called into investigate a horrible multiple homicide on a stretch of desolate rural highway near Santa Fe (although the film was shot in Saskatchewan and looks like it.) Two lunatic highway cops make a sport out of shooting out a tire on a passing car, then cruising up to the car and sadistically tormenting its occupants. In the second episode of that game, they hassle a nice middle class family on vacation, and a couple of high druggies stumble upon the scene, then in the midst of all that, there is a traffic accident. The outcome is a high body count.

Pullman and Ormond interview the one surviving policeman, the one surviving druggie, and the only survivor of the family vacation, a little girl (Simkins). The interviewees give self-exculpatory accounts but a series of omniscient flashbacks show us what really happened, more or less. The flashbacks use the annoying and manipulative technique I call “camera suspense,” where the camera’s point of view is restricted to create artificial suspense. Unlike the Roshomon technique, the camera is not attached to a character. We see arbitrary extreme close-ups and sub-second cuts. It’s a substitute for careful writing.

David Lynch’s films usually didn’t make much sense either, so why should his daughter’s? At least there were no rabbit-headed people walking around. The film is more on the side of realism than surrealism, but not by much. You must accept a steady stream of implausibilities, such as sadistic, psychopathic cops running amok, shooting out tires on a moving car with a pistol at 500 yards, the FBI investigating a highway accident, and so on. Even the victims do not act realistically. And the ending, while a genuine surprise, is unmotivated, the kind of ending that negates everything you have seen so far, leaving you with nothing. It demonstrates contempt for the audience.

Having mentally disturbed characters excuses a writer from having to engage the human condition, because crazy people might do anything at all without obvious motivation. The technique is a hallmark of poor writing.

On the plus side, the movie is well photographed, well-directed, and very well-edited. Acting is above average, even from Pullman, a familiar character actor who shows his chops. The visual imagery is striking and memorable, with lots of gun violence and plenty of blood. Dialog is crisp. If there had been better story it would have been a real winner, but perhaps that’s asking too much from a Lynch.

Dirty Pretty Things: Grade C

C
Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou, Sophie Okonedo; Director Stephen Frears;

The three main characters are illegal immigrants working at a fancy London hotel. Ejiofor’s character, the desk man, discovers that black market human organs are being traded at the hotel, and worse, the surgeries are being performed there also. Destitute immigrants trade kidneys for forged British passports and money. Being illegal, Ejiofor and his colleagues cannot go to the police. Meanwhile the immigration service is on everyone’s back trying to catch them working in the country illegally. There is good tension when they raid.

This movie is of the “Ain’t it Awful!” genre. Instead of relying on the main story line of the black market organs, or developing the lives of the characters, the movie focuses instead on the plight of illegal immigrants, the humiliations they must suffer, the long hours they must work, their poverty, oppression, exploitation, yada, yada; all while they hold their heads up high, pronounce high moral principles and fierce allegiance to their ethnicity. It is all too much. I get that illegal immigrants have a tough time. However, they are illegal, so what can they expect? It’s an old story and not particularly well retold. A movie like The Visitor does the topic much better.

Meanwhile, the organ market story is not explored in detail. There is a twisty penultimate scene that is satisfying, although the final ending is a melodramatic sapsucker. And I thought the sound engineering was poor: muddy dialog throughout. Acting by the principals is excellent however. I am a huge fan of Ejiofor, and enjoyed watching him, even though this is not his best performance. And who can resist Audrey Tatou’s trembling upper lip? Okenedo is magical, and it is a mystery in itself why we do not see more of her. So good acting redeems an otherwise substandard movie.

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.

The Soloist: Grade C

C
The Soloist (2009)
Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey, Jr., Catherine Keener; Director Joe Wright.

In this docudrama of a true story, Foxx is Ayers, a schizophrenic homeless man in contemporary Los Angeles. Downey is an LA Times reporter who does a story on Ayers’ skilled playing of a violin with only two strings. He befriends Ayers. In his research he discovers that Ayers was once a gifted cello player with the LA symphony before he succumbed to schizophrenia. The reporter provides Ayers with a new cello and takes him to a couple of classical concerts.

There is no plot beyond that. The man has schizophrenia, which means he hears voices, has delusional thinking and incoherent speech. The reporter is unable to get psychiatric medicine for Ayers, not that he would want it or take it. The movie is really a dramatization of the awful plight of the homeless in all big cities. Most are victims of drug abuse and/or mental illness and all are in financial ruin. They are abandoned by their families and friends, by the medical system and by all of society (except for a few dedicated but overwhelmed social service organizations). This movie demonstrates all that, and gives a fairly accurate portrayal of schizophrenia. I was pleased that Foxx’s character did not suddenly become “cured” in Hollywood melodramatic style, upon playing the cello again, or upon meeting his mother again, because schizophrenia is an incurable brain disorder. It can go into remission, and it can be managed, but there is no happy ending.

As a docudrama this film performs an educational service. Acting by Foxx and Downey is superior and well-worth seeing. But as a movie, it is a not very interesting or entertaining, and as a documentary, it is superficial. It takes two hours to give a 15 minute story on homelessness. Neither Ayers' nor the reporter's life is examined in meaningful detail. Schizophrenia and its treatment are not explored. Not even the tragedy of becoming afflicted is well dramatized. The camera swoops around dizzily as on a TV show, for no apparent purpose, although there are a few individual shots that prove a good photographic eye is behind the lens once in a while. The dialog is pedestrian. The characters do not develop over time. We never do understand the reporter’s motivation for getting involved. Catherine Keener is wasted in an incomprehensible character. The overall pace is far too slow. And, as mentioned, there is no plot. There are some interesting DVD extras on homelessness in LA, including interviews with the real life Ayers and the reporter, but these do not redeem the movie.

The Class: Grade C

C
The Class (2008)
François Bégaudeau (also wrote); Director Laurent Cantet. (French, Subtitled)

The French title is « Entre les murs », literally, “Between the walls,” a more appropriate title for this story of teacher of French in a suburban Parisian junior high school (students 13 and 14 years old). It is a docudrama, almost a documentary, of one academic year as professor Marin (Begaudeau) attempts to teach grammar and poetry to unruly, inattentive, and uninterested students. There are teachers’ meetings, PTA meetings, trips to the principal’s office, and all the ordinary events you would expect. There is a very slight story about a particularly disruptive young man who eventually gets kicked out of class. Other than that, nothing unusual happens. The movie is too long and too slow.

The strength of the movie is the interesting and genuine portrayals of the students (played by actual students, not actors, and largely unscripted), and of the teacher-student interaction. Few of us can remember what it was like inside a junior high classroom and it is impossible to get inside today unless you are the teacher. So this does give an authentic glimpse “between the walls” of that hallowed chamber. What goes on in there however is more depressing than enlightening. The students are justifiably uninterested in the imperfect subjunctive and the teacher is unable to connect grammar to life, so everybody is, predictably, frustrated.

As a lifelong teacher of young adults myself, the emotions are too close to home. I didn’t find it enjoyable or useful to glorify the frustration of trying to teach poetry to a stone. Not that I wanted yet another Stand and Deliver, but the upside of teaching was almost completely absent, leaving only “le bummer.” It’s a well-made picture and might be interesting to non-teachers who wonder what goes on entre les murs.

The Last Hit Man: Grade B

B
The Last Hit Man (2008)
Joe Mantegna, Elizabeth Whitmere, Romano Orzari; Writer-director Christopher Warre Smets.

Mantegna is a worn-out hit man near the end of his career. His daughter (Whitmere) drives getaway. He doesn’t want her to know he is burned out, but she suspects and is protective of him. When he flubs an assignment, the employer sends a hit man after him (Orzari) but they end up becoming friends and try to find out who has ordered his death. The ending is believable and poignant.

Mantegna gives a very sensitive performance. He is not a stereotypical mobster, just an ordinary guy who misses his deceased wife and loves his daughter and enjoys his country house. His assassin cum friend (Orzari) also shows subtlety and complexity. The director really knows how to pull expressive performances out of small gestures and a few words. Whitmere does a competent job but her character is under-written so she is relegated to the obvious. It is the two men who keep you riveted. The story is inventive enough to keep up the pace. Photography is excellent, especially the black and white sequence before the titles. This is not great art. You have to accept that people hire contract killers to solve their problems, that murderous psychopaths also have gentle family lives and ordinary values, that there are no police or insurance investigators sniffing around, that killers never leave evidence, that bodies bury themselves, and much else. But within the constraints of the genre, this little Canadian film is surprising and satisfying.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29: Grade D

D
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008)
Various players who were on the teams; Director Kevin Rafferty

Unless you are an American football nut, you can skip this documentary about a college football game that happened forty years ago. The game is shown play-by-play, in unrestored television footage with washed out color, grainy images, and with the original announcer. Between plays, there are contemporary interviews with bloated old guys who were on the teams in 1968. They recall every play, every move, every nuance, like golfers after the round telling with deep emotion how their birdie putt lipped out on number eleven.

The documentary is competently made, but I am at a loss to understand why anyone would care about a forty year old college game. Was it a good game? Sure. Yale was ahead by ten points at the half but Harvard turned it around to tie the game. But again, so what?

I wonder what such contests would be like if there were no onlookers. The reminiscing old players talked repeatedly about the euphoria of being cheered. They say it was life-changing. How that could be, I cannot imagine. The game is a socially manufactured situation, entirely arbitrary, with nothing of consequence at stake. Certainly athletic contests measure a person’s skill and character in ways that go back thousands of years, and are worthy for that. But the game itself is not the point, the performance is. That is not how Earthlings see it, apparently.

The crowd’s excitement is just as mysterious. Noam Chomsky once remarked in an autobiographical comment: “I was watching the game when I suddenly wondered, why do I care if my team wins?” Exactly.

The Unknown Woman: Grade B

B
The Unknown Woman (2006)
Kseniya Rappoport, Clara Dossena; Co-writer and director Giuseppe Tornatore. (Italian, subtitled).

A young Ukranian woman (Rappoport) searches for work as a cleaning woman in northern Italy. Gradually we discover that it is not just any work she wants; she must work in a particular apartment building. Then by hook and crook, she wheedles her way into a position as a maid/nanny for a particular family. Why she is stalking this family, we do not know, but the tension is palpable. Through a series of brief but graphic flashbacks, we discover that she had been a sex slave in the Ukraine. She escaped by killing her boss in a gory, blood-soaked scene, and she took his stash of cash also. Inevitably, the Ukrainian bad guys are after her and the money. Slowly we learn why she is interested the Italian family, and at the same time is pursued by her old Ukranian boss, despite him being dead (she has to kill him again). It makes no sense at all. There are many other inexplicable non-sequiturs in the story and the ending is particularly unsatisfying. The brutal violence in the sex slavery scenes is hard to take, but it is integral to the story and not merely exploitative.

The pace is too slow, as European movies are for Americans. I could easily have edited 30 minutes out of the two hour run time. On the plus side, the movie is beautiful. It is very finely directed (Tornatore did Cinema Paradiso), and superbly acted. Sets and costumes are perfect. The story has just enough direction to carry us through the scenes, even if it does not add up in the end. You watch this movie for the exquisite acting, excellent directing, thoughtful photography, and lovely language. Overall, it is a worthwhile and memorable movie experience.

Phoebe in Wonderland: Grade D

D

Phoebe in Wonderland (2008)

Elle Fanning, Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson, Bill Pullman; Writer-Director Daniel Barnz.

The only thing that saves this self-consciously precious domestic melodrama from total failure are a few excellent acting scenes. One from Huffman, as the mother of her disturbed daughter (Fanning) is riveting. Clarkson possesses the screen each time she is on, even if she says hardly anything. I grudgingly admit that Fanning is charismatic, though I object to exploitation of child stars. She is only an adequate actor but has the incongruous face and voice of a female twice her age.

Phoebe is about 10 and suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, a variant of OCD. At first we see just children’s games of the “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” variety, but soon full fledged OCD emerges. Oddly, despite being a Ph.D. candidate, the mother remains unaware and thinks the girl’s problems at school are caused by her own inattentiveness. She rejects recommended psychiatric medication out of ignorance. Phoebe gets succor and zenlike advice from the monosyllabic drama teacher (Clarkson), gets in trouble with the caricature dimwit principal, but the show must go on! (the show is Alice in Wonderland). The conflict over psychiatric meds remains unresolved, as does the child’s future.

There is about 30 minutes of story. The remaining hour-plus is filled with mind-numbing domestic scenes of no consequence, kids acting precocious, adults pronouncing clichés and platitudes. There is a mild but genuine story about the difficulty for parents of recognizing and coming to terms with childhood mental illness, but here the theme was swamped by maudlin sentimentality. There may be an audience for this kind of movie among brain dead mothers who don’t get out much. It’s hard to fathom why critics generally liked it.

Tokyo! : Grade A

A
Tokyo! (2008)
Numerous unknown Japanese and French actors; Co-writers and Directors: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Joon-hoo Bong; French and Japanese (subtitled).

These three strange stories are not for everyone. They are weird and surreal, but beautiful, provocative, well-acted, well-directed and exceptionally creative Each film is about 30 minutes and produced by separate directors, crews and actors.

In Interior Design a broke young couple searches for their first apartment in Tokyo. The young man wants to be a filmmaker and we see samples of his fantasy work. The woman has no apparent direction, although we otice that she is a talented visual artist. He criticizes her for lacking ambition and direction and she becomes despondent and turns into a wooden chair. Yes. The story reminds me of Kobo Abe’s 1967 one-act play, The Man Who Turned Into a Stick.

In the second film, Merde, A deranged man who lives in the sewers surfaces to terrorize Tokyo. He is arrested but there are only three people in the world who speak his strange language. The film has a lot of fun with how arbitrary languages can seem. Monsieur Merde’s special language involves hoots, whines, guttural noises, tapping the teeth with a fingernail and slapping of the right side one’s own face with the left hand. It’s hilarious, but a careful observer will note that the language sounds are culled from actual human languages, and that there is a definite syntax to the made-up language. The linguistic games reminded me of the synthetic language in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It could be an overdeveloped theme for those not as interested in language. What does Mr. Merde stand for? He is definitely from the sewers and that metaphor could be taken literally. There is also a suggestion that he represents Uncle Sam or at least, non-Japanese foreigners in general.

Finally there is Shaking Tokyo, about a man who has become a recluse, living inside his Tokyo apartment without seeing anyone for ten years. He orders his pizza and dry cleaning by phone, until one day there is an earthquake and he accidentally makes eye contact with the attractive young pizza delivery girl. Eventually he leaves the house to search for her and finds the streets empty and the city deserted. Everyone has become a recluse! Apparently this is a real social problem in Tokyo, and it is understandable, the population pressure being so enormous in that city.

Any one of these films is a gem. All three of them are mind-spinning. There are interesting DVD extras, each as long as its film. Highly recommended for the adventurous.

Killshot: Grade B

B
Killshot (2008)
Micky Rourke, Diane Lane, Rosario Dawson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Thomas Jane; Director John Madden.

A strong cast and outstanding photography make this action-thriller a good watch. Rourke is a mafia hit man in northern Michigan who, for no reason except maybe loneliness, makes friends with a psychopathic (close to psychotic) young man, Richie (Gordon-Levitt). The two of them shoot up the office of a guy Richie is trying to blackmail. The guy isn’t even in the office, but a husband and wife (Lane and Jane) are there, so obviously, they must be killed in order to “tie up loose ends.” But inexplicably, the bad guys leave and then have to hunt down the witnesses later.

Does this make sense? A mafia hit man needs to kill two real estate agents because they saw his face when some windows and plaster were broken? It is not a believable premise. One gets the feeling the script was re-written so many times it lost its way. The last part of the movie focuses on the hunt. The couple goes into witness protection, but predictably, that doesn’t work and there is a confrontation.

The story is so lame it robs the movie of any dramatic tension. However, much else about the movie is good. Rourke’s brooding Indian character is believable and fascinating. Gordon-Levitt gives 110% in an energetic performance well worth watching. Sets and photography are outstanding, characterizations for the bad guys are strong. The pacing flags at times, and Rosario is wasted, but it’s an engaging, satisfying film anyway, and Rourke stands out.

The Great Buck Howard: Grade B

B
The Great Buck Howard (2008)
John Malkovich, Colin Hanks, Emily Blunt. Writer-director Sean McGinly.

Malkovich plays such a perfect evil villain that it is a treat to see him play a comic role, although even here, there is a dark shadow over the character and the humor. He is an aging stage magician and mentalist, playing small audiences in towns like Bakersfield, Akron, and Cincinnati. He offers the same act he did 40 years ago on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, an achievement he tells to everyone he meets. But now he is old, crabby, and nobody cares. He hires a young assistant, Troy (Hanks, son of Tom) as his road manager. Troy treats Buck with respect, even recognizing he is a washup. Blunt is a publicity agent inserted into the story just to provide Hanks with a romantic interest. Her character does not do anything. She gives her best though, and reminds me of Juliet Lewis. And that’s it. There is no real character development, just characterizations, no real story, just a snapshot of these people at a moment in time. There are parallels to Mr. Saturday Night with Billy Crystal, but that film had a strong developmental arc. The stage magic is fun here but not explained and it is not the point of the story. I rate the movie well because I am a Malkovich fan, not because it is a tight movie.

The story is actually a quasi-biography of real stage magician “The Amazing Kreskin” who did appear on Johnny Carson’s show. It is not a close biography, just a “based on.” Still, it is well worth watching to see the Amazing John Malkovich exercise his craft, which is considerable. There are some very funny lines, many quite subtle, and tons of cameo appearances, including Tom Hanks, “The Stewarts” (Jon and Martha), John Goodman, Regis Philbin, and many others, demonstrating how well-connected Malkovich is. Caricatures of dingy small-theater venues are perfect, as are the overweight, ditzy women in charge of them. It’s not LOL comedy, but a definite tickler with a poignant streak.

Dead Like Me: Grade D

D
Dead Like Me (2009)
Ellen Muth, Britt McKillip; Director Stephen Herek.

This is a direct to DVD movie based on a TV series (of which I was unaware) that ran in 2003-2004. A group of four “grim reapers” are dead people who are assigned the task of reaping souls at the moment of death. They mingle among the living, disguising their calling but seem otherwise normal. (One assumes there is actually a much larger contingent of reapers to handle the tens of millions who die every day.) In this tale, the reapers start slacking their duties and enjoying their immortal “life,” with the consequence that one reaper (Muth) misses a reap and a young high school football hero goes into a coma instead of dying. It turns out that his girlfriend is none other than the reaper’s sister, who is still mourning her sister’s death. So the reaper now has a conflict of interest. Does she reap the soul of the young man as she is supposed to or let him live for her sister’s sake?

The movie does not make much sense conceptually but you have to go with the flow. And, you have to believe in “life after death,” which is a contradiction in terms, because as far as we know, there is only death after death. There is a heavy presumption of spiritualism and you must also buy the concept of ghosts. Beyond all the nonsense however, the story does address important themes of grieving the death of a loved one, and on teenagers first becoming aware of their mortality. The script is pedestrian, although with some moments of good humor. It is well directed, but not well acted. Worth seeing if you are between 8 and 15.

12: Grade B

B
12 (2007)
Numerous Russian actors unknown in the west; Co-writer and director Nikita Mikhalkov. (Russian, subtitled).

This is a remake of the 1957 classic American courtroom drama, Twelve Angry Men, done in a peculiarly Russian way. The broad outlines of the original story are kept, but instead of the American version’s didactic exercise in critical thinking, the Russian characters make their points and persuade each other with rambling, often poignant, personal stories, characteristic of traditional Russian culture. The accused is a young Chechen, reviled and presumed guilty of killing a Russian military officer, but the stories gradually introduce a sliver of compassion, shreds of doubt, and eventually a re-thinking that overturns the initial consensus. It didn’t seem as dramatic a conversion as in the American tale, but that is probably because I am American, not Russian. I got the sense from the stories told that the drama would have been quite intense for a Russian audience. Acting is uniformly good, pacing is good, and it is enjoyable to get glimpses into the values and thinking of ordinary Russians. It would have been a better movie if it had been an original Russian story “based on” a similar situation and had not used clunky adherence to original plot points. But maybe the larger message was that educated Russian society is now thinking about democracy and justice along American lines.

The Caller: Grade C

C
The Caller (2008)
Frank Langella, Elliott Gould. Co-writer and director Richard Ledes.

In this stylish neo-noir drama, Langella is a financial analyst who blows the whistle on an energy company’s evildoings. Naturally, they hire a contract killer to silence him. He knew they would do that, so he hires a PI (Gould) to keep an eye on him, but he tells Gould (with an electronically disguised voice) that “the subject” is a dangerous murderer. The logic of that move is unclear. The PI gets to know the exec, without realizing he is also his employer. He learns a few things about the exec, all of it mundane, none of it important. In a series of irrelevant Langella flashbacks to a WWII childhood, we learn that the exec and the PI were childhood friends who narrowly escaped the Nazis in France. Gould however is unaware of this historical link, and in the climactic scene of the movie, he becomes aware. So what? So nothing. The story in all its parts is pointless. However, you might want to look at this movie anyway to see Langella’s fine, brooding performance, and excellent acting from Gould and several other characters, and the high quality cinematography, directing, and music, especially bandoneon music, which I am nuts about. This is really an attractive movie; too bad they did not have a decent story to tell.

Humboldt County: Grade C

C
Humboldt County (2008)
Jeremy Strong, Brad Dourif, Frances Conroy, Peter Bogdanovich; Co-writers and co-directors: Darrin Grodsky & Danny Jacobs.

Uptight medical student Peter (Strong) goes on a bender and wakes up in a hippie house in the redwood forests of Humboldt County, CA, the marijuana growing capitol of the nation. Some mildly humorous straight vs stoned scenes follow as we get to know the colorful characters of the community. Peter abjures the weed and vows to get back to town but somehow manages to miss the once-daily bus several times. Gradually he becomes sympathetic to the potoculturists and when he is finally “rescued” by his overbearing and arrogant father, a prominent physician who treats him like an idiot, Peter has to make a life choice. Guess what it is.

The acting is good and the characters are interesting, although shallow stereotypes only. They laugh and sing, eat and drink, forget things and tell wild stories, but only one of them, an ex-theoretical physicist, has any background of interest. We get just a tiny glimpse of that. Overall, it is a pro dope movie, and the growers are shown in a favorable light. They argue that they are simple farmers who live lightly on the earth, harming no one, and should be left alone. They don’t mention who their buyers are, and whether those buyers are also committed humanists or possibly armed members of international drugs cartels, and there is no hint that the growers are part of an illegal drugs supply system that brings untold grief to millions of people and their families when users end up imprisoned, or worse. So that argument is extremely one-sided and annoying for that.

Yet when Peter argues that as a medical student, he accomplishes more in one week than his cannabis obsessed counterpart has in his lifetime, that is something to think about. Is it true? What do medical students accomplish? What does anybody accomplish in life? Aren’t all our so-called accomplishments just exercises in self-aggrandizement? When you’re dead, what does all that accomplishment matter? Maybe you will get a bridge named after you. Whoopee. If “accomplishment” is an inauthentic value, why not just smoke dope, don’t worry, and be happy? Why worship the frontal lobes? It makes you think (if you don’t inhale).

Having Peter and his father be physicians gives more weight to their argument, because physicians alleviate human suffering, surely a worthwhile value and a legitimate rebuke to the dope growers. In the end, Peter chooses the life of the weed, so the film makes its point. Yet there is ambiguity. Was Peter’s choice a personal Oedipal reaction, or was it a symbolic rejection of mainstream society’s emphasis on achievement and accomplishment? While these issues are presented sophomorically, it’s still a good film for a discussion group.