So last year I really struggled to come up with my Top 10 Movies list.  I had a hard time finding ten films that I felt were really GREAT.  What a difference a year makes!  This year there were so many films that I loved that I wanted to include on my list that, for the first time, I decided to expand my Top 10 list to a Top 15 List!  AND I cheated even more and made my number 15 a three-way-tie!

I thought 2011 was a really terrific year for movies, and there were a lot of great films that didn’t make it onto this list.  I really enjoyed Moneyball, 50/50, The Ides of March, Like Crazy, The Descendants, 30 Minutes or Less, Your Highness, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2, The Rum Diary, The Muppets, Midnight in Paris, and Our Idiot Brother, but they didn’t make the cut in this strong year.  (Follow the links to read my reviews of those films.)  But, wow, those films could have been on my Top 10 list and that would have been a really strong Top 10 list, one that would have held up quite well in comparison to my previous years’ Top 10 lists!  That’s how good a year this was.

I saw a lot of films in 2011, and particularly in the last month I’ve crammed in a lot of movie-watching, trying to catch up on all the 2011 films I wanted to see.  There are a lot of films that I saw in the last few weeks that I didn’t think warranted inclusion on this list, but about which I’ll be writing reviews on this site in the coming weeks.  These include My Idiot Brother, The Help, Tree of Life, Horrible Bosses, and more.  So you can look for those reviews soon.

As I always do, before I dive into my lists I want to mention the films I wanted to see, but never got to: A Dangerous Method, Shame, The Debt, Drive, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, Larry Crowne, Beginners, The Trip. So if you loved one of those films and want to know why they’re not included on my list — well, now you know.  Hopefully I’ll get to track down some/all of those films in the near future.  (They’re all on my Netflix queue, so all I need is time!)

15.  Marvel’s Summer Movies: Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and X-Men: First Class — I do love me a good super-hero movie, and this summer mighty Marvel gave us three of ‘em, each one a really terrific, fun film in its own… [continued]

Let’s get this clear from the outset: I haven’t read Stieg Larsson’s original novel, nor have I see the Swedish film adaptation.  What put the American film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my radar wasn’t any connection with the source material, but rather my great love for the films of director David Fincher.  (Click here for my review of The Social Network, here for my review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, here for my review of the Director’s Cut of Zodiac, here for my review of Fight Club, and here for my review of Se7en.)  So I’ll be judging this film purely on it’s own merits.

Do I really need to summarize the story for anyone?  Even I, who had never read a word of Mr. Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, was quite well-acquainted with the basic story going in.  Well, OK, let’s keep it brief: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) gets hired by wealthy, elderly Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the death of his young niece, Harriet, thirty years earlier.  Eventually Mikael’s path crosses with Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) a young, brilliant but extremely maladjusted computer hacker and investigator, and the two wind up working together to solve the decades-old mystery.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an extremely weird movie.  There are elements of true genius at work, but also aspects of the film that I felt were not entirely successful.

The most notable aspect of the film is Rooney Mara’s fierce interpretation of Lisbeth.  Ms. Mara dramatically transformed her physical appearance in order to create this character, but that’s just the beginning of the way in which she sunk into the role.  Ms. Mara’s Lisbeth is a haunted, withdrawn, almost alien creature.  The way she looks, the way she talks, the way she interacts with other people is distinctly abnormal.  There’s a humanity there, but it’s buried deep down underneath the fortress that Lisbeth has constructed around herself.  She is an abused and lonely young woman, but she’s also a superhero with extraordinary cunning, mastery of technology, and great physical strength.  There are times when Lisbeth is extraordinarily sympathetic, and times when she’s extremely difficult to like.  There are times when her thoughts and emotions are writ large on her face, and times when it’s almost impossible to determine what’s going on in her head.  Ms. Mara’s work as Lisbeth is the center of the film, and by far the most interesting aspect of the whole proceedings.  It’s a staggering performance, and one that stayed with me long after having seen the film.

The bulk of the movie — the middle two hours of this… [continued]

Well, I was already a big, big fan of star Jean Dujardin and director Michael Hazanavicius from their two OSS:117 French-language James Bond parody films, Cairo Nest of Spies (click here for my review) and Lost in Rio (click here for my review).  Now, after seeing the two men’s jump into “serious” movie-making with the beautiful, heartfelt film The Artist, my opinion of those two artists has only grown.

In The Artist, Mr. Dujardin stars as George Valentin, a super-star of the silent film era.  At the premiere of one of his films, a young woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), accidentally bumps into him and the two are photographed together.  This is Peppy’s first blush with stardom, and that brief bit of exposure helps land her a bit part as an extra in a film, and from there her career begins to skyrocket.  Mr. Valentin’s career, unfortunately, is on the opposite trajectory, as the advent of movies with sound (“talkies”) dooms a silent-film stars like himself.  The film follows several years in the lives of Mr. Valentin and Ms. Miller, and the way that the two characters keep bouncing back into one another’s orbit.

The Artist isn’t just a film about the silent film era.  It is, itself, a silent film.  The film begins by throwing us right into what is, after a few fun-filled minutes, revealed to be Mr. Valentin’s latest silent film, A Russian Affair. But even after that film-within-a-film ends, The Artist continues to be, with just a few (very, very cleverly-used exceptions), a silent film.  There is no dialogue and there are no sound effects, just a rousing, gorgeous score by Ludovic Bource (who just a few days ago won a Golden Globe for his score for this film).  One might imagine that a full-length silent film, in today’s era, might stretch an audience’s patience.  But I did not find that to be at all the case.  The film is beautiful, emotional, and very, very funny, and I found myself completely swept along in the story.

Enormous credit for that, of course, goes to the lead actors.  Mr. Dujardin is an incredibly skilled performer.  He’s incredibly handsome, and his movie-star good-looks serve him well in this role as an enormous movie-star.  His comic skills were on fine display in the OSS:117 films, and are well-utilized here.  Mr. Dujardin has an infectious smile, and when he unleashes it it’s clear why his character was such a big star in the silent era, and of course it also draws in the modern audience watching from their seats in the theatre.  But I was also quite taken by how well Mr. Dujardin sells the dramatic moments.  For… [continued]

I was absolutely taken with the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Sir Alec Guiness, which I watched just a few weeks ago.  It was terrific preparation for the equally wonderful feature film adaptation of John le Carré’s spy novel, starring Gary Oldman and a phenomenally robust ensemble.

The film, directed by Tomas Alfredson (who also directed the fantastic, creepy Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In) is a delightfully taut, twisty tale of spies and spy-masters.  I was stunned by how much of the story from the six-hour miniseries made it into the two-hour film.  The script by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan is stuffed full to overflowing with plot and incident, but the film never feels rushed.  In fact, under Mr. Alfredson’s steady hand, the story unfolds at a carefully measured pace.  As in the mini-series, the scope of the story builds gradually, as scene after scene of conversation (often between men who we, the audience, don’t quite know who they are, talking about things that we’re not sure we quite understand) accumulates and comprehension gradually dawns on the audience as it does on George Smiley himself.

This is a spy story, but it is not an action film.  It is very much a drama, and a drama in which the tension is drawn not from gunplay or chase-sequences, but from quiet conversations in dark rooms.  I’ve read many rave reviews of this film in which the reviewers commented that the film was good on first viewing, but GREAT on second viewing, at which time you could really understand who everything was and what was going on.  I certainly was glad to have watched the mini-series before seeing the film, as that enabled me to follow the story without any confusion right from the beginning.  (It also gave me the delight of seeing characters and scenes from the mini-series reprised and reinterpreted by these new performers.)  I certainly don’t think one has to have seen the mini-series, nor have any prior knowledge of the film or the story, to be able to really enjoy this film.  But it helps!  This is a movie that is built for repeat viewings.  The film (like the mini-series before it) does not spoon-feed the audience any information.  There’s little-to-no exposition to spell-out who people are or what their relationships are to one another.  You need to figure those things out for yourself.  In this way, the film draws in the audience, and puts you, in a way, into George Smiley’s investigative shoes.  As in the mini-series, I found this for-the-attentive-viewer style of story-telling to be tremendously compelling.

Smiley, so memorably portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness in… [continued]

At this point in Woody Allen’s amazing career (and whether you love or loathe the filmmaker himself, you must acknowedge that the man’s writing and directing a film a year for the last forty-some odd years is an amazing achievement) I think that my level of enjoyment of his new films rests largely on which side of the familiar I feel his new films land.

Many critics object to the been-there, done-that feel that they get from Woody’s films these days. And I certainly feel that way myself, sometimes. But, on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a great artist continuing to explore certain themes or ideas throughout his work. Painters do that, as do musicians, so why not filmmakers?

Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, opens to a gorgeous montage of images of Paris, set to a piece of jazz music. This is a device that Mr. Allen has used before in his films, most notably in the opening to Manhattan (click here for my review of that seminal film), in which we’re presented with a montage of images of New York City, set to a wonderful piece of music by George Gershwin. Watching the opening of Midnight in Paris, one might sigh and say, “been-there, done-that, this is just the same as the opening of Manhattan.” But, despite the similarity, I still loved this device as a way to open the film. It felt like a stylistic echo of Mr. Allen’s previous work in a way that was like spoons fitting comfortably together in a drawer, rather than repetition done by an artist out of ideas. (It helps that the images of Paris in the opening to Midnight in Paris are so beautiful, and the jazz music so wonderful.)

On the other hand, when we’re presented with scenes, in the early part of the film, in which we meet Gil (Owen Wilson)’s shrewish wife Inez (Rachel McAdams) who is hassling him about his pursuit of “artistic integrity” and who thinks he should just relax and take the easy pay-check (that his Hollywood screenwriting job affords), or when the two argue about Paul (Michael Sheen), with whom Inez is enchanted but who Paul dismisses as an airhead intellectual, I felt that we were on the BAD side of the familiar.

I’ve seen those character types, and those arguments, time and time again in Woody Allen’s films, and I was disappointed to see those same “talking points” returned to here. These character dynamics were interesting to me in Woody’s films from thirty years ago, but now, to me, they feel played out. I would have rather seen Mr. Allen push himself a little bit… [continued]

I really loved Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film from two years ago, and so I was thrilled that they went into production on a sequel so quickly. (That the first film ended with such a delicious promise of further adventures didn’t hurt, of course!)

But, unfortunately, the follow-up installment, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, left me rather cold.

To be honest, I’m having a bit of trouble putting my finger on what exactly went awry. I still love Robert Downey Jr.’s manic interpretation of Holmes, and I thought Mad Men’s Jared Harris was terrific as Professor Moriarty. There are some big laughs in the film, and also some terrific sequences of action/adventure. The chase through the forzen woods, in which Holmes & co. are barraged by artillery fire, is pretty thrilling (much more effective in its entirety than it was in the film’s trailer, in which I thought those slo-mo shots looked pretty silly). And Holmes and Moriarty’s final confrontation — a chess game that moves into an intense battle of wills, all inside their heads — is genius, and probably the reason-for-being for the entire film.

So why did the whole thing leave me feeling somewhat empty?

Well, let’s start with Professor Moriarty. We’re told, over and over again, that the genius professor is an evil mastermind, and a mental match for Holmes. But except for one moment in the middle of the film, in which Holmes admits that “I made a mistake” and finds himself unable to stop an assassination, we don’t really see Moriarty as a genius mastermind until that final confrontation at the very end of the movie. I wanted a sense of urgency throughout this film. I wanted to feel, over and over again, that Moriarty was two steps ahead of Holmes. But I never felt that way at all. In fact, Moriarty makes a big mistake early in the film in which Holmes is able to rescue Noomi Rapace’s gypsy character, Madam Simza, from death. So right away we see that Moriarty isn’t infallible and, of course, Simza ultimately proves key in helping Holmes unravel Moriarty’s plans.

It’s not until that final battle-of-wills-to-the-death between Holmes and Moriarty that we’re really given a sense of Moriarty’s genius. I understand that the filmmakers wanted to save that mental duel for the film’s climax, but the result is that everything that comes before feels somewhat underwheming to me. This is a story-telling problem that, in my opinion, the filmmakers weren’t able to solve.

The result, as I noted before, is a film that I found to be rather lacking in intensity. Take the opening scene. (SPOILERS ahead now, my friends, so beware.) I was thrilled to… [continued]

In a season of generally serious movie-fare, Young Adult is a blazingly funny film that still carries some serious dramatic heft.  It’s an absolute knockout of a film from screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman (who previously collaborated on the great 2007 film Juno).

Charlize Theron plays Mavis.  She was clearly the queen bee of her high school, though her life these days seems to be anything but great.  She’s divorced, living alone in the city, and the line of high school-set young adult novels that she’s been ghost-writing has been cancelled.  When she receives an e-mail notification that her old high school flame, Buddy, has become a father, Mavis decides to head back to her small home-town of Mercury to win back her old beau (his wife and child be damned).

Ms. Theron has never been better, in my opinion, than she is as Mavis.  Mavis is still gorgeous on the outside, but Ms. Theron (guided by Ms. Cody’s take-no-prisoners script) is fearless in showing us how absolutely twisted and broken she is on the inside.  Mavis is a terrible, terrible person, and of course for the whole film you’re rooting at her to fail in breaking up Buddy’s family.  But at the same time, Ms. Theron is able to create a character who doesn’t totally turn off the audience.  She’s so hysterical in her bad behavior that she’s completely compelling as the lead character in the film.

The comedian Patton Oswalt is equally terrific as Matt Freehauf, a high school classmate who Mavis bumps into at a bar when she first returns to Mercury.  Matt was (and still is) a geek, and to say that he and Mavis travelled in different circles in high school is to put it mildly.  And yet, the two strike up a weird sort of friendship during the week that Mavis is in town.  There are a few times when the film hits the “geek” aspect of Matt’s personality a bit too hard (there are plenty of lonely geeky guys out there, I’m sure, who don’t still play with action figures), but for the most part I found Matt to be nearly as interesting a personality as Mavis.  Most of that is due to Mr. Oswalt’s energy and charisma.  Matt is a depressed, lonely guy, someone who contains a lot of pain and sadness inside, and yet even as Matt says he hates his life, Mr. Oswalt gives him an almost childlike joie do vivre that I found tremendously entertaining.  Physically and personality-wise, the pairing of Mavis and Matt (and Ms. Theron and Mr. Oswalt) is an inspired study in contrasts, and yet the two are both so similar in their loneliness.… [continued]

And now for the second-half of my Steven Spielberg double-feature — War Horse. (Click here for my review of The Adventures of Tintin.)

When I first saw the trailer for War Horse, I dismissed it almost immediately.  Something about the swelling music and the dramatic shots edited together rubbed me the wrong way, as if the trailer was screaming for us to understand that THIS IS A SERIOUS (read: Oscar-bait) FILM!!  Equally unappealing to me was that, on the other hand, what appeared to be a story about the adventures of a miraculous horse seemed to be to be incredibly silly and childish.  If the words “a Steven Spielberg film” hadn’t been in there, I would have immediately resolved not to see the film.

But there’s just no way that I can miss seeing a new film by Steven Spielberg on the big screen, and I’m glad that I didn’t write this film off because War Horse, while not a masterpiece, is a very solid film and a much different type of story than I was expecting.

The weakest part of the film is the first thirty minutes or so.  That’s the part of the film that is most like what I feared the movie would be.  A boy forms a miraculous bond with a beautiful horse, and then that amazing horse plows the field that everyone declared was impossible to plow.  Now, I’m no farmer, but the film presents us with two pieces of information that every character accepts as fact:  that, a) the horse Joey is far too small to be a plow horse of any kind, and that b) the rocky field is considered to be un-plowable by even the biggest, best plow-horse.  So, of course, Joey is able to plow the field, which brings us right into fantasy-land.  I was worried.

But then World War I breaks out, and the boy, Albert, loses his horse to a young man going off to war, and the film really begins.  I was worried that War Horse was going to be the adventures of this amazing horse at war.  Luckily, though, with one small exception (the scene in which it seems that Joey volunteers to pull the heavy artillery, in order to spare another, injured horse), the film is not about the heroic actions of an anthropomorphized heroic horse.  Rather, Joey is the vehicle for telling a series of different vignettes about World War I.  As Joey passes from owner to owner, and the war progresses, we meet various different characters on all sides of the conflict (British, French, and German) and so are presented with stories covering a wide range of the spectrum of experiences (mostly pretty… [continued]

Steven Spielberg has only directed one film since Munich (click here for my review) in 2005, and that was the tragically disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 (which I prefer to pretend never happened).  That’s a long dry spell for one of the masters of modern cinema.  Luckily for us all, Mr. Spielberg burst back onto cinema screens in a big way, late last month, with the release of not one, but TWO new films, released just three days apart from one another: The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. I saw them both during a terrifically fun late-night double-feature.  I’ll be back here soon with my thoughts on War Horse — for now, let’s dive into The Adventures of Tintin.

The film is, of course, based on the long-running French-language comic-book series written and illustrated by the Belgian artist Hergé.  It draws upon material from several of the Tintin books, including The Secret of the Unicorn (which was, at one point, the sub-title for this film — I’m not certain when that was dropped), The Crab with the Golden Claws, and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Tintin, Boy Reporter, purchases a model of a three-masted sailing ship, The Unicorn, at an outdoor market and immediately finds himself embroiled in a globe-trotting adventure involving various parties’ search for the wreck of the actual ship The Unicorn, which is rumored to contain an enormous treasure.

The film is magnificent, a viscerally entertaining romp all the way through.  When the film ended and the lights went up, I couldn’t believe it was over — the time had passed so quickly.  I’ve heard people comparing The Adventures of Tintin in tone to Raiders of the Lost Ark. While Tintin doesn’t equal that masterpiece, there certainly are similarities in terms of the film’s pulp-inspired adventurous spirit, and the rapid pace in which we (and the hero character) are thrown from one exciting action-sequence into the next.

Actually, what the Adventures of Tintin reminds me of, even more than Raiders, is the prologue to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, depicting one of young Indy (played by River Phoenix)’s adventures.  Not only is our protagonist a fairly young boy who is surprisingly tough and clever for his age, but there’s a delicate balance between intense action that features peril for our hero and an almost slapstick comedic sensibility.

That’s a tough balance to find, but with Steven Spielberg’s hand at the helm (not to mention producer Peter Jackson’s), it’s a balance that The Adventures of Tintin makes look effortless.  There are so many thrilling sequences that stick out in my mind, from the film.  There are the flashbacks… [continued]

Click here for my thoughts on Carrie (1976) and here for my thoughts on The Fury (1978)!

Well, one thing’s for sure: the opening of Dressed to Kill isn’t one I’m going to be forgetting any time soon.  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but an extended shower scene featuring full frontal nudity of the lead character (played by Angie Dickinson, though apparently the actual nude body on display was that of a body double) who, after getting herself nice and soaped up, begins masturbating and is then surprised and raped.

Oh, it all turns out to be a dream, but it’s an eye-opening sequence and that’s putting it mildly.  In my review of Carrie, I commented that I felt the opening shower scene was totally gratuitous and really weakened what was otherwise a strong start to the film.  Well, this opening shower scene is WAY more graphic (in terms of the nudity shown), and while it feels a bit more of a piece with the erotic thriller that follows, it still feels totally gratuitous.  In mean, it isn’t even an event that actually HAPPENS in the film, it’s just a dream!  I suppose one could suggest that the dream is an introduction to the weird sexual inner life of Angie Dickinson’s character, Kate.  And the concept of dreams and the line between fantasy and reality is a major theme of the film.  But it’s hard to argue that this opening isn’t just a way to start one’s movie off with a bang and titillate the audience.  I guess that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but (and I made the same comment about Carrie), it makes it hard to take the rest of the movie seriously.

Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is a wealthy housewife unsatisfied by her husband.  She admits her desire to have an affair to her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), and eventually does pick up an unnamed guy in a museum.  I’m reluctant to spoil what happens next, so I’ll just say that a spree of sex-related murders begins, and eventually a call-girl, Liz (Nancy Allen, returning from Carrie) and Kate’s young son, Peter (Keith Gordon) team up to try to stop the killer.

Angie Dickinson is terrific in the film, with her star-wattage turned up high.  She’s electric in her early scene in Dr. Elliott’s office, and also in the extended near-wordless sequence in which she picks up a guy (or allows herself to be picked up) in the museum.  It’s great fun to see Michael Caine in the film, and he brings great dignity and presence to the role of Dr. Elliott.  Having these two movie-stars in the film really elevates the… [continued]

My journey back through the films of Brian De Palma continues!  Click here for my thoughts on Carrie.

Two years after Carrie, Mr. De Palma directed The Fury, another story of telekinetic teenagers.  But while the initial description of the film does sound a bit like more of the same, The Fury is actually quite different from Carrie in terms of tone and execution.

Carrie was focused on the telekinetic teenager in question.  It was very much a coming-of-age story (albeit a very bizarre, horrific one!)  But The Fury is more of an espionage story.  And while we do follow the telekinetic girl Gillian (Amy Irving) throughout the story, I felt the main character — and the heart of the film — was the adult character, Peter.  In the film’s opening, Peter’s son, Robin (who we learn has telekinetic abilities) is kidnapped by mysterious men who try to kill Peter (and, indeed, Robin believes they succeed).  Throughout the rest of the story, we follow Peter in his increasingly desperate attempts to locate his son.

Peter is played by Kirk Douglas, and he’s terrific in the film.  We don’t learn a lot about Peter’s background, but he clearly has experience and training in the military.  The script doesn’t give Peter too much character — the story is far more concerned with the plot mechanics of twists and double-crosses, rather than character development — but Mr. Douglas’ performance fills in all the blanks we need.  He plays Peter’s friendly charm and charisma, as well as the tough-as-nails, willing-to-do-whatever-it-takes side of him.  He’s a ton of fun to watch, and frankly whenever the film cut away from Peter’s story I was impatient for it to get back to him.

That’s not to criticize Amy Irving (returning from Carrie), who is lovely and endearing as Gillian.  In the movie’s early-going, Gillian discovers that she possesses unusual gifts.  She eventually winds up checking into the Paragon Clinic, a boarding house devoted to young people with special abilities (shades of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters!).  The clinic’s director (Charles Durning) seems friendly, but it is soon revealed that he has connections to the shady operative (John Cassavetes) who arranged for Robin’s kidnapping.

I enjoyed watching this non-super-hero take on kids with special powers unfold, and I enjoyed how the script and (by John Farris, adapting his novel) and Mr. De Palma’s direction treated the story seriously, without camp.  As I wrote above, The Fury is structured like a spy/suspense film, and I think that was a very successful choice.  (This distinction is made clear right from the film’s opening, an energetically staged assault on an Israeli beach designed to mask the effort to kidnap young… [continued]

Martin Scorsese isn’t exactly the first name I think of when I think about family-friendly adventure films, but with Hugo, the master proves once and again his incredible control of the medium of film, no matter the genre.  Hugo is a breathtaking work of genius, and I found myself enraptured by the film’s propulsive energy and the exuberant love for film and, indeed, for all works of art, that pores out of every frame of the movie.

The Hugo in Hugo (adapted from from The Adventures of Hugo Cabret, which was written and illustrated by Brian Selznick) is a young boy living in the walls of a Paris train-station in the 1930′s.  His parents are dead, and the uncle who adopted him is a drunkard who eventually abandoned him.  But not before teaching young Hugo how to mind all of the clocks in the station, a task which Hugo has secretly continued to do.  All the while he has scrounged tools and supplies to work on repairing a broken automata (an elaborate wind-up figure), which he and his father were working on together before his father’s death.  When Hugo is caught, mid-theft, by the crochety old man who runs a small toy booth in the station, Hugo agrees to work for him to repay what he has stolen.  He is quickly befriended by the intelligent, well-read young girl, Isabelle, in the man’s care.  The bond between Hugo and Isabelle grows as they start to realize that the old man, whom she refers to as Papa Georges, hides secrets of his own, including a possible connection to Hugo’s automata.

In my first paragraph I described Hugo as a family-friendly film, but don’t take that to mean that the film is childish or simplistic.  Quite the contrary, I found Hugo to be richly layered and nuanced.  There is fun adventure to be had as the tale unfolds, but also great sadness and melancholy.  (If you’re looking for something to compare it to, in tone, I would direct you to Pixar’s Up.)

Right from the opening frames, the film is gorgeous.  Mr. Scorsese uses visual effects with extraordinary aplomb.  The opening shots juxtapose the gorgeous city-scape of 1930′s Paris with the complex gears and inner mechanisms of a clock, and the sequence is thrilling and clever.  The environment of the city, and of the city-within-the-city that the train station represents, is brought to fully-realized, teeming life.  I don’t know where the beautiful costumes and sets end and the computer-generated effects begin, and that’s just the way I like it.  Every frame of the film is packed with fascinating imagery — if my eye ever wandered from the main action, there was always… [continued]

I’ve really enjoyed all three Mission: Impossible films, though none of them quite reached perfection in my mind.  Probably my favorite part of all three films is the first 30 minutes of the first one, where we got to see an awesome team of super-spies engaged in some really fun, twisty covert operations.  Then, of course, they all get killed off and the film (and the sequels) turns into the Tom Cruise super-hero show.  J.J. Abrams’ third installment was a big step back in the right direction, but even in that film I felt the team was too-quickly sidelined.

What a delight it is to report, then, that I think the latest installment, Ghost Protocol, is the strongest film in the series so far!  I saw the film in huge, glorious IMAX, which is how I highly recommend that you see it as well.  People are all atwitter about 3-D these days, but I think that seeing a film in IMAX represents a far more immersive experience than the often-distracting 3-D effects.  (Although I did just see Martin Scorsese’s new film, Hugo, in wonderful 3-D — check back here on Wednesday for my full review).  Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible film takes full advantage of the huge canvas that IMAX has to offer.

I’ve long-worshipped Brad Bird, from his work on The Simpsons to his amazing animated films The Iron Giant (GO SEE IT right now, you won’t regret it), The Incredibles, and Ratatouille.  Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is Mr. Bird’s live-action directorial debut, and it represents a triumphant announcement of an incredible talent.

The action in this film is phenomenal.  Ghost Protocol is alive with action, from start-to-finish.  This film MOVES.  There are so many gleefully inventive set-pieces that I hardly know where to begin.  There’s the opening break-out from a Russian prison, with the film’s playful withholding of the identity of the man being rescued.  There’s the fiendishly clever way the IMF team infiltrates the Kremlin.  (I LOVE the screen employed by Ethan and Benji in the hallway.)  Then there’s the gangbusters sequence in which Ethan (Tom Cruise) is forced to scale the exterior of the tallest skyscraper in Dubai.  In the trailers, I actually thought that scene looked rather silly.  But in the film I found it to be a bravura sequence of phenomenal special effects and mounting tension.  Here is where seeing the film in IMAX really pays off.  There’s a terrific shot in which Ethan steps out of the window onto the side of the building.  Suddenly the camera follows him out, and we the viewers are right there vertiginously hanging off the building right along with him.  As the sequence escalates and things start… [continued]

I’ve often enjoyed here, on the site, taking some time to watch or, in some cases, re-watch, a series of films by the same director.  One of my very first blogs on the site was a look back at several of the films of David Mamet, and more recently I re-watched the last decade and-a-half of the films of Steven Spielberg (click here for my reviews of AI: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, The Terminal, The War of the Worlds, and Munich) and took a look back at the first three films by director Terrence Malick (click here for my reviews of The Thin Red Line, Badlands, and Days of Heaven).

I’ve decided now to turn to a prolific director whose films are very well-known, and yet somehow I’ve only seen a few of them: Brian De Palma.  Of his lengthy filmography, I’d only ever seen Scarface, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes, and Mission to Mars. There are a ton of other famous films, directed by Mr. De Palma, that I’ve been meaning to see for years: Carrie, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito’s Way, Femme Fatale, and more.  So I was excited by the opportunity to finally check out those films.  I was also intrigued by Mr. De Palma’s reputation, in that he seems to be a filmmaker who some love, while others loathe.  Personally I didn’t yet have a strong opinion on Mr. De Palma, having seen so few of his films.  That’s about to change.

I decided to start with one of Mr. De Palma’s most famous films, and the one I had been most wanting to finally check out: Carrie.

The film is based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name.  Sissy Spacek (just three years older than she was in Badlands) stars in what might be her most famous role as young Carrie White.  Raised by her single mom, a religious fanatic (Piper Laurie, dialing the crazy all the way to eleven), Carrie has lived a sheltered life.  Now, as a teenager, she is almost completely clueless as to the simple social realities of how to connect with the other kids at school, and in the movie’s still-shocking opening, Carrie is horrified when she has her first period in the school gym’s shower.  Carrie has no idea what is happening to her, and in the film’s first step into weirdness, that traumatic incident provides the spark that ignites Carrie’s burgeoning telepathic powers.

The opening scene in the girls’ locker room encapsulates everything that works, and doesn’t work, about this film.  Stephen King’s original idea, of taking the terror inherent in a young… [continued]

Ok, so it took me a little longer than I’d anticipated to get to the next installment in my “Days of Terrence Malick” series, looking back at the films of this acclaimed director.  Re-watching The Thin Red Line (read my review here) made me want to watch the two films that Mr. Malick made in the 1970′s: Badlands (read my review here) and Days of Heaven. Both films are considered masterpieces by many, and I was eager to finally see them.

In Days of Heaven, a young and very handsome Richard Gere plays Bill, a poor worker forced to flee his steel-mill job in Chicago after he knocks down his boss in a moment of anger.  So he and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and young sister (Linda Manz) hop a train out of the city.  The threesome eventually find themselves in the Texas panhandle, where they find work (along with hundreds of other migrant laborers) in the wheat fields of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard, who I’ll always associate with his role as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff).  The farmer takes a liking to Abby, and Bill urges her to move in with him, so that the three of them can take advantage of the farmer’s wealth.  Needless to say, things don’t turn out well for anyone involved.

There is very little dialogue in Days of Heaven. At times it feels like a silent movie, or a tone poem in which the beautiful imagery is called upon to carry the weight of the story.  There are moments in Days of Heaven in which Mr. Malick is able to harness the awesome power of cinema to create some truly breathtaking moments, all the more notable for their near-total lack of dialogue or narrative exposition.  There are long stretches in which the film lets the absolutely gorgeous shots of the rural Texas landscape carry the viewer along, and I found myself endlessly fascinated by the scenes showing the men and women hard at work harvesting wheat.  Those moments have a poetic beauty that surprised me.  Then, most notably, there is the sequence, late in the film, in which a fire spreads through the farmer’s wheat fields, eventually building to a mighty conflagration.  The escalation of this sequence is incredible and terrifying, a bravura achievement.

And yet so much of the film feels to me as if Mr. Malick was purposely trying to make his film difficult to understand.  I continually found myself struggling to understand the dynamics between the characters, or the simple set-ups of what was going on.  Bill and Abby make a decision, in the early minutes of the film, to pretend that they are brother… [continued]

Last week I saw The Muppets and then The Descendants, in what has to be one of the weirdest double-features ever.  I was really excited about The Muppets, and while I enjoyed that film (read my review here) I was surprised to end the evening having far preferred The Descendants!

The whole world seems to have gone ga-ga over Sideways, Alexander Payne’s last film (which was released all the way back in 2004, wow).  I really enjoyed that film, and it deserves credit for showing the whole world how great Paul Giamatti is, but I’m going to say that I found The Descendants to be a stronger film over-all.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a well-off real-estate lawyer living in Hawaii.  He describes himself at the start of the film as “the back-up parent,” but he’s forced out of that comfortable-to-him role when his wife falls into an irreversible coma following a boating accident.  Matt suddenly finds himself the primary care-giver for his two daughters, the teen-aged Alex (Shailene Woodley) and the ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller).  In the process of traveling around the Hawaiian islands to tell friends and family about his wife’s condition, things become even more complicated when Alex reveals to Matt a secret about his wife (her mom) which all the trailers for the film spoiled but which I’ll avoid revealing here.

The above paragraph isn’t really a description of the plot of the film.  Well, it sort of is.  But it’s more like the framework around and within which the events of the film — mostly a series of moments in the lives of this threesome — transpire.  Not a whole heck of a lot happens in The Descendants, and that’s part of the film’s charm.  Things seem to unfold at a slightly laid-back, Hawaiian pace.  There is some learning and some growing, but I felt the film stayed pretty far away from schmaltz, and the character arcs felt earned, rather than just being driven by what Hollywood Screenwriting 101 might think is necessary.

OK, maybe I’m overstating things to say that not a whole heck of a lot happens in The Descendants. It’s interesting to compare this film to Like Crazy, which I reviewed last week.  Now THERE’S a film where not a whole heck of a lot happens!  Compared to Like Crazy, a movie that strove for often-times painful naturalism, The Descendants is incredibly dense with plot.  And I will admit that there is quite a lot of drama that befalls George Clooney’s character in the week-or-so depicted in the film, perhaps more than would realistically befall you or me, even in one of our most tumultuous weeks.  But somehow it… [continued]

The beginning of The Muppets, the new film starring Jim Hensen’s creations, presents us with a world much like our own: one in which the Muppets have been pretty much forgotten, passed over in favor of more modern sources of entertainment.  Beseeched to get the gang back together and once again put on a Muppet Show, Kermit at first refuses, concerned that there’s no way for the Muppets to ever regain their former status, that the world has changed too much.

It’s a clever way to reintroduce us to these beloved characters as, indeed, it’s been a long long long time since these characters felt at all relevant.  Though I adored The Muppet Show as a kid (and I must have watched the first three films — The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan – dozens of times), I haven’t seen any of the kiddie Muppet films released over the past two decades.  Whatever you think works or doesn’t work in this new Muppets film, we can at least hopefully agree to thank Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller and director James Bobin for spearheading a project that takes the Muppets seriously, and that is intended to be enjoyed by kids AND adults, just as the classic Muppets shows and movies were.

There’s been some grumbling in the press by folks like Frank Oz (a tremendous talent who I revere greatly) and other Muppets performers that Jason Segel and the other young turks responsible for this film haven’t been respectful to the Muppets, but that claim couldn’t be further from the truth.  The Muppets is positively dripping with admiration and adoration for these characters, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many loving references to classic Muppets characters and bits were woven into the film.  Most of all, the film’s entire story is clearly designed to prove to the world that the Muppets ARE wonderful characters, and that they CAN still be just as funny, relevant, and entertaining today as they were in the ’70s and ’80s.

One might expect that folks like Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller would try to stuff the film full of crass jokes and dirty humor, but that doesn’t happen at all.  (If anything, the film is a bit TOO square for my tastes.  More on that in a moment.)  And the characters are NEVER played for laughs.  The Muppets generate jokes, but we’re never laughing AT them.  This is an important distinction.  Though most of the characters are voiced by new voice actors (Jim Henson has of course long-since passed away, and Frank Oz declined to participate in the film), the character of each Muppet has been wonderfully preserved, and… [continued]

If Like Crazy is playing anywhere near you, I really encourage you to seek out this wrenching little film.

The movie stars Anton Yelchin (who played Chekov in J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot) and Felicity Jones (getting a tremendous amount of acclaim, and deservedly so, for this breakout role) as a young couple who meet at university in L.A. and quickly fall crazily in love.  Jacob (Yelchin) is an aspiring furniture designer, and Anna (Jones) is a writer.  The two immediately spark to one another, and Anna chooses to stay the summer in L.A. rather than returning home to London.  But overstaying her VISA gets her into trouble when she does eventually return home to London, and she finds herself barred from re-entering the United States.  The bulk of Like Crazy follows Jacob and Anna struggling to maintain a connection during the months and eventually years that follow, when, despite their efforts, they are unable to get Anna’s travel ban lifted.

I could imagine that plot summary being written about a big-budget Hollywood romantic film, with two super-stars in the lead roles, in which the separation of the two characters leads to silly hi-jinks (Maybe they experiment with phone sex!) and eventually to big heart-felt moments (A dramatic speech!  A kiss in the rain!) scored to pop songs or to rousing orchestral music.  Thankfully, none of that is found anywhere near Like Crazy.

The film is presented in a stripped-down fashion, with the focus tight on the two lead characters.  The camerawork keeps us often intimately close to these two people, and the story is unflinching in its sometimes brutal exploration of the painful emotional truths of love and relationships.

Like Crazy was made on a shoe-string budget.  In an interview, the 28 year-old director, Drake Doremus, said that the entire film cost only $250,000, and was filmed entirely on a $1,500 camera.  The shoot lasted only a few weeks, and the scenes were mostly improvised by the two actors.  Working from a detailed 50-page outline, created by Mr. Doremus, the actors developed the scenes, and the details of their relationship, through the process of filming the movie.

It’s clear to me that the film benefitted extraordinarily from the aesthetic choices necessitated by such an on-the-cheap, on-the-fly process of filmmaking.  I really connected to the movie’s unadorned technique, and the fly-on-the-wall, almost voyeuristic position into which we, as the viewers, are placed, as we watch this couple struggle through their long-distance relationship.  The film asks tough questions of the characters, and their responses to the situations in which they were placed felt very real to me, very emotionally true.  Both Jacob and Anna are presented as likable… [continued]

I’d been reading about Joe Cornish’s directorial debut, the British sci-fi/horror/comedy film Attack the Block, all year.  The low-budget film was a hit on the festival circuit, and was trumpeted by several of my favorite on-line film reviewers, notably Drew McWeeny at Hitfix.com and Devin Faraci at badassdigest.com.  It received a U.S. theatrical release, but sadly came and went from theatres pretty quickly.  When the film was released on blu-ray last month, I was excited to track it down.

The film is terrific, and I’d wager that if you enjoyed UK-based action/comedies such as Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Layer Cake, then you’ll really dig Attack the Block.

The titular “block” refers to a low-income housing unit in Kennington, England.  The film’s main characters are a small band of kids from the block who try to escape their lives of poverty and boredom at home by wreaking havoc on the streets.  When we first meet them, they’re egging on their leader, Moses (John Boyega in a star-making role), to beat an unidentifiable creature to death.  Then they mug Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a young single nurse who also lives in the block.  It’s the start of a fine evening for the boys, until an alien invasion spoils all their fun.  Yep, turns out the creature they beat to death was a little alien, who has a lot of angry friends.

The genius of Attack the Block is the way it marries sci-fi alien invasion movie conventions with the street-level young-tough humor of Guy Ritchie’s early films.  Generally these types of alien invasions strike New York City, not a run-down English inner city.  But, of course, watching these street hudlums face an alien apocalypse is the deliriously clever premise of the film, and the source of all the fun.

Not that Attack the Block is all fun and games.  In fact, the early-going isn’t that funny at all.  The gang’s mugging of Sam is an unsettling sequence, not the type of scene you’d expect to find in a film with comedy on its mind.  But writer/director Joe Cornish cleverly sets the stakes of the film to be very high right from the beginning.  This is a world in which bad things happen.  That mugging scene demonstrates that the characters in this film face real peril, thus escalating the dramatic tension.  It also gives a real character-arc to the boys in Moses’ gang.  I intensely disliked the boys at first, but absolutely grew to love them by the end.  It’s a pretty impressive achievement of story-telling, and is a critical reason that the films works as well as it does.

The other is in the way in which, while the… [continued]

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good, angry political thriller, so I quite enjoyed George Clooney’s latest directorial feature, The Ides of March. Perhaps thriller is the wrong word, since that word conjures thoughts of films featuring mysteries or action/suspense or damsels in distress.  And while there is an unfortunate damsel in The Ides of March who is subject to a great deal of distress, when I write “thriller” I refer not to the presence of any violent murder in the plot, but rather to the film’s bubbling sense of dread and urgency, which builds to a fierce boil as the story approaches its climax.

George Clooney is a fine actor.  I’ve long held that he — like Brad Pitt — is a far better actor than he needs to be, what with his movie-star looks.  But while Mr. Clooney might be a fine actor, he’s a damn magnificent director.  His first feature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, remains one of my very favorite films ever (and the movie that cemented my abiding appreciation for the great Sam Rockwell), and his second, Good Night, and Good Luck, is an equally beautiful, confident, urgent piece of work.  There’s a direct line that can be drawn from the beating political heart of Good Night, and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow’s stand against McCarthyism, to the Ides of March.

Set during several tumultuous days leading up to the Ohio Democratic primary, The Ides of March stars Ryan Gosling (who blew my mind, back in the day, in The Believer — and, if you’ve never seen it, go out and find that searing film about a young Jewish boy who becomes a neo-Nazi) as Stephen Meyers, the idealistic number two in the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney).  I’m loathe to reveal any details of the plot, but suffice to say things get a little rough for Stephen and his candidate.  The Ides of March casts its gaze at the dirty back-room political in-fighting that goes on behind the scenes, far away from the bright lights of the network camera crews.  The film clearly has some broad points to make about our modern political races, but the film is first and foremost a gripping dramatic tale.

Ryan Gosling is terrific, charismatic and compelling as Stephen.  He plays the film’s light early scenes with grace and charm, clearly showing us why Stephen has, at a young age, become such a skilled political operator.  When things turn increasingly desperate, Mr. Gosling takes us right down the rabbit hole along with him, and the genius of the film is the way in which we’re forced to wonder, in the final… [continued]

In the DVD’s special features, Zooey Deschannel describes the film Your Highness as a dirty version of The Princess Bride, and I’d say that’s as good a description as any for this very profane, very funny fantasy film.

I won’t call it a spoof, because Your Highness isn’t out to make fun of the conventions of fantasy films.  Rather, Your Highness is an unabashed fantasy adventure, albeit one in which the main character is totally out of place in this sort of film!  That’s the genesis of the film’s comedy.

Danny McBride plays Prince Thadeous, a pampered, cowardly fellow who has been forever living in the shadow of his more heroic brother, Prince Fabious (a perfectly-cast James Franco).  Fabious is the sort of young hero who is usually at the heart of these sorts of tales, but it’s Thadeous who is thrust into the spotlight when his brother’s fiancee Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) is kidnapped by the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux).

The film is a terrific spotlight for Mr. McBride’s specific brand of foul-mouthed, man-child energy.  He’s enormously endearing even while being extraordinarily selfish and crude.  Mr. Franco also is given a real chance to shine in the role, reminding me of the exquisite comedic chops he displayed back in Freaks and Geeks. Fabious could have been a boring straight-man character, but Mr. Franco brings a gleeful energy and over-the-top chippiness to all of his scenes, making Fabious just as entertaining as his brother.

I’ve never heard of Rasmus Hardiker before, but he’s quite funny as Thadeous’ faithful man-servant Courtney, who dutifully accompanies Thadeous and Fabious on their quest.  Equally entertaining is the great Toby Jones’ as Fabious’ far-less-faithful servant Julie.  Director David Gordon Green comments, in the special features, at how he thought the comedy would work best if the ridiculous elements were surrounded by the best, most serious actors he could find — the actors who would be cast in the “serious” version of this film — and watching Toby Jones, Charles Dance (most recently seen as Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones), and Damian Lewis (Lt. Winters from Band of Brothers) act their hearts out in the film only makes the story’s lunacy that much crazier.

Speaking of acting their hearts out, Justin Theroux knocks it out of the park as the wizard Leezar.  Mr. Theroux has popped up, as an actor, in places as disparate as Zoolander, Miami Vice, John Adams, Parks and Recreation, and (most notably to me) as the Werner Herzog-esque host of the Tropic Thunder faux making-of documentary DVD special feature Rain of Madness (click here to learn more about what the heck I’m talking about).  He’s also a solid writer, having written… [continued]

It’s not getting much notice in theatres, it seems, but I found myself quite taken with The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s book, starring Johnny Depp.

I am not at all a devotee of Hunter S. Thompson.  I have not read the novel on which this film is based, and I must somewhat ashamedly confess that much of what I know of Mr. Thompson is drawn from the character of Duke from Doonesbury. Still, I’m familiar with the man’s reputation, and The Rum Diary serves up a fine dose of the debauchery, booze, journalism, and a dash more debauchery I was expecting from an adaptation of one of his novels.

Johnny Depp plays the main character, Paul Kemp (seemingly a stand-in for Mr. Thompson himself, which makes this film Mr. Depp’s second go-round at playing him, after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). We meet Paul on his first day in Puerto Rico, recovering from a hell of a bender that apparently is not an aberration for Mr. Kemp.  He’s taken a job at a dying newspaper in Puerto Rico, and the film never quite makes clear whether this is borne from Kemp’s sense of adventure or simply because this barely-functional drunk can’t hold down a steady job anywhere else.

The role is a fine showcase for Mr. Depp’s talents, talents that I was beginning to think were lost and gone after one too many horribly cartoonish performances in Tim Burton films.  While Paul Kemp is gloriously weird and teetering on unhinged, Mr. Depp keeps the weirdness dialed just within the realm of believably human.  And he brings a charm to the character that allows us to continue to sort-of root for the fellow, even as we watch him be pretty much a complete boor for much of the film.

Kemp repeatedly states (most often to his boss at the paper, Lotterman) that he’s trying to cut down on his booze-intake.  It seems clear that he says that just to appease his boss, or because he knows that’s probably what he should be saying to people.  But Mr. Depp is able to squeeze just enough decency into the character that we wonder if maybe he does realize, somewhere in the back of his brain, that maybe his booze-and-drugs-fueled lifestyle is not the way to go.

Not that Kemp really learns that lesson by the end of the movie, which is part of what I loved about the film.  We do get a rousing “call-to-action” section late in the film, in which a series of events finally drives Kemp to actually want to do some real journalism.  He unleashes a stirring speech about the power of the… [continued]

I had previously seen Mimic once, back when it was originally released to theatres in 1997.  I think I went to see it because the trailers looked interestingly creepy, and because I had so enjoyed Charles S. Dutton in Alien 3.  (I still think that Mr. Dutton is one of the best aspects of that sadly misguided Alien sequel.)  I remember thinking Mimic was OK, but it wasn’t a film I was ever drawn to re-watch.

Years later, when I began to discover the films of Guillermo del Toro, and I realized that he had directed Mimic, I began to think it might be interesting to go back and re-watch the film.  That desire to rediscover an early del Toro film was counteracted by what I’d periodically read or hear, in interviews with Mr. del Toro, about how difficult an experience making Mimic was for him, and how many of the decisions represented in the finished film did not at all represent his intentions.

I started hearing rumors, a few years ago, about a possible director’s cut of Mimic, and so I was thrilled when this was finally released to DVD and blu-ray this past summer!  It’s rare — and so always a cause for celebration — to see a filmmaker given an opportunity to go back and try to restore a film that was taken away from them (I’m thinking of the Richard Donner version of Superman II as one example — click here for my review).  As Mr. del Toro describes in the DVD’s special features, there were many things that he had wanted to film but was unable to, so many aspects of his original plans for the film are not represented in this new director’s cut.  What he has done is to go back and trim out much of the second-unit footage that was included in the original edit, footage which he did not direct.  He was also able to re-incorporate into the film many scenes and plot-threads that had been excised from the theatrical cut.  The result, Mr. del Toro describes, is a film that is as close to “his” as we’re ever going to get.

Mimic is, at its heart, a B-movie.  (The plot does involve bugs that grow to mimic humans!)  Mr. del Toro readily admits that in his commentary, and he discusses how his filmmaking strategy has always been to elevate B-movie ideas by taking them 100% seriously and applying as much care as he possibly can in the telling of those stories.  It’s a technique that has served Mr. del Toro very well.  Mimic, though, even in this new director’s cut, never really breaks out of it’s B-movie essence.  Nevertheless, I… [continued]

OK!  As I wrote about last week, after re-watching Terrence Malick’s 1998 WWII film The Thin Red Line, I decided the time had come for me to track down Mr. Malick’s first two films, both of which had gotten so much acclaim when they were released back in the ’70s.  The first of these was Badlands, Mr. Malick’s debut film which he wrote and directed.

Set in the 1950′s, Badlands centers on two main characters: Kit and Holly.  Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, is a fifteen year-old girl living with her father in a quiet South Dakota town.  Her life changes forever when she meets Kit (played by a ferocious, impossibly young Martin Sheen).  Kit is the epitome of cool to her: he is quiet and enigmatic, he’s older (Kit is twenty-five), and he looks and dresses sort of like James Dean.  What’s clear to the audience, though not to Holly, is that something is definitely off about this young man.  During the scene in which we first meet him, working his route as a garbage-collector, Kit seems socially awkward and more than a little weird.  But what I did not see coming was Kit’s tendency towards violence.  That tendency explodes when Holly’s father forbids Kit from seeing her, and only grows from there.  Once Holly finds herself in Kit’s orbit, she gets swept up in an American odyssey of violence and murder.

That sounds like the plot of an exciting action film, but Mr. Malick was after something entirely different.  Badlands is as quiet and weird a film as Kit is as a character.  There is not an inordinate amount of dialogue in the film, and what little there is is fairly banal stuff, not really connected to the incredible events that are transpiring.  Both Kit and Holly are rather still, quiet, almost passive characters.  (Somewhat paradoxically, Kit’s passivity only lasts until he picks up his shotgun.)  Though Kit and Holly are the main characters, the film does not go out of its way to get us to like, or even to sympathize at all with, either one of them.  That cold, almost dispassionate way in which Mr. Malick’s film presents the events we watch unfold is quite striking, and part, I think, of what makes this such a unique piece of work.

Even on the battered version of the film I watched (the image on the old DVD I got from Netflix was a far cry from the gorgeous, newly-restored image of the Criterion Collection’s blu-ray release of The Thin Red Line!), I still found Badlands to be a beautifully shot film.  Mr. Malick’s camera takes the time to explore the incredible vistas of the American… [continued]

Is anyone else as amused as I am by how closely Brad Pitt, in the new baseball film Moneyball, resembles Robert Redford in the classic baseball film The Natural (click here for my review)?  It’s spooky, man!

Anyways, Moneyball is adapted from the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.  The book (which I have never read, but it’s been on my to-read for a while now and has been bolted up to the top of that list after I watched the terrific film adaptation) elaborates upon the technique of sabermetrics, a type of baseball statistical analysis that focuses on in-game performance as opposed to other intangibles (like leadership, heart, etc.).  The book, and the film, focuses on the Oakland A’s 2002 season, and on their General Manager Billy Beane, who was one of the early adopters/pioneers of this strategy.

I’ve always loved baseball, but these days with my incredibly busy life I don’t follow the game with anything approaching the passion and devotion I did as a kid.  Growing up as a die-hard Mets fan, I listened to almost every single game on the radio (WFAN New York) and when I couldn’t (like when I was away at summer camp) I would voraciously devour the box scores (which my parents would faithfully mail to me several times a week).  Moneyball is a fantastic film and, more than that, it’s a fantastic baseball film, and it really brought me back to my days as a kid analyzing, with my friends, the ins and outs of every game and every player.  The film really made me miss those days!!

Baseball is a magical sport, and has always fascinated me the way no other professional sport does.  Although one aspect of Moneyball is to debunk many of the assumptions of the game (and to reveal the inherent unfairness in which certain ball-clubs with enormous payrolls — cough Yankees cough — can spend their way to victory after victory, leaving the small-market teams in the dust), the film also pours over with a love for baseball and a fascination with its complexities and mysteries.  The sequence, late in the film, chronicling the A’s incredible win-streak from the 2002 season is thrilling, an incredibly-realized reminder of the powerful pull of baseball at its best.  It’s as good a celluloid love-letter to the game as I’ve ever seen.

I also really love the scene in Mr. Beane’s office right before the trade deadline, in which he works the phones, wheeling-and-dealing to acquire the players he thinks he needs.  All that talk of trades is a bit inside baseball (to use a very appropriate metaphor), steeped in the specific baseball… [continued]

I was really disappointed by this summer’s Green Lantern.  I had high hopes for the epic space adventure promised by the trailers, but what we got instead was a lame, Earth-bound mess.  (Read my full review here.)

I wondered if the “Extended Cut” of the film released on DVD and blu-ray would address any of my criticisms of the film.  Sometimes I find that extended versions of films can really flesh out the stories and characters in a way that alters my opinion of a film that I had previously disliked.  Sadly, that is not the case here.

Basically, the only change made to Green Lantern in this new, longer version is an extended flashback, set at the beginning of the film, in which we get to see Hal, Carol, and Hector as kids, and we witness firsthand the death of Hal’s test-fighter pilot.  It’s a great sequence, and never should have been excised from the film.  It’s a much more coherent way of presenting this important back-story than the laughably ridiculous Airplane!-style stress-induced flashbacks that Hal gets, in the theatrical version, when trying to out-maneuver Ferris Airlines’ new pilot-less drones when we first meet him.  It also enables us to start the movie by sympathizing with Hal, which is far better than starting the movie thinking he’s a jerk the way we do in the theatrical cut.

After watching that long new introductory sequence, I was jazzed — this movie is already a whole lot better, I thought!  Sadly, if there were any further changes or extensions to the film after that point, I didn’t notice them.  The rest of the film is as turgid as before.  They even left-in the ridiculous flashbacks in Hal’s test-flight early in the film!!  That makes that whole sequence even MORE stupid than it was in the theatrical cut, when at least the flashbacks were presenting us with some new information.  In this version, we just saw ALL of those scenes literally minutes beforehand!!  Having to sit through those scenes again is beyond stupid.

But Green Lantern is afflicted by this sort of ham-handed story-telling from start-to-finish.  Take the whole introduction to the film, and the escape of Parallax (the film’s main villain).  We hear, in prologue, all about the Green Lantern Corps and about their great enemy, Parallax, who only the great Green Lantern Abin Sur was able to defeat, and imprison in something called “the Lost Sector.”  First of all, as much as I loved Geoffrey Rush’s voice in the narration, and the cool sci-fi imagery on display, I think telling the audience everything we need to know about the villain right off the bat deflates all of the tension… [continued]

Terrence Malick directed two highly acclaimed films in the 1970′s (Badlands and Days of Heaven, neither of which I’ve seen, but I plan to remedy that soon — more on this later), and then he dropped out of sight for twenty years.  Mr. Malick finally returned to the world of filmmaking in 1998 with the release of The Thin Red Line, his lengthy adaptation of James Jones’ novel, set during the battles of Guadalcanal during World War II.

I had previously seen The Thin Red Line once, in theatres back in 1998.  It had nowhere near the effect on me that Steven Spielberg’s WWII film, Saving Private Ryan (which had been released earlier that year) did.  (I still remember my shell-shocked, emotionally drained reaction after seeing Saving Private Ryan in the theatre.  My friends and I sat silently in our seats for a good while after the film ended, and it took a while into the car-ride home before we began to unwind a bit and find ourselves able to discuss the film we’d seen.  These days I am well aware of the film’s narrative weaknesses and tendencies towards over-emotionalities, but I still bow before Mr. Spielberg’s skill in crafting a film that, upon my initial viewing, on the big-screen, left me so emotionally devastated.  The only other film that’s affected me quite that way, when seeing it for the first time on the big screen, was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.)

But even though I didn’t have anything like that reaction upon seeing The Thin Red Line for the first time back in 1998, I remember thoroughly enjoying the film.  I was entranced by the gorgeous imagery and beguiled by the dense, inter-weaving inner monologues of countless characters, each sharing some of their own insight and reflections on the conflict and on larger issues of human nature and mankind.

When the Criterion Collection released a new blu-ray edition of The Thin Red Line, I was eager to see the film again.  The blu-ray, no surprise, looks and sounds absolutely immaculate.  The barrage of imagery in what I once read described as Mr. Malick’s “tone-poem” remains as sumptuously gorgeous as I remembered.  The juxtaposition of the jaw-droppingly beautiful landscapes and imagery of animals and nature with the unspeakably brutal realities of human conflict during war gives the film a potent and heart-rending thematic punch.

I do find myself wishing, though, that the film’s dense ideas and philosophical musings — not to mention the sheer amount of filmmaking mastery on display as one watches the film’s gorgeous imagery unfold — could have been melded with a narrative that was more effectively coherent.  Because we’re constantly jumping around from character to character, because many… [continued]

Back in 1986, Frank Miller turned the comics world on its ear with the release of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  This four-issue prestige-format limited series, which Mr. Miller wrote and pencilled (with inks by Klaus Janson and gorgeous colors by Lynn Varley), told the story of a bitter, middle-aged Bruce Wayne.  In Miller’s story, Bruce had retired from being Batman following the death of Jason Todd (the second Robin, who was actually killed in-continuity in the Batman books a year or so later in the “A Death in the Family” story-line).  But disgusted by the cess-pool of crime and corruption that Gotham City has become, Bruce puts back on the cape and cowl and resumes his one-man war against crime, leading to his final confrontation with the Joker and, ultimately, with Superman, who is now in the employ of the U.S. Government.  Violent, gorgeous, and compelling, The Dark Knight Returns blew my mind when I read it (at far too young an age, back in 1988), and it still stands today as one of the finest comic book stories ever made (and certainly as one of the very best Batman stories ever told).

One might have thought that such a work could never be equaled, but the following year, in 1987, Frank Miller returned to Batman and told a story that is as good — if not even better — than The Dark Knight Returns.  For four issues in the regular Batman comic (#404-407), Mr. Miller and David Mazzucchelli retold Batman’s origin in the story called Batman: Year One.  Whereas The Dark Knight Returns was a huge, epic saga, Batman: Year One is a street-level, entirely stripped down Batman story.  In fact, the genius of the story is that it isn’t really Bruce Wayne’s story at all.  The focus is on a young James Gordon, as he attempts to survive his first year on the force in Gotham City.  Batman: Year One is a tough, violent, gritty tale, populated by the corrupt and the broken.  Even our heroes, Bruce Wayne and James Gordon, are presented as being far from perfect — but their heroism derives from their striving to battle past their flaws and imperfections and attempt to do the best they can in a city without hope.  It’s one of Frank Miller’s very best-written tales, and David Mazzucchelli’s art continually takes my breath away with its gorgeous stylization (the man knows how to spot blacks better than pretty much anyone else in the business) and astonishing detail.

Like The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One sits at the very top of the heap of comic book story-lines.  It’s been mined for inspiration by several of the big-screen versions… [continued]

As you’re probably aware, back in 2010 Conan O’Brien’s stint as host of the Tonight Show was unceremoniously cut short when he refused to comply with NBC’s plan to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 AM in order to give Jay Leno back the 11:30 PM time-slot.  After just seven months as the Tonight Show host, Conan was out.  (The whole crazy business was chronicled in the book The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, by Bill Carter, which I reviewed here.)  Conan eventually started a new late-night show on TBS, though his agreement with NBC prevented him from appearing on television until his new show launched in the fall of 2010.

So in the intervening months, Mr. O’Brien and his crew of writers and producers launched the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour, a mad-cap series of live shows all across the country.  The documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, directed by Rodman Flender, chronicles the tumultuous several months of the tour.

Having been unable to get tickets to any of the sold-out shows, I was first and foremost interested in a glimpse at what the shows were like.  In that, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop delivers in spades.  Throughout the film we get to see a lot of hysterical footage of the live shows — the song parodies, the big production numbers, the comedy bits with visiting guest-stars (like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), and more.

But the film is far more than that.  It’s a compelling warts-and-all depiction of Conan O’Brien at a very stressful point in his life.  The film highlights Conan’s incredible work ethic and easy charisma, both of which helped to make him such a successful entertainer.  We also see how difficult he could be, at times, to work with (such as in the much-written about scene in which he mercilessly mocks 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer without any apparent justification, or in the many times we see him be curt with his assistant, Sona, among other examples).  Mr. Flender told the New York Times that he said to Conan, before beginning the project: “I don’t want this to be U2 Rattle and Hum. I don’t want to deify you. I want this to be honest.”

And honest the film is.  But Mr. Flender’s documentary isn’t out to get notice just by depicting a big star at its worst.  Mr. Flender is clearly a fan of Conan’s (in addition to their being friends since the two were at Harvard together), and over-all Conan comes off as a hard-working performer trying hard to make the best of a tough situation.  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is a fascinating peak behind-the-curtain… [continued]

In 50/50, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a young man who is diagnosed with cancer.  (His physician gives him a 50/50 chance of survival, hence the title of the film.)  While his relationship with his girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) is rocked by this news, Adam finds surprising strength from his buddy Kyle (Seth Rogen).  50/50 was written by Will Reiser and, as has been widely reported, is based on Mr. Reiser’s real-life experience of being diagnosed with cancer in his twenties, and his friendship with Seth Rogen.

Balancing comedy and drama in a film can be a very tricky thing, especially when true-live events come into play.  I thought about this issue last month after watching 30 Minutes or Less, a film about a young pizza boy (played by Jesse Eisenberg) who is kidnapped and has a bomb strapped to his chest, at which point he is forced to rob a bank to get money for his kidnapper.  That situation actually happened to a poor fellow back in 2003 (although the filmmakers claimed not to have been inspired by that incident).  Still, the parallel with real life events (that ended tragically) give the film a tension that runs throughout.  Sometimes I felt that helped the film, in that the story-line felt dangerous in a way that kept me engaged.  Other times I felt that hurt the film, in that it occasionally felt hard to laugh too hard at events that I know, in real life, ended up in a death.

Over-all I enjoyed 30 Minutes or Less, but compared to 50/50 that film feels like a fairy trivial, superficial lark of a movie.  50/50 aims for something deeper, and while it doesn’t always succeed, I really enjoyed the filmmakers’ ambition in crafting a story that is very, very funny, while also tackling some serious issues about mortality and friendship.

Yes, 50/50 is a comedy about cancer.  I suspect that topic kept many people away from this film, but I’m glad I saw it.  The film was directed confidently by Jonathan Levine (who also helmed the little-seen film The Wackness which I really loved), and more than just the presence of Seth Rogen reminds me of the work of Judd Apatow.  The focus on the friendship between guys, and the willingness of the film to mine comedy from tough real-life situations are all aspects I’ve really enjoyed in Mr. Apatow’s work.  50/50 is able to find that tricky balance of tone, allowing us to laugh along with the story while also engaging with the characters and their struggles.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been on quite a hot-streak lately (in films such as (500) Days of Summer and Inception), and… [continued]

Did you know that Ghostbusters is back in theatres???  It’s true!  At select cinemas across the country, Ghostbusters screened last Thursday night, and there are showings scheduled for this Thursday and the following Thursday as well!  I was delighted to have been able to be at one of the screenings this past Thursday, and it was a blast.

One of the best movie-going experiences of my life was getting to see Ghostbusters on the big screen, about a decade ago, at one of the big Boston movie-theatre chains.  This theatre used to screen old movies at midnight on Friday and Saturday nights (for all I know, they still do!), and although I didn’t have the stamina to go every week, I certainly did attend a number of those midnight screenings.  They were always a huge amount of fun, and I relished getting to see great films like The Goonies, Batman, Beetlejuice, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc., on the big screen and with a packed house of fans.  But by far the best midnight screening I ever attended was the showing of Ghostbusters.

Although I distinctly remember seeing Ghostbusters 2 in theatres, I am pretty sure I never saw the original on the big screen.  My memory of seeing it for the first time was watching it on TV with my dad (and running out of the room during the scary parts!).  So when I went to that midnight screening, I was excited to get to see this film that I loved so much on the big screen for the first time, and that was indeed super-cool.  But I was unprepared for the crazy energy of that sold-out theatre, stuffed to the gills with Ghostbusters fans.  People went crazy right from the opening shot, singing along to the music, laughing and joking around and having a grand old time.  About half of the people in the theatre were doing all of the lines right along with the characters.  Even better, the other half of the people weren’t just saying the dialogue, they were making jokes and shouting things at the screen that were funny because of the line of dialogue that we all knew was coming a second later.  It was like seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show! An amazing movie was made even more spectacular by the insane energy and love for the film felt by everyone in the theatre.

I knew nothing could ever top that particular screening, and sure enough, when I saw Ghostbusters this past Thursday night, the crowd was far more sedate!  But that is not to diminish the great pleasure of getting to see Ghostbusters — one of my favorite films! —… [continued]

After having such a good time re-watching David Fincher’s films Se7en (click here for my review) and Fight Club (click here for my review), I decided to take another look at Zodiac.

It was Zodiac that cemented David Fincher in my mind as one of the most amazing directors working today.  I knew he was associated with Alien 3, but that he had that film taken away from him.  (I have a warm spot in my heart for the third Alien film, even though I still see it as a total betrayal of everything that made James Cameron’s Aliens so great.)  I knew he had directed Se7en and Fight Club, but while I immediately recognized that both of those films were clearly made by people with an enormous amount of skill, neither was a film I really loved.  (I have since come to really, really dig Fight Club, but that first time I saw it I think I was a bit overwhelmed by it.)

Something about Zodiac really intrigued me when it was released, but despite that I never got to see it in theatres.  It was only when the film was released on DVD that I tracked it down and watched it.  (I own the Director’s Cut DVD.  This is the version I’m reviewing now, and the only one I’ve ever seen, so I can’t compare it to the theatrical version.)

It blew me away, and I am still in love with it when re-watching it now.

Every frame of the film feels like the result of an incredible amount of focus and creative effort.  It’s clear that an extraordinary amount of detail was pored into the sets, the costumes, the cars, the props, everything, all guided by the skilled eye of a visionary director: David Fincher.  Set over several decades, Zodiac beautifully captures the feel of the different eras, both through subtly altering the look of key sets (like the San Francisco Chronicle office set) and through some stunning visual effects shots (such as a shot made to look like a time-lapse reconstruction of the building of the Transamerica Pyramid).

Speaking of the film’s visual effects, the DVD’s top-notch special features reveal that Zodiac is awash in incredibly subtle, absolutely photo-realistic visual effects that were used to recreate key real locations in the San Francisco area from the ’60s and ’70s.  Most notably, in my mind, is the corner of Washington and Cherry at which the Zodiac killer murdered an unfortunate cab-driver.  The scene when inspectors Toschi and Armstrong arrive at Washington and Cherry to investigate the murder is a tense scene, but when watching it I didn’t give one thought to the scene’s environment.  I was… [continued]

This was a fun one!  Last week I watched The Sting, the 1973 film starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, for the first time.  I’m a big fan of David Mamet’s con-man films (like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner – click here for my thoughts on those films and several more by the great Mr. Mamet), so it was fun to go back and watch this terrific Best Picture-winning film.

Robert Redford plays Hooker, a street-tough grifter who, one day, working with his partner Luther (Robert Earl Jones — and yes, I did recognize his voice so I wasn’t surprised to look him up on-line and discover that he was James Earl Jones’ father!) scam a mob runner out of a lot of cash.  This, of course, brings all sorts of heat down on the pair.  Hooker winds up in Chicago, and tracks down a man he’s heard is the master of the long con: Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman).  Together, the two hatch down a scheme to take down one of Chicago’s major gansters: Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw).

It’s easy to see why the pairing of Robert Redford and Paul Newman made this film such a hit back in 1973.  The two movie-stars are in top form, and the film gives these two charismatic and handsome actors plenty of room to play.  There were a few moments when I felt Mr. Redford laid it on a bit too thick in his portrayal of the young, stubborn Hooker, but for the most part he’s an engaging lead, and his charisma is potent.  Mr. Newman is an absolute pleasure to watch from start-to-finish, absolutely smooth as silk as the seasoned confidence man.   Mr. Newman is able to convey enormous intelligence and cunning behind Gondorff’s poker-face, and the first time we see Gondorff in action (during the poker-game on the train), it’s clear that he’s a master at his trade, played by a real master of his trade!

Robert Shaw is probably most famous for playing Quint from Jaws, but I’ll always think of him as Donald Grant from From Russia With Love (click here for my review) and also as Mr. Blue from The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (click here for my review). He is absolutely fabulous as the mean, take-no-prisoners gangster Lonnegan.  Mr. Shaw puts on an Irish brogue that might not be entirely convincing, but which I loved nonetheless.  This man plays the bad-guy like nobody’s business, and he presents a real, credible threat to Hooker and Gondorff.

Hooker and Gondorff surround themselves with a cadre of fellow con-men in order to pull off the scheme, and I particularly enjoyed the performances of Ray… [continued]

Last week I wrote about the disappointingly mediocre Me and Orson Welles, and I commented that the film covered familiar ground as Cradle Will Rock, the 1999 film written and directed by Tim Robbins.  After writing that blog post, I realized that it had been years since I’d last seen Cradle Will Rock, and I was in the mood to give it another viewing.

Set in 1937, Cradle Will Rock focuses on the tumultuous production of the musical written by Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria), directed by Orson Welles (Angus Macfadyen) and funded by the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the depression-era Work Progress Administration that helped bring theatre to millions of people nation-wide.  The play Cradle Will Rock depicted the struggles of working-class union members, and as such was seen as extremely controversial by some.  But the sprawling story of Tim Robbins’ film covers far more than just the production of that one play.  It also tells the story of the artist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades)’s creation of an enormous mural for Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) that was destroyed when Mr. Rockefeller disapproved of the left-leaning imagery of the mural.  We also see an elderly ventriloquist’s struggles in the face of the demise of vaudeville, the House Un-American Activities Commission’s assault on the Federal Theatre Project, and more.  Through all these stories, Cradle Will Rock tells the stories of artists struggling in the face of economic depression, and the collision between art and politics.

Mr. Robbins has assembled an incredible, enormous ensemble for his film.  Each one of these characters could be the headliner in a film focusing solely on them.  (If I have any criticism about Cradle Will Rock, it’s that it might have been nice to have spent some more time with some of these characters, had the film had a narrower focus.  But they’re each so good, and their characters’ stories so interesting, that I can’t really complain.)

When the film opens, we meet Olive (Emily Watson), a beautiful young singer who has been forced to sleep in movie theatres because she is broke and homeless.  She eventually finds work as a stagehand in Orson Welles’ production of Cradle Will Rock. Mr. Welles is portrayed by Angus Macfadyen.  It’s a much broader, comical portrayal that that of Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles, and watching these two films in such short succession I found that I preferred Mr. McKay’s portrayal.  But that’s no knock against Mr. Macfadyen, who is still one of the best things about Cradle Will Rock. He is a hoot as Orson, loud and vivacious and argumentative and brilliant.  It’s a really fun performance to watch.  He bounces beautifully off of Cary… [continued]

Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (one of my very favorite films, and the film that made me forever a fan of Sam Rockwell), Adaptation (click here for my review), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He also wrote the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, which he also directed.  (To this day, that is the first and only film Mr. Kaufman has directed.)  Based on Mr. Kaufman’s pedigree, I was of course eager to see Synecdoche, New York when it was released.  But I missed it in theatres, and when I read mixed reviews of the film, my enthusiasm to see it dimmed a bit.  It remained on my list of movies-I-want-to-see, but that is a very LONG list, and so it was only last month when I finally sat down to watch Mr. Kaufman’s movie.

Synecdoche, New York is a very bizarre film.  It is very difficult, at times, to watch (both because of the somewhat confusing narrative but also because I found much of the film’s subject matter to be incredibly depressing).  But it is also very funny in places, and I found the film’s wonderfully weird, almost dreamlike structure to be quite unique and engaging.

From the very beginning, the film is constantly, subtly playing with the idea of what is reality.  At first it seems like we’re watching a sad, quiet relationship drama, not unlike many other small-budget indie films.  We can see that the marriage between the playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his painter wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is crumbling.  But, without fanfare, in the early scenes there are several blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments when the film seems to slip into Caden’s head, and what we see on-screen is not reality but rather what Caden is thinking and feeling.  I’m thinking, most notably, of several amusing instances in which Caden imagines himself in the middle of whatever he is watching on TV.

As the film progresses, the line between reality and fantasy begins to blur.  After Adele leaves Caden and heads to London without him, we see Caden reading a magazine, and he comes across a spread in the magazine all about Adele.  At first I assumed that was a moment of fantasy, in which Caden was imagining Adele being completely happy and successful without him in London.  (It must be fantasy, because how could she have a lengthy article written about her only a week after she went to London?)  But later scenes caused me to question my interpretation of that scene.  The sit-up-and-take notice moment, for me, came a few minutes later (about 30 minutes into the film).  We see Caden meet Hazel (Samantha Morton) for… [continued]

In Me and Orson Welles, directed by Richard Linklater, high school student Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) somehow finds himself cast in a small role in Orson Welles (Christian McKay)’s 1937 production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre.  As the brash, brilliant, egocentric Welles struggles to realize his vision for the production, Richard enters a master class in theatre and life as he struggles to hold his own in the production while also finding himself attracted to Mr. Welles’ pretty, driven young assistant Sonja (Claire Danes).

Whenever Me and Orson Welles focuses on Mr. Welles, and his efforts to mount his production called Caesar, the film soars.  Christian McKay is wonderful as Welles.  He commands the screen whenever he is on it, just as the real Orson Welles did.  As Welles, Mr. McKay is dynamic, funny, and outrageous — an oversized personality, bursting at the seams with brilliance and ego.  There’s an element of caricature in the performance, but it never falls over into silly parody.  Mr. McKay shows us the beating, human heart of the man — his failings, and his burning desire to succeed in his endeavors despite all the obstacles in his way.  It’s an incredible performance, and I hope that Mr. McKay goes on to have a long, successful career.

I was fascinated by the film’s glimpses into Welles’ production: the way he turned constraints into creative devices (choosing to set the film in modern day because he didn’t have money for costumes), and I thrilled to the glimpses we were given into the staging of certain scenes and Mr. Welles and his actors’ debates as to how to bring certain moments from the play to life (such as the death or the poet Cinna).  He ensemble of actors in the film who portray Welles’ ensemble at the Mercury Theatre are very strong (James Tupper, Eddie Marsan, Ben Chaplin, Leo Bill, and more) and could each almost be the lead of their own film.

Unfortunately, where the film falls flat is in the story of the main character, Richard, played by Zac Efron.  While I’m certainly not a fan of Mr. Efron’s (I’ve never seen High School Musical or any of his work), I not a hater, either.  I was eager to see what this young actor/musician could do in this serious role.  Sadly, he’s just terrible.  Mr. Efron plays his scenes with an arrogant smirk that caused me to have an immediate, visceral dislike for his character.  Throughout the film, it’s impossible to tell when Richard is being genuine or when he’s just spinning lies to get the girl or to get a job.  (When Richard first meets Orson Welles, he clearly lies through his… [continued]

In the new film 30 Minutes or Less, Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, an affable though fairly hapless pizza boy.  Aziz Ansari plays Chet, Nick’s closest friend.  The two have been buddies for years, though Chet seems to have figured out his life (we can see that he has a steady job and a nice, clean apartment) in a way that the aimless Nick clearly has not.  But what finally threatens to drive a wedge between the two friends is Nick’s infatuation with Chet’s sister Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria).  Meanwhile, another pair of buddies are concocting a scheme that will turn Nick and Chet’s lives upside down.  Danny McBride plays Dwayne, a frustrated, gun-loving loser living in his father’s basement, while Nick Swardson plays his loyal follower, Travis.  Dwayne’s father, “the Major” (played by Fred Ward), is wealthy after winning the lotto, but he seems to have no interest in passing any of his money on to his son Dwayne.  Spurred on by a suggestion made by a topless dancer (Bianca Kajlich) with whom he is infatuated, Dwayne devises a plan to hire a hit-man (Michael Pena) to kill the Major.  How will he get the money to pay this hit-man?  By strapping a bomb to the chest of a sucker, who Dwayne can then coerce into ribbing a bank for him.  Enter: Nick the pizza-boy, and the movie is off.

When I was a kid, I remember there being a lot of action-comedies — movies like Lethal Weapon that were very funny, but that were also serious action films (rather than just farces).  It doesn’t seem to me that there are too many movies in that style these days, so it was fun to see a group of filmmakers make the attempt to create that sort of movie.  The way in which 30 Minutes or Less throws a lot of crazy comedy into what is, when you think about it, a pretty terrifying story (and one which seems to be based on a real-life event that ended with the poor pizza delivery man being killed), really caught my attention.  Though there’s no action in 30 Minutes or Less that’s on par with the Richard Donner-directed Lethal Weapon, the film is definitely cut from that type of cloth, and that’s a compliment.  (I haven’t seen Lethal Weapon in years, so I have no idea if it holds up, but I have very fond memories of that film from my youth.)

In a similar way, 30 Minutes or Less feels, to me, like the type of movie that The Pineapple Express wanted to be.  I quite enjoyed The Pineapple Express (click here for my review), but I did feel that film… [continued]

After re-watching David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en (click here for my review), I couldn’t resist taking another look back at Fight Club.  As with Se7en, I had seen Fight Club only once before.  I’d really enjoyed it, but because of the violence and the extraordinarily down-beat tone, I’d never been driven to revisit it.

The first thing that struck me upon re-watching the film is that, while the film is just as violent and anti-social as I’d remembered, it’s also incredibly funny.  Maybe my shock at the brutal, casual violence that runs through the film had blinded me to this when I first saw it, or maybe I’d just forgotten.  But Fight Club is very, very funny.  Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk (which I really need to read one of these days), the script by Jim Uhls (which was apparently rewritten by an uncredited Andrew Kevin Walker, who also wrote Se7en) is very sharp.  Fight Club is a tough, take-no-prisoners social satire.  The film has quite a lot to say about our commercial society, and the way advertising holds so many of us in its thrall.  (I love the pan, in the film, of the main character’s apartment, when we can suddenly see on-screen the labels for each purchased-from-a-magazine item of furniture.)

Through the character of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the audience is swept along in the appeal of this society-rejecting rebel.  Tyler has abandoned commercialism and the accepted ideals of how we should be living our life.  Rather than a fancy, well-furnished apartment, he prefers to live in squalor in an abandoned, decrepit building.  When he discovers this do-what-you-want, live-how-you-want lifestyle, Edward Norton’s character (and, by extension, the audience) finds it to be incredibly freeing.  With no one living within a mile of him and Tyler, the two can do whatever they want, whether that’s hitting broken bottles with golf clubs or beating the snot out of one another.

The film — and Tyler — slowly drags Edward Norton and the audience along into weirder and weirder places.  At first, the idea of a fight club — where men find themselves by engaging in brutal one-on-one fistfights — might be horrifying.  But Tyler — happy, sexy, joyous Brad Pitt — is able to sell it to Edward Norton’s character, and to us, as a way to throw off the smothering curtain of “civilized” behavior.  There’s an appeal there that Norton’s character grabs ahold of with both arms, and which the audience can understand.

The fun of the film, of course, is the way Tyler Durden’s behavior eventually causes the viewer to question, and perhaps (or maybe I should write “hopefully”) ultimately reject his philosophies and his… [continued]

I saw Se7en on the big screen back in 1995, and it freaked the hell out of me.  I’m not sure what prompted me to go see it in the first place, but I know that I was entirely unprepared for the brutal film that unfolded before my eyes.  It was tough, shocking stuff, and while I really respected the film I never felt any desire to go back and watch it again.

Almost a decade and a half later, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Social Network have cemented my opinion of David Fincher as one of the finest American directors working today.  With the release of Se7en on blu-ray, I thought it would be interesting to give the film another look.

Even so many years later, Se7en remains as punishing a movie-watching experience as it was back in 1995.  There is some truly vile, stomach-turning stuff on display in the film.  Some of which we see on-screen (I remember my first glimpse of that horribly obsese corpse — the first murder victim discovered at the start of the movie — from 1995, and I found it just as unsettling the second time around), and some of which is just discussed (such as the terrible fate of the prostitute).  But the two blend together into an almost unrelenting parade of horrors, from the first frame to the very last.

All of which, of course, was certainly the intention of David Fincher and his collaborators.  Watching the film, today, I can step back a bit from what I’m watching on-screen to recognize the extraordinary skill on display by the filmmakers.  On crisp blu-ray, Se7en is absolutely beautiful in its unremitting ugliness.  The filmmakers have created a word of unending gloom, from the seemingly never-ending rain in the unnamed city in which the action takes place to the sickly yellow light of Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman)’s refrigerator.  The oppressive urban decay and the constant rain remind me distinctly of Blade Runner, and there’s even a great shot of Brad Pitt running across a street and jumping over cars, his weapon drawn, while the rain continues to pour down, that is a direct quotation of an iconic shot of Harrison Ford from that film.  But Mr. Fincher and his team have gone beyond homage to create a distinctly real, potent environment that is unique to this film.  This city breathes and sweats, and we (and the film’s characters) feel it as an oppressive force.  In Se7en, the city is as much the enemy as the serial-murdering John Doe.

Mr. Fincher has come to be well-known for his meticulous attention to detail, and that is on fine display throughout this… [continued]

In the biting, acid film Roger Dodger, Campbell Scott stars as Roger, a handsome, well-off, and very arrogant New York advertising executive who seems able to use his sharp tongue to talk any women he wants into having sex with him.  One day his 16 year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) shows up in his office.  Nick is in town looking at Columbia, and while he’s there he wants his smooth-with-the-ladies uncle to teach him how to talk to women.  Although he’s at first put-off by the idea of having to deal with this kid, Roger quickly agrees to school Nick in That Which He Knows Best, and the two begin a crazy night that will take them all over the city and in and out of the lives of several fascinating and beautiful women.

I don’t know what on earth prompted me to rent this film on DVD five or six years ago, but it really blew me away as a unique, hard-to-define, I can’t quite believe what I’m watching film.  I’ve been meaning to see it again for ages.

Written and directed by Dylan Kidd, Roger Dodger is an extraordinarily well-written and well-made film that demonstrates the skill of an artist in his prime.  (I really want to know what the heck Mr. Kidd has been up to since 2002!!  I wish he’d made six movies in that time!)  The script is exquisite, with rat-a-tat dialogue that is fiercely intelligent, funny, and very biting.  If you told me that David Mamet had scripted this film, I would easily believe it.

Right away from the opening scene it’s clear that this is a movie unlike many others.  The film opens with a lengthy post-meal conversation over drinks and smokes between Roger and his friends.  In between some light banter with the people around the table, Roger unloads a lengthy monologue describing how he feels that evolution and technology are combining to gradually render the male species obsolete.  Roger’s dialogue demonstrates his keen intelligence and verbal skill, and also his arrogance and his close-minded, gender-focused worldview.  The scene is shot in a fascinating style that Mr. Kidd will utilize throughout the film.  There are never any master shots used (wide shots that show us the setting for a scene and where all of the characters are in relation to one another).  Instead, the scene plays out through a series of close-ups, filmed with a hand-held shaky cam that is continually moving around and observing the central characters through visual obstacles (over the shoulder of another character, obstructed by a glass or a table center-piece, etc.).  It’s a bit disorienting, but also extraordinarily vibrant and energizing, and a terrific way to make… [continued]

Despite the silly title, I had pretty high hopes for Cowboys and Aliens.  The idea of uniting Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones/Han Solo) is genius, and the film boasted a strong supporting cast, a solid director (Jon Favreau, who directed the magnificent first Iron Man film), and the trailer boasted of some nifty special effects and fun sci-fi action.

But in the end, I was disappointed.  Cowboys and Aliens isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty mediocre.  Though Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have a great eye for material (they have been involved with a number of geek properties that interest me, including Star Trek and Transformers) and they seem like nice fellows, I have not liked any of the scripts that they have written.  And I’m starting to wonder if I haven’t over-estimated Jon Favreau in my mind.  He’s a terrific actor and a very funny guy, but in the end he’s really only directed one film (the first Iron Man) that I’ve really loved.

The main problem with Cowboys and Aliens is that the movie has no teeth.  The first 20-25 minutes promise us a confrontation between two tough bad-asses, Craid and Ford, in the midst of some crazy sci-fi mayhem, but that never comes. 

The opening scene to the film is terrific, and it immediately establishes Daniel Craig’s character as a dangerous, kick-ass dude.  We open the film at the moment that Daniel Craig wakes up, in the middle of the desert, with a bizarre technological device attached to his wrist, and no memory of how it got there or of any events that happened before he woke up.  He can’t even remember his own game.  Moments later, some tough guys find him and threaten to kill him, but in a quick, brutal action scene, Craig wipes them out.  It’s a great set-up to his character, and a terrific way to open the movie.

We then spend a while hearing about Harrison Ford’s character, Colonel Dolarhyde (but don’t call him Colonel!).  He is built up as a man to be feared, and when we finally meet him in the flesh, we see Dolarhyde mercilessly torturing an unfortunate soul who Dolarhyde believes has betrayed him. 

We all know that these two characters are on a collision course, and when the sci-fi menace (that we know is coming) rears its ugly head, I was excited to see these two take-no-prisoners mean bastards, played by two movie icons, collide with one another. 

That would have been an awesome movie!!  But that’s not at all what we got.  The film immediately backs off from the toughness of those two characters, and quickly shows us that they’re both really softies underneath their… [continued]

When I first started to read about the possibility of a new Planet of the Apes film, a few years back, I thought the central concept was at once incredibly gutsy and yet at the same time quite boringly predictable.

The idea of remaking not the first Planet of the Apes (the way Tim Burton catastrophically attempted to do, ten years ago), but rather the FOURTH one — re-telling the story of Caesar and his ape revolution — seemed to me to be a rather gloriously insane notion.  Who would be interested in such an “inside baseball” approach (exploring this obscure piece of Apes lore, from Battle for the Planet of the Apes, that I suspected few had ever heard of)?

On the other hand, since Hollywood seems insistent on churning out prequel after prequel these days, it also seemed very boringly of-the-moment to do a Planet of the Apes “Begins” story.  Urgh, when separated from the loopy time-traveling fun of the circular narrative of the original Planet of the Apes films of the ’70s, what was the point?  Did we really need yet another prequel explaining how a beloved fantasy world came to be?

Well, my friends, I am extraordinarily pleased to report that director Rupert Wyatt, along with writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, have managed to create a new Planet of the Apes film that is the best of both worlds.  Set in the present day, the film succeeds as a totally accessible, stand-alone piece of speculative fiction that can be enjoyed by anyone, even if you’ve never seen a minute of any other Planet of the Apes film.  But for those of us die-hard Apes fans, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a wonderfully engaging, clever re-imagining of the series, and one that fits shockingly well into the continuity of the original 1968 film.

James Franco plays Will Rodman, a brilliant young scientist whose passion to create a drug that can repair deficient brain cells is based on his desperate need to help his father (played by John Lithgow), who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.  As the film opens, Will believes that he is on the cusp of incredible success, because one of his ape test subjects has demonstrated enormous leaps in mental cognition after taking Will’s drug.  But things quickly turn sour, and Will’s project is shuttered.  His apes are put down, but one of Will’s co-workers is able to save one baby ape.  When Will discovers the remarkable intelligence possessed by this ape, who he names Caesar, he begins to suspect that maybe his drug was a success after all.  But his noble efforts to cure a terrible disease might have catastrophic consequences… [continued]

My friends and I discovered the Planet of the Apes films in college.  We’d taken to visiting the local rental store, trying to fill in the gaps in our movie-watching histories.  Basically, we rented films that we felt we really SHOULD see, since we considered ourselves movie-fans.  When we realized that none of us had seen Planet of the Apes, we decided to give that a viewing.  Suffice it to say, we LOVED it, in all its silly/serious glory.  When we realized that there were actually FOUR MORE Planet of the Apes films, we decided, well, we’d better watch them all too!  We had a great deal of fun watching the entire series, and the Apes films quickly became the movies we were prone to throw on, late at night, when in need of some entertainment.

So back in 2000/2001, when we heard that there was actually going to be a NEW Planet of the Apes film, and that it was going to be a big-budget version helmed by Tim Burton (a filmmaker we all held in high esteem), we were pretty much blown away with excitement and anticipation.  Though we were well out of college by then, several of us gathered together on opening weekend, to take in this new Apes film together.

Sigh.

I don’t think any of us HATED Tim Burton’s film, but we were pretty underwhelmed by what we saw.  I had such a dim view of Mr. Burton’s movie that, despite being a huge fan of the Apes series, and despite the many times I have re-watched the original five Apes films during the subsequent decade, I have never once been driven to sit down and watch Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes film again.

But I’d been having so much fun, recently, re-watching all of the Apes films in preparation for the new Apes movie that I decided, what the heck, it’s been ten years, let’s give Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes film another go.  Maybe now, removed from all of the hype and my built-up expectations, I’d think more highly of this film.

No such luck.  Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes is pretty much exactly the dud I remembered it being.

Things get off to a bad start right a way with a lugubrious opening credits sequence in which the camera slowly floats around an ornate object extreme close-up.  Gradually the camera pulls back, and we see it’s an ape helmet.  I thought this was cool when Mr. Burton did that with the Bat-Signal during the opening credits of Batman, but here it felt boring — been there, done that.

Things pick up somewhat during the sequence that follows.  In 2029,… [continued]

We have made it, at last, to the fifth and final film in the original Planet of the Apes series!  (Click here for my review of Planet of the Apes, here for my review of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, here for my review of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and here for my review of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.)

Though released only a year after 1972′s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, this final installment is set ten years after the events of that film.  In the intervening years, two key events have transpired: Caesar (Roddy McDowell)’s revolution of the apes has succeeded, and much of the planet has been laid waste by nuclear war.  The mute apes we saw in Conquest have now all gained the ability to speak (though whether this is due to education by Caesar and friendly humans, or to mutation from the nuclear radiation, is never clarified).  In a fairly primitive, jungle village, we see apes and humans living together, though tensions between the two species continue to run high.  A gorilla general named Aldo opposes Caesar’s wish for peaceful co-habitation and plots to kill all of the humans and take control of the ape society.  Caesar, meanwhile, is distracted by a quest to learn about his parents (the deceased Cornelius and Zira) by traveling into the radioactive Forbidden Zone and accessing the video-tape archives stored there.  Will Caesar and his new society be undone by the violent gorillas, or by the mutated remnants of human society living in the Forbidden Zone?

After the society-shattering events of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes seems fairly small in scale.  This is the cheapest-looking of the five original Apes films.  I can imagine that, by this point, the law of diminishing returns had set in, and this film probably had a smaller budget than its predecessors.  Battle also tells, to me, a far less interesting story than did Conquest. Whereas Conquest of the Planet of the Apes still stands today as a pretty shocking, envelope-pushing film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes covers pretty familiar ground: tension between the different species of apes, danger from radioactive mutants, and a few peaceful apes and humans who just want to find a way to get along.

That’s not to say that Battle for the Planet of the Apes is entirely without merit.  The film still boasts an admirable willingness to address some interesting, thorny issues in the way that the very best science fiction does: by presenting real-world issues in a different setting, the better to make a point about… [continued]

I’m entering the home stretch of my journey back through the Planet of the Apes film, as I’ve just taken in the fourth installment: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes! Click here for my thoughts on Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Escape From the Planet of the Apes.

After the silliness of Escape From the Planet of the Apes, this fourth Apes film shifts back into serious mode.  VERY serious.  Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is, I think, by far the most grim and down-beat of all five original Apes films.

Which is not to say it isn’t also chock full of silly and ridiculous things.  Like the incident, at the start of the film, which sets the whole movie’s events in motion.  Kindly Armando (Ricardo Montalban) has secretly been raising Milo (who has choosen the name Caesar), the child of Cornelius and Zira.  All is well.  That is, until Armando decides, for no reason that I can fathom, to take Caesar right into the middle of a large human city.  Here, we see that in the years since the last film, mankind has begun to domesticate and enslave apes, forcing them to serve a servants and menial laborers.  Caesar is, of course, horrified by what he sees.  He promptly stirs up trouble, and finds himself on the run while Armando is arrested.  But why oh why did Armando take him on his little tour of the big city filled with enslaved apes, in the first place???  It boggles my mind.

Anyways, after a lengthy opening sequence that shows us all the horrible things the humans are doing to the apes, we follow Caesar as he finds himself mistaken for an ordinary ape and treated just like all the others.  But Caesar quickly gains control of the situation, and begins fomenting a revolution of all the apes, urging them to rise up and overthrow their human masters.

The film ends with a lengthy, violent sequence as we witness the fateful night that Caesar leads the apes in their successful revolution.  It’s a pretty shocking climax to the film.  The movie doesn’t pull any punches in depicting both the vast number of apes who are killed by the fearful humans, as well as the way many humans are brutally murdered by the throngs of rampaging apes.  We’re a long way from the scenes of Apes going shopping and sipping grape-juice plus in Escape From the Planet of the Apes! All of these films have had tragic endings, but I think this ending is the most brutal one of the whole series.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a… [continued]

And so we come to it at last, the final piece in the puzzle before next summer’s unprecedented super-hero cross-over movie, The Avengers.  There was Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor, and now we have Captain America: The First Avenger.  Captain America is overly simplistic and a little corny at times, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a rollicking good time in a movie theatre.

As with all of the Marvel Studios films so far, the film sets itself up for success with its impeccable casting.  Chris Evans was the best thing about the terrible Fantastic Four movies, and he’s found an even better role here in that of Steve Rogers/Captain America.  He absolutely looks the part, and more importantly than that he’s able to sell Steve Rogers’ aw-shucks good-hearted nature without coming off as silly.  He’s an un-ironic heroic lead, and I found his honest, open-faced portrayal to be quite compelling.  This performance is assisted by some wonderful CGI effects that create the 90-pound weakling version of Steve Rogers that we see in the first act.  This isn’t The Curious Case of Benjamin Button style photo-realism, not by any stretch.  But the effects are convincing, and after a few moments I really did stop thinking about the visual effects and just accepted skinny-Steve as a fully-realized character.  It’s a terrific achievement in effects.

Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings) creates yet another iconic villain in the role of Johann Schmidt, The Red Skull.  Putting on what sounded to me like his best impersonation of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, Mr. Weaving chews a lot of scenery but never tips over the edge into camp.  The Red Skull is a big, bad, totally EVIL comic-book villain, and I thought he was just terrific.  (Possibly the best bad-guy in a Marvel Studios film so far.)  I loved the look of his make-up effects, and I was pleased that once his fleshy mask comes off, it stays off for the rest of the film.

I was surprised at how large a role Tommy Lee Jones has in the film.  I thought this would just be a cameo, but his Colonel Phillips becomes a key character throughout the film, and Jones just kills.  He gets many of the film’s best lines, and his gruff, warm presence is a delight.  Most of the rest of the film’s best lines go to Stanley Tucci as Dr. Abraham Erskine, the inventor of the super-soldier serum that transforms Steve Rogers into Captain America.  This was another surprise for me, and I appreciated that we really got to know Dr. Erskine in the film’s first act.

The film makes some… [continued]

I’ve made this comment in my last several Harry Potter film reviews, but it bears repeating one final time: what an astounding achievement it is, that this eight-film series has made it all the way to the end with the same ensemble of actors all the way through (save for the late Richard Harris).  And, even more than that, what an amazing stroke of luck it is that every single one of the young child-actors who appeared in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has grown into such a marvelous actor in his or her own right.

Though perhaps it’s not luck at all.  Though Chris Columbus’ two installments (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) are by far my least favorite films of the series, the man clearly deserves ENORMOUS credit for his great skill at casting.  The strength of the ensemble he assembled for those first two films has enabled this series to blossom in ways I never could have predicted when walking out of the theatre after seeing that first movie.  It’s a pretty unprecedented achievement.

Somehow I have watched the entire story of Harry Potter on film without having read any of the books (save for the first one, which I read the day before seeing the first film).  Heresy, I know!  But nothing in the first three movies made me want to read the books, and when I really started digging the film series during movie four (which was the first Harry Potter film that I really liked) and movie five (which still stands as my very favorite of the films), I figured that, at that point, I preferred to continue discovering the story through the films.  (Now that I have made it through to the end, I’m sure I will some day soon read through all seven of the books.)  But, for now, as in the past, I will report my comments on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II as someone taking in the film, and the film alone (rather than drawing a comparison to the novel).

I have written before, on this blog, when contemplating the end of long-running television shows, just how difficult it is to craft a satisfactory ending to a long-form story.  From everyone I know who has read the books, it seems that J.K. Rowling accomplished this feat when writing the seventh and final book, and I am pleased to report that the makers of this eight and final film have done the same.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II is an exciting, emotional ride from start to finish, and I felt it provided a wonderful ending to… [continued]

I can’t help it.  I really love The Transformers.  As a kid, I loved the cartoon show, I loved the toys, I loved the crazy-dark animated movie, I loved Marvel Comic’s comic book series, I loved it all.  And that’s why, even after suffering through the abysmal Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (click here for my review — and in hindsight, I went VERY easy on that terrible film), I bought a ticket to see Michael Bay’s latest installment, the woefully titled Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

This third film isn’t nearly as terrible as Revenge of the Fallen, but since Revenge of the Fallen was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, that’s not saying much.

Somewhere, buried deep within Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is a good movie.  That would be a movie about the Autobots miraculously discovering their original leader, Optimus Prime’s mentor Sentinel Prime, alive and well.  But they’d gradually discover that their once-great leader had become broken by the long millennia of bitter war with the Decepticons, and that his discovery would lead to a terrible betrayal which would decimate the Autobot ranks and leave Earth helpless before a Decepticon invasion.  In the rubble of a shattered planet, a brave few Autobots and their human allies would fight desperately for some way to turn the tide and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

That would be a pretty damn good movie, I think!  That story, accompanied by Michael Bay’s clear mastery of constructing action sequences, plus the technical wizardry of the ILM craftsmen who can bring living, talking, Transforming robots to breathtaking life, could be the elements that would combine to form a powerfully entertaining piece of summer popcorn entertainment.

Sadly, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is not that movie.

First of all, Michael Bay and his writers (this time the script is credited to Ehren Kruger) seem relentlessly unwilling to allow any of the actual Transformers to be the main characters in the movie.  That was sort of understandable in the first film, in which it made sense to allow the audience to discover these crazy, outlandish characters (big talking robots who transform into planes, cars, etc.) through the eyes of a human “everyman” audience surrogate character.  But here in the third movie, every time I found myself watching scenes of Spike Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) trying to get a job, or bickering with his parents, or engaging in ridiculous physical “comedy” (and I use the term loosely) with Ken Jeong, I found myself desperate for the movie to cut back to the robots, already!

We do actually get to spend a bit more time with Optimus Prime in this film,… [continued]

Last week I began my project to re-watch all five original Planet of the Apes movies by re-watching the original Planet of the Apes from 1967.  Today, we move to discuss the first sequel: 1969′s Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

For whatever reason, Charlton Heston only participates in this sequel in a very limited role.  We see him in reused footage from Planet of the Apes at the start of the film, and in a handful of new shots, and then not again until the end of the film.  But somehow, shockingly, I don’t find myself missing him all that much.

In Chuck’s place, we meet a new protagonist: Brent (played by James Franciscus).  Brent is pretty much the exact same character as Taylor.  He’s a human from modern time who was catapulted through time and space to crash land on the Planet of the Apes.  (The film postulates that he was sent on a rescue mission to find Taylor and his crew, who never returned home.  But the first film told us that, due to the time dilation effects of space-travel, Taylor and his team weren’t supposed to have returned to Earth until 700 years after they left!  So I’m not quite sure when/why a rescue mission would have been sent after them, but whatever…)  Brent even LOOKS like a dead ringer for Taylor!  This is the type of thing that would usually have me groaning in agony at the stupidity of it all, but somehow when I watch this film I always find myself liking Brent — in many ways, even more than Taylor.  Mr. Franciscus’ performance has none of the scene-chewing histrionics that made Mr. Heston’s work in the original film so memorable, but in some respects that actually helps the story.  Brent seems like a much nicer fellow than Taylor, and he certainly acts more like one would imagine an astronaut would.  Mr. Franciscus isn’t a BIG STAR like Mr. Heston, but he does a fine job carrying the film’s story on his shoulders.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes expands on the world of the first film by playing up the differences between the different types of apes: the conservative, political-minded Orangatuns, the weaker, scientifically-focused Chimpanzees, and the war-like Gorillas.  I find this concept intriguing and it allows for a hint of the social commentary that was such a primary aspect of the first film’s narrative, though the idea that there are just three ape personality types is rather simplistic.

And, anyways, this installment — with its radioactive mutants and their perilous forbidden zone — is clearly far more of a pulp adventure than the first film.  Oh, yes, there are radioactive underground-dwelling… [continued]

Well, we’ve had two very solid super-hero films so far this summer, Thor (click here for my review) and X-Men: First Class (click here for my review), and while neither were quite as perfect as I might have hoped, I found both to be very solidly entertaining films.  But with Green Lantern, sadly, we have our first big super-hero swing-and-a-miss of the summer.

Green Lantern isn’t terrible, and there are certainly a lot of things that work in the film.  But it’s very, very mediocre, and it’s painful to see the potential for a much better film that was squandered.

What works?  The film is, for the most part, well-cast.  Ryan Reynolds does a fine job as Hal Jordan.  He certainly looks the part, and there are moments (such as his desperate, through-gritted-teeth declaration of the Green Lantern oath late in the film) that really made me believe in him as Green Lantern.  The voice actors chosen to portray the alien members of the GL Corps (most notably Geoffrey Rush as Tomar Re and Michael Clarke Duncan as Killowog) are spot-on, and Mark Strong is absolute perfection as Sinestro.

But all are completely wasted in the film!  Let’s begin with Hal Jordan, who is barely a character.  The film wants him to be Tony Stark from Iron Man (the self-centered asshole with incredible abilities who eventually learns to see beyond himself and his own ego to become a hero), but his character arc is so barely sketched in as to be laughable.  It all seemed very predictable and perfunctory to me.  I never felt that we really got to know Hal Jordan at all — who he is and why he behaves the way he does.  (And, no, the painfully on-the-nose flashback during Hal’s test flight at the start of the film didn’t do it for me.  That sequence seemed right out of Airplane!, and that’s not a good thing!)  When he stepped into the role of a hero, it didn’t feel earned the way that Tony Stark’s transition did in the first Iron Man film.

Speaking of Iron Man, the whole vibe of Green Lantern felt totally derivative of that film.  The movie desperately wanted to be hip and cool while also telling a fairly earnest super-hero story, just like the first Iron Man, but Green Lantern was never able to find that tone.

I had thought, from the trailers, that Green Lantern was going to be a cosmic adventure film.  That the film opens in space, and keeps cutting back to events taking place in space (rather than starting with human Hal Jordan and staying with him until he discovered Abin Sur and the Green Lantern… [continued]

I am a big, big fan of the original five Planet of the Apes films (released between 1967 and 1973).  They’re so marvelously ambitious and earnest and, at the same time, so laughably silly, that I’ve always held a great fondness for the series.  While all four sequels represent a steep drop in quality from the original Charlton Heston-starring film, the sequels go in such bizarre, unexpected directions, and they’re so filled with their own charmingly quirky touches, that I find an enormous amount to enjoy in all of them.  (I am not afraid to admit, gentle reader, that my enjoyment of all five of these films is assisted, and sometimes enhanced by, the consumption of generous quantities of grape-juice-plus while watching them.)  With the I-can’t-believe-it’s-really-happening arrival of a new Planet of the Apes film this summer (the ridiculously titled — and that’s saying something for this film series — Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco), it seemed a suitable excuse to go back and revisit the five original films.  (I might re-watch Tim Burton’s 2001 Apes film — which I’ve only seen one time — as well, I haven’t decided yet.)

So let’s begin with the first and the best: the original Planet of the Apes from 1967.  Charlton Heston plays Taylor (not sure if that’s his first or last name), an astronaut who leads a deep-space mission that goes terribly awry — their ship is knocked off-course and crash-lands on a planet where Apes are the dominant species and humans are just mute savages and slaves.  (“It’s a madhouse!”)  Heston’s comrades quickly meet unfortunate ends, but Taylor himself befriends two brilliant and inquisitive chimpanzees: Zira (played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowell).  He also befriends (if that’s what they’re calling it these days — wakka wakka!) a beautiful human girl (played by Linda Harrison) whom he decides to name Nova.  When Taylor’s ability to speak is discovered, he is put on trial by the incredulous ape leaders (including Dr. Zaius, played by Maurice Evans) who cannot believe that a human is capable of speaking the way apes can.  Taylor is eventually freed, and despite Dr. Zaius’ warning (“Don’t look for it, Taylor!  You may not like what you find.”) sets out into the “Forbidden Zone” in order to discover how it came to be that apes took over the planet.  What he discovers brings him to his knees, and has become an indelible image in our pop-culture ever since.  Just in case you didn’t know the surprise ending of the film, it’s spoiled on the DVD box cover art.  (And just in case you missed it on the front cover, the image is… [continued]

… [continued]

I really enjoyed the two Hellboy movies directed by Guillermo del Toro, and the exquisite Pan’s Labyrinth made me a fan of his for life.  Last year I tracked down his 2001 Spanish-language horror film The Devil’s Backbone, which I really enjoyed (you can read my review here), and I was delighted when, a few months ago, the fine folks at the Criterion Collection released a beautiful new edition of Mr. del Toro’s 1993 debut film, Cronos.

Jesus Gris is an elderly antiques dealer.  One day in his shop with his granddaughter Aurora, he discovers an ancient, scarab-shaped amulet hidden in an old relic.  The amulet turns out to be a powerful device that offers its user the promise of immortality — but at a great cost.  When Jesus inadvertently allows the scarab to prick him, he quickly finds himself drawn into a nightmare in which his humanity seems to rapidly spiral out of his reach.

Cronos is an impressive achievement for a first-time writer and director.  (Mr. del Toro wrote the script in addition to directing the film.)  While it’s clear that many of the ideas and stylistic techniques that Mr. del Toro would hone in his future films are, as yet, unpolished, Cronos is still a very competently made horror film.  There are some genuine scares in the film, and some suitably gross makeup effects.  But Cronos isn’t just a film designed to make you jump or squirm.  As with much of Mr. del Toro’s work, there’s a fascinating, original story that drives the film.  The kindly Jesus’ descent into, well, into events that I won’t spoil for you here, is tragic because of Mr. del Toro’s skill at establishing characters who you really care about.  I’m also continually impressed by the originality of Mr. del Toro’s stories and designs.  The scarab device and the other creatures and effects in the film are all singularly unique creations that aren’t in any way derivative of other films or other stories.  I was totally surprised when, late in the film, it becomes apparent that this story is actually Mr. del Toro’s take on a familiar genre of horror.  But because his approach to that genre was so new and clever, I wasn’t able to predict where the film was going at all.  Even in his first film, it’s clear that Guillermo del Toro possesses an unparalleled imagination, and the skill to bring his unique imaginings to the screen.

As with The Devil’s Backbone, I wasn’t at all bothered by having to watch this Spanish-lamguage film using the subtitles.  The story and imagery are so strong that the subtitles weren’t an impediment at all to my engagement with the film.… [continued]

J.J. Abrams’ new film, Super 8, is an unabashed love-letter to the late ’70s and early ’80s films directed by Steven Spielberg and, as such, seems like it was designed from top-to-bottom to tickle every movie-loving funny-bone in my body.  I’m sure I’m not alone.  Super 8 has some narrative problems that prevents it from ever reaching the heights of the great Spielberg-directed films it was designed to emulate, but that doesn’t stop it from being a rousingly entertaining film of a type that we really don’t see too much of anymore.

It’s the summer of 1979, and Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has just recently lost his mother to a terrible accident in the factory where she worked.  As the school-year ends, he finds solace in the project he’s working on with his friends: filming a make-shift zombie movie on a super 8 camera.  Somehow, Charles (Riley Griffiths), the boy directing and masterminding the film, has convinced a girl, Alice (Elle Fanning) to play a part in their movie.  Joe is immediately smitten, but his father (Kyle Chandler) forbids him from having anything to do with her, due to a bitter feud with her father.  One night, after having all snuck out to film a scene of their movie, the boys and Alice witness a terrible train derailment.  Soon after, all sorts of mysterious events begin happening in their small town, and the military arrives to supervise the investigation of the train-wreck.  As things escalate, the boys begin to suspect that something terrible was released when the train crashed, and the super 8 footage they shot that night might hold a vital clue.

It’s interesting that I began that description of Super 8 by writing about some of the character story-lines in the film, rather than the monster-on-the-loose sci-fi story.  That’s because where Super 8 succeeds — and succeeds brilliantly — is in creating several wonderfully layered character story-lines (several of which I have only hinted at in my above summation) that engage the audience and pull at one’s heart-strings.  It’s on the monster side of things where the film wobbles a bit, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Many of Steven Spielberg’s early films were told from the point-of-view of a child or children (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is the best example), and like that film, Super 8 spends a lot of time fleshing out the characters and personalities of the different kids who form the main cast of characters.  I’ve read several reviews that commented on how Mr. Abrams and his team echoed the device used in E.T. of allowing the kids to be constantly talking over one another in the film, the way real kids do.  I… [continued]

I was beginning to think I’d never get to see another great X-Men movie!

I’m a big, big fan of Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men films.  I think they’re pretty much perfect, the first two steps in what seemed like an epic cinematic saga.  When the final shot of X2 tantalized viewers with the promise of the Dark Phoenix saga (probably the single greatest X-Men storyline ever), I was overcome with gleeful anticipation.  I think I’m still recovering from the disappointment at how badly the film series fumbled things from there.  The studio rushed X-Men 3 into production with another director, as a big up-yours to Bryan Singer, who had been hired to direct Superman: Returns.  X-Men 3 has a decent first 45 minutes or so but then things totally collapse, and the brutally awful handling of the Phoenix storyline was crushingly disappointing.  And in the years since, the only new X-Men movie we’ve gotten is the abysmally terrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine (share the pain and read my review here).

When I heard that they were finally putting together a new X-Men film, and that it was a prequel, I was not pleased.  I really hate prequels, as readers of this blog are probably aware.  I think it’s a lazy approach to story-telling, and I’d always rather see a story move FORWARD rather than circle back upon itself.  That we’ve been so deluged with prequels these past few years makes me absolutely crazy.  Why do I want to see the young versions of characters I love?  I want to see the experienced versions of these characters, in their prime, kicking ass and going on new adventures.  Why has that seemingly been so difficult for the masterminds behind the X-Men film franchise?  Can no one in Hollywood think past a trilogy?  X-Men 3 was flawed, but it still made a TON of moola.  Hire some new writers and get to work on X-Men 4! Of all the franchises in the world, the X-Men seems like the easiest no-brainer in the bunch.  There are SO MANY great characters and story-lines in the comics to choose from.  Is Patrick Stewart getting too expensive?  No problemo!  The comics were constantly writing Professor X out of the stories for long periods of time.  Let’s see the films adapt some of the great X-Men stories from the eighties, in which Prof X was gone and Magneto tried to reform and take over the X-Men.  That would be awesome!  It just seems so simple to me — we should be getting brand new X-Men films every 2-3 years, like clockwork.

But, obviously, that hasn’t happened.  Just one god-awful Wolverine solo flick and a prequel.  Going into… [continued]

After watching and enjoying Lost in La Mancha last month, I was in a documentary kind of mood, so I decided to track down a film I remembered reading really positive reviews about upon its release: Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!

This is a really crazy film!!

This documentary chronicles the Australian film scene of the 1970′s and 1980′s.  During those years, a large group burgeoning filmmakers in Australian produced scores of what some would consider “exploitation” films — meaning low-budget films filled with a ton of sex and violence.  Written and directed by Mark Hartley, Not Quite Hollywood delves into the development and spread in popularity of these films and filmmakers.  The documentary is divided into sections focusing on different types of these Ozploitation films — the sex-comedies, the horror films, etc. — while also spotlighting many of the directors, actors, and actresses who worked on these films.

Sometimes you watch a documentary and it’s clear that, while the film is interesting, it’s pieced together from interviews with just a few subjects.  Not this film.  There are literally HUNDREDS of people who have been interviewed for this film.  It’s clear that Mr. Hartley and his team did an extraordinary amount of work to track down so many of the people with stories to tell about the making of these Australian films.  No stone was left un-turned.  It’s impressive, and at times a bit overwhelming!  The film is edited at an extraordinarily rapid clip — with quick interview snippets running one after the other, often-times running over (or sharing a split-screen with) clips from the many films being discussed.  I can’t remember ever seeing a documentary that unfolds at such an energetic pace.  The result is a film that feels as crazy, unhinged, and FUN as the films being discussed!

And boy, there are some crazy films being discussed.  Other than the Mad Max films, I haven’t seen a single one of the many, many films spotlighted in Not Quite Hollywood.  On the one hand, watching this documentary makes me want to track some of these films down!  On the other hand, it’s a tremendous amount of fun watching this only-the-best-bits summations of all of these wacky films, and I’m not sure they’d be quite as much fun at full-length.  As with the interviews, Mr. Hartley and his team have assembled an extraordinarily vast collection of clips from all sorts of these crazy-looking Australian films.  I should warn you: there’s a LOT of nudity in these clips, and also a lot of crazy, bloody scenes of horror.  But it all seems so silly and good-natured (yes, even the horror has such a childish spatterific “top… [continued]

Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a young girl who has been raised in total isolation in a frigid, rural setting by her father Erik (Eric Bana).  When we first meet Hanna, it becomes immediately clear that Erik has been training her to be a fierce warrior — tough, smart, and fearless, with a keen tactical mind and skills with all manner of different weaponry.  Erik has apparently been in hiding from government agent Marissa (Cate Blanchett) for years, but now that Hanna has become a teenager she has grown tired of her isolation.  So Erik allows Hanna to let Marissa know where they are hiding, setting young Hanna on a violent collision course with Erik and Marissa’s secret past.

Hanna is a violent, fast-paced thriller.  This story could have been a slow-burn story of intrigue and subterfuge, but while there is no shortage of intrigue and subterfuge in the tale, Hanna is a kinetic, adrenaline-pumping film right from minute one.  The throbbing, techno-beat pumping of the score reminds me of Run Lola Run, and it drives the action scenes forward with at a propulsive pace that is also reminiscent of that terrific German film (read my review here).

This was not exactly the type of movie I expected to see from Joe Wright, the director of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement.  But his second collaboration with Saoirse Ronan is incredibly potent, and Mr. Wright brings extraordinary skill and style to spare to this film.  And truly, Hanna is an exercise in cinematic style from start to finish.  There’s nothing exceedingly unique about the story of spies and their dark secrets, but the execution by Mr. Wright and his team give the film a truly distinct flavor all its own.

They are ably assisted, of course, by the terrifically talented threesome of Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, and Cate Blanchett.  I haven’t seen Atonement, the first film that brought Ms. Ronan national attention a few years ago, but she is a captivating presence here.  There’s a bright intelligence to be seen behind her piercing blue eyes, and she is entirely convincing as the brutal, feral warrior she has been raised to be.  She also completely sells the moments of naive innocence exposed in Hanna when she’s confronted with aspects of the modern world that she’s never before experienced.

Cate Blanchett is touch as nails and entirely unlikable as Marissa, which of course is exactly what the role calls for.  Ms. Blanchett dials back her charisma to create, in Marissa, a woman who is clearly a shell of a human being, totally devoted to her job and her pursuit of secrets that has become her whole life.  She’s a great villain.

Then there is Eric… [continued]

When you combine the two main creative forces behind Freaks and Geeks (one of the greatest television shows ever made) with some of the funniest actresses working today, is it any result that the resulting film is an uproariously funny, ferociously entertaining comedy from start to finish?

Kristen Wiig stars in Bridesmaids as Annie, a young woman whose life is on a bit of a downturn.  Her boyfriend left her, which would be painful enough if the withdrawal of his financial backing didn’t also cause her bakery business to go under.  Annie is at first happy to hear that her life-long best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), has gotten engaged, but soon that happy news turns bitter as Annie begins to feel that Lillian has found a new best friend in one of her bridesmaids, the wealthy, perky Helen (Rose Byrne).  As she feels Lillian slipping away from her, Annie tries ever-harder to plan perfect wedding-related events for her friend, but those efforts wind up exploding in increasingly spectacular fashion.

In addition to starring in the film, Kristen Wiig co-wrote Bridesmaids with Annie Mumolo.  No one could possibly survive and thrive on Saturday Night Live for as long as Ms. Wiig did without clearly having a strong comedic voice and some writing skills, but this film firmly establishes her as a powerhouse talent.  She and Ms. Mumolo have crafted a script that is screamingly funny but also endearingly human.  There is some exaggeration in the film, to be sure, and there are some characters who drift closer to comedic archetypes than they do to real people.  But the central story-line of the film is very real and very honest.  The description of the film’s plot in the above paragraph could just as easily be the plot for a somber, depressing drama.  Obviously, Bridesmaids is anything BUT a depressing drama!  But the idea of a life-change driving a wedge between long-time friends is a story that rings emotionally true, and that gives the film a weight that many other raunchy comedies don’t have.

Having a potent, real emotional story at the core of the craziest of comedies has been one of the reasons why the films directed by and produced by Judd Apatow over the last several years have been so terrific.  Mr. Apatow produced Bridesmaids, and I can see immediately why he responded to the script by Ms. Wiig and Ms. Mumolo.  It’s also easy to see why this story appealed to Mr. Apatow’s former Freaks and Geeks collaborator, the amazing Paul Feig.  (Mr. Feig created Freaks and Geeks, while Mr. Apatow served as the executive producer.  Mr. Feig directed Bridesmaids, which was produced by Mr. Apatow.)  You might not all… [continued]

The phenomenally high-quality Moon (starring Sam Rockwell — read my review here) guaranteed that I’d buy a ticket for director Duncan Jones’ next film.  Well, that film has arrived, and although it took me several weeks to find the time to get catch it in a theatre, I’ve finally seen Source Code.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Captain Colter Stevens.  He wakes up on a train heading towards Chicago, but doesn’t have any idea how he got there.  His last memory is flying a mission in Afghanistan.  Across the seat from him is a woman, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), who seems to know him, but he has no idea who she is.  Also, she calls him Sean.  After a few frantic minutes trying to figure out what’s happening to him, the train explodes, killing Captain Stevens, Christina, and everyone on board.

But Captain Stevens doesn’t die.  He wakes up in some sort of pod.  A woman on-screen in a military uniform identifies herself as Goodwin and begins to lay out some of the details of Captain Stevens’ situation.  A terrorist detonated a bomb on that train and has threatened to decimate Chicago by detonating another bomb, this one with nuclear material.  A technology known as Source Code will allow Captain Stevens to relive the last eight minutes of life of one of the passengers on the doomed train.  He has that long to try to identify the bomber and prevent the threatened destruction of Chicago.  They’re going to continue sending him back into that eight minutes until he does.

Let me get this right off the bat: Source Code is no Moon. It’s an entertaining sci-fi thriller, and it certainly has some fun mind-bending concepts, but it’s nowhere near as memorable as the incredibly original, tightly-structured Moon.

Both Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan do fine work as the two leads.  They’re both talented and charismatic enough that they capture our interest even though we don’t really get to learn much about either character.  The focus of the film is far more on the intricate sci-fi plotting than it is on developing characters.  That’s not a criticism — I love twisty plot-driven films.  But when comparing this film to, say Speed (which is certainly not great cinema but is a rousing action adventure that also focuses on a man and a woman trapped in an enclosed moving vehicle in a tense situation), it’s clear that we certainly get to know Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock’s characters far better than we do those of Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Monaghan.  I adored Ms. Monaghan’s work in the magnificent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and the also-terrific Gone Baby Gone, and I’ve been waiting for her… [continued]

Although Thor doesn’t come close to equalling some of the amazing super-hero films we’ve been blessed with over the past several years (the first Iron Man, which kicked off this current run of inter-connected Marvel films, The Dark Knight, the first two X-Men films, and the first two Spider-Man films), it is a WAY better film version of the character of Thor and his mythos than I EVER would have imagined possible.

Despite by being a huge comic book fan and a Marvel Zombie since I was a kid, I never read the Thor comic regularly.  I always thought Thor was great as part of the ensemble of The Avengers, but his solo title never captured my interest.  And when Marvel announced, after the huge success of Iron Man, that they were working on a film version of Thor (as part of a series of films that would build up to The Avengers), I was dubious.  The recent Marvel films had worked so well in large part because they were fairly grounded.  Sure, Iron Man wound up with two guys in huge metal suits punching each other, but the filmmakers and the actors took pains to ground the story in the real world (and to give the characters human, real-world motivations and emotions).  I think that was a big part of the film’s success.  Same goes with the Spidey films and the X-Men films (which, for example, cast off most of the more colorful aspects of the comics — like the yellow spandex costumes).

But Thor? The Thor comic books are all about a big guy who is ACTUALLY A NORSE GOD and speaks in archaic language (a lot of “thees” and “thous”) and who has crazy adventures with other gods or god-like characters.  How could that possibly be achieved in a film that wouldn’t feel painfully small-scale (without the budget or the resources to properly achieve the epic scale of Thor’s cosmic adventures as seen in the comics) and/or feel totally ridiculously silly.

And yet, somehow, director Kenneth Branagh managed to pull off a film that, for the most part, works really well and is enjoyable both as a film in its own right and as a key stepping-stone towards The Avengers.  This is an impressive achievement and a pretty fun time at the movies!

As with Iron Man, the film’s biggest success lies in it’s casting.  There are other things that one can pick at about Thor (and I will of course do so momentarily), but I think the casting is pretty much spot-on perfect.  Chris Hemsworth (so great as James T. Kirk’s doomed dad in the opening scenes of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek) is tremendous as Thor.  He… [continued]

I had a chance last month to see Rango, the new film by Gore Verbinski (who most recently helmed the three Pirates of the Caribbean films).  Johnny Depp voices the titular Rango, a lonely but imaginative chameleon.  In the opening minutes of the film we see that Rango, living alone in the small glass box owned by a suburban family, has dealt with his solitude by inventing an enormously rich inner life for himself.  But his carefree life of imagination is violently interrupted by a car-accident that leaves him stranded on his own by the side of the road.  Rango eventually makes his way into a tiny town called Dirt, populated by a motley assortment of animals.  Through some good luck, Rango manages to kill a hawk that’s been menacing the town, and so finds himself appointed sheriff.  But that quickly puts him in conflict with the sinister forces attempting to control the town for their own devices, and Rango will need more than just imagination to keep his head attached to his shoulders and, just maybe, save the town and win the girl.

Rango is a slight, though endearing, fairy-tale fable of the Old West.  All of the familiar Western archetypes are there, just pleasantly twisted by having the roles played by various animals.  The film is chock-full of references to other movies.  There’s the over-all Chinatown plot, of course (no incest, just a businessman attempting to use a drought to his own nefarious purposes), along with a ton of little winks and nods to various other cowboy films.  (Many of which, I’m sure, went right over my head, since I can’t say that my knowledge of westerns is that deep.)  These aren’t really in-your-face gag-references, like you’d see in the Shrek films.  Thank heaven for that!  No, these are more subtle references that add a fun layer of texture to the film’s story.  (Well, mostly subtle.  The character who portrays the Spirit of the West is just who you’d expect it to be.  But that scene is still so much fun that I couldn’t possibly complain.)

Rango is the first feature-length animated film produced by George Lucas’ incredible visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic.  As such, no surprise, it looks incredible.  The film has a very different look from that of the Pixar films — the stylization of the animation leans less towards cartoony simplification and more into hyper-detailed weirdness.  That’s not to say it looks better or worse than a Pixar film — just that it looks different.  And, again, thank heaven for that!  Pixar is not going to ever be beaten at its own game, so it was wise of the artists at ILM to… [continued]

I have fond memories of watching The Natural with my father as a kid, but it’s been quite a number of years since I’d seen it last.  When I saw a blu-ray of the film on-sale at Amazon for just a few bucks, I snatched it up.  What fun it was to revisit this fine film!

In Barry Levinson’s 1984 ode to baseball and Americana, Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs.  As a young man he is clearly gifted with amazing skills at the game of baseball, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stand in his way to become the best ball-player to ever play the game.  But one moral mis-step cuts his dreams short.  Roy gets a second chance sixteen years later, when as a middle-aged rookie he comes back to the majors to help a losing ball-club on it’s quest for the pennant.

There’s a dramatic through-line to the film, of course, but The Natural really is a fairy-tale.  That had always been by recollection of the film, but I was still surprised, re-watching it now, just how prominent those fairy-tale aspects of the film are.  Watching the film, you might notice that the dangerous females all wear black, while the honest, noble heroine wears white.  But it cuts deeper than that.  The film is, at essence, a morality play.  It’s clear that we’re meant to understand that young Roy Hobbs is struck down by the woman in black not out of some random chance, but because he chose to break faith with his girlfriend back home (Glenn Close).  Then, later in the film, during his come-back season, when he takes up with the duplicitous Memo (Kim Basinger), his seeming invincibility at the plate suddenly ends.  In the world of The Natural, only the morally true can succeed.

I found this puzzling as a kid (I didn’t really understand why one moment Roy Hobbs could hit nothing but home runs, while the next he was striking out, and I was totally befuddled by the motivations of the woman in black), while now as an adult I find it to be endearingly sweet.  Such a simplistic, moral story could collapse into silliness, but the film is carried along by strong direction by Barry Levinson and some great performances by a high-wattage cast.

At the top, of course, is Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs.  Other than Christopher Reeves’ performance as Superman in the late seventies and early eighties, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with such a striking representation of truth, justice, and the American way.  The performance works because Mr. Redford — as did Mr. Reeves — plays the role with such straight-faced honesty and enthusiasm, with… [continued]

It seems to me like Paul, the new film from Simon Pegg & Nick Frost, has been flying far under the radar.  That’s too bad, because the two men (who, along with Edward Wright, were responsible for Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz) just might be the finest comedy duo working today.  They’re each great individually, but there’s something magical that happens when the two get together.  Paul doesn’t reach the comedic heights of Shaun of the Dead, but it’s pretty great nonetheless.

Pegg plays Graeme and Frost plays Clive, two geeky Brits who have traveled to the US to attend the San Diego Comic-Con and then take a driving tour of the locations of famous UFO sightings.  The last thing they expect is to actually encounter a real-live extra-terrestrial: the fast-talking, good-times-loving alien named Paul who is on the run from mysterious government forces.  Will the nerds be able to help Paul escape the men in black and meet up with the space-ship sent to take him home?

The movie hits the geek jokes a bit hard in the early-going (making fun of the costume-wearing crazies who attend Comic-Con is a pretty easy joke) but the film quickly settles into a nice rhythm… and then builds towards a frenetic, hilarious finish.  I like comedies that are also able to get audiences to invest in the adventure story being told (I hold up Ghostbusters as a prime example of this), and I was quite pleased by how engaged I was by the film in the third act, when the chase was really on.

Although I missed Edgar Wright, it’s hard to complain with someone as talented as Greg Mottola at the helm.  Mr. Mottola directed Superbad and Adventureland (a vastly underrated film that I just re-watched last week and loved as much as the first time I saw it).  The man is a keen comedy director, giving his cast room to play but also keeping the film moving at a fast clip.

One could play a fun game connecting the dots from Mr. Mottola’s past work to see how he assembled such a terrific ensemble to surround Frost and Pegg.  From Superbad, he brought in Seth Rogen.  Mr. Rogen voices the alien Paul, and it’s brilliant, inspired casting.  Once you hear Mr. Rogen’s voice emanating from the short, big-headed alien, you know what type of a film you’re in for.  Rogen really sinks his teeth into the role, and his line delivery is impeccable.

By the way, I should also note that the visual effects work on Paul himself are incredible.  This isn’t a movie that I expected to dazzle me with state-of-the-art visual effects, but I… [continued]

I’m here at last with the long-delayed final installment of my Spielberg in the Aughts series with a look at Mr. Spielberg’s 2005 film, Munich. This was pretty much the only Spielberg film from the last decade-and-a-half that I’d unabashedly loved when I first saw it in theatres, and I’m pleased that I found the film to be just as strong when re-watching it last month.

In September, 1972, eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich were held hostage and eventually murdered by members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group.  Following those terrible events, the film postulates that an Israeli Mossad agent named Avner (Eric Bana) is asked to lead a small, secret group of Israeli agents assigned to hunt down and assassinate the men who the Israelis hold responsible for the Black September plot.

I think that Munich is one of, if not the most, mature and emotionally devastating films that Steven Spielberg has ever made.  There’s no question that Mr. Spielberg is one of our preeminent masters of the pop crowd-pleasing adventure film, and he’s also shown great skill at tackling more serious topics in films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, and more.  In all of those films, though, the lines between good and evil were very clearly drawn.  What fascinates me about Munich, and what gives the film a power equal to if not surpassing those films I just named, is that this story is all about shades of gray.  There are no clearly defined heroes or villains in this film, and while one might enter the film with pre-established sympathies for either the Israeli or the Palestinian side in these events, the film wisely avoids painting either side as entirely heroic or entirely villainous.

As Avner and his team set about tracking down and killing their assigned targets, we see not only how Avner and his men (who each begin the assignment with varying degrees of idealism and toughness) begin to feel the mental and moral effects of their bloody work, but also how their actions — however justified they (and some audience members) might feel them to be — serve to extend the cycle of violence.  When Avner’s team kills a target, it’s not long before another terrorist group strikes back against Israeli targets, and so on and so forth.

Note that the film’s making a point about how violence serves only to beget violence is a subtly — but critically — different message than saying that the actions of this Israeli team are entirely without justification.  I don’t think the film gives that message at all.  I remember reading some criticisms of this film, from Jewish perspectives, that took… [continued]

A few days ago, Devin Faraci wrote a great piece over on Badassdigest.com (a really phenomenal site that I can’t recommend highly enough) about the terrible ending of the classic Bill Murray film, Stripes.

Mr. Faraci is right on the nose — the last 30 or so minutes of Stripes are really quite terrible.  Now, I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of the first two-thirds of Stripes, either.  I think I saw the film way too late in life to really connect with it the way other children of the eighties did.  Despite my long-held love for Bill Murray’s movies of the 1980′s (epitomized by my near fanatical worship of Ghostbusters), somehow I missed Stripes throughout my childhood — I only finally saw it when I was in college, and by then I just didn’t find it all that funny.

But Mr. Faraci’s article got me thinking about other good films undone by their endings… and wondering if there any films, as Mr. Faraci asks, whose first two-thirds are so good that I forgive their weak ending?

(Let me state that, obviously, SPOILERS LIE AHEAD for the films under discussion!!)

Let’s begin with some films that start off strong but are, in my opinion, completely ruined by their terrible endings:

No Country for Old Men — I was totally engrossed in this tense, beautiful film for much of its run-time, but the ending totally sunk my enjoyment.  After following the character of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) throughout the film, and totally investing in him, I couldn’t believe how that character was completely abandoned and ignored in the final few minutes of the movie.  The film’s title — No Country for Old Men — and the way the end of the film focuses on Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) indicates to me that the Coen Brothers intended the film to be the Sheriff’s story, not Llewelyn’s.  But the movie never earns that.  It never shows us the message given by its title, and Tommy Lee Jones’ monologue in the last scene.  What was it about the death of Llewelyn Moss that so affected Sheriff Bell?  For a man who had clearly been involved in other cases that involved murder and death, what was it about this particular event that shook the Sheriff so deeply?  We’re never told, and ultimately, as a viewer, I didn’t care too much about Sheriff Bell — I was invested in Llewelyn!  And having the end of his story be cut off by the finale really disappointed me.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence — Not that the first two-thirds of this film were so perfect to begin with, but had the movie ended with David… [continued]

I’m always intrigued, but a bit worried, when I hear that another Philip K. Dick story is being turned into a movie.  Many adaptations of Mr. Dick’s work have been pretty horrid, and even the ones that are great (such as Total Recall and Blade Runner) tend to diverge pretty far from the source material.  But the promise of one of Mr. Dick’s short stories being used as the basis for the script, along with an intriguingly talented cast, piqued my interest in the new film, The Adjustment Bureau.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a young, hot-shot rising-star politician who, nevertheless, has just lost the race for the New York Senate seat.  In the moments before he’s to give his concession speech, he meets a beautiful young dancer named Elise (Emily Blunt) in the bathroom.  She’s hiding out from security in the men’s room because she just crashed a wedding in the same building.  Sparks immediately fly between the two, and she inspires David to give a surprising off-the-cuff speech that  almost immediately begins to revive his political career.  When the two meet again soon thereafter, bumping into one another on a city bus, it’s clear that they have a powerful connection.  But almost immediately David finds himself confronting a mysterious group of men who seem determined to keep the two apart.  These men are the Adjustment Bureau.  They claim to be the instruments of a higher power, helping to keep people on their proper paths.  They warn David that he and Elise are not fated to be together, and that if he does not let her go, the consequences will be disastrous for them both.

For a film based on a story by Philip K. Dick (his 1954 tale Adjustment Team), the film is actually surprisingly light on the science fiction.  It’s really more of a fantasy about belief and faith and fate than it is a sci-fi adventure.  That’s not in any way a criticism.  The film incorporates the fantastic with a fairly light touch, keeping the focus squarely on David’s real-world emotions and his struggle to find a way out of the impossible situation in which he finds himself.

The glimpses we were given into how the Adjustment Bureau functions were fun — just tantalizing enough to leave us intrigued but not bogged down by exposition.  I loved the look of their books (which map individuals’ destinies), and I thought that their system of traveling incredible distances in the blink of an eye through doors that they could turn into portals across the globe was cool (even if the thunder of this device was stolen slightly by Monsters, Inc. — still, Mr. Dick’s story came first!).  There… [continued]

It is absolutely unbelievable to me that it has been nearly FIFTY YEARS since the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, back in 1962.

(I don’t think the 1954 television version of Casino Royale counts.)

Let me say right at the outset that I am an enormous James Bond fan.  My enthusiasm for the film series began when I was in college.  After a bunch of my friends and I went to see Goldeneye in theatres, and enjoyed the heck out of it, we decided to go back and start re-watching all of the earlier films.  Over the next several years, a group of us became quite fanatical about the Bond films, watching and re-watching them all the time (often — I will admit, gentle reader — in various stages of intoxication).

But time passes, and I realized the other day that, while I’ve watched the two Daniel Craig Bond films several times, it had been quite a number of years since I’d seen most of the earlier films.  So I’ve decided to go back to the beginning, and re-watch the series in order.  I’m not going to rush things.  I’m not commiting to watching a film a week or anything like that.  Like a fine bottle of 1953 Dom Perignon (which is probably a lot harder to come by today that it was when James expressed his preference for it back in 1962), this is a series that should be savored!

The film: What a pleasure it was to re-watch Dr. No.  It’s astonishing to me how well-made the film is.  Despite its age, I think it holds up remarkably well.  It’s a taut action thriller, one that takes its time to develop the story without ever losing any of the fun or the tension.  Dr. No is a much smarter film than much of what passes for action movies these days.  But it’s also very fast-paced, keeping the film interesting to a modern audience.  (A number of participants on the wonderful commentary track on the DVD comment on the groundbreaking nature of Dr. No‘s editing.  It might not seem fast-paced to us today, but the filmmakers took great pains to cut the film in a manner that would keep the story zipping along.  I think that’s a big reason why the film still works so well today.)

Dr. No was made on a tiny budget, but you’d never know it.  I continually find myself amazed by the broad canvas of the film — it takes place in countless different locations and sets, and everything looks convincingly real to my eyes.  I’ll discuss this further later in my review, but the impressive set design is but one way… [continued]

Although I’m a huge fan of Wes Anderson, somehow I had only seen Rushmore – the film that broke him through to a larger audience — one single time.  I saw it on VHS back in 1999 or 2000.  I didn’t know a thing about Wes Anderson at the time, I just knew it was a Bill Murray comedy that had been well-reviewed when it came out.  But since my idea of a great Bill Murray comedy was something like Ghostbusters or Groundhog Day, I was totally unprepared for Rushmore.  I didn’t like it at all.

Thinking back on it, I think the problem was that I was expecting a totally different kind of movie.  I didn’t know quite what to make of Mr. Anderson’s little film.  It was a much more somber, sad film than anything I would readily describe as a “comedy.”  I do remember laughing at a few points — particularly the mid-movie montage in which Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman’s characters try to destroy one another — but those moments were few and far between.  It also probably didn’t help that I was watching the movie on a tiny little TV screen, late at night when I was exhausted.

For years now I’ve been thinking that I really should go back and revisit Rushmore.  It’s GOT to be a better film than I remember it being, I thought!  After watching Wes Anderson’s first film, Bottle Rocket, last year (click here for my review), I was all set to re-watch Rushmore.  But somehow, months passed, and I never got to it.

But last month, finally, I did!

As I expected, I thought much, much more highly of Rushmore this time.  I still think that The Royal Tenenbaums is far and away Wes Anderson’s greatest film (though The Fantastic Mr Fox certainly would give it a run for its money — click here for my review of that film), but I quite enjoyed Rushmore, and I can see why it was such a critical darling upon its release in 1998.

Jason Schwartzman turns in a star-making performance as the Max Fischer — an overachiever who has founded countless school clubs and written and directed a series incredibly elaborate plays but who, nevertheless, is in danger of flunking out of Rushmore Academy.  Max strikes up a friendship with Herman Blume (Bill Murray) a rich local businessman who finds that he likes the eccentric Max far more than his own “popular” sons.  The two men are both lost and lonely, and they’re able to find deep common ground between them, despite their age difference.  That is, until they both fall in love with the same woman: a teacher… [continued]

Last spring I wrote about OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies, a French parody of the Sean Connery era James Bond films.  I really liked the movie — I thought it was a spot-on Bond parody and very, very silly — and so I was very excited to watch the 2009 sequel: Rio Ne Repond Plus.  (The English subtitle is Lost in Rio.)

Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, French secret service agent code-named OSS 117, is assigned a new case: to track down and pay-off an ex-Nazi, Professor von Zimmel,  who has a list of French collaborators from WWII.  Hubert is quickly intercepted by a group of Mossad agents, who want von Zimmel captured and brought back to Israel for trial.  So Hubert reluctantly teams up with Israeli colonel Dolores Kulechov.  They decide to locate von Zimmel by using his son, but quickly find themselves beset by double-agents, masked wrestler/hit-men, groovy hippies, and a lot of Nazis.

Once again, Jean Dujardin plays Hubert.  The over-the-top Francophonic Hubert is arrogant, racist, and misogynistic.  But in an endearing way!  Well, fairly endearing.  Lost in Rio pushes the humor of the series even further outside the bounds of political correctness than the last installment did.  For the most part, the boundary-pushing humor works, because Mr. Dujardin imbues Hubert with such happy cluelessness that he’s hard to dislike.  And the film is pretty clear that it is Hubert himself who is the buffoon, and the subject of our laughter.

The key to this is for the film to ensure that Hubert, rather than any of the people he mocks or puts down, is the primary idiot in every scene.  He can laugh about how useless his female partner is, but since we can clearly see her being extraordinarily brave and heroic, we know that the joke is on Hubert.  The only major mis-step of the film, for me, was the running subplot about the various Chinese hit-men chasing after Hubert all being hard to understand.  Hubert’s jokes about their accents are a little less funny because the actors portraying the hit-men DO all speak in a sort of silly accent.  The film wants us to laugh a little at the Chinese hit-men, not just at Hubert himself, and I think that’s a mistake.

But over-all, the film is extremely funny.  There’s a lot of pleasure to be had from the continued tweaking of Bond-era styles, from Hubert’s wardrobe — which includes a tiny blue Goldfinger-esque terry cloth robe — to the insanely over-the-top use of split-screens in certain sequences.  Some of the humor is very low-brow physical, while some is clever word-play.  (There’s an Au Revoir, Les Enfants joke that really tickled my funny bone.)… [continued]

And so we come at last to the final installment (for now, at least!) of my “Catching Up on 2010″ series, in which I’ve been writing about all of the 2010 films that I watched in my very busy January attempt to catch up on as many of the 2010 films that I’d missed as possible.

Martin Scorcese’s new film, Shutter Island, didn’t much interest me when it came out last summer.  But it was a new Scorsese picture, so it automatically had my attention.  I never got around to seeing it in theatres, but I was able to catch up to it on DVD last month.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall dispatched, along with his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), to investigate the disappearance of an inmate at Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane located off the coast of Massachusetts.  The woman, Rachel, seems to have vanished without a trace from within her locked cell.

Right away from the beginning of the film, I was a bit put off by the over-wrought score.  Every beat in those early moments was punctuated by bombastic, creepy music that seemed to state loudly, just in case we missed it, that SHUTTER ISLAND IS EVIL and something REALLY BAD is going on there!  I felt that the dour overcast skies, the deranged-looking inmates, the imposing architecture, and the unfolding story would have been more than sufficient to establish a suitably fearsome, unsettled vibe, which is clearly what Mr. Scorsese was going for in those opening scenes.  I didn’t think there was any need for the over-the-top score to shove that in our faces.

But once the plot began to unfold I thought the film settled down into a nice rhythm.  There are some great actors at play in this film, and I enjoyed watching the mysteries of the story develop and deepen.  I was also quite struck by the backstory given to Mr. DiCaprio’s character, Teddy.  It turns out that he was involved in the liberation of a concentration camp at the end of WWII, and he is haunted by the atrocities he witnessed — as well as the reprisals against the German soldiers of the camp that he participated in.  That particular story point caught me off-guard.  I had no idea that the Holocaust played any part in the story of Shutter Island.  (The trailers wisely left that tid-bit out.)  I was intrigued by this revelation of Teddy’s back-story.  It indicated to me that perhaps there was far more going on in Shutter island than just a ghost story, and that Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators (including Laeta Kalogridis, adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel) had more to… [continued]

I noticed the small Australian crime drama, Animal Kingdom, on many critics’ 2010 Top 10 Lists, so I decided to track the film down myself to take a look.

Whoa.  I was not at all prepared for the level of terrible spirit-crushing oppression contained in this joyless look at a family of Australian drug-dealers.  I can totally understand why many critics connected to the unique voice represented by this fierce film, but I found it tough to get through at times and, overall, a pretty dour movie-watching experience.

In the film’s opening scene, seventeen year-old J (for Joshua) discovers that his mother has died of a heroin overdose.  With nowhere else to go, he calls his grandmother Janine “Smurf” Cody (Jacki Weaver), and she agrees to take him in.  Very quickly, we discover what young J apparently already knew: that Janine and her sons are a pack of vicious criminals involved in drug-running and armed assaults.  Things get even more complicated when police detective Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) begins pushing J to inform on his family.  Though Leckie’s intentions seem honorable — to pull J out of the terrible environment in which he’s living — he winds up putting J in the hot-seat with his family, particularly the brutal “Pope”.

Writer/director David Michod has crafted a tough, take-no-prisoners film.  Like J, we are thrust right into the proverbial lion’s den of this family and their fearsome matriarch.  Jacki Weaver’s performance as Janine is the highlight of the film.  At first she appears sweet and friendly to J, but once we see the way she kisses her sons (with uncomfortably lengthy kisses on the lips), it’s clear that this woman is somewhat off the reservation.  As the film unfolds, we learn that she might be the hardest, most dangerous member of the family.  It’s a powerhouse of a performance — Ms. Weaver creates a truly dangerous character.  We never know whether her face will be full of sweetness or of death.

James Frencheville does strong work in the lead role as J.  It’s a tough role.  J is pretty passive, with a deer-in-the-headlights look for most of the film, but once he does finally start to take action we really see Mr. Frencheville come to life.  (There’s one particular scene, late in the film, in which J breaks down in a bathroom, that is really emotional, powerful stuff, really well-played by Mr. Frencheville.)  I love Guy Pearce, and it’s great to see him in this film.  His detective is portrayed in marked contrast to the Cody family, yet Mr. Pearce gives him just enough ambiguity that we must wonder whether he truly has J’s best interests at heart.  I was also… [continued]

In The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the novel by Jim Thompson, Casey Affleck stars as Texas sheriff’s deputy Lou Ford.  At first, he seems like the good-natured heroic main character of the film.  ”Around here, if you’re not a man and a gentleman, you’re nothing,” Lou intones in a monologue that opens the film.  My initial reaction was that Lou was describing the way he tries to live his life — the importance of striving to be a gentleman.  The reality, as we quickly learn, is much darker.  Lou is certainly not a gentleman and barely even a human being.  His statement reflects his cold, blunt knowledge of that fact.

The Killer Inside Me is worth watching purely for the phenomenal lead performance of Casey Affleck.  I am continually amazed by Mr. Affleck’s insistence on taking on challenging, outside-of-the-mainstream roles, and also for his extraordinary versatility as an actor.  He can play straight comedy in the Ocean’s Eleven films, a heroic but conflicted lead character in Gone Baby Gone, and then the most horrible type of evil in this film.  It’s an extraordinary range for an actor to display, and with each film Mr. Affleck seems to get better and better.  In The Killer Inside Me, one can’t help but be captivated as Mr. Affleck reveals layer upon deeper layer of the cruel, horrible individual who Lou Ford really us.  It’s a raw, electrifying performance, and one from which you really can’t look away.

The rest of the film is a little more difficult to praise.  The film is outrageously violent, and there are several extremely gruesome and graphic depictions of Lou Ford’s violence towards women that verge on the nauseating.  I don’t have a strong stomach for violence in films, I will readily admit, and this film really pushed me to my limits.  It’s not that there is constant violence throughout the film — it’s more that there are several instances of intense, terrible violence.  In particular, one female character meets a shocking demise about of a third of the way into the film.  It’s a stunning moment — not only because I had expected that character to stick around for the rest of the film, but also because of the extraordinarily painful, extended, right-on-camera depiction of her death.  It’s really rough stuff.  I don’t think the violence is necessarily gratuitous — I do understand what Mr. Winterbottom was intending to accomplish — but it’s so tough to watch that in many ways those moments pull me right out of the story I’m watching unfold.

Though what really cripples the film, for me, is the loony left-turn that the narrative takes in the final ten-or-so minutes.… [continued]

While I try not to let a filmmaker’s personal life interfere with my enjoyment of their work, I must admit that I didn’t exactly feel a burning desire to rush out and see the latest Roman Polanski film, 2010′s The Ghost Writer. However, while Mr. Polanski’s somewhat sordid past did give me pause, I must of course acknowledge his tremendous skills as a filmmaker.  So, in that respect, his involvement in The Ghost Writer also piqued my interest in the film.  I wondered what sort of spin Mr. Polanski had brought to a story that looked, on the surface, like a pretty run-of-the-mill thriller.  This push-pull on my interest resulted in my passing on the film in theatres, but adding it to my Netflix queue once it came out on DVD.

(And that, my friends, is a little extra free-of-charge insight into how my brain works!)

In the film, Ewan McGregor plays the titular ghost writer.  (Interestingly enough, his character’s actual name is never given.)  He’s a professional author, hired to help famous people complete their memoirs/autobiographies/etc.  The ghost writer’s services are called into play, at the start of the film, to help beleaguered British politician Adam Lang.  Mr. Lang, once the British Prime Minister, is now under fire for allegedly allowing suspected terrorists to be tortured while he was the PM.  That, plus the untimely death of his last ghost writer, has put a wrinkle in the progress of his upcoming book.  With the political scandal reaching fever pitch, the book’s publisher is desperate to get the book completed and on the shelves in great haste, and so Ewan McGregor’s character is dispatched to the Lang compound to begin work immediately.

Except, no surprise, things quickly become very complicated for the ghost.  He finds himself faced with Mr. Lang, a politician under siege, who seems extraordinarily affable at times and yet reluctant to open up about himself or his past; Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), who seems sympathetic but also extremely tightly-wound; and a growing mystery about Adam Lang’s past and what may or may not have happened to his ghost writer predecessor.

Pierce Brosnan was widely-praised for his performance as Adam Lang, and rightly so.  He brings all the charisma and bluster of a great politician to the fore, while also hinting at a dangerous edge that just might lie right below the surface.  He constantly keeps the audience guessing as to whether he’s a noble politician beset by pernicious enemies, or whether Adam Lang is in fact a much more sinister character.  Speaking of keeping the audience guessing, so too does the wonderful Olivia Williams (Dollhouse, Rushmore) as his wife Ruth.  She is wonderfully creepy in her… [continued]

… [continued]

When I first heard about The Fighter, I thought “here we go again, yet another boxing movie.”  But then I realized that, though I could certainly list a TON of boxing movies, I haven’t actually seen that many of them.  I’m not at all interested in the “sport” of boxing, and though I definitely enjoy some dark, downbeat films, I’m not a big fan of a lot of violence or gore in movies.  All of which means that it’s rare for me to want to go see a boxing film.

But something about The Fighter sparked some interest in me.  Perhaps it was the cast, or perhaps it was the story of Mark Wahlberg’s years-long effort to bring the real-life story of boxer Micky Ward to life.  Whatever the reason, I’m glad I decided to see the film, because it is absolutely terrific.

Mark Wahlberg has turned in some strong performances over the past few years (even when he’s in films that I don’t really like, such as The Other Guys).  He was, for instance, absolutely brilliant in The Departed (click here for my review).  Born in Dorchester, MA, it’s clear that Mr. Wahlberg felt a strong connection to the scrappy fighter from Lowell, MA, and that shows through every moment of the performance.  Mr. Wahlberg is completely believable as a welterweight boxer, but he also brings an endearing gentleness to the portrayal.  His Micky is soft-spoken and desperately eager to please.  It’s fascinating to me that the film’s narrative arc rests on Micky learning to actually be a little bit selfish and make a decision that will do right for HIM, rather than for his mother, sisters, or brother.

Speaking of his brother (really his half-brother), as good as Mark Wahlberg is as Micky Ward, this movie absolutely 100% belongs to Christian Bale and his performance as Dicky Eklund.  Dicky was once a great boxer and “the pride of Lowell,” but now he’s a crack-addicted shambles of a man who’s convinced himself that training his brother to fight will be his road to a comeback.  Mr. Bale’s performance is mesmerizing.  Dicky is a whirlwind of tics and energy that threatens to fly apart any room or situation that he’s in.  We can see the echoes of his charisma that once made him a local hero, and that perhaps also explains why his loved ones tolerate his behavior.  And his smile.  Oh, his smile is devastating.  It conveys such warmth from the heart of this man-child, but it’s also devastatingly sad and pathetic as we quickly see what a self-destructive force Dicky has become.

(The extraordinary high esteem in which I held Christian Bale’s performance as Dicky was… [continued]

I really can’t believe how much I enjoyed director Tom Hooper’s new film The King’s Speech!

I was a bit dubious going in.  I’d heard that the film was good, but it looked like a classic “Oscar-bait” type of movie to me.  You know: period setting, famous actors, a character struggling to overcome a disability as well as his own personal demons, etc.  Didn’t strike me as the type of film I’d be at all interested in.

But I’m glad I decided to go see it, because I think the film is marvelous.

The King’s Speech opens in 1925, when Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), gives the closing speech at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.  The speech goes poorly, because Prince Albert is afflicted with a terrible stammer.  Though the Prince has grown weary of dealing with doctors who have been unable to help him, his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) arranges a meeting with a speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).  At first the Prince is put-off by Lionel’s casual manner and techniques, but gradually the two men form a strong working relationship and, possibly, a friendship.  Things grow more complicated when Albert’s father, King George V, dies, and Albert’s elder brother, Prince Edward, decides to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman.  This leaves Albert in line for the throne, and about to face a terrible threat to his nation: the rise of Hitler.

The King’s Speech rests squarely upon the shoulders of Mr. Firth and Mr. Rush.  Their complex relationship is the central dynamic of the piece, and it is because of the enormous skill of those two actors that I found the story as compelling as I did.  (Though the smart script by David Seidler helps enormously, too!)  Both Mr. Firth and Mr. Rush craft layered, nuanced performances, and I found their interactions with one another to be electric.  There are some enormous world events that form the backdrop to this story, but despite that I found the most dramatic scenes of the film to be the ones when it was just those two men, sitting in a room, talking.

There’s a strong dramatic arc to Prince Albert’s story, but I was pleased that the filmmakers didn’t ladle on the drama too heavily (a cardinal sin of the “Oscar-bait” types of movies I mentioned above).  Indeed, the story is told with a fairly light touch — there’s a lot of humor in the tale.

I’m all for films where the characters are unlikable, broken people — that can lead to some really complex, engaging story-lines — but I think The King’s Speech is well-served by just… [continued]

In Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right, we meet Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), a loving lesbian couple who have been raising two kids together: Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson).  Their lives aren’t perfect, but over-all it’s a stable, happy family unit.  But when Laser convinces Joni to help him find their biological father (though Nic gave birth to Joni and Jules gave birth to Laser, they share the same sperm donor), the foundations of the family are shaken.

I was really quite taken with this film.  I think it’s an interesting story filled with complex, human characters, and all of the lead actors give terrific performances.  I was ultimately dissatisfied with where the narrative wound up (more on that later), which lessens the film’s total impact slightly for me, but it’s still a very solid, enjoyable, aimed-at-adults movie.

I’ve been complaining a lot recently about films with one-dimensional characters.  I don’t mind films having heroes and villains, and likable and unlikable characters.  I simply tend to prefer films where the characters aren’t completely black and white.  (Ex. This father is a TOTAL JERK with no redeeming qualities.)  So major props to writer/director Ms. Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg for crafting a story filled with truly human characters.  No one in The Kids Are All Right is a total saint.  The characters have positive qualities and some negative ones as well.  Likable characters make some bad decisions.  It’s thrillingly refreshing.

This top-notch material is elevated by a wonderful cast.  Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are both phenomenal as Nic and Jules.  These characters felt completely REAL to me, and their relationship felt equally honest.  It’s sweet and messy and complicated and feels really true.  I like that we get to see the two sharing some tender moments, as well as the times when they seem completely distant from one another.

Equally wonderful are the two kids.  Mia Wasikowska was one of the few good things in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (read my review here), and it’s delightful to see her looking and acting like a real human being without all of that accompanying Tim Burton weirdness.  Ms. Wasikowska is able to bring to life Joni’s innocence, as well as to her growing temptation to leave her childhood behind and step into the trappings of an adult.  Josh Hutcherson is also strong as her brother Laser (pronounced Lazer).  He’s already begun to push at the boundaries of conformity and acceptable behavior, but Mr. Hutcherson keeps reminding us of Laser’s good-natured side as well (a product, one can assume, of the strong upbringing he’s received from his two moms).

Then there is Paul (Mark Ruffalo).… [continued]

Back in June I posted a trailer for Rob Reiner’s new film, Flipped, and I wondered if, at last, Rob Reiner (the mastermind behind This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and A Few Good Men) had broken his long dry streak and finally directed a good new film. Unfortunately Flipped was only in theatres for about five seconds, so I never got to see it — but I was happy to have a chance to catch it on DVD.

And I am happy to report that the film represents a strong return to form for Mr. Reiner!

Adapted from the book by Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped tells the story of Bryce Loski and Juli Baker.  When Bryce is seven, his family moves into the house across the street from Juli’s.  She immediately develops a crush on him, while he finds her attentions to be annoying in the extreme.  By the eight grade, though, Bryce finally begins to see what’s so special about Juli… at the same time as she starts to think that maybe Bryce isn’t the amazing kid she always thought he was.

While I wouldn’t argue that Flipped is of a level with the amazing films listed above that Mr. Reiner directed earlier in his career, it’s a really fun, sweet film that I quite enjoyed.  Mr. Reiner has always had the ability to craft what one might call “family” films that avoid the simplicity and schmaltz so prevalent in “all-ages” types of films, and that skill is on fine display here.  Flipped isn’t edgy, it isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s an extremely well-crafted little story that I found to be really endearing.

The film employs a device (which, I gather, was a main hook of the original book) of continually switching back and forth between Bryce’s & Juli’s perspectives.  We see event unfold narrated by Bryce, and then the film cuts back and we see the same events from Juli’s perspective.  As the film began I wondered if that device wouldn’t get tedious, but in Mr. Reiner’s skilled hands nothing of the sort happens.  He knows exactly how to cut the footage so that he shows us just enough, on the second run-through, of what we need to know without boring the audience by replaying every single second, and the narrative is so-cleverly crafted that our second viewing of the events always shows us something we hadn’t learned before.  (With one notable exception.  Towards the end of the film there’s a scene in which Bryce is talking to a friend about Juli in the library, and although we don’t see her at the time, I found… [continued]

I’m not really sure quite how to put this so I’ll just go ahead and say it:

Black Swan freaked me the fuck out.

And I pretty much loved every second of it.

The one-two punch of The Fountain and The Wrestler have made me a big, big fan of Darren Aronofsky, and with Black Swan he’s pretty much made me a fan for life.  Black Swan is one of the most viscerally engaging experiences I’ve had in a movie theatre in quite a while.  The film is intense and erotic and gruesome and it grabbed me by the guts and never let go.  It only squeezed harder as the film built to the absolutely wonderfully madcap insane final twenty-or-so minutes.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is cast as the lead in her theatre company’s new production of Swan Lake.  The company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), knows that Nina has the technical perfection to play the White Swan half of the role, but he worries that her dancing is too cold, too polished, for her to embody the more sensual Black Swan half.  As Nina pushes herself harder and harder to satisfy Thomas, things start to fall apart for her in a big way.

Right from the beginning, Mr. Aronofsky and his team establish a creepy vibe for the film.  Nina is clearly an extremely tightly wound creature, so one immediately knows that the pressure of the starring role might be trouble.  This concern is only magnified when we’re given a glimpse of her home life.  Nina still lives with her mother (played by Barbara Hershey), and it’s clear that the two have a very weird relationship in which Nina seems to be extraordinarily infantilized.  For example, her little room is decked out with stuffed animals and other pink, frilly things as if she were as seven year-old girl.  There’s a great scene in which Nina is reluctant to eat a cake that her mom has bought her to celebrate her being given the lead role in Swan Lake, and her mom’s extreme reaction to this minor rejection clearly indicates that this co-dependant relationship is fraught with problems.

As the tension and pressure on Nina builds, things get creepier and weirder.  The film really plays with the notions of reality.  We never quite know if what we’re seeing is real or just in Nina’s head.  There are a few really quick, subtle visual effects shots that are dropped in at just the right moments to give the audience (and Nina!) a jolt.  Mr. Aronofsky’s camerawork also serves to keep the audience on our toes.  We’re continually pushed right up close to the characters’ faces.  The cinematography really keeps the viewer right… [continued]

Some movies are so bad that they are soul-crushingly painful.  It kills me when I sit down in a movie theatre with great hope and anticipation for a new film, only to watch my dreams slowly shatter as the turd-on-film unfolds.  I’m not talking about films that disappoint, I’m talking about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull spirit-demolishing catastrophes.  These films are just sad.

Then there are the films that are also terrible, but in a different way that makes them laughably ridiculous (as opposed to shoot-me-now painful).  These are the films that are so over-the top bonkers, so wrong-headedly BAD, that you just can’t help but laugh at the madness you’re watching on display.

The Green Hornet definitely fits into the latter category.

I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but I have great respect for the talents involved (including Seth Rogen, who I’ve found hysterical ever since Freaks and Geeks, and director Michel Gondry, who helmed the amazingly beautiful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and so I had some interest in checking out what they had done with the pulp story of the Green Hornet.

Wowzers.  This film is so unbelievably terrible right from the first scene that it’s jaw-dropping.

I’m not kidding.  RIGHT FROM THE FIRST SCENE this movie is awful.  That first scene shows us Seth Rogen’s character, Britt Reid, as a child, being berated  by his father (played by Tom Wilkinson).  I guess this scene is supposed to show us the complicated father-son relationship between these two, and also perhaps instill in us some sympathy for young Britt.  But the scene does neither because it’s so over-the-top in every single respect as to be ludicrous.  Tom Wilkinson — one of the finest actors working today — plays Britt’s father James, and he has never been worse in a film.  He’s stiff and forced to spout silly, over-the-top dialogue that hits us over the head with the idea that he’s a jerk who is insensitive to his son.  Meanwhile the music is going full-bore ominous, there’s a crazy sound effect when James pops the head off his son’s toy, and right there I was shifting in my seat thinking “uh oh.”  Everything is dialed up to eleven.  James isn’t just a jerk, he’s a JERK with capital letters who is completely, one-dimensionally horrible to his kid.  The music is over-the-top.  The sound-effects are over-the-top.

And the WHOLE MOVIE is just like that scene.

Oh, sure, there are some jokes that are funny.  I mean, you can’t have Seth Rogen on screen for two hours and not laugh occasionally.  But the ratio of jokes that hit to jokes that miss is embarrassing.… [continued]

I’m always intrigued by the idea of world-building in film.  Whether we’re talking about fantasy worlds a long time ago and far, far away, or the depiction of distinct real-life settings or time-periods, when I watch a movie I love to be immersed in a fully-realized universe in which the story takes place.  In some movies, the setting is barely mentioned and basically irrelevant to the story.  In others, the setting becomes almost a key character in the story, and the filmmakers expend great time and skill in bringing that particular universe of the story to vibrant life.

Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik and written by Ms. Granik and Anne Rosellini (adapting the novel by Daniel Woodrell), definitely falls into the latter category.  The story is set in the Ozarks, a rural area of Missouri.  I have no idea if the world of the Ozarks as depicted in this film bears any connection to real life (I assume that it does, but I certainly can’t verify that myself), but whether it does or not, I have found it difficult to shake the picture of this downtrodden community that Ms. Granik has created in her film.

Winter’s Bone focuses on Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), a 17 year-old girl who has assumed the role of caretaker for her family (a sick mother and two younger siblings) in the absence of her father, a meth cooker who has vanished — either dead or on the run for the law.  Though she harbors a dream of joining the army and leaving her home behind, when we first meet Ree she seems to have settled impressively well into her role as head of the family.  She exhibits great responsibility and maturity in taking care of everything that needs to be done, without complaint, and she gives enormous amounts of care to her mom and siblings.  But her precariously-balanced existence is thrown into grave jeopardy when the local Sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) informs her that her missing father (Jessup) had put up their house and all their possessions as bond. If he doesn’t show up to his court date, Ree and her family will lose everything.  With her back up against the wall, Ree begins trying to locate her father by making inquiry with her neighbors — most of whom seem to be related to her in some way, and most of whom seem to be involved in the same criminal activities that her father was.  They are proudly defiant of the law and as such refuse to help Ree track down her father.  With the clock ticking, the young girl feels her options waning.

I’ve read reviews of this film that describe it as depicting the… [continued]

If there was any doubt in your mind that Emma Stone is a bona fide movie star, that should be erased by Easy A.  She’s clearly a vibrant, intelligent, beautiful young woman, and she’s very engagingly watchable.  She has no trouble carrying this film on her young shoulders.

Unfortunately, other than watching Ms. Stone dig her teeth into her first starring role, I found precious little to enjoy in this movie.

The biggest problem is that, as talented as Ms. Stone clearly is, she’s just way too vibrant, intelligent, and beautiful a young woman to be believable as the totally unnoticed zero that she claims she is in the film’s opening monologue.  Much of the plot of the film depends on our accepting Olive (Emma Stone’s character) as a lonely looser, but nothing in her scenes on-screen leads me to buy that reality!  The problem is not contained just with Ms. Stone.  As the film progresses, we get to meet the young man who’s the real object of her affection: the boy she nicknames “Woodchuck Todd” (Penn Badgley).  I guess he’s also supposed to be something of an oddball, since he doesn’t seem to hang out with the “in” crowd kids, and he’s apparently the school’s mascot (a woodchuck, hence the nickname).  Except that when we see him without his shirt (which is often), Mr. Badgley is clearly an extraordinarily handsome, well-built fellow who looks more like the football team’s star quarterback than the goofy team mascot.  As with Ms. Stone, he’s entertaining, but I just don’t buy him in the role.

The rest of the actors supposedly playing high school kids all look equally too old and too good-looking to really be high school kids.  Look, maybe I’m spoiled by my devotion to Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Greeks, a show where the high school kids ALL ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS!!  Easy A certainly isn’t the first movie or TV show to cast older, more impossibly beautiful people in the role of high school kids.  But it seems particularly egregious here.  (It doesn’t help, by the way, that the film features Joan Jett’s song “Bad Reputation” on the soundtrack at a key moment.  I can’t help but compare your movie to the brilliant Freaks and Geeks when you ACTUALLY USE FREAKS AND GEEKS’ THEME SONG IN YOUR FILM!!  Sheesh!!)

But while I didn’t believe Emma Stone to be a lonely, unseen kid, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t really enjoy watching her in the role.  She truly is a lot of fun, and when the movie works it works because of her charisma.  She effortlessly takes on the lead role.

I also really enjoyed the scenes with Olive’s… [continued]

Despicable Me seemed like a movie that I’d really dig.  It’s an animated film about dueling super-villains, which is a great hook, and it features a spectacular voice cast: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Jack McBrayer, Danny McBride, and more.

Boy, what a disappointment!

First of all, despite what the trailers indicated, the film isn’t about dueling super-villains at all.  Jason Segel’s character Vector, who is presented in the trailer and in the opening scenes of the film as a rival for Steve Carell’s villain Gru, hardly factors into the story at all until the very end.  Instead, the plot of the film really focuses on Gru’s adopting three cute little girls (as part of one of his dastardly plans), but instead of manipulating them he grows fond of the girls and discovers that he can be a great dad.

Blech!

Boy oh boy, this film failed on pretty much every level for me.  It’s more interested in cutesy-moments (whether featuring the three oh-so-cute little girls or the oh-so-adorable little yellow “minions” that work for Gru) than actual jokes.  There are a few funny moments, but they’re few and far between.

The plot, as it were, is very thin.  The idea that Gru could adopt those three girls is more ludicrous than any of the super-villain hi-jinks in the film.  There are a few perfunctory scenes with the girls in their orphanage, run by a cruel woman named Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), which are clearly only in the film to minimize the horror of the idea of this bizarre man being allowed to adopt three innocent little girls.  (“Hey, at least he’s not as bad as SHE is,” we’re supposed to think!)  Then the film attempts to mine some drama from Vector kidnapping the girls at the end, but there’s no tension because he’s clearly no match for Gru.  After the opening scenes, the film has tried to mine laughs from Vector being presented as a total doofus.

The film doesn’t even really bother to explore the premise that it sets up — a world where there are apparently no super-heroes and super-villains are allowed to operate with impunity.  Where are the heroes?  How does society react to the free reign these villains apparently have?  Are there other villains out there besides Gru and Vector?  How did Gru create his minions?  I could go on and on.  Compare this to the fully-relized universe created in Pixar’s super-hero film, The Incredibles.  Not only did that movie feature three-dimensional characters and a compelling story-line, but it also managed to really explore the world being presented.  We learned about the effect that the heroes had… [continued]

This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly features a brief interveiw with the Coen Brothers, in which the writer congratulates Joel & Ethan Coen on True Grit, a “four-quadrant” movie (meaning a flick that appeals to men and women, young and old), and the biggest box-office success of their careers.

It’s delightful to see the public embracing True Grit to the degree that it has, because while this film might be more easily categorizable than the last several Coen Brothers films (A Serious Man, Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men), it’s still a Western that has been filtered through their unique and sometimes bizarre sensibilities.  And I love it all the more for that!

Hailee Steinfeld plays fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross.  Her father has recently been murdered by an outlaw named Tom Chaney, but despite her efforts, it doesn’t seem like any lawman seems much interested in pursuing him.  So Mattie hires herself a bounty hunter: the aging, cranky, one-eyed Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges).  She also encounters a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, who has been pursuing Chaney, under a different name, for another murder that he committed.  At first she takes a strong disliking to the pompous Ranger, but as the chase commences and she & Cogburn continue encountering LaBoeuf, Mattie begins to wonder if she hasn’t hitched her wagon to the wrong horse.

I found True Grit to be great fun from start to finish.  There’s a strong emotional throughline — Mattie’s increasingly desperate efforts to find someone who will help her achieve vengeance for her father’s death — and the film is very well-paced.  I thought it was intriguing and engaging throughout.  As always, the Coens know how to stage an action scene, and there are several sequences that are true nail-biters (including the shoot-out outside of the cabin about half-way through the film, and of course the climactic encounter with Tom Chaney and Lucky Ned Pepper’s gang).  The film is intense and violent at times, but it’s never gory.  True Grit is rated PG-13 (in that EW interview, Joel Coen comments: “It seemed obvious to us that because it’s a movie where the main character is a 13-year-old girl, 13- and 14-year-old girls should be able to see the movie”), but it never feels dumbed down or softened the way I often feel PG-13 movies are.

But the real joys of True Grit are the tremendous performances.  Jeff Bridges proves once again that he is unbeatable when directed by the Coen Brothers.  His protrayal of Rooster Cogburn is one of those iconic performances that I suspect we’ll be seeing clips from in highlight reels for years to come.  Rooster is tough and cunning, but also prey to weakness (his age and his fondness… [continued]

It’s very possible that John Cazale has the greatest batting average of any actor in history.  He only appeared in five films, but they were, in order: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. It’s an amazing streak of five phenomenal performances in five phenomenal films, although that only emphasizes the tragedy of Mr. Cazale’s death at the incredibly young age of 42.

Anyone in the cult of The Godfather, like me, already knows the name John Cazale.  He, of course, plays the sweet but hapless Fredo, brother of Michael (Al Pacino) and Sonny (James Caan).  Although not one of the big-star names in the film (like the afore-mentioned Mr. Pacino and Mr. Caan, along, of course, with Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall), Mr. Cazale’s work as Fredo is absolutely amazing.  He creates, in Fredo, a role of enormous depth and sophistication.  Fredo is a character who is, on the one hand, all surface — he’s unable to hide his thoughts and feelings the way his brother Michael can — though Mr. Cazale brings enormous soul to the character and shows us deep layers of emotion and feelings behind his amazingly expressive eyes.

Those eyes are often commented upon by those who loved and admired Mr. Cazale in the documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, directed by Richard Shephard.  The film is aimed at introducing movie fans to this incredibly talented, yet sadly somewhat forgotten, actor.

Even at the time, Mr. Cazale’s talents were often overlooked.  The film points out that, while the five films he starred in were nominated for a total of 44 Academy Awards (quite a haul!), Mr. Cazale himself was never nominated.  And in a sad scene early in the documentary, we see pedestrians in New York City asked to identify Mr. Cazale from a picture of him as Fredo from The Godfather. While many are able to recall the name of his character, not one knew Mr. Cazale’s name.  (I always wonder if scenes like these in films aren’t the result of judicious editing to make the point that the filmmakers want, but in this case I have no doubt that most people have never heard John Cazale’s name.)

The film spends a few minutes giving us some insight into Mr. Cazale’s background and childhood, but for the most part it focuses on his work in his five films.  A plethora of actors and directors — including Francis Ford Coppola (who directed Mr. Cazale in the first three films in which he appeared), Sidney Lumet (who directed him in his fourth film, Dog Day Afternoon), Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro,… [continued]

In the film Cyrus, written and directed by Jay & Mark Duplass, John C. Reilly stars a John, a pretty pathetic fellow whose self-confidence is not improved by the news that his ex-wife, Jamie (Catherine Keener), is about to re-marry.  Jamie convinces John to join her and her fiancee at a friend’s party.  To John’s great surprise, he actually winds up hitting it off with a beautiful woman named Molly (Marisa Tomei).  They go on a couple of dates, all of which go very well.  Molly seems wonderful.  But when he notices that Molly never seems willing to spend a whole night at his place, John begins to wonder if she’s married, or if she’s hiding some other secret from him.  When he follows her home one day, he discovers what that secret is: her 21-year-old son, Cyrus.  Molly has raised Cyrus by herself, and neither has ever been able to separate from the other.  He still lives with her, but that’s the least of it!  To call their relationship co-dependant would be a dramatic understatement, and John is forced to wonder whether he can ever fit into the life that those two have created for each other.

I’d read some rave reviews about Cyrus when it played at festivals earlier this year.  Even though it’s release to theatres fizzled this past summer, I was eager to watch it on DVD.  I’d read that this was a black comedy, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the weirdness on display in this film!!  It certainly goes to some places I did not expect.  There’s a lot that I enjoyed about the film, though I can’t really say that it all worked for me.

The biggest problem with the movie, for me, was the first twenty-or-so minutes before we meet Cyrus.  The film takes this time to establish John as a character.  I understand that we need to learn that he’s lonely and odd, because we need to understand why he doesn’t head for the hills at the first whiff of weirdness between Molly & Cyrus.  The filmmakers need to show us that John is a man pretty desperate for love and companionship, and that is what causes him to stick things out and try to fight for Molly’s affections.  But, boy, I think the Duplass brothers went WAY too far over the top in presenting John as such an extraordinarily pathetic loser in those opening scenes.  Those sequences are just PAINFUL to watch — I didn’t find any humor in those scenes, they just made me squirm.

The film comes to life, though once we meet Cyrus.  Jonah Hill has come a long way since the first movie he appeared in… [continued]

Before I finalize my Best of 2010 lists (which will be coming in a few weeks), I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the movies/TV shows/comics/etc. that I’d missed during the past very busy twelve months.  One of the films that I was bummed to have never gotten to was the recent documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.  I was able to watch the film on DVD, and it is fantastic.  (I have a feeling this might have just bumped another film off of my Best Movies of 2010 list!  We’ll see…)

Directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, the film follows a year in the life of the 77 year-old working comedian.  For so many people these days, Joan Rivers is basically a joke — a nasty woman criticizing people on the red carpet line while herself looking pretty hideously plastic as a result of inordinate amounts of plastic surgery.  Being a big comedy fan — and, in particular, stand-up comedy — I’m actually fairly familiar with her early work, when she was a pretty sharp, hysterical comic.  But I still had the same perception of her, these days, as most.  I had respect for the comedian she’d been, but that only made it more painful these days to see her hocking gawdy items on QVC.

But after watching Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, it’s clear that I didn’t know Joan Rivers at all.  The film does an incredible job at humanizing Ms. Rivers.  Not by glossing over her faults — no, the film pulls no punches when it comes to moments when she doesn’t appear in the best of light.  But in many respects this warts-and-all presentation of Joan Rivers forces audiences to look at her and her work in a new light, and to reconsider our caricaturish perceptions of her.

Most importantly, the film emphasizes what a vibrant, FUNNY comic she still is.  The film contains some terrific clips from her glory-days on the stand-up circuit and, of course, some of her appearances on The Tonight Show, but it also contains generous clips from many of Ms. Rivers’ current stand-up gigs, and she is a RIOT.  Crude, unflinching, and hysterical.  (After the film was over, my wife Steph and I turned to each other and said, “boy, it’d be fun to go see her perform live!”)  I was totally unprepared to laugh at any Joan Rivers material post 1980.

The year chronicled by the film (2008-09) was a fascinating year for Ms. Rivers, containing many low points (her disappointment at the criticisms leveled at her play after performances in London; her decision to part company with her long-time manager) and high points (winning… [continued]

Before the start of James L. Brooks’ new film, How Do You Know, there was a trailer for a new Adam Sandler film.  Apparently, Sandler’s character likes to wear a wedding band, even though he’s not married, in order to score chicks.  Then he meets a girl he really likes, but when she finds his wedding band, he’s too embarrassed to admit what he’s been doing, so he pretends he is actually married, to his assistant (played by Jennifer Aniston).  But then Aniston mentions her kids in front of Sandler’s new girlfriend, so NOW he has to pretend that he’s married AND that Aniston’s kids are actually HIS kids.

This is exactly why I can’t stand most of what passes for mainstream studio comedies these days.  I simply have no patience for films in which we’re supposed to be laughing at characters behaving in the ways that no actual human being possibly would — doing outrageous things and spinning increasingly outlandish webs of deception.

What a refreshing change of pace, then, to watch a film like How Do You Know, in which the characters all actually behave like real people might, and in which the situations seem like actual real-life situations.  Sure, there’s some exaggeration for comedic effect, and sure, there are some coincidences involved in the plot (such as two main characters in the story happening to live in the same building), but with only one small exception (which I’ll get to in a minute), the comedy in How Do You Know is drawn from actual, recognizable human behavior and emotions.  Thank heavens for James L. Brooks!

Reese Witherspoon plays Lisa, an athletic, driven young woman who nevertheless, at the age of 31, finds herself past her prime in her sport and cut from the USA women’s softball team.  She’s recently started dating Matty, played by Owen Wilson, an affable though somewhat dim professional baseball player.  George, played by Paul Rudd, has suddenly found himself under indictment for suspected unethical stock transactions.  He’s pretty sure he’s innocent, though the cost of his defense will most certainly bankrupt him and if he loses the case he could wind up in prison.  He’s pretty sure that his father, played by Jack Nicholson, who is also the head of the company where he works, knows a bit more about the situation than he’s telling.  Even after a set-up dinner that goes pretty poorly, Lisa and George  seem to continue to find themselves drawn into each other’s orbit, as they both struggle to find a way to get through this low-point in their lives when the hopes they had and the plans they’d laid out for themselves are coming crashing down around them.… [continued]

The original Tron (read my review here), released in 1982, boasted incredibly stunning special effects but was hamstrung by a pretty simplistic story.

The new Tron: Legacy, released last week, boasts incredibly stunning special effects but is hamstrung by a pretty simplistic story.

I’ve got a lot more to say about Tron: Legacy, but really, it all boils down to that.

At the end of the original Tron, Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and his friends (Alan and Lora in the real world, and their digital counterparts Tron and Yori in the digital realm inside of computers) had defeated Ed Dillinger and his Master Control Program.  The programs residing in the digital realm had been freed, and Flynn had seized control of his company Encom back from Dillinger.  All was well.  But, as we learn in Tron: Legacy, he mysteriously vanished several years later, leaving his son, Sam, an orphan.  Though Alan tried his best to mentor his lost friend’s son, Sam has grown into an angry young man whose only association with his father’s company is his repeated attempts to prank and sabotage Encom’s initiatives.  He’s grown to disbelieve his father’s wild stories of “the grid” that he heard as a child — but, of course, we know it won’t be long until Sam finds himself sucked into that computerized world himself.  There he will encounter the father who he thought abandoned him as a youth, and do battle with the dictatorial program, Clu, that wears his father’s face and has taken control over the grid.

If I were only to judge Tron: Legacy by the visuals and the music, then this would be a fine film indeed.  The visual effects are, quite simply, astounding.  (With one notable exception, which I’ll get to in a few moments.)  The whole look of the original Tron, which was so ground-breaking back in 1982, has become quite dated when viewed in 2010.  Director Joseph Kosinski and his team had an enormous challenge before them of capturing the “feel” of the digital world created in Tron, but updating that for modern audiences and expanding it using the most cutting-edge tools available to them.  They succeeded admirably.  The thirty-minutes after Sam is sucked into the grid represent the high-point of the movie, as we find ourselves stunned, along with Sam, at this astonishing world we have entered.  It’s a blast seeing several classic images from the original Tron — the interceptors, and of course the light-cycles — brought to a whole new level of life.  In short-order, Sam finds himself captured and forced to compete in a series of disc-wars and, finally, a light-cycle chase.  These sequences are astounding — visceral and fast-paced and dazzling.… [continued]

Before seeing the new, big-budgeted sequel Tron: Legacy, being released this week by the Walt Disney Company, I decided that I really needed to go back and watch the 1982 original.

That proved a little more difficult than I had anticipated!  I’d assumed that Disney would cash in on the building excitement by releasing a snazzy new DVD/blu-ray edition of the film in advance of Tron: Legacy‘s release, but that didn’t happen.  (There’s speculation that Disney was afraid that people would watch the dated 1982 Tron and get turned off on the idea of seeing the new film.)  Either way, the decade-old previous DVD edition is out-of-print and apparently fiendishly hard to get a hold of.  Thank heaven for my phenomenal local video store, the Video Underground.  They had a copy of Tron, and though it took me a few visits until it was finally in, I was ultimately able to rent the film.

I’ve seen Tron a few times before, but it had been quite a while since my last viewing, so I was excited to give it a whirl.

Jeff Bridges (yes, that Jeff Bridges) stars as Flynn, a brilliant but sort of slackerish computer programmer who has recently been fired from Encom, a large computer company.  Flynn has been trying to hack into Encom’s computer systems, in an attempt to prove that the new head of the company, Ed Dillinger (David Warner), stole his work as part of his rise to power.  Unbeknownst to Flynn and the rest of the world (but, as Mel Brooks would say, knownst to us), in taking over the company, Dillinger has allowed an emergingly-sentient computer program, the Master Control Program, to take control of all of the company’s systems and begin a process of taking over other powerful computer systems across the globe.  Meanwhile, Flynn’s ex-girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan), and her new boyfriend Alan (Bruce Boxleitner), both of whom still work for Encom, learn that Dillinger has discovered Flynn’s hacking attempts, and they try to warn Flynn to stop what he’s doing.  But Flynn convinces them that Dillinger needs to be stopped, so the three of them break into Encom in an attempt to find the evidence Flynn needs to bring Dillinger down.

All of that is really just set-up for when the Master Control Program zaps Flynn with a laser and digitizes him, sending his conscience into the mainframe of the system itself.  There Flynn learns that, inside the world of the computers he has spent his days and nights programming, exists an entire universe of life.  Programs that he and others have written as lines of data exist here as individuals, trying their best to live their… [continued]

In 2005 Steven Spielberg returned to sci-fi with his version of H. G. Wells’ famous story from 1898, War of the Worlds.

Not surprisingly, rather than being a period piece, Mr. Spielberg set his adaptation in the present day.  Tom Cruise reunited with Spielberg to star as Ray Ferrier, an affable but cocky guy separated from his wife (played by the beautiful Miranda Otto, who played Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings).  When she and her new husband go away for the weekend, Ray has to look after their two children: Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning).  Despite his efforts, he finds that he has trouble connecting to either one of his kids.  Then aliens attack.

Mr. Spielberg, along with writers Josh Friedman and David Koepp, have chosen to take us through the story of an alien apocalypse through the eyes of these three “every-person” characters.  We witness the horrific events of the invasion through their eyes, as they struggle to survive.  While that’s not exactly a ground-breaking choice, I think it’s an effective way to structure the film.  We don’t have a sense, until the very end, of what exactly is happening — who the invaders are, what they want, or what the governments of the world are doing to fight back — and that only adds to the tension and terror of the film.  Ray and his kids are swept up in cataclysmic phenomena, and so are we as the audience.

There are some extraordinary visual effects sequences in War of the Worlds.  This big-budget sci-fi film was clearly made by a director who is a master of his craft, ably assisted by a huge assortment of talented artists, designers, and visual effects wizards.  Ray’s initial encounter with a tripod — and his frantic flight away from it while the monstrosity tears across city blocks and vaporizes other terrified civilians — is a tour de force sequence that make clear that Spielberg & co. meant business with this story.  The tripods’ attack on the ferry, the battle on the hilltop towards the end of the film… these are extarordinarily well-realized sequences, dark and violent and intense.

I love that, in many respects, Steven Spielberg chose to make a much grimmer film than is his usual practice.  There’s not a lot of fun to be had in War of the Worlds, nor are there many rah-rah crowd-cheering action moments (of the type found in, say, Independence Day).

But somehow, War of the Worlds still leaves me a bit cold.  I can’t say it’s a movie that I can get too excited about.  Is the problem that the film is TOO grim?  Or is perhaps the problem that… [continued]

When we first meet Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Jamie Randall at the start of Edward Zwick’s new film Love & Other Drugs, we learn immediately that Jamie is a fast-talking salesman who seems to be able to convince anyone to buy anything, and also that he is quite a ladies man who is not above having sex with a woman he knows to be involved with someone else.  In this case, the “someone else” happens to be his boss, which results, no surprise, in Jamie’s quick exit from that job.  His brother, though, is able to help him land a job selling drugs for Pfizer.  Since this film is set in 1996, it’s not a tremendous surprise that this fast-talking salesman soon finds himself involved in selling a certain call-your-doctor-if-your-erection-lasts-more-than-four-hours love drug.  While all that is happening, Jamie gets involved with Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a vivacious, free-spirited young woman who, for reasons that become clear later in the film, is reluctant to let their sexual encounters deepen into anything more meaningful.

Quite a lot has been made of all of the nudity in this film, and with good reason.  We certainly get to see quite a lot of the skin of both of the two good-looking leads.  Ms. Hathaway, in particular, spends an enormous amount of screen-time in the nude.  Note to filmmakers: there’s no better way to get a guy interested in your romantic comedy than by including copious amounts of Anne Hathaway nudity.

And make no mistake, Love & Other Drugs is a romantic comedy.  I get the sense that the filmmakers had something a little more serious on their minds with this film, what with the third-act shift into dramatic territory as Maggie and Jamie struggle with the implications that her illness has on her future, and on the possibility of their building a life together.  But despite that, the film follows the standard romantic comedy tropes.  The couple meets cute, sparks fly, there’s an obstacle that causes them to separate, and then they’re reunited in the end, happily ever after.

There’s a lot that I enjoyed about Love & Other Drugs.  (BESIDES the Anne Hathaway nudity!!)  Both Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Hathaway are dynamic, charismatic leads.  I think they have a strong chemisty on screen together, and I enjoyed watching them interact.  The first half of the film has a fun, jaunty tone with a lot of humor.  And I respect the filmmakers for trying to introduce some narrative ideas of more depth into the film’s second half.  But ultimately, I was disappointed to find that the film was unable to break out of the boringly familiar romantic comedy formula.

And, also, in the end the film leans on some stunningly obvious jokes. … [continued]

The fifth and final film in my EZ Viewing movie marathon is Airplane! (Click here to read about film one: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), here to read about film two: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, here to read about film three: Tropic Thunder, and here to read about film four: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.)

The spoof film from which all other spoof-films pay homage (and to which they all pale in comparison).  I find this film just as uproariously funny today as when I first saw it as a kid (though perhaps for different reasons).  Every single inch of this film is funny.  There are jokes piled upon jokes piled upon jokes.  (A few years ago I was able to see Airplane! on the big screen at a midnight showing at a local Boston theatre, and for the first time I could read some of the titles on the magazines in the airport newsstand.  All were funny, of course!)

Loosely based on the 1957 film Zero Hour (which one of the filmmakers once referred to as “the serious version of Airplane!”), the film was written by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker.  They would go on to write and direct many other funny movies, but I don’t think any of their later efforts ever topped Airplane!.

The cast is amazing.  David Zucker commented that “the trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges.  These were people, who up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were.”  He was right — how funny are those four men in this movie???  They’re all pretty much perfect.  The film is filled with cameos.  Many of those faces aren’t that familiar to audiences today, but I don’t think anyone will ever forget Barbara Billingsley (from Leave it to Beaver) as the jive-speaking passenger.   In his original review of the film, Roger Ebert helpfully listed many of the film’s small roles and the films that their inclusion were parodying: “The movie exploits the previous films for all they’re worth. The passenger list includes a little old lady (like Helen Hayes in Airport), a guitar-playing nun (like Helen Reddy in Airport 1975), and even a critically ill little girl who’s being flown to an emergency operation (Linda Blair played the role in Airport 1975).”

And, of course, there’s Robert Hayes and Julie Hagerty in the lead roles.  They have to do a lot of heavy lifting in order to keep what little story the film has moving forward through all the gags and digressions, and they… [continued]

The third film in my EZ Viewing movie marathon is Tropic Thunder! (Click here to read about film one: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and here to read about film two: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.)

Tropic Thunder knocked my socks off when I first saw it!  (Click here for my original review.)  It’s so fearless and so, so funny, right from the first frame to the very last.

Ben Stiller (who also co-wrote and directed the film) stars as Tugg Speedman.  Though he was once a hugely successful action-movie star, Tugg’s recent effort at more serious fare (“Simple Jack”) was met with disdain, so he decides to appear in the war film Tropic Thunder.  The film (within the film) is an adaptation of the Vietnam experiences of the hook-handed veteran John “Four-Leaf” Tayback.  Along with Tugg, the film stars the method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), the comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and the rapper Alpha Chino (Brandon T. Jackson).  This pampered assemblage of prima-donnas has trouble getting anything done, so the frustrated director (Steve Coogan) decides to drop his actors in the middle of the jungle, in an attempt to capture some “real” drama.  Chaos ensues.

The cast is stupendous.  The stand-out, of course, is Robert Downey Jr., portraying “a dude pretending to be a dude disguised as some other dude.”  He came in for some criticism when the film was released, not only for his performance as a white actor pretending to be a black man, but also for the “full retard” speech he gives to Ben Stiller’s character.  But I think that Downey Jr. is pure genius in the role – and that speech happens to be screamingly funny.  The point of his performance – and, indeed, the point of the entire film – is to skewer how seriously actors take themselves.  (It’s funny – not long after seeing this film for the first time, I found myself re-watching the amazing WWII mini-series Band of Brothers.  It’s an astonishing mini-series.  When I finished, I watched some of the special features – but after having seen Tropic Thunder, I could not take at all seriously any of the actors patting themselves on the back for how much the conditions of the shoot really rivaled the experience of really being in combat!!)

But the rest of the ensemble is also phenomenal.  Stiller is great in the lead role – he’s just likable enough that you sort of root for him, even though he’s a total loony-tune.  (LOVE that he likes to watch Classic Star Trek on his ipod, though!!)  Jack Black is perfectly cast as Portnoy, and Jackson is absolutely… [continued]

The second film in my EZ Viewing movie marathon is Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country!

I respect J.J. Abrams for what he accomplished with his Star Trek reboot.  (Click here for my review.)  I enjoyed the flick, and am thrilled that Trek is exciting and “cool” again.  But THIS — Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country — is my kind of Star Trek: dark, sophisticated, and adult.  This vies with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for the position of my favorite Star Trek film, depending on my mood.

An ecological disaster on the Klingon homeworld leads them to make the first gesture of peace towards the United Federation of Planets, their bitter enemies for so many decades.  Captain Kirk and the Enterprise are sent to escort the Klingon chancellor to a peace conference on Earth, but a brutal assassination sends the two galactic super-powers once again hurtling towards war.

Star Trek VI is a serious, dark film.  Yes, there is some action/adventure to be had, but for the most part it’s a rather somber film.  The film is brave in presenting our hero, Captain Kirk, in a pretty unsympathetic light: Kirk is still filled with anger at the death of his son at the hands of the Klingons (in Star Trek III), and is shown to be remarkably cold and callous at the prospect of the terrible fate about to befall their empire.  “Let them die,” he quietly tells a shocked (and disappointed) Spock, early in the film.  I love this portrayal of Kirk – it’s a very human depiction of this heroic character, and it gives Kirk a real journey to go on over the course of the film that has nothing to do with warping across the galaxy.  It’s a potent, emotional core to the film.

Trek VI has an incredibly smart, literate script.  The film is filled with references to literature and history.  Some of those are obvious (such as the Shakespeare-spouting Klingon villain, General Chang) while others are much more subtle.  (One of my favorite moments is when, during Kirk and McCoy’s trial on the Klingon homeworld, General Chang angrily shouts at them “Don’t wait for the translation!  Answer me now!”  This, of course, is a nod to Adlai Stevenson’s speech to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)  Even the film’s title, I probably don’t need to point out to you, is a reference to a famous line in Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech.  The film’s central story – the prospect of peace between long-time enemy super-powers, and what that means for the “Cold Warriors” so used to hating their enemies – was inspired by the real-world… [continued]

It is very rare for a film or TV franchise to have an opportunity to craft a finale for its characters and storylines on its own terms.  So often these long-form tales are interrupted by cancellation or poor box office, or they just peter out as subsequent sequels drain a once-vibrant franchise of originality and interest.

On TV, show-runners are occasionally able to craft a series-ending finale, but more often than not shows find themselves cancelled before they have a chance to do so.  In film series, the opportunity for a true finale is even more rare.  How many can you think of?  George Lucas brought his Star Wars series to a close with Return of the Jedi – a film that, while not eliminating the possibility of sequels, certainly wrapped up most of the story-lines and character arcs from the original trilogy.  (Of course, as we all know, Lucas did eventually continue making Star Wars films – to my eternal dismay.)  The original Star Trek cast had an opportunity to have a triumphant swan song in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (a film that, as it happens, I’ll be waxing poetic about on this site next week!).  There’s Back to the Future Part III.  Can you think of many others?

Did Die Hard with a Vengeance really serve as a true finale, in any sense, to that series?  Did Lethal Weapon 4? Did Jurassic Park 3? Will the Bond series ever have an ending?  I mentioned Star Trek above, and that’s a double-edged sword.  As great as it is that the original cast got a fine film finale, their Next Gen successors were denied that privilege as their series met its untimely end following the dismal box office of Star Trek: Nemesis.

Obviously, the Harry Potter films are a horse of a slightly different color, as the films aren’t charting their own course – rather they are adapting J.K. Rowling’s seven-novel story.  Still, that the film series has made it so far, so successfully – that every single novel has been adapted to film featuring almost entirely the same ensemble of actors and actresses – that most of the films have actually been pretty darn good — and that the film series is now preparing to take its final bow, not with a whimper but with an enormous bang – is really downright astounding.

I was luke-warm on the Harry Potter films at first, but I thought things started to turn around with film four: The Goblet of Fire.  Film five: The Order of the Phoenix remains my favorite of the bunch, but I was also quite taken with The Half-Blood Prince (even if I still don’t understand just… [continued]

For years, Star Trek fans spoke of the odd-numbered curse that afflicted the Trek movies.  The odd-numbered films (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek V: The Voyage Home) seemed markedly inferior to the even-numbered ones (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).  True Trek fans, though, knew that there was nothing supernatural at play.  The simple fact is that the even-numbered Trek films were of a higher quality because those were the three Trek films that benefitted from the involvement of Nicholas Meyer.

This talented filmmaker wrote and directed Star Trek II and Star Trek VI (the two darkest and most adult entries in the franchise) and was heavily involved with scripting Star Trek IV (by far the most commercially successful film in the saga until J.J. Abrams’ recent Trek reboot).  The commentary on the DVD of Star Trek IV reveals that Mr. Meyer basically wrote every scene of the film that takes place back in 1986 (while Harve Bennett scripted the opening and closing scenes set in the 23rd century).  Basically, this means that Nicholas Meyer wrote the bulk of the film!  (Mr. Meyer states in the DVD features that the first line of his part of the movie is Spock’s wonderfully deadpan comment that “judging by the pollution content in the atmosphere, we have arrived in the latter half of the 20th century.”  Such a good line!)

As an enormous fan of Mr. Meyer’s work in the Star Trek universe, I have long wanted to check out his 1979 film, Time After Time.  For years I’ve been hearing about this film that Mr. Meyer directed, featuring H.G. Welles travelling through time to combat Jack the Ripper.  (Though somehow in my head I had gotten the idea — which has been my impression for YEARS now! — that it was Sherlock Holmes traveling through time, not Welles… go figure…)  But, while well-received at the time, Time After Time is a pretty forgotten film these days, and my personal “must-watch” list of movies is pretty long, so it took me until last month to get to see the film.

I know this film has some fervent fans, but I can’t really say that it’s an undiscovered treasure.  Time After Time was clearly made with a lot of love and care, and there certainly is a lot to enjoy in the film, but over-all I must say that it hasn’t aged terribly well.

In 1893 London, H.G. Welles (Malcolm McDowell) unveils his newest creation to his stunned dinner companions: a time machine.  Welles intends to travel into the future to investigate what… [continued]

A friend of mine at Walden Media was kind enough to invite me to last night’s sneak peek at the latest Narnia film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  (Thanks, Evan!)  I am happy to report that I quite enjoyed the new film (though I recognize that I’m not quite the target audience).

I adored the Narnia books as a kid, reading them over and over (though it’s been a long time, well over a decade-and-a-half, since I’ve last read any of the books).  The first film adaptation, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, left me cold (read my comments on that film here).  It seemed like a film that wanted to be The Lord of the Rings, but wound up being just a pale, half-hearted reflection.  I found the drama as unconvincing as were many of the special effects.  I was far more taken, though, with the follow-up: Prince Caspian.  My understanding is that the sequel did not live up to expectations at the box office, but I thought it was a terrifically rousing installment.  It was a much darker, more serious film.  The special effects were worlds better than the first film (I found the landscapes of Narnia to be extraordinarily beautiful and believable), and the story-line was far more compelling.  (Edward’s duel with the evil Miraz was a particularly stand-out moment.)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader falls somewhere between the first two films, in terms of style and tone.  The film preserves Prince Caspian‘s greater emphasis on creating a compelling, dramatic narrative through-line for the film as well as the high-quality of its fantastic visual effects, while at the same time returning to a slightly more family-friendly tone that is closer to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t have quite the same life-or-death stakes that I felt Prince Caspian did, and it certainly has FAR less of a body count!  As such it seems to me that it will be a more palatable family film than was Caspian.  While the darker and more violent tone of Prince Caspian appealed more to me (as an adult fan of fantasy films), I suspect that the fine folks at Walden Media and 20th Century Fox are hoping that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader hits just the right middle-of-the-road sweet spot with audiences.  Based on what I saw last night I have every reason to suspect that the film will.

In fact, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader reminded me quite strongly of the first two Harry Potter films.  It’s episodic nature; it’s efforts to present some danger and suspense for the characters (and the… [continued]

I’m a big, big fan of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  That film really took me by surprise — it’s a very, very funny film, but also one that is remarkably endearing.

The breakout star of the film was, of course, Russell Brand’s rock star Aldous Snow.  Snow was a delirously lunatic creation — a jovial, high-life-living, self-absorbed maniac of a musician who stole every scene of the movie that he was in.  Many of those scenes co-stared Jonah Hill, who had a small role as a hapless waiter who idolized Aldous.

Get Him to the Greek is a feature-length attempt to recapture the energy of Mr. Brand and Mr. Hill’s interactions in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  Russell Brand repises his role of Aldous Snow, while Mr. Hill portrays a new character: Aaron Green, a young music executive.  Aaron has come up with an idea for Pinnacle Records, the company at which he works: in an attempt to revitalize Aldous Snow’s career, and their flagging record sales, they’ll schedule a concert at the Greek Theater in LA on the ten-year anniversary of Aldous’ previous triumphant performance at that venue.  All that Aaron needs to do is to ensure that the hard-living musician arrives at the theater on time to perform.

It’s a familiar set-up, and one can see the road-map for the film’s story a mile away.  Clearly, Aaron is going to have a lot of frustrating moments trying to keep Aldous en route to the theater, and one can also reasonably expect the straight-laced Aaron to be tempted and perhaps at first overwhelmed by the singer’s partying lifestyle.  Perhaps Aldous might also learn some lessons in responsibility from Aaron.

And that, in a nutshell, is the movie.  So don’t expect Get Him to the Greek to turn any comedy film tropes on their ear.  Nevertheless, I was quite taken by the film’s relentlessly entertaining nature.  Director and co-writer Nicholas Stoller has assembled some amazing comedic performers, and he pretty much lets them all cut loose and bounce off of one another for the duration of the film.  There are plenty of scenes that seem to go one for longer than they should, and plenty of scenes that don’t really serve much of a purpose in the film’s story.  But I didn’t mind terribly, because it’s a lot of fun watching these characters interact with one another, and I enjoyed the time we got to spend in their world.

Brand and Hill are reliably hilarious.  For me the biggest surprise was Rose Byrne, who knocks it out of the park as Aldous’ former musical partner and lover Jackie Q, who is now living with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich (who ahas a very funny small… [continued]

You might have thought that Tom Hanks had a crazy accent in Catch Me If You Can, but that was merely a prelude to the ludicrously silly sort-of-Slovic voice that Mr. Hanks puts on for his role as Viktor Novorski in Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film, The Terminal.

Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) has just arrived to New York City from the Eastern European country of Madeupistan.  Er, excuse me, Krakozia.  Unfortunately, his country undergoes a military coup while Navorski is in the air.  By the time he arrives in New York City, all relations between the United States and Krakozia have been severed, and due to a variety of legal permutations, Mr. Navorski is unable to enter the U.S. but is similarly unable to return to Krakozia.  In short, he finds himself stuck, indefinitely, in the airport.

Let the comic hijinks commence!

I commented in my review of Catch Me If You Can on my feeling, when I first saw the film back in 2002, that it was a surprisingly slight film for Mr. Spielberg to make.  That probably caused me to dismiss the film a little too quickly at the time.  Well, if Catch Me If You Can is slight, then The Terminal is practically nonexistent.

That sounds harsh, which isn’t my intention.  There’s certainly some fun to be had in The Terminal. It’s just that while Catch Me If You Can was a light, fun film, it did have a pretty dramatic emotional core.  The Terminal sort-of shoots for that as well, but there’s just not much there.  What’s left is a fun, frothy film, but one without a whole heck of a lot to say.

(My wife thought that Viktor’s predicament — in which he is forced to go to some extreme lengths in order to adapt to survive the stranded situation in which he finds himself — reminded her of Mr. Hanks’ role in Cast Away.  I’d never thought of The Terminal in that way, but she’s right!  The difference, of course, is that The Terminal doesn’t have any of the dramatic underpinnings of Cast Away.  That’s putting it mildly!)

The Terminal has a fairly episodic structure.  Through a variety of vignettes, we see Viktor adapt to his crazy situation and somehow make for himself a remarkably pleasant life living in the airport.  He gradually bonds with several of the other off-beat but kind airport employees — played by Chi McBride (Boston Public), Diego Luna (Y tu mama tambien, Milk), Gupta Rajan (just as entertaining here as he was in The Royal Tenenbaums), and a pre-Star Trek Zoe Saldana (and, by the way, it’s a riot to see Ms. Saldana play a Star Trek fan in this film,… [continued]

When I began this project of rewatching the last decade-and-a-half’s worth of films directed by Steven Spielberg, I was hoping that I’d discover (or rediscover) some great films that I had perhaps dismissed too easily when I originally saw them in theatres.  I wondered if watching the films now, years later and separated from the hype and expectations that came with their original theatrical releases, would allow me to appreciate them more and perhaps cause me to re-evaluate my original opinions.

So far, though, that hasn’t happened.  I’ve enjoyed (for the most part), re-watching The Lost World, Amistad, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and Minority Report, but for all four films my opinions have remained almost exactly what they were when I first saw them.  (In a nutshell: mediocre, good, horrible, mediocre.)  But then, this week, I arrived at Catch Me If You Can.  I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this flick!

Based on the autobiography of Frank Abergnale, Jr. (and co-written by Stan Redding), Catch Me If You Can tells the story of Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young man who, for years, successfully conned people into thinking he was an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, and who forged millions of dollars worth of checks.

Mr. Spielberg skillfully strikes a deft balance with the tone of the film.  There are some great moments of humor to be found in the tale (I particularly loved Hanratty’s knock-knock joke), and over-all the film has a fun, light tone.  And yet, at its core, Catch Me If You Can is really a profoundly sad story.  To me, the relationship between Frank and his father, Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) is the back-bone of the film, and it is heartbreaking.  In Frank Jr. we see a young man who, for all of his experiences, is still basically a child, looking for his father’s approval and desperately hoping to find a way to return his life to his idealized vision of how things used to be — with him, his father, and his mother all living happily together in a nice suburban house.  Frank Sr., meanwhile, has seen his business slowly fail (in the film we see him continually dogged by the IRS, and one assumes, despite Frank Sr.’s repeated claims, that this is not without good reason) and his wife leave him, but he is too proud to admit when he needs help and too angry at the government (and the society that allowed him to fail) to push his son to stop the increasingly elaborate con that he’s spinning.

Mr. Walken’s unique line-delivery can make him a ripe subject for parody.  For me, his one scene in Pulp Fiction has forever defined Mr. Walken in my mind… [continued]

There’s no question in my mind that Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors working today.  There’s only one of his films that I haven’t seen (his first — Following — and I do hope to remedy that situation soon), and I have thoroughly enjoyed every other movie he’s made.  His worst film is probably Batman Begins, and I think that’s a pretty damn good film!

Contrary to my previous statement, my sense is that the general consensus about Mr. Nolan is that Insomnia, his follow-up to Memento, is his weakest film.  But I remember enjoying Insomnia back in 2002, and I really loved it when watching it again on blu-ray last week.

Insomnia is a remake of a 1997 Swedish film of the same name starring Stellan Skarsgard and directed by Eric Skjoldbjaerg.  I’ve never seen the original Insomnia, though I understand that it’s pretty well thought of.  I realize that, had I seen it, it’s possible that I might be as dubious of a remake as I am of the recently-released re-do of Let The Right One In (the new American version is titled simply Let Me In).  But having not seen the original, I am free to judge Mr. Nolan’s version exclusively by its own merits — and it’s quite excellent.

Al Pacino plays beleaguered L.A. homicide detective Will Dormer.  The L.A. police department has been rocked by allegations of misconduct, and Dormer believes that the I.A. investigators are ultimately after him.  In the midst of that, Dormer and his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) are dispatched to a tiny Alaskan town to investigate the murder of a teen-aged girl.  Heading up the local investigation is a young, well-meaning cop named Elie Burr (Hilary Swank).  She clearly worships Detective Dormer, and he seems to appreciate her enthusiasm.  But the case is a difficult one, and Detective Dormer soon finds himself stymied by his main suspect, a local author named Walter Finch (Robin Williams).  As the film progresses, Dormer gradually unravels, his struggles with the case exacerbated by his persistent insomnia (caused perhaps by the fact that, because of how far North as the Alaskan town is, the sun never sets during this season – or, perhaps by Dormer’s growing guilt over the mistakes of his past and a terrible event that happens soon after arriving in Alaska).

This was a high-profile role for Hilary Swank, coming as it did not long after her Academy Award-winning role in Boys Don’t Cry (1999).  Ms. Swank is solid if unspectacular in the film.  The real superstars of Insomnia are Al Pacino and Robin Williams.

Though unquestionably one of the greatest actors of our time, I’ve often felt that in the last decade or so Mr. Pacino (not… [continued]

When I first saw Steven Spielberg’s film  Minority Report in theatres back in 2002 (the only time I’d seen the film until I watched it again on DVD last week), I remember it becoming startlingly clear to me that the man has trouble with the endings of his films.

I recognize that the present-day epilogues to Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are overloaded with schmaltz and are completely unnecessary to the story, but I’ve never been bothered by those endings (the way others have been, most famously William Goldman, who eviscerated Saving Private Ryan in his famous review).  I was so emotionally engaged with the stories and characters in both of those films that I was not bothered with their endings (even though the logical part of my brain did realize that Mr. Spielberg was laying the emotion on a bit thickly).  But as I wrote last week, I thought the final 25 minutes of A.I. were abominable and possibly the worst 25 minutes Steven Spielberg had ever put to film.  The ending of Minority Report isn’t quite at that level of jaw-dropping terribleness, but I think the first hour and 45 minutes of the film are a very solid, dark sci-fi thriller that is completely undone by the last 35 minutes or so.

At first, Minority Report kept me very engaged.  It’s easy and popular to hate on Tom Cruise these days, but I think he’s a far better actor than he gets credit for, and he’s an engaging lead here.  Mr. Cruise plays the generically-named Tom Anderton, the top-cop at the new Pre-Crime division that has been set up in Washington, DC.  Using three “pre-cogs” (psychics kept under sedation), the Pre-Crime team are able to intercept murders before they happen.  After six years of operation, in which the team has virtually eliminated homicides in DC, a national referendum has been set to determine whether Pre-Crime divisions will be set up in other cities across the U.S.  In advance of this, John and his team are under investigation by Federal Agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell).  Everything goes to hell when the psychics predict that John himself is about to commit a homicide.  He goes on the run, determined to prove his innocence, but finds himself setting in motion events that might undermine the legitimacy of the entire Pre-Crime unit.

For that first hour and 45 minutes, Minority Report is a solid, gritty little film.  It goes to some surprisingly grim places.  There’s an early scene in which we learn that apparent super-cop John Anderton is actually a rather broken man.  With the rain falling outside, John sits in the dark in his cluttered apartment, watching holographic projections of… [continued]

Director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has assembled a powerful new documentary, Waiting for “Superman,” about the deep problems in the United States’ public school system.  These problems may seem extraordinary and insurmountable, but Mr. Guggenheim’s film argues that the solutions are actually fairly clear, if the public and our leaders have the will to enact them.

The situation in our schools is a deeply depressing topic, and that might cause many to skip this film.  (Who wants to go to a movie theatre to be bummed out?)  But I encourage you to give Waiting for “Superman” a try.  Mr. Guggenheim has crafted a film that is never boring, and while he covers a lot of ground in the film, the narrative zips ahead at an energetic pace, assisted by several clever techniques.  Mr. Guggenheim utilizes some simple but interesting bits of animation to help illustrate his arguments.  The film’s narration (spoken by Mr. Guggenheim himself) keeps the documentary on target and focuses our attention on the points Mr. Guggenheim is trying to make, without falling into bombastic rhetoric or frustrating oversimplification.  (While Mr. Guggenheim is never a character in his film to the degree that, say, Michael Moore is in his films, I appreciated the way that Mr. Guggenheim wasn’t afraid to include himself in the film.  We hear him asking questions of many of the interview subjects, and he doesn’t shy away from discussing how and why he and his wife chose not to send their children to public school.) 

But most of all, the film succeeds because Mr. Guggenheim has chosen to focus on several engaging individual subjects.  Rather than making the movie solely about vast statistics and broad national problems, he grounds his film in the stories of five children (and the parents trying to find the best schools for them) as well as on two controversial figures attempting broad reform to the public school system.  These small stories help illuminate the larger problems before us.

The kids featured in Waiting for “Superman” are well-chosen.  They are from different parts of the country, and from different ethnic and social backgrounds, but each of them (along with their families) are faced with the same dilemma.  All five are good kids who have an interest in learning — but all five are located in districts with public schools that, to put it mildly, are not known for excellence.  In more blunt terms, these schools are “failure factories” — one of the many nick-names for these sorts of public schools that can be found across the nation, from which the vast majority of kids fail to graduate. 

I defy you not to fall in love with these kids.  It’s heartbreaking to listen to their parents describe their hopes for their children,… [continued]

After re-watching Jurassic Park (click here for my review) and The Lost World (click here for my review) last month (as part of my look back at the last decade-and-a-half’s worth of films directed by Steven Spielberg) I figured, what the heck, why not take another look at Jurassic Park III (executive produced by Mr. Spielberg and directed by Joe Johnston).

While not as bad as I’d remembered, like The Lost World this third Jurassic Park film is a pale reflection of the first one.

In some respects, I think I like Jurassic Park III better than the second installment.  Whereas The Lost World was slow and rambling — with a story that was all over the place — Jurassic Park III has a much leaner, meaner narrative: a group of people crash on the island and must find a way to survive long enough to reach the coast where rescue hopefully awaits.  That’s a simple hook, and I think it serves the film well.  The story gets going quickly, and from there moves right along like gangbusters straight through to the end.  There’s an intensity and sense of danger that I felt the second film was completely missing.

There are also some terrific action set-pieces.  Here is where Joe Johnston’s background in the world of visual effects serves him well.  We finally get to see some Pterodactyls (teased by the first two films), and they’re worth the wait — the whole sequence in the Pterodactyl cage is a tense, exciting adventure.  I also love the Spinosaur/T-Rex fight early in the film (shades of the King Kong/T-Rex fight, I felt, but that amused me rather than annoying me), as well as the Spinosaur attack on the river, in the rain, that takes place late in the film.

Whereas The Lost World chose — mistakenly, I think — to focus entirely on Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, this third film wisely returns the focus to Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant.  I love Mr. Neill in this role, and it’s great to see him back front-and-center in this film.

Unfortunately, despite those strengths, there’s also quite a lot of weaknesses to Jurassic Park III, things that keep the film squarely mediocre in my mind.

First of all, other than Sam Neill, I think the film’s ensemble is pretty weak.  One of the key components to the first film’s success was how many great characters there were in the piece — and the great actors chosen to portray them.  But like The Lost World, while the lead character in Jurassic Park III is interesting and sympathetic, the rest of the ensemble is flat.  I love William H. Macy, but he… [continued]

In celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary (and also, not coincidentally, to promote yesterday’s release of the trilogy on blu-ray), movie theatres across this great nation of ours screened Back to the Future this past Monday night.  I’m thrilled to say that I had tickets to the showing here in Boston, and it was an absolutely magnificent event.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had more fun in a movie theatre!!

What a delight it was to get to see this spectacular film on the big screen!  The film played like gangbusters — the audience I was in was captivated by the movie from minute one.  Of course everyone in the theatre knew the movie backwards and forwards, but that could lead to an audience laughing at the film, and the experience becoming more like watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  (Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly a different experience from when an audience is really engaged by a film’s story.)  But the audience I was with was kept spellbound by the film all the way through — laughing hard at all the jokes (even the subtle ones) and cheering at all the key places.

It’s hard to believe that Back to the Future is a quarter-century old.  The film holds up remarkably well.  The acting, the direction, the score, the visual effects — everything works almost exactly as well as it did back in 1985 when the film was released.  OK, there are one or two dodgy moments (like the effects shot when Marty & Doc whip around to look at the fire tracks left by the just-vanished DeLorean in the Twin Pines Mall — if you look closely, Marty and the Doc appear to be floating in the frame) but these are barely noticeable and, really, sort of endearing if you do pick up on any of those tiny flaws.

At the screening, the film looked and sounded amazing.  The print that we were shown had been gorgeously restored.  The image was sharp and with vibrant colors.  The dialogue was clear, the music was rocking, and the effects were booming (especially the climactic clock tower lightning strike!).

There were so many aspects of the film that were really highlighted when seeing it on the big screen.  First and foremost is the eyeball-acting of Christopher Lloyd.  Seriously, I could spend the entire run-time of the film just watching Mr. Lloyd’s eyeballs pop and squint and wriggle.  Lloyd is a riot, and he makes then most of every single second he has on screen.  Take the scene in the Doc’s garage, when Lorraine shows up (having trailed Marty there).  Doc has maybe one line of dialogue in the… [continued]

I was blown away by Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and so I was of course eager to see his second film: The Town.  While I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as Gone Baby Gone, The Town is as an engaging and confident sophomore effort from Mr. Affleck, and definitely worth your time.

As with Gone Baby Gone, The Town is set in Boston (in this case, specifically, Charlestown).  In both films, one of Mr. Affleck’s primary accomplishments has been in bringing that Boston setting to life to the degree that the film’s story is indelibly linked with the Boston location.  By shooting in Boston, by casting naturalistic actors (as well as a variety of local non-actors), and by a million other details that Mr. Affleck and his team get just right, the streets of Boston become the film’s beating heart.

In addition to directing and co-writing the film (“It’s going to be awfully tough to walk away from this one,” Mr. Affleck told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last month, referring to his triple-threat role), Mr. Affleck stars as Doug, a hardened young man who works for a sand and gravel company breaking rocks — that is, when he’s not robbing Charlestown banks with his crew.  In the heist that opens the film, Doug’s close friend (the two are practically brothers) Jem briefly takes the young bank manager, Claire, hostage in order to have some insurance in case the cops show up earlier than expected.  They let her go, but Jem worries that she could incriminate them, so Doug agrees to discreetly find out what she knows.  He arranges to accidentally bump into her at the laundromat, but quickly finds himself drawn to this young woman who, to Doug, represents his idealized vision of a life outside of The Town. 

That doesn’t stike me as a terribly original hook for a film (troubled guy falls for a girl who makes him, you know, want to be a better man), and nothing in the narrative of The Town feels especially surprising.  This, to me, is the main reason why I didn’t find The Town to be nearly as gripping as the edge-of-your-seat, where-the-heck-is-this-all-going narrative of Gone Baby Gone.  I haven’t read Chuck Hogan’s novel, Prince of Thieves, on which The Town is based, but I can’t imagine it’s as strong a source material as was the novel by Dennis Lehane that was adapted for Gone Baby Gone. 

But, OK, though The Town isn’t as good as Gone Baby Gone, it’s still a very well-made and entertaining thriller. 

Mr. Affleck is a way better actor than he’s usually given credit for, and he’s great in the lead as Doug.  He’s eminently believable as the street tough… [continued]

Now that we’ve arrived at 2001′s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I can finally start calling this series looking back at the recent films of Steven Spielberg by the original title I’d thought up: “Spielberg in the Aughts.”  (My first thought, last month, was that I’d look back at the last decade of Mr. Spielberg’s films, none of which I’d ever revisited after seeing them in theatres — but then I realized there were several of his films from the ’90s that I wanted to revisit, too, while I was at it!  Click here for my review of Jurassic Park, here for my review of The Lost World, and here for my review of Amistad.) 

I hated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence when I saw it in theatres.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I thought the first three-fourths of the movie — right up to the point when Haley Joel Osment’s David finds himself trapped underwater staring at the Blue Fairy but unable to reach her — was a solid if somewhat dour sci-fi film.  But then the movie kept going.  I felt those last 25 minutes-or-so were the worst 25 minutes that Steven Spielberg had ever committed to film.  Those 25 minutes were so bad that, for me, they entirely destroyed the film.

So what did I think, a decade later?

Well, after nearly ten years of having the thought in my head that the final 25 minutes of A.I. were the worst 25 minutes of film that Steven Spielberg had ever shot, those 25 minutes had been quite built up in my mind, so not surprisingly they didn’t quite live up to the heights of awfulness that I had remembered.  Also, after having seen the entirety of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I can no longer state with certainty that the end of A.I. represents the worst 25 minutes that Steven Spielberg has ever put on film. 

But I will say that I still thought the ending was entirely awful on almost every level.

The basic plot of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was developed, over many years, by Stanley Kubrick.  As the story goes, Mr. Kubrick worked on the film for years — and often discussed the project with his friend Steven Spielberg — but for a variety of reasons never actually made the movie.  Following his death, Mr. Spielberg got involved with the project in an attempt to realize this unfinished work that Mr. Kubrick had begun.

As a movie-fan back in 2001, I was ecstatic that Steven Spielberg (the man who made E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was returning, at long-last, to sci-fi.  I was intrigued to see Mr. Spielberg bring the extraordinary visual expertise and… [continued]

It’s hard for me to a recall another film that has so bravely allowed its lead character to come off as so completely unlikable.  In The Social Network‘s power-house of a first scene, Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is clearly presented to us as a Grade-A, prime-cut jackass.  It’s a hell of a way to start a movie!

As you are all probably aware, this arrogant Harvard undergrad is the man who will go on to become the billionaire creator of Facebook.  Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaire, The Social Network follows Mark from his days at Harvard through the world-wide explosion of Facebook and the eventual lawsuits brought against him by several former Harvard classmates, including the young man who had once been his closest friend.

There has been some questioning of the accuracy of The Social Network, but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin defends the film.  He told Entertainment Weekly: “If we know what brand of beer Mark was drinking on a Tuesday night in October seven years ago when there were only three other people in the room, it should tell you something about how close our research sources were to the subject and to the events.”  Producer Scott Rudin makes similar statements: “You can’t make untrue statements about someone without running the risk of getting sued.  Look around and notice that nobody has sued us.”

While of course I myself have no idea about whether events truly unfolded the way they are depicted in The Social Network, I can say that the film FEELS real to me.  All of the characters in the film — including Mark Zuckerberg — are depicted in a three-dimensional way.  There aren’t easy heroes and villains in the film — most of the characters seem likable and unlikable at different points in the narrative, just as real human beings are.  (This, to me, is in contrast to a film like A Beautiful Mind, in which it seemed so clear to me as a viewer that the filmmakers had shaved away any unlikable aspects to John Nash in order to create a more heroic lead for the film.)

But knowing that the parties involved strongly dispute just what went down over the course of the creation of Facebook, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin cleverly decided to embrace that ambuguity with the film’s structure.  As we watch events unfold chronologically, the film regularly cuts forward in time to the depositions in the two lawsuits eventually brought against Zuckerberg.  In those scenes, we see the participants debate and argue about the moments that we, the viewers, just saw occur.  This is a really smart way to allow the film to incorporate the characters’ different viewpoints… [continued]

After re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird last month, I couldn’t resist re-watching the famous film adaptation from 1962 starring Gregory Peck.  I’d seen the film before, many years ago, but I hardly remembered it.  After having devoured Harper Lee’s magnificent novel, reminding myself in the process of what an amazing achievement in literature it is, I was eager to take another look at the film.

Sadly, whereas re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird only elevated it further in my mind, I found myself fairly disappointed by the film version.

It’s a fairly faithful adaptation.  Almost all of the key characters and scenes from the novel are present in the film.  Events are slightly re-organized, and the time-frame is condensed (the film takes place over a single year, from one summer to the next, while the novel is spread out over two years and three summers), but nothing major is left out.  Yet the whole thing seems sort of flat and lifeless.  The familiar scenes are all there, but they’re drained of much of the emotional context that I felt in the book.

Where the film really fell down, for me, was in the performances of the kids.  Frankly, I just didn’t care for any of the three child actors chosen to play Scout, Jem, and Dill.  I have written often on this blog that I think the failure or success of child actors rests on how they are handled by the director, so I don’t just fault the kids.  I also acknowledge that standards and styles of performance were quite different in the 1960′s than they are today.  One can’t expect to see the type of viscerally honest performance by a child actor such as Max Records as Max in Spike Jonze’s recent adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (click here for my review of that amazing film) in a movie from that era.  But whatever the reason, I just didn’t feel the performances of the three kids.  It felt like three kids acting out scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird, rather than my believing that I’m watching three real characters interact.

Where the film didn’t disappoint me, though, was in Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch.  Although he’s been in a number of other famous, well-made films, Mr. Peck has become indelibly linked with Atticus, and after thirty seconds on screen one can see why.  Mr. Peck is perfectly cast.  With his deep voice and large frame, Mr. Peck is powerfully believable both as an erudite lawyer as well as the town’s best sharp-shooter, and he embodies all the wiseness and kindness of an ideal father figure.  While I felt that the kids (and several other performers in the film)… [continued]

My revisitation of the last decade-and-a-half of the films of Steven Spielberg continues!  I’ve already looked at Jurassic Park and The Lost World, which brings me now to 1997′s Amistad.

In an attempt to recapture the magic of 1993 (in which he released two films in a single year, the dramatic historical film Schindler’s List as well as the crowd-pleasing action spectacle Jurassic Park), in 1997 Mr. Spielberg released both the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World as well as the historical epic Amistad. 

In 1839 a group of African slaves broke free aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and killed most of the crew.  When they were intercepted by an American naval vessel, the slaves were imprisoned and brought to trial.  A group of abolitionists became aware of the case, and hired a young, inexperienced lawyer named Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) to take the case.  Mr. Baldwin was forced to retry the case multiple times, as the politics of a nation heading towards Civil War bestowed upon this small case an enormous weight in the potential fate of the nation.  Ultimately, the case was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) assisted Mr. Baldwin in arguing for the release of the Amistad slaves.

As is often the case, Mr. Spielberg assembled a talented group of actors to embody the characters in the film.  Mr. McConaughey does a fine job as the jovial, slightly naive lawyer Baldwin.  The role doesn’t feel like much of a stretch for him (particularly after playing a lawyer the year before as the lead in 1996′s A Time to Kill), but he reins in some of his more over-the-top mannersisms which allows him to fit well into this historical drama.  Fresh off of The Lost Word, Pete Postlewaite pops up again as an equally unlikable fellow — this time, he’s the lawyer assigned to prosecute the Amistad case.  Stellan Skarsgard and Morgan Freeman play the abolitionists who are drawn to help the Amistad slaves.  Though neither has much to do in the film, both make the most of their small parts.  Other familiar, talented members of the cast include Nigel Hawthorne as President Martin van Buren, David Paymer (The Larry Sanders Show, State and Main) as Secretary Forsythe, Xander Berkeley (24) as the presidential advisor Hammond, Anna Paquin (X-Men, True Blood) as Queen Isabella, and I was pleasantly surprised that I had forgotten that Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Spartan) has a fairly substantial role as the translator who assists Mr. Baldwin in communicating with the Amistad slaves.

But the two standouts of Amistad are Djimon Hounsou as Cinque, the young man who who leads the Amistad revolt and as such becomes… [continued]

Last week I began my look back at the last decade-and-a-half of Steven Spielberg films with Jurassic Park.  Now my project to revisit all of the films that Mr. Spielberg has made since 1993 — films that, with the exception of Saving Private Ryan, I have only seen once — continues with Mr. Spielberg’s 1997 Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World.  (I’ll be calling this series Spielberg in the Aughts, but I can’t really use that title for a film made in 1997…!)

I remember being very disappointed with this film when I saw it back in 1997.  It was the first time I had gone to see a Steven Spielberg film in theatres and come out disappointed.  (But not the last…)  So when I watched this film on DVD, I was curious to see if I liked it any more now, so many years later and divorced from all the hype of the time.

In a word: no.

I will say that The Lost World looks great.  Mr. Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, genius-level cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, have darkened their palette this time out.  Whereas the first Jurassic Park was quite bright for much of it’s run-time, The Lost World has a much more shadowy look to it, and that is effective at adding a layer of spookiness and mystery to the proceedings.  The dinosaur CGI effects still look pretty great.  One of the few scenes that takes place in bright daylight is the introduction to Pete Postlewaite’s great white hunter Roland Dembo and his team, as they attempt to capture a number of dinosaurs in the midst of a high-speed run across a plain.  There are no shadows in which to hide dodgy effects, but none are needed — ILM’s CGI creatures (combined with some top-notch work from Stan Winston’s animatronic workshop) look fabulous.

But that’s pretty much the only good thing I can say about The Lost World.  I found the story to be a mess, and the characters flat and uninvolving.  From the get-go, The Lost World was operating at a disadvantage to its predecessor, Jurassic Park, because its source material was much weaker.

I still remember being blown away when I first read Michael Crichton’s novel, Jurassic Park (well-before the movie came out), and I was so excited when the news broke that he was working on a sequel book.  But I was underwhelmed by The Lost World when the novel was released.  It just didn’t seem anywhere near as interesting as the first.  Wisely, Mr. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp chose to jettison much of the source material — but what they came up with in its place wasn’t much better.

Right from the beginning… [continued]

I once considered Tim Burton one of my very favorite directors, but recent years have changed that somewhat for me.  I still think he’s an extraordinary talent who has given us some incredible films, but since 1999′s Sleepy Hollow, in my opinion Mr. Burton has directed two mediocre films (Big Fish and Sweeney Todd) and two absolutely terrible films (Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

When I first heard that Mr. Burton would be directing an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, I thought at first that that was an inspired idea — that the weirdness of Alice in Wonderland would be a great match for Mr. Burton’s bizarre sensibilities.  But when I started seeing trailers for the film, I thought it looked terrible.  The glimpses I got of Johnny Depp’s totally wacky portrayal of the Mad Hatter didn’t interest me, the design of the film looked garish, and it seemed to me that the dark terror of Sleepy Hollow had been replaced by lowest-common-denominator all-ages pap.  For the first time that I could ever remember, here was a new Tim Burton film that I was not interested in seeing.  Once I started to read the poor reviews (and, in particular, the on-line eviscerations of the 3-D conversion), I decided to pass on seeing the film in theatres.

But, you know, it’s a new Tim Burton movie!  Even though it didn’t look like a film I would enjoy, I do admit to remaining sort of curious to see what Mr. Burton had come up with.  Was the film really as bad as it looked to me in the trailers, and as I’d read?  When I saw the film in the “new releases” section of my local video store, I decided to rent it so I could see for myself.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is not a total catastrophe.  There are some bits and pieces of the film that I liked.  But as you could probably tell from my recent cartoons, I found the whole thing to be exceedingly mediocre, and quite a disappointment coming from the talented Tim Burton.

The film started off well.  I quite liked Mia Wasikowska’s performance as Alice.  She’s certainly quirky enough to feel right at home as the lead in a Tim Burton film, but her Alice also felt recognizably vulnerable and human.  Her trip down the rabbit-hole and entrance into Wonderland was sufficiently weird and spooky, and I quite liked the build-up of hints that this wasn’t Alice’s first trip to Wonderland.  That was a surprising choice on Mr. Burton’s part (and that of screenwriter Linda Woolverton), but I really dug it.  I liked the sense of history and mystory that gave the… [continued]

1993 was a banner year for Steven Spielberg.  That year saw the release of two films that he directed: Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park.  Both were phenomenally good, though two more different films I can scarcely imagine.  To my younger self, those dual accomplishments in 1993 embedded Steven Spielberg in my mind as a director at the top of his game who could pretty much do no wrong.  If he could succeed at making both a potent, emotional historical drama, as well as a nail-biting sci-fi action spectacle, then the man could do anything.

I remember very clearly when I first saw Jurassic Park on the big screen.  It scared the hell out of me!  That seems sort of silly now, but I wasn’t prepared at the time for how intense a film it was.  Seeing it projected on the big screen, I was totally blown away by the visual effects, and also by the incredible sound.  Jurassic Park is one of the first films that really made me think about the sound design.  I think it was the incredible sound-scape that contributed to the intensity of the film as much as the amazing imagery.

Watching Jurassic Park, today, on DVD, the film doesn’t have anywhere near that intensity.  It does, however, hold up rather well.  The CGI effects that were so ground-breaking at the time still look great.  That’s a pretty amazing achievement — I’m sure you don’t have to think too hard to come up with a lengthy list of films whose visual effects were groundbreaking at the time but are pretty laughable today — and it’s a testament to the quality work done by all the artists involved with the film.  It’s pretty amazing to me how well-made the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are.  There wasn’t a single shot that jumped out at me as being silly or fake-looking.  This is important in allowing the film to retain its effectiveness, even almost twenty years later.  It’s critical that the dinosaurs work as believable creatures — otherwise I think you’d be plucked right out of the story.

But the reason why Jurassic Park still works today isn’t just about the dinosaurs — it’s also about how carefully and successfully Mr. Spielberg (and screenwriters David Koepp and Michael Crichton, adapting Mr. Crichton’s novel) establish a believable, interesting ensemble of characters to hang the story around.  It takes almost a full hour of the film before the dino-mayhem really begins.  That time is well-used, as we get to know and care about the folks who are about to be terrorized.

Sam Neillhas never been better than as Dr. Alan Grant, the paleontologist hero of the film.  He’s ornery but not in an… [continued]

I saw a lot of movies in 2009, but one of the films that I missed was An Education.  I’ve been meaning to remedy that for a while, ever since the film was released on DVD, and I finally had a chance to watch it earlier this month.  It’s a great film, which I thoroughly enjoyed right up until the final 3-4 minutes.  (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a sixteen year-old girl who lives with her parents outside of London in the 1960′s.  She is studying hard at an all-girls school in the hopes of being accepted to Oxford the following year.  One rainy day, while walking home from school, she meets David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), a charming, wealthy man who is a great deal older than she.  Jenny is impressed by his lifestyle, and his interest in and knowledge of art and music.  David’s charm seduces Jenny’s parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) almost as much as it does Jenny — her mother and father are so excited at the prospect of their daughter marrying such a well-off, intelligent and cultured fellow that they allow themselves to be blinded to the potential downsides of the relationship.

An Education is a fairly small-scale, intimate character study (that’s a compliment, not a criticism), and as such it is carried on the strength of its ensemble cast.  (Though a strong script from the great Nick Hornby helps too!)  That the actors assembled are SO strong is probably why the film was met with such acclaim upon its release last year.  Carey Mulligan knocks it out of the park in her first major leading role.  She brings a fierce intelligence as well as a believable vulnerability to the role of Jenny, a young woman on the verge of a larger education about life than she was expecting.  Peter Sarsgaard is equally compelling as David.  Anyone who’s ever seen a movie before can probably surmise that there’s more to this seemingly charming man than meets the eye, but Mr. Sarsgaard’s compelling performance makes one understand why Jenny (and her parents) can fall for him.

Speaking of Jenny’s parents, Alfred Molina is stupendous as her father.  As with all the actors in the ensemble, he avoids cliche or over-simplification in his performance.  He’s a comic stick-in-the-mud at many points in the film, particularly in the early-going (complaining about listening to Jenny’s practicing her cello, or protesting that he doesn’t want to drive so far to hear a concert), but he also clearly cares for his daughter and is concerned for her well-being.  As his wife, Cara Seymour has the far-less showy role, but she also brings great strength (and… [continued]

In the quiet, tense new film The American, George Clooney plays Jack (though we have no idea if that’s his real name, and he assumes the name Edward for much of the film).  Jack is involved in some Bad Things, though what exactly those Bad Things are is never specified.  He is perhaps a gun-for-hire, and he is definitely a gun-maker-for hire, as that is the job we see him involved with for the bulk of the film.  Jack has been hired, through his nameless employer, to craft a specific type of gun for a beautiful woman named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten, who played Sayid’s doomed girlfriend Inga in “The Economist” episode of Lost).  While Jack clearly seems to be a master of his craft, the loneliness and isolation of his life has begun to affect him — not to mention the fact that he is being pursued by several Swedish assassins.  When he forms a connection with a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), we can see that Jack has become desperate for a real, substantial human connection — though he is also skilled enough at his profession that he is well aware of the dangers of “making friends.”

Mr. Clooney is a compelling lead, dramatically downplaying his charm in his depiction of an almost-broken man who is nevertheless believably magnetic to Clara.  There is very little dialogue in the film — the story is carried along mainly by looks and gestures.  We spend much of the film watching Mr. Clooney quietly at work, and he gives Jack a strong inner life without ever having to resort to lengthy monologues to tell the audience what he’s thinking or feeling.

The film is gorgeously shot.  The vistas (the film is set in Sweden and Italy) are amazingly beautiful, and director Anton Corbijn shows a keen eye for composition and a confidence in keeping his camerawork stable and slow-moving.  In many ways his camera-placement is as “quiet” as the rest of the film.  This works well, I think, in focusing our attention on the drama happening in Jack’s head. 

The American reminds me, in aspiration if not quite in accomplishment, of The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece starring Gene Hackman.  Both films center on a protagonist involved in not-quite-legal doings, one who is a master at his game but who has also begun to chafe at the isolation that his mastery of his profession demands.  In both films, the tension rises as the protagonist attempts to connect with a woman, while also finding himself to be under constant threat of death from outside forces. 

Where The American fails for me (in contrast to The Conversation), is in the sketchiness with which the situation… [continued]

Let me say right up front that I found Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to be an enormously fun, engaging, original movie, and I am really bummed that the film has been so poorly received at the American box office.  After a summer filled with so many lazy, lowest-common-demoninator money-grab movies, here at last is a movie stuffed to overflowing with wit and creativity and heart.  Too bad so few people have seen it!!

Based on the series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley (which I’ll admit that, despite my love of comics, I have never read), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World tells of story of Scott, a young, lonely twenty-something kid looking for someone to love (who will hopefully love him back).  The film is bold in making Scott to be rather unlikable when we first meet him.  We quickly learn that he’s been in a number of failed relationships, and that he doesn’t seem to have been too gentle to the girls he broke up with once he decided that they weren’t his one true love.  There’s been some back-lash against Michael Cera in recent days, and several of his films have crashed-and-burned (Year One was a mess, and did anyone see Youth in Revolt?), but he’s very well cast in the lead role of Scott Pilgrim.  He has the acerbic edge that allows us to see how he could easily be a jerk to the girls he’s dated, but he also has enough warmth and humor and gentleness that we still wish him well and want to follow him on his adventures in the film.

And Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is certainly more of an adventure than the Juno/Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist type opening might have you believe.  When Scott meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), he immediately finds himself deeply infatuated with her, and the two begin to date.  This is when Scott learns that, to date Ramona, he must battle and defeat her Seven Evil Exes.

If that synopsis is starting to sound like the premise of a video-game more than a movie, then you’re right!  Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is positively drowning in a clear love for video-games.  The film does contain the increasingly elaborate and energetically staged superhero vs. supervillain fights (mirroring the increasingly challenging levels of a video game) that the premise seems to promise, but there’s much more to it then that.  Starting with the ingeniously revamped opening title-cards (in which the studio logos are presented in a pixellated version that looks like what you’d see after dropping a few quarters into an arcade game), practically every frame of the film is filled with creative stylization, much… [continued]

Boy, it’s hard to believe this movie really exists!  Originating as a fake trailer from the start of Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, Grindhouse (FINALLY coming to DVD/Blu-Ray!  Thanks the gods!), Mr. Rodriguez and his team at Troublemaker Studios have expanded the trailer into a full-length film.  Machete is just as much crazy, silly, violent exploitation fun as the original trailer promised.

In a pretty fascinating game of connect-the-dots, Mr. Rodriguez and co-screenwriter Alvaro Rodriguez have created a story that somehow includes pretty much every shot and scene from the original fake trailer.  For me, a big part of the fun of the film was watching to see how and when all of those scenes, that were never originally intended to connect, have all been incorporated into the movie.

Danny Trejo kills in the title role as a tough Mexican who shouldn’t be f–ked with.  Trejo’s Machete is one of the most unflappable characters I’ve ever seen on film — the man seems to take everything in stride, whether that be a confrontation with a crowd of armed bad-guys or an opportunity to sleep with the wife and daughter of an evil politician.  The performance is hilarious in its complete dead-pan affect.  Jeff Fahey and Cheech Marin also reprise their roles from the Grindhouse trailer.  Fahey plays the politician who hires and then foolishly double-crosses Machete, while Marin is Machete’s priest brother who’s not afraid to pick up a shotgun and kick some ass when necessary.  Both are phenomenal.  Fahey is all smarm and sleeze, whereas Marin brings a surprising amount of warmth to his small role.

In fleshing out the story from the original trailer, Mr, Rodriguez and co. created a number of new characters, and they filled those roles with a wonderfully ludicrous assemblage of actors.  Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez play the two tough-and-amazingly-beautiful women who find themselves in orbit of Machete.  Alba is Sartana, a cop whose job is to bust illegal aliens, whereas Rodriguez is Luz, the head of “the Network,” a secret organization set up to help Mexicans enter the country and find work.  I’m not a huge fan of Jessica Alba.  I think Rodriguez uses her well in his films — she was perfect in Sin City, and certainly has some opportunities to look stunning and crack some heads here — but the scenes where she’s called upon to deliver some serious, heart-felt dialogue fell a little flat to me.  (I do blame the script for some clunky lines, as much as her performance.)  But Michelle Rodriguez is just phenomenal (perfectly cast) as Luz — she’s fun and tough and vulnerable all in one.  And let me just say… [continued]

In this summer of bad movies, I suppose The Other Guys must be considered a great comedic success — and, I will freely admit, there is a lot of fun to be had in this film — but it’s not quite the home run I’d been hoping for from a cast and filmmakers of this pedigree.

Will Ferrell plays Allen Gamble, a quiet, bookish police officer who is more accountant than cop.  He’s been partnered with Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), a tough guy who’s been demoted and humiliated after accidentally shooting Derek Jeter during the World Series.  The two men both must live and work under the shadow of super-celebrity cops Highsmith and Danson (the perfectly cast Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).  While those two Lethal Weapon-type cops get all the glory (no matter how much chaos, violence, and property damage they might cause in their movie-style city-wide chases), when compared to them, Gamble and Hoitz are just “the other guys.”  But when Gamble’s eye for details notices some discrepancies in the financial reporting of Wall Street big-wig David Ershon (Steve Coogan), Hoitz sees a chance for glory if they can successfully make the big bust.

The Other Guys has a great cast.  I love the pairing of Ferrell and Wahlberg — that’s an inspired team-up, and watching the two of them bounce off one another is the greatest pleasure of the film.  There are some wonderful digressions over the course of the film (particularly during the first half) in which the story takes a back-seat for a minute for the two to engage in some sort of ridiculous debate, and those scenes are hysterical.  Steve Coogan is all smarm as the surprisingly pathetic Ershon, and he can wring a laugh out of a flummoxed look like nobody’s business.  I also really enjoyed seeing Michael Keaton as the put-upon police captain.  Mr. Keaton hasn’t had a lot of strong roles in the last decade or so, but the man is a riot.  It’s nice to see that he can still bring the funny when well-used in a film.

For the first hour, I was really loving The Other Guys.  The film was filled with zany scene after zany scene, but it was all anchored by a believable story about two good cops having to live in the shadow of the showboating super-stars of their department.  I’m not sure quite what went wrong, then, in the film’s second half, but in my opinion things seemed to peter out.  It might be that the story doesn’t seem to really go anywhere.  As an example, I felt that the momentum of the film grinds to a halt during the sequences… [continued]

I was extraordinarily taken with Adaptation when I first saw it in theatres back in 2002, but I hadn’t seen it since.  I had been waiting for there to be a follow-up to the initial bare-bones DVD with nary a single special feature (save the film’s theatrical trailer) — if ever there was a film that left me desperate for a behind-the-scenes peek at just how the film came to be, it’s this one — but no special edition DVD ever arrived.  Shame!  Still, when I saw the disc in the five dollar bin at Newbury Comics a few months ago, I couldn’t resist.

Adaptation centers on screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s struggles with adapting Susan Orlean’s novel, The Orchid Thief.  How can he possibly make a movie out of the plot-free novel about flowers, without selling out by employing tired Hollywood cliches of action sequences and characters falling in love and learning important life lessons?

The above two-sentence summary really fails to do the film’s weird, complex, sprawling narrative justice.  The film swims deliriously in-and-out of real life events.  Adaptation is of course written by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who really was hired to adapt The Orchid Thief only to find himself totally stymied in his attempts, and he did decide to write himself into his screenplay (Adaptation is the film that resulted), as does the Charlie in Adaptation.  Still with me?  And yet much of Adaptation is pure fiction — Charlie Kaufman doesn’t really have a twin brother Donald (despite Donald’s name being listed in the film’s credits, a clever touch), and of course none of the insanity at the end of the film with Susan Orleans and her subject Laroche (in which drugs and murder come into play) has any basis in reality.

I can only laugh and wonder what the real Susan Orleans thought of this sort-of adaptation of her novel, or of her depiction in the film.  Former executive Valerie Thomas (played in the film by Tilda Swinton), told Variety: “I’m 10 pages in, and suddenly realize, ‘Oh my God, I’m in this.”  That Variety article goes on to comment that Ms. Thomas got off easy in the film, though perhaps they’re forgetting the scene in which Charlie masturbates to the thought of her having sex with him.

Nicolas Cage turns in one of his finest performances ever (well, two of his finest performances ever, actually), in the dual role of Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald.  It is astonishing to me how completely Mr. Cage is able to create and inhabit two entirely different characters despite their identical features.  Cage’s Charlie is depressed, anxious, and self-loathing, whereas Donald is happy, outgoing, and eager to please.… [continued]

And so at last my little tour through the early films of Albert Brooks  concludes.  (Feel free to check out my reviews of Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in America (1985).)  Defending Your Life is probably the Albert Brooks movie that I’ve seen the most — but still, it had been many years since my last viewing, so it was great fun to take another look at the film.

In a brisk opening (a model of efficient story-telling), we’re introduced to Daniel Miller, a mid-level executive who, although he seems to be doing well enough at work that he’s able to buy himself an expensive car to celebrate his birthday, seems to live a fairly lonely life.  While taking his new car out for a spin, Daniel gets distracted and winds up driving directly into a bus.  When he next opens his eyes, he’s in Judgment City, and the movie is off.

Judgment City isn’t heaven or hell, as it’s explained to Daniel — it’s a way-station in which the recently dead are judged to see if they’re ready to move on to the next stage of their existence, or if their souls need to be sent back down to Earth for another go.  Everyone has an opportunity to defend their life in a courtroom-like setting (though Daniel is repeatedly told that it’s not really a trial) before the final decision is made.

The tag-line of Defending Your Life is “the first true story of what happens after you die.”  One of my friends is fond of saying that he fervently hopes that that is true.  There is something appealing, I must agree, to the notion that we’ll all have an opportunity to defend our lives — the actions we took, the choices we made — in the afterlife.  Though he and I aren’t quite sure we agree with Mr. Brooks’ depiction, in this film, that whether one has overcome one’s fear is really the most important question on which one’s life should be judged.  It’s an interesting perspective, and it certainly provides for some fine drama in this film, but I tend to think that there are other, better ways in which one’s merit could be evaluated.  I’m sure there are some quite fearless people out there who are also complete jerks!

It’s a credit to Mr. Brooks’ ambitions that he has created a comedic film that can also prompt such serious questions and thought.  Defending Your Life is certainly a comedic film, though as always Mr. Brooks isn’t afraid to  let several minutes pass without any big punchlines.

The best source of laughs in the film is probably Rip Torn, wonderfully cast as Daniel’s defender,… [continued]

Back in May, after watching Albert Brooks’ 1985 film Lost in America, I wrote that I planned on re-watching his 1991 film Defending Your Life the next week.  Well, time got away from me, and I do still hope to find the time to re-watch that great film soon.  But a few weeks ago, when the mood struck me to again sample an Albert Brooks film, I decided instead to hunt down the last remaining film by Mr. Books that I hadn’t yet seen: Real Life, from 1979.

After having written, directed, and starred in several short films for Saturday Night Live during its early years, Mr. Brooks moved to the big screen with his debut film, Real Life.  He plays film director Albert Brooks (not for the last time), who, in the film, has seized upon an amazing idea: the subject of his next movie will be real life.  Rather than filming a movie with fake characters portrayed by actors and actresses acting out a fake story, he will choose one average American family and film their lives for a year.  Out of that footage he’ll be able to craft a movie more exciting and dramatic than any other motion picture, and it will have something that none of them do: it will be REAL.

Needless to say, Brooks’ “perfect” American family soon turns out to be anything but, and the family’s struggles to maintain their normal lives in the face of constant monitoring by film cameras — not to mention Mr. Brooks’ difficulties at avoiding any interference in their lives — lead to things quickly dissolving into chaos.

I always thought that Albert Brooks was a little bit ahead of his time, but this 1979 film is remarkably prescient in predicting today’s American fascination with “reality TV.”  In Real Life, Mr. Brooks was able to portray both the seduction of being constantly on display before others, as well as the inherent horror of such a situation.  He was also able to predict, with pinpoint accuracy, the way the act of filming someone’s actions will, without fail, cause subtle (or gross) alterations in that individual’s behavior.  (Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Reality Television.)

Amongst the cast, the standout is Charles Grodin.  Mr. Grodin is at the top of his game as Warren Yeager, the beleaguered patriarch of Mr. Brooks’ perfect family.  Grodin is able to be sympathetic and rather pitiable all at the same time.

As with most Albert Brooks films, Real Life is a riot.  The sequence in which veterinarian Warren Yeager attempts to save an injured horse is a knock-out.  But, also as with most Albert Brooks films, there’s also an element of American… [continued]

Hoo boy, this one was disappointing.

I’m a big fan of both Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, and I thought Dinner For Schmucks had a premise that was so weird it seemed to promise good comedy.  Rudd plays Tim, who is trying desperately to climb the ladder at the private equity firm at which he works.  When one of his ideas sparks the attention of his boss (the always-great Bruce Greenwood), Tim gets an invite to his boss’ annual dinner.  But this isn’t just any dinner: each guest must bring, as their guest, the biggest idiot they can possibly find.  The purpose, simply, is for the rich hosts to mock the unfortunate souls gathered for the meal.  When Tim accidentally hits the socially awkward, dead-mice-collecting taxidermist Barry (Steve Carell) with his car, he seems to have found the perfect guest to bring along.

I’ve got to hand it to the filmmakers for having the guts to go with Dinner For Schmucks as their title.  (I’m not quite sure how that one got approved by the MPAA while Kevin Smith’s buddy cop film A Pair of Dicks had to be re-titled Cop Out — do the suits not know what the word schmuck means?)  But that title is about the only edgy element to be found in this broad, obvious comedy.

There aren’t any real, human characters to be found in this film.  Despite being one of the two male leads, I didn’t feel like we really got to know Rudd’s character Tim at all.  He likes his girlfriend and wants to get ahead in business.  What else did we learn over the course of the film?  Tim is painfully middle-of-the-road — not nice enough of a person to be someone we really sympathize with while watching the film, nor enough of a jerk to have any sort of character arc in the movie.  Then there is Carell’s Barry, who’s a big giant goofy cartoon, full of all sorts of bizarre manners and idiosyncracies.  I guess it’s all supposed to be funny, but it didn’t really tickle my funny-bone.

Director Jay Roach has been involved in some very funny movies (such as Austin Powers films), but it seems that lately he’s tended to make overly simplistic, broad comedies (such as the Meet the Parents films), and Dinner For Schmucks exacerbates that trend.  The set-ups for the gags are tired and obvious.  Hey, two characters have the same phone, I wonder if they’re going to get mixed up?  Hey, Tim has an important lunch, I wonder if Barry is going to screw that up?  Hey, now would be the worst moment for Tim’s girlfriend Julie (the beautiful Stephanie Szostak) to show up,… [continued]

A Few Good Men is one of those movies that I saw countless times in the nineties, to the point that I knew the film so well that it bored me. But then I stopped watching it, and when I decided to pop the film into my DVD player earlier this month, it had been many years since I’d last seen it.

While there are a few moments that haven’t aged well, overall I found A Few Good Men to still be a powerhouse of a film – just phenomenally entertaining.

This film is part of Rob Reiner’s astounding run of films – This is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand By Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989). Has any other director had such a run of such phenomenal films, one after another? And what’s really astounding is how different they all are from one another – different genres, different styles. It’s unbelievable how good all of those films are (and how well they all hold up to this day).

Take a director at the top of his game, and mix him with a screenplay by the brilliant Aaron Sorkin (adapting his own play), and you have a recipe for an amazing film. As with much of the work of Mr. Reiner and Mr. Sorkin, the story has a strong dramatic core – but it is also filled with a lot of humor.

It’s fun to watch this movie now and to see just how young Tom Cruise and Demi Moore are in this film. Cruise is just great – you can see his star-power shining through, bright and strong, in his protrayal of hot-shot young lawyer Daniel Kaffee. Moore is a little flatter, but still does well in the role of the stiff Lt. Cdr. Joe Galloway. I think this is one of her best performances. I feel the same way about Kevin Bacon. I tend to think that he’s a much better actor than Demi Moore, and there are certainly plenty of other films in which I’ve really enjoyed his performance. But still, I would argue that his role in A Few Good Men is one of his very best. I love the way he plays his relationship with Cruise’s Kaffee. There’s deep friendship, but also some rivalry and antagonism, between the two young men. In the hands of less-skilled actors, the relationship could have so easily tipped over to one side or the other – but Cruise and Bacon walk that fine line perfectly. I find their characters’ interplay to be endlessly fascinating, and one of the secret treasures of this film.

The great… [continued]

Thank goodness – finally a good movie! I was beginning to think that Toy Story 3 was going to be the only bright spot in this rather dismal summer of movies.

With Inception, writer/director Christopher Nolan reunites a great many members of his Batman ensemble (Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe) with some terrific new faces (Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, and Marion Cotillard) to create a wonderfully mind-bending twisty-turny dream of a movie.

I went in knowing practically zero about the plot, which I think is the best way to approach Inception, so I’m going to avoid even a hint of a plot summary here. I will tell you that Mr. Nolan and his team have been able to create yet another tense, fun piece of summer-movie entertainment that is also sophisticated and adult. There’s some great action in Inception, but this isn’t one of those check-your-brain-at-the-door summer blockbusters.

I’ll be interested to see how well Inception holds up to multiple viewings. Will I remain as entranced by the layers-within-layers narrative structure, or will the movie become boring once I know how things unfold? It’s hard to say, but on this first pass I found the film’s M.C. Escher staircase-like structure to be a hoot.

Right now, Christopher Nolan’s greatest competition is with himself. He’s directed so many wonderful films that I adore with such fervor, that I can see it starting to become a challenge for his new films to stack up to his previous work. Indeed, underneath all the pyrotechnics and special-effects wizardry, Inception is actually a much simpler film that the brilliantly complex Memento. And, while exciting, it lacks the edge-of-your-seat-shit-is-going-DOWN intensity of The Dark Knight.

But that still leaves Inception as a superbly entertaining film. I must again praise the cast, who really are terrific across the board. I was particularly taken with Tom Hardy as the forger Eames. He brings a toughness and a humor to the role that I found very compelling. (Hard to believe this is the same actor who was in the abominable Star Trek: Nemesis.) I also really enjoyed Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance as Dom Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio)’s loyal partner. I really wanted to know more about this guy!

It was fun seeing Ellen Page (Juno) in this type of film, though her character’s arc was probably the weakest part of the film. No fault of Ms. Page’s, but it seems to me that the film never really sold her friendship with Cobb. I didn’t really believe that he opened up to her about his history because he had connected with her – it just seemed like that was the… [continued]

It’s not that the folks at Pixar are incapable of making a bad movie.  (I, for one, never cared for Cars.)  It’s just that it’s so very very rare that they do.  But after watching the marvelous Toy Story 3, it’s easy to believe that Pixar can do no wrong.

It’s been eleven long years since Toy Story 2.  One can perhaps be forgiven for doubting that even the mad geniuses at Pixar could recapture the magic of Toy Story after such a long hiatus.  But I am pleased to report that Toy Story 3 continues Pixar’s powerful winning streak.  It might not be quite the masterpiece that Toy Story 2 is (that film still stands as one of my all-time favorite movies), but I found it to be relentlessly entertaining and deeply moving.

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody and the gang gave up the possibility of a lifetime of preservation (behind glass in a toy museum in Japan) in favor of a few more years being played with by Andy.  Toy Story 3 follows that decision through to its painful, inevitable conclusion.  Yes, Woody, Buzz and friends got a few more years being loved by Andy — but at the beginning of this film, he is all grown up and heading to college.  This leaves the toys facing the prospect of either years of storage in an attic, or being taken out with the trash.  Both prospects are devastating to the toys, whose main desire is to be played with and loved by a child.

Pixar could have easily kept Andy — and the rest of the characters — forever frozen in an ageless state, like Peter Pan or Bart Simpson.  I could easily imagine Pixar making sequel after sequel featuring the gang’s adventures in Andy’s room, without feeling the need to allow real-world issues like the realities of time and aging to intrude on the fun.  God bless the folks at Pixar, then, for not taking that route, and instead grappling head-on with the tough questions raised by the end of Toy Story 2.  The result is a film that — while still absolutely hilarious in parts — I found to be surprisingly melancholy.  This is not a criticism, it is a powerful complement.  The artists at Pixar haven’t created another simplistic, cookie-cutter franchise-extender.  They’ve produced a poignant fable that wrestles with issues that have no easy solution.

That statement leads me to consider (as I have many times since walking out of the theatre), the film’s marvelous ending.  (I’m going to be vague here, to try to avoid major spoilers — but nevertheless, please beware.)  I gladly admit that this film had me fooled… [continued]

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies is a French film that lovingly parodies the 1960′s Sean Connery era James Bond films.  It got very little play here in the U.S., but if you’re a fan of the Connery Bond films then this movie is not to be missed.

OSS 117 actually began as a serious series of spy novels and films in the 1950′s (predating Ian Fleming’s secret agent by several years).  However, Cairo, Nest of Spies is anything but serious.  Now, this film isn’t total insane lunacy like the Austin Powers films.  Rather, this film represents a gentler form of parody.  In many respects, the filmmakers have lovingly recreated the world of 1960′s James Bond — through the sets, the costumes, the colors, the score, etc.  But when it comes to the story, everything is nudged several directions towards the silly.

Jean Dujardin stars as the titular OSS 117, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath.  He’s a well-dressed, highly-trained secret agent, able of besting a skilled foe in hand-to-hand combat and wooing any lovely lady he sets his sights on.  Sound familiar?  But he’s also rather dim, ludicrously devoted to France’s president, and totally condescending to any culture and religion that is not French.  Dujardin is a riot, and the film succeeds primarily because he’s able to walk the tightrope between being an imbecile, but a lovable one.  He’s able to handle witty reparte as well as broad physical humor (the pose he strikes any time he fires his weapon made me laugh every time).

It can be challenging for a comedic film to work even when watched with subtitles, but despite that I still found Cairo, Nest of Spies to be very, very funny.  I’m sure there were a few jokes that would have worked better if I spoke fluent French, but not many.  It helps that many of the film’s best gags are visual ones.  My favorite moment: a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag about OSS 117′s bed-hair when he wakes up in his suite about mid-way through the film. (Though I will comment that I was disappointed that there were several spelling mistakes in the subtitles.  That’s unfortunately amateurish.)

This is an obscure film, but for a Bond nut like myself I am so glad to have seen it.  To any fellow Bond-fanatics out there, I highly recommend you track this down.  (And luckily, a sequel has already been made — OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  It hasn’t been released yet here in the States, but I eagerly await its arrival…)

I’m behind the eight-ball on this one, I know.  Movie-related web-sites across the web have been showering praise on this small-budget Swedish vampire film for the past two years, but I only recently got around to seeing it.  It’s just as terrific as I’d heard.

Oskar is a twelve-year old boy whose parents are separated.  He doesn’t seem to have any friends, at least not any that we see, and he’s terribly bullied by a trio of boys from school.  Oskar likes to hang-out by himself in the courtyard of the building where he lives with his mother.  One night, he meets a girl, Eli, who has just moved into the building.  The two form a gentle friendship.  Of course, once we see Eli’s father/guardian Hakan murder a man in the woods and drain him of his blood, it’s clear that Eli hides a terrible secret.

That plot could easily describe a film that played into a whole lot of dumb, horror-movie cliches, but I was delighted that nothing could be further from the truth.  Director Tomas Alfredson, working from a screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) has crafted a surprisingly gentle, tender film that is at once sweet and chilling.  Let the Right One In unfolds through a series of small, quiet scenes.  It’s a very still movie (though that stillness is punctuated by a few moments of intense violence).  The way the camera lingers on the frozen, snow-covered landscape reminds me in some ways of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, and also in the way the M. Night Shyamalan was unafraid, in his early films (like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable) to let a quiet long shot tell the story.

All of this would be irrelevant were not the film’s two leads, Kare Hedebrant as Oskar, and Lina Leandersson as Eli, so spectacularly good.  There is no over-acting to be found in this film.  Both Hedebrant and Leandersson are able to express a world of character through their small, underplayed facial expressions, often without speaking a word.  (Or when, as is often the case in real life, the words they are speaking fail to convey what’s really going on in their hearts and minds.)  Whenever I see great performances by child actors, I always credit the director as much as the actors themselves, and so kudos to Mr. Alfredson for drawing such restrained, naturalistic performers out of his stars.

I am not a big horror fan, but Let The Right One In quickly won me over.  I’m so glad to have finally given it a shot.  It’s hard to believe that one could describe a vampire movie as tender, but this one is.  I must also… [continued]

After re-watching Albert Brooks’ film Modern Romance a few weeks ago (read my review here), I decided the time had come to revisit some of his other films.  I started by tracking down Lost in America, his 1985 film that, somehow, I had never seen.

Mr. Brooks (who also directed and co-wrote the film, with Monica Johnson) stars as David Howard.  After failing to get a promotion at work — one that he’d been working towards for years — he tells off his boss in spectacular fashion (the explosion is just as much fun as you might think) and gets fired.  So he convinces his wife Linda, played by Julie Hagerty (Elaine Dickinson from Airplane!) to quit her boring job as well.  They sell their house, liquidate their stocks, buy a Winnebago and set out to roam America and find themselves.  Unfortunately, their first stop is in Las Vegas and, after only one night, they’ve lost all their money.  Left with only $800 to their name, David and Linda have to try to find jobs in the small, midwestern town in which they find themselves.

In my humble opinion, Albert Brooks wrote and directed far too few films.  So it was a great delight to get to discover, for the first time, an Albert Brooks film that I’d never seen.  Lost in America certainly isn’t my favorite Brooks film (that would be Modern Romance), but there’s a lot to appreciate here.  There’s a lot of comedy today that wrings laughs from awkward, painful moments (the original British The Office comes to mind), but Mr. Brooks was pushing those boundaries thirty years ago.  For a “comedy,” there’s a lot of real, human moments to be found in Lost in America (and in all his films, really!).

It’s clear from the film’s opening scene — a slow, slow pan through David & Linda’s home, while a Larry King interview with film critic Rex Reed plays on an out-of-sight radio — that we’re in the hands of a filmmaker with great skill.  It’s a very meta choice to start one’s film with a lengthy monologue from Rex Reed talking about films, and it indicates that Mr. Brooks was after more than just a few yuks.  Lost in America tells the story two people who both find themselves trapped in their lives — trapped by their go-nowhere jobs, by the expectations that they put upon themselves about what they “should” be doing, about the house they “should” be living in, and so forth.  It’s a situation in which, one presumes, many middle-class folk find themselves in at one point or another in their lives.  There’s a strong aspect of “wish-fulfillment” in the plan that… [continued]

I’m always chasing after that perfect cinematic experience — the rare movie where everything just seems to magically click, and I walk out of the theatre totally jazzed by what just unspooled before my eyes.  I felt that way when I saw the first Iron Man. I was really blown away by the confidence with which director Jon Favreau and his team (headlined, of course, by the amazing Robert Downey Jr.) pulled off their exciting, engaging, and all-around FUN first installment.

Best of all, while that first movie was certainly a complete story all its own, it ended on a terrific high-note that promised fertile stories ahead — Tony’s spur-of-the-moment “I am Iron Man” admission in the final scene of the film, and the end-of-the-credits button that introduced Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury (played by Sam Jackson, who was the visual model for the character in Marvel’s “Ultimate” universe created about a decade ago) and made mention of the “Avengers Initiative.”  I walked out of that theatre unbelievably pumped for the stories to come, and when Marvel announced, about a week after Iron Man‘s opening, their plans for future films based on Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man 2, all of which would build to a movie-version of Marvel’s super-hero team The Avengers, it was clear that an extraordinary venture was underway.

But that venture was fraught with risk.  Both Thor and Captain America seem like characters who work great in comic books but would be fiendishly difficult to pull off believably in a movie version.  And while most of the key creative players behind Iron Man were returning for the sequel, well, I probably don’t need to list for you the many, many sequels that have been colossal disappointments, unable to capture the magic of the first installment.

Alright, already, so what did I think of Iron Man 2?

Mr. Favreau and his team have crafted another fun, engaging installment of the adventures of Tony Stark.  They haven’t reinvented the wheel.  They haven’t turned over the apple-cart in the way that makes some of the truly great movie sequels so notable (The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, The Dark Knight…).  I didn’t walk out of the theatre with that same tingle that I had after seeing the first Iron Man.  But that doesn’t mean that the film isn’t very good.

Robert Downey Jr. proves that his perfection as Tony Stark in the first installment wasn’t a fluke.  He’s once again phenomenal, totally magnetic whenever he’s on screen.  I was pleased that the filmmakers resisted the temptation to trim any of Stark’s rough edges — Tony is just as much a pompous egomaniac here as he was… [continued]

It’s funny — although I acknowledge that Peter Bogdanovich is a significant, influential director, I must admit with some embarrassment that I’ve seen very few of his films.  Many of his ground-breaking films from the ’70s remain, as-yet-unseen, on my lengthy “to-watch” list: The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, Paper Moon, etc.  I actually know Mr. Bogdanovich more as a knowledgeable film historian (his audio commentary on the DVD of Citizen Kane, for example, is magnificent and enlightening) than I do as a director.

But I’m a big fan of a film that he made in 2001, The Cat’s Meow.  The film is based on Hollywood whispers (“the whisper told most often”) about the events of a fateful boat cruise hosted by legendary media mogul William Randolph Hearst in 1924 that (might have) resulted in the untimely death of director Thomas Ince.

As the film tells the tale, W.R. Hearst invited an assemblage of show-biz folks (and a few gossip-writers) to join him on a yacht cruise in celebration of Mr. Innes’ birthday.  One of the guests was Charlie Chaplin (played by comedian Eddie Izzard), who may or may not have been involved at the time with Hearst’s very young starlet wife, Marion Davies (played by Kirsten Dunst).  (Of course, Hearst’s relationship with Marion Davies was most famously depicted — not in a positive light — in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which resulted in Hearst’s attempts to block that film’s release.)  Though the weekend was supposed to be a fun getaway, it seems that almost every guest on Hearst’s yacht arrived with their own agenda.  The fun of the film is in watching these powerful Hollywood personalities bounce off one another, as each guests’s true ambitions bubble just below the surface.

There’s a lot of humor to be found in the film, although it shouldn’t be mistaken for a farce.  The Cat’s Meow is actually a pretty sad story — this boat cruise did not have a happy ending for many of its guests.

Mr. Bogdanovich assembled an interesting mix of actors for the film.  I really enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s performance as Chaplin.  He doesn’t really look like Chaplin, but still, the casting is inspired.  Izzard really nails the charisma of Chaplin, without falling into mimicry.  It seems to me that Kirsten Dunst isn’t that well thought of as a serious actress, but I thought she was terrific here as Davies.  Unlike Mr. Izzard, she really does look the part — and she brought a surprising amount of soul to the performance.  (You’ll have a lot more empathy for Marion Davies when watching The Cat’s Meow than when watching Citizen Kane!)  Edward Herrmann (whom my wife was excited to… [continued]

As with Death at a Funeral (which I reviewed last month), The TV Set is a film that I’ve been wanting to see ever since it was released.  It was one of those films that sounded really interesting to me, and was very well-reviewed, but I just never got around to catching it.  I keep a little notebook with a long LOOONG list of all the movies that I want to see someday.  Any time I read about a film that sounds interesting, I add it to the list.  I’ve been very busy lately, but I’m really happy that I’ve been able to cross some great films off of that to-watch list lately, thanks to Netflix!

The TV Set stars David Duchovny as Mike Klein, a TV writer.  Mike has written and sold a script for a new TV pilot called The Wexley Chronicles, and over the course of the film we follow the process of casting and filming the pilot from Mike’s well-liked script.

I am a big fan of television, and as a result, The TV Set is difficult to watch at times.  That’s because this film dissects, with surgical precision, why so much television is so terrible.  Written and directed by Jake Kasdan (Orange County, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) and produced by Judd Apatow, the film is based on Apatow and Kasdan’s experiences making the brilliant-but-quickly-cancelled TV series Freaks and Geeks.  Over the course of the film we, along with poor Mike, watch with horror as the network takes his script — which they liked because of its originality — and, through a thousand small compromises that they force Mike to make, set about to eliminate all of the project’s uniqueness in order to create something that will offend no-one and appeal to the widest audience possible.  The process is summed up in an awkward confrontation between Mike and the network head-honcho Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), in which she tells him flat-out: “originality scares me.”

The cast is superb.  Duchovny is perfect as the talented but also sort of sad-sack Mike.  We can see, in his eyes, the quiet desperation with which Mike is trying to hold on to his vision for the project, and the anguish that each little compromise causes him.  Sigourney Weaver kills as the tough, take-no-prisoners Network boss Lenny.  She is a riot, and to describe Lenny as a formidable presence would be a grand understatement.  Ioan Gruffudd (Horatio Hornblower from USA’s series, and perfectly cast but then stranded by the execrable Fantastic Four movies) plays Lenny’s right-hand man Richard, brought over from England to head up the network’s TV development.  Whereas Lenny only cares about the bottom line (making money),… [continued]

Drew McWeeny (who has a terrific blog over at Hitfix.com) has a series called “The Basics,” in which he writes about a film that he considers one of the “essentials” — a film that anyone who takes film seriously should see — and then another, younger writer, William Goss, writes a response.  To read more about this series, click here and then here.  Recently he and Mr. Goss invited other writers to get involved in their film conversations.  Since the last film under discussion was Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), I was really excited to chime in.  (Here’s Mr. McWeeny’s piece about Manhattan.  Here’s what Mr. Goss wrote, and here’s what I had to say.)

Now Mr. McWeeny is writing about Albert Brooks’ 1981 film Modern Romance. What a terrific choice!  It had been a few years since I had last seen the film, so I was happy to have an excuse to pull it off my DVD shelf and give it a viewing.

The great Albert Brooks (who also directed and co-wrote the film) plays Robert Cole, one one the most neurotically messed-up characters I’ve ever seen captured on film.  As the movie opens, Robert breaks up with his girlfriend Mary (Kathryn Harrold, who I always think of as Francine from The Larry Sanders Show).  From her reaction it is clear that this has happened before, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that this opening-scene break-up doesn’t exactly break that cycle.

Modern Romance is very leisurely paced, with long scenes that aren’t in a rush to get to the punchline.  But don’t let that lead you to think that the film isn’t funny.  Quite the contrary, it is hysterical.  This is one of the most quotable comedies that I know.  It might be my favorite Albert Brooks movie, and that’s mostly because of the script’s tremendous wit.

In his review, Mr. McWeeny comments that he loves the way that Mr. Brooks isn’t afraid to digress in the film.  That pretty well sums up one of the strongest aspects, in my opinion, of Modern Romance.  My very favorite moments in the film are the ones that have nothing at all to do with Robert’s on-again off-again cycle with Mary.  I’m talking about the glimpses at Robert’s job as a film editor, working on a lousy-looking science-fiction picture.  That the film takes ten minutes to present us with a scene that’s all about how editing works (as Robert makes an edit to the sci-fi film that he feels strengthens the suspense of a scene) is just wonderful to me.  It helps, of course, that the greatly-missed Bruno Kirby (When Harry Met Sally, The Godfather Part II) and James… [continued]

I’ve been wanting to see Death at a Funeral ever since it was first released (back in 2007), so it’s a funny coincidence that it arrived in my home (via Netflix) the same week that the American remake (featuring a predominantly African-American cast) opened in theatres.

The remake has gotten some decent reviews, but trust me, friends — after watching the phenomenal original version you’ll have absolutely no interest in any other take on this material.

Directed by the great Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy & Yoda and the director of films including Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, In & Out, and Bowfinger), Death at a Funeral features a mostly British cast.  Matthew Macfadyen (MI5, Pride & Prejudice, Frost/Nixon) plays Daniel, who is attempting to arrange the funeral for his father.  Friends and family are gathering for what is supposed to be a quiet, dignified funeral service at Daniel’s parents’ home.  Of course, you can be assured that an escalating series of lunacy quickly unfolds.  Death at a Funeral is a classic farce, and there’s great joy in watching the filmmakers carefully set up all of the dominoes, in the first 30-45 minutes of the film, that they will spend the rest of the movie knocking over to hilarious effect.

This film is a RIOT.  Mr. Macfadyen is great as the straight man trying desperately to hold things together.  He’s surrounded by a terrific ensemble, including Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) as an old friend of Daniel’s father with a big secret; Andy Nymen & Ewam Bremner as two of Daniel’s fairly hapless friends; Keeley Hawes as Daniel’s wife Jane (and, seeing as she played Zoe Reynolds in MI5, it’s great fun seeing her paired again with Mr. Macfadyen); Rupert Graves as Daniel’s more-successful writer brother Robert; and many more talented actors & comedians.  But the film belongs to Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) who plays Simon, the nervous fiancee of Martha (Daisy Donovan), Daniel’s cousin.  At the start of the film, Daisy gives Simon what she thinks is a Valium to calm him down.  Of course, the pill isn’t a Valium at all, but a much, er, stronger concoction.  Now, that might sound like a hackneyed comedy set-up, and maybe it is.  But you’re really not prepared for the insanity that Mr. Tudyk unleashes in the film once the drugs that Simon has taken take effect.  This is  one of the great comedic performances of all time, and one of the primary reasons that I’m recommending this film so strongly.

I don’t really understand why Hollywood has chosen to remake an English-language film that was released in the U.S. only three years ago.  And, you… [continued]

“Why do you think nobody’s ever tried to be a superhero before?  You’d think all these guys talking about it online every day, at least one would give it a try.  Not everybody gets to be a rock star, but it doesn’t stop people buying guitars.  Jesus, man.  Why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?”

That is the question posed by teenager Dave Lizewski to his friends in the fantastic new film Kick-Ass.  Originally an eight-issue comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. (read my review of the comic here), Kick-Ass the comic was juvenile, profane, hyper-violent, and absolutely wonderful.  I am pleased to report that the film adaptation directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust)is equally juvenile, profane, and hyper-violent, and also equally wonderful.

Kick-Ass is the story a strange, lonely kid who seizes upon a crazy idea: to become the world’s first real-life super-hero.  Dave Lizewski doesn’t have any super-powers; he doesn’t have a large inheritance that he can use to buy incredible gadgets; he doesn’t really have any special skills at all.  But he’s not going to let that stop him.  What unfolds is a quickly-escalating spiral of chaos, as Dave finds himself neck-deep in a bloody struggle between crime-lord Frank D’Amico (played by the great Mark Strong, who it seems to me can do no wrong after his great performances recently in Stardust, Body of Lies, and Sherlock Holmes) and two real-life super-heroes, Big Daddy (Nic Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz).

The casting in this film is superb.  Nobody plays a bad-guy better than Mark Strong these days, and Chloe Moretz has found herself an extraordinary break-out role.  Speaking of break-out roles, bravo to the filmmakers for their casting of Aaron Johnson as Dave Lizewski.  This relative unknown absolutely kills in the part.  I was also really thrilled to see Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad) well-used here as Chris D’Amico.  Again, perfect casting, and its nice to see Mintz-Plasse in a different sort of role that nonetheless takes advantage of his bizarre geekiness.

We’re living in a good time for comic book fans, as Hollywood seems to be getting the message that faithful adaptations of great comic books is a wiser strategy than complete reinventions.  (Then again, Mark Millar’s terrific comic book Wanted, about super-villains who have successfully taken over the world, was completely mangled into an Angelina Jolie vehicle about assassins who take their orders from a magical loom, and that movie made hundreds of millions of dollars, so maybe I’m being hopelessly naive.)  But I look at a film like Watchmen, and I look at a film like Kick-Ass, and I am delighted at the respect… [continued]

One of my earliest posts on this blog was a look back through the films of David Mamet.  One of the films I wasn’t able to review at the time was Homicide, because it was shockingly unavailable on DVD.  Late last year, though, the fine folks at the Criterion Collection thankfully stepped in to remedy that situation, releasing Homicide in a lovely new DVD set (which made my list of the Top 10 DVDs of 2009).

Joe Mantegna plays Jewish homicide detective Bobby Gold.  When the FBI screws up the manhunt for a suspect, Randolph (Ving Rhames), in whose case Bobby was originally involved, Bobby and his partner Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) are tasked with finding the missing man.  But on the way to a key meeting in the investigation, Bobby stops to help two young beat cops who have found the body of a murdered woman in a convenience store.  It turns out that the elderly Jewish woman had owned the store in the tough neighborhood for decades, and the local kids think she was murdered because of rumors that she kept a fortune hidden in her basement.  When Bobby finds himself assigned to this new murder case, he is is frustrated by what he sees as a distraction from his priority: the pursuit of Randolph.  But quickly the case begins to get under his skin and leads Bobby to confront long-buried questions about his own Jewish identity.

Written and directed by David Mamet, Homicide stars many Mamet regulars (Mantegna and Macy, along with Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon, and many other familiar faces) and features his distinct, fast-paced, rough and tumble dialogue and a twisty-turny plot in which the story that you think is unfolding in the film’s opening minutes turns out to be merely a feint, as Mamet has other intentions with his tale.

For, despite its title, Homicide really isn’t a police procedural at all.  Yes, Bobby’s investigation into the murder of the elderly Mrs. Klein is the backbone of the story, but that’s not really what the film is about.  Rather, Homicide is a story about identity.  Over the course of the film, Bobby Gold is forced to address deep-rooted questions about how he defines himself.

According to The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies, by Kathryn Bernheimer (published by Birch Lane Press, 1998): “Mamet, who admits he has always felt like an outsider and acknowledges a great longing to belong, has said the story was inspired by his experience as an American Jew growing up not feeling sufficiently Jewish or American.  Like many of his previous films, Homicide deals with what Mamet calls ‘problems of reconciliation and self-worth’.”

When we first meet Bobby Gold, there’s… [continued]

I well remember my reaction upon watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, many years ago.  The star-child appeared, and the end credits rolled, and I turned to my brother and started laughing.  ”What the heck was THAT???”  I had no idea what to make of any of the ponderous weirdness that I had just seen, and I wondered what exactly I had missed.

But even during that first viewing it was clear that there was something special about 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s a film that stayed with me.  I found myself driven to revisit the film (several times, in fact, over the years), and to read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke (which, interestingly, was written concurrently with the production of the film).  I can think of few other films about which my opinion has so dramatically changed based on subsequent viewings.  Each time I watched 2001 I found myself enjoying it more and more.  As I peeled back the layers of the onion of the film, to use a familiar but handy analogy, what was once perplexing obtained profound meaning.

It is a challenge to provide a summary of 2001.  If you’ve seen the film, no summary is necessary, and if you haven’t, I’d hate to spoil anything.  I can tell you that the film is divided into several distinct sections.  The movie opens in primordial times (“the dawn of man”) and then jumps forward to the year 2001, when a strange object is discovered on the surface of the moon.  That discovery leads (for reasons I’ll not detail here) to an expedition towards Jupiter.  The experimental space-ship Discovery is crewed by Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, and the computer HAL 9000.  Things go awry.  The final segment of the film is the most perplexing, and the reason for the film’s tag-line “the ultimate trip.”

Right from its opening scenes, it is clear that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science-fiction film unlike most other science-fiction films.  This is a cerebral undertaking, one that is concerned with posing some BIG QUESTIONS for the audience.  The film spans the entire history of human-kind — that should give you a good idea of Mr. Kubrick & Mr. Clarke’s ambitions!!

In terms of “plot,” there’s not too much that actually happens in 2001.  This, I think (along with the ending, which we’ll get to in a few moments) is one of the chief reasons that this film might not work for many casual viewers.  To say that the movie is leasurely paced would be an enormous understatement.  Events unfold very slowly, and the movie is filled with stately, long shots in which Mr. Kubrick’s camera moves… [continued]

Last week I wrote about Moon, one of the 2009 films that I hasn’t succeeded in catching before the switch-over to the Year We Make Contact.  Today I’m here to write about another 2009 film that I’m glad I found a chance to see before getting too far into 2010: Crazy Heart.

Jeff Bridges plays “Bad” Blake, a once-great country singer who, through a combination of bad luck and his own hard-living, has been reduced to singing in bowling alleys.  Bad is a pretty pathetic figure when we first encounter him in the film, pulling up to his latest small-town gig in his battered old pick-up truck and dumping out a jug full of his urine.  But drunk and washed-up though he may be, when he starts to perform we can see the embers of his greatness.  Until he has to run outside to puke, that is.

It’s not too hard to guess that, over the course of the film, Bad will be able to claw his way up to some small form of redemption.  But the pleasures of Crazy Heart aren’t in any big dramatic plot twists or emotional epiphanies.  They’re in the way that, through a million small choices, Jeff Bridges brings this broken-down man to fully-realized life.  Bad isn’t really a cliched scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold.  He makes a lot of poor choices, and we see him fully live up to the name he has taken for himself.  But Mr. Bridges brings such humanity to the performance that one somehow can’t help rooting for Bad nonetheless.  Can anyone deny that Jeff Bridges is one of our finest actors working today?

Maggie Gyllenhaal is solid, as she always is.  But I was really pleasantly surprised by Colin Farrell’s excellent work as Bad’s former protege Tommy Sweet.  It’s a very well-written part.  Tommy is talked about a lot in the film before we ever see him on-screen.  While Bad has hit hard times, Tommy has become a country music super-star.  I was expecting fireworks when these two finally met up in the film, but I was really pleased that the film went in another direction.  There’s friction between the two, but also reservoirs of affection.  I was quite taken with Mr. Farrell’s work, giving Tommy the arrogance one might expect of an on-the-rise mega-talent, but also a deep core of loyalty to his former mentor.  I’ve always been a big fan of Colin Farrell (I even love him in Daredevil!), and between this and his role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (read my review here), it’s nice to see him getting some decent roles these days.

Crazy Heart has a heck of a soundtrack, featuring an array of classic… [continued]

After months and months of reading praise for Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker, I finally was able to see the film on DVD.  (Once again, thank you Netflix!)  I am extremely pleased to report that, for me, the film lived up to its hype.

In the bravura opening sequence, we meet Delta Company, an elite unit of the U.S. Army serving in Iraq.  Delta Company consists of the men who get called in to disarm and/or detonate I.E.D.s (Improvised Explosive Devices) and all manner of other sorts of explosives before they can kill any U.S. servicemen/woman or others.  The tense, harrowing first few minutes of the film tell us everything we need to know about the incredible bravery and ability of the men of Delta Company who we’ll be following through the film, the excruciatingly difficult task that they are called upon to deal with every single day, and the high fatality rates of their assignments.

The Hurt Locker focuses on three men in Delta Company.  Anthony Mackie plays Sgt. JT Sanborn — a tough, by-the book officer of great professionalism.  Brian Geraghty plays Specialist Owen Eldridge, the youngest member of the team.  Eldridge struggles with the weight of the life-and-death assignments that he must take on every day, but we never see those concerns affect his performance in the field.  Then there is Staff Sgt. William James, played by Jeremy Renner in a phenomenal, star-making performance.  SSG James is assigned to head up Delta Company after the death of their previous field leader.  James is an extraordinarily talented officer, but we quickly learn that he is not one for by-the-book procedures.  This brings him into conflict with Sgt. Sanborn, who judges James to be reckless and dangerous.  Young Eldridge finds himself caught somewhat in the middle.

That could be the plot of a great movie, but The Hurt Locker isn’t really a drama about conflict within a military unit.  Though we see evidence of that conflict that I have just described over the course of the story, The Hurt Locker isn’t concerned with typical Hollywood war-movie character arcs or story-lines.  Rather, director Kathryn Bigelow has created a film whose main purpose, it seems to me, is to put the viewer right in the middle of the intense, every-moment-could-be-your-last job that these men serving in Iraq have been given.  Through careful direction, tight editing, and above all stupendous acting, The Hurt Locker consists of one nail-biting sequence after another.

The film is episodic in nature.  In less capable hands this could be a weakness, undermining the narrative thrust that a successful film needs to achieve.  But under the sure guidance of Ms. Bigelow, the episodic structure of the film… [continued]

Though 2009 is well in the past, I’m still trying to find time to watch those 2009 films that I missed (some of which I listed when writing my Best Films of 2009 list).  At the top of my I-really-wanted-to-see-it-but-never-did list from 2009 was Duncan Jones’ little sci-fi film, Moon.

When I say “little,” I am referring only to the budget (5 million dollars).  Because in no other way is Moon a “little” film.  No, Moon is a phenomenal achievement, and it surely would have made my Best Films of the Year list had I seen it in time.

It’s the near future, and the great Sam Rockwell (Galaxy Quest, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Frost/Nixon) plays Sam Bell, working alone in a small helium-3 mining station on the moon.  His only companion is the station’s computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey, perfectly cast).  Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract and is anticipating his return to Earth and to his family.  Of course, it’s not going to be that simple.

I’ve barely said anything about the film’s story, but I really think that’s for the best.  This is a film best appreciated going in cold, without knowing any of the plot twists.  Suffice it to say, when a distracted Sam crashes one of the station’s small rovers, he unwittingly sets into motion a chain of events that leads to things quickly going more and more awry in his once-efficient little moon station.

Moon is an acting tour-de-force for Sam Rockwell.  With the exception of a few other people glimpsed briefly on computer monitors, Sam is the only character on screen for the entire film.  But he dominates the screen so thoroughly that I didn’t even really consider that fact until well after the film had ended.  Mr. Rockwell has always been known for bringing a particularly idiosyncratic brand of humanity to the flawed array of characters he has portrayed on screen, and his Sam Bell in this film is a spectacular example.  Once the plot gets going, Sam’s ordered life starts to fall down around his ears, and the way Mr. Rockwell brings to life his increasing desperation, and also his surprising inner reservoirs of strength, is wonderful.  Shame on the Academy for not nominating this spectacular acting performance!!

Writer/director Duncan Jones jokes in the DVD’s special features that the most recent example of an “indie” sci-fi movie that he can think of is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which was made for around 50 million dollars. Moon was made for 5 million.  To say that my jaw was on the floor when I learned that this movie was made for such a miniscule budget would be an… [continued]

After watching Michael Moore’s latest (and last?) film, Capitalism: A Love Story (read my review here), I started thinking about his previous movies. Despite my enjoyment of his work, I realized that I’d never actually seen his very first film: Roger & Me.

Hello, Netflix!

Released in 1989 (though Mr. Moore was working on the film for several years prior to that), Roger & Me is an unflinching look at the devastating effect that the shutdown of several General Motors factories (eventually resulting in the firing of approx. 80,000 workers) had on Moore’s home-town of Flint, Michigan.

As Mr. Moore admits on the DVD’s commentary track, he not only had never made a movie before Roger & Me, but he knew very little about what went into making movies. But he (and a small team of partners) taught themselves everything they needed to know (about filming, sound, editing, etc.) over the course of assembling their film. This gives Roger & Me a raw, unpolished, feel which, to my mind, wound up working in Mr. Moore’s favor in enhancing the film’s effectiveness. This isn’t a slick-looking documentary. This feels like a film put together by a bunch of average folks, trying to address a situation that they felt passionately about.  That passion is another key to the film’s strength.

Right from the beginning, Mr. Moore is a major (perhaps THE major) character in his film. Roger & Me opens with a montage of Mr. Moore’s home-movies, as he introduces himself in voice-over and describes his early years growing up in Flint. Mr. Moore’s on-screen involvement in his films has by now grown tiresome to some, but here his presence helps ground the film as a whole. Moore grew up in Flint, his father (and, it turns out, many other members of his extended family) worked for GM. At one point in the film, following a sheriff’s deputy evicting people from their homes who couldn’t pay their rent after having been laid off by GM, Moore discovers that one of the young men being evicted is someone he went to high school with. This is a personal story for Mr. Moore, about HIS community, and his anger and frustration at the way GM abandoned Flint underline every frame of the film.  This lends the over-all film a gravity that a more polished but less-personal film would have lacked, I think.

As always, it can be hard to separate a discussion of one of Mr. Moore’s films from a discussion of his politics. The central question of what sort of responsibility a corporation has to its employees (and the communities in which the corporation grew… [continued]

I’ve been reading Drew McWeeny’s writings about film for, oh, probably a decade now.  I first found his work when he wrote for Aintitcoolnews.com, though these days he has a terrific blog over at Hitfix.com.  The dude has some sharp opinions, and while I’m not always in agreement with him, I can always count on his pieces being interesting & insightful, to say the least.  I’m a big fan.  Drew recently started a series called “The Basics,” in which he writes about a film that he considers one of the “essentials” — a film that anyone who takes film seriously should see — and then another, younger writer, William Goss, writes a response.  To read more about this series, click here and then here.

With their latest installment, Drew opened the door for others to chime in with their opinion.  Since the film in question is Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, I jumped at the chance to share my two cents!

I am an enormous Woody Allen fan.  I have seen every one of his films (with one exception, Interiors, a situation that I’m sure I’ll remedy someday, but I must confess to not being in any rush), and many of them I have seen too many times to count.  But while I recognize that Manhattan is one of Woody’s most well thought-of films, I’ve actually only seen it one time, about 15 years ago.  I remember enjoying it, but I didn’t think it was of the level with what I would consider to be Mr. Allen’s masterpieces, films like Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bananas, etc.  (It probably didn’t help that I watched Manhattan less than a month after first seeing Annie Hall, a film that absolutely blew me away and that remains easily one of my top ten favorite films of all time.)

So, prompted by this “The Basics” series, I was excited to go back and re-watch Manhattan.  Would my opinion of the film change?

Filmed in gloriously beautiful black and white, Manhattan follows several good-natured but lost urbanites as they try to find some measure of love and happiness.  Woody Allen plays Isaac, a television comedy writer unhappy with his job who dreams of writing a novel.  When we meet Isaac, he’s involved with a much, much younger woman: the 17 year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway).  Meanwhile, his married best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton).  While Isaac and Mary strongly dislike one another when they first meet (at an awkward encounter in a museum), they gradually strike up a friendship and ultimately start seeing each other.

None of the elements of that plot… [continued]

I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Zemeskis’ Contact when it was first released in 1997.  For years now, it’s been a movie that I’ve been eager to add to my DVD collection, but I was holding off for a better special edition than the bare-bones DVD release from ’97.  It’s been a long wait, but when Contact was finally re-released on disc in a jazzed-up new edition — and on blu-ray, no less — I eagerly snatched it up.

Based on Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact tells the story of Ellie, a young girl whose interest in science and astronomy are fanned by her father.  Through much of the early parts of the film, we follow Ellie’s development as a scientist and her growing fascination with the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life.  It’s a search that increasingly comes to seem like a fool’s errand as, over the years, all of the sources of funding for that research dry up.  If that was the end of the story, of course, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.  Needless top say, Ellie and her team do eventually discover a signal that appears to be extra-terrestrial in origin, and their quest to unlock its meaning leads Ellie on an astounding journey and brings mankind to an incredible turning point.

I’ll stop my summary there, even though I have really only covered the first thirty-or-so minutes of the film.  For me, the most compelling aspect of Contact is watching the story unfold and gradually become bigger and bigger.  I still remember my pleasure in seeing the film for the first time and thinking to myself, with great delight, “just how far are they going to take this??”  Even having seen the film and knowing what’s coming coming, I still find the story to be terrifically engaging.

I am an enormous sci-fi fan.  Sadly, the vast majority of sci-fi films seem to revolve around menacing aliens and action-adventure hi-jinks.  Now, I’m all for a good action movie, and there have certainly been plenty of action/adventure sci-fi films that I have thoroughly enjoyed.  But I love that Contact is a much more cerebral story, one in which the science of the tale is just as important as the narrative’s twists and turns.  It’s also a story that is centered by the character of Ellie’s emotional journey, and that is what gives the film its power.

Jodie Foster is quite compelling as Dr. Ellie Arroway.  She brings a fierce commitment and intensity to the role.  Foster is an actor who always seems to be thinking — you can see it in her eyes — and that is key for her performance as this brilliant and driven woman.  I love… [continued]

Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are expecting their first child.  When they learn that Burt’s parents are moving away, they realize that they have nothing tying them to Denver any longer.  (Verona’s parents have passed away.)  So Burt & Verona decide to travel around the country, visiting various friends and family-members in an attempt to find a new place to live that they think will be a good place to raise their baby.  What at first seems like a fun adventure turns dispiriting rapidly as they discover that everyone they visit has fairly crazy ideas about parenting.

Written by Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) & his wife Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road), Away We Go is a quirky film filled with quirky characters.  Your tolerance for that approach to creating characters will determine how annoying you find this to be as the movie progresses.  The characters are, for the most part, painted in pretty broad, caricature-esque strokes.  They are funny and painful and sad, but not all that deep.  I really enjoyed the individual performances of the actors playing the various folks who Burt & Verona visit  – Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Chris Messina, and Melanie Lynskey (who, by the way, had a heck of a year in 2009 with this film along with her roles in The Informant! and Up in the Air) — so much that this trend didn’t really bother me too much until I sat back and thought about the film afterwards.

In my review of Woody Allen’s 2009 film, Whatever Works, I described my frustration at the enormous condescension that Mr. Allen’s screenplay seemed to be showing towards every character in the film with the exception of the Woody Allen stand-in character played by Larry David.  I felt the same sort of condescension here.  Burt and Verona are presented as the only sane characters in an entirely insane world.  Burt’s parents (played by Catherine O’Hara & Jeff Daniels) might be hysterical (I’d like to see a whole movie about these two!), but they and are jaw-droppingly self-centered and, shockingly, have no apparent interest in their grandchild-on-the-way.  Verona’s friend Lily (Janney) is crass and her husband (Gaffigan) is a buffoon.  Burt’s cousin LN (that’s not a typo) and her husband Roderick are bizarre hippie-intellectuals who have sex in the same bed where their children sleep and breastfeed other people’s babies.  Burt & Verona’s friends Tom & Munch are by far the most normal of the bunch, but even they have their problems (which I won’t spoil here).  I understand the point that Eggers… [continued]

Before seeing his latest film, The Lovely Bones, I thought it fitting to seek out a gaping hole in my Peter Jackson viewing filmography: his 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures.  I’ve been hearing/reading about this film since the lengthy pre-release build-up to The Fellowship of the Ring.  (By the way: Wow!  It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since Fellowship, which was released in 2001!!)  Heavenly Creatures seems to be rather well thought-of, and since the Lord of the Rings films have made me a life-long Pater Jackson fan, it seemed crazy that I had never seen this movie.  It’s a situation I was happy to remedy last month.

Heavenly Creatures tells the true-life story of the friendship between two young New Zealand girls in 1953/4.  Melanie Lynskey plays Pauline.  An artistic, shy introvert, she is friendless and miserable at the Catholic school which she attends.  Her world changes, though, when Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet, arrives at her school.  Juliet is from a wealthy family, and her travels with (and without) her parents make her seem extraordinarily worldly to Pauline.  Like Pauline, she is artistic and bucks authority, but Juliet more outgoing and brazen.  The two bond almost instantly.  Deep friendships like these happen between schoolgirls all the time across the globe, with less tragic outcomes.  But here, the increasingly unhappy home lives of each of the girls pushes them to become more dependent upon one another’s company, and they begin to withdraw more and more deeply into their shared fantasies.  Feeding off one another, those escapist fantasies soon take a terrible turn.

Heavenly Creatures is the first screen role of both Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet.  It’s no surprise that this proved to be a star-making turn for Ms. Winslet, as she displays terrific abilities and assurance for such a young actress (not to mention great beauty).  As for Ms. Lynskey, I was delighted to realize that this was her first screen role as well.  She’s nowhere near as well-known as Kate Winslet, but if you were an avid movie-goer in 2009 then I’d wager you’ve enjoyed her work.  (She had key roles in Away We Go, The Informant!, and Up in the Air.)

Heavenly Creatures is an interesting film.  I found it to be a bit hard to get into, at first.  There was something about the first 45 minutes that kept me, as a viewer, from being sucked in to the story.  I wasn’t sure if it was the script, the acting, or the directing, but everything seemed a bit “stagey” and over-wrought (filled with dramatic zooms and music that didn’t seem to quite fit the proceedings).  With a based-on-a-true-story like this one, I… [continued]

Sometimes I get DVDs and I watch them immediately, devouring the movie and the special features within 24 hours.  Sometimes I’ll get a DVD and, for one reason or another, it will sit on my shelf for months and months.  Such was the case with the Director’s Cut of Ridley Scott’s 2007 film, American Gangster.

I enjoyed American Gangster when I first saw it in theatres.  I didn’t love it the way I love some of Scott’s other films (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, and the vastly underrated Kingdom of Heaven), but I quite liked it, and when I saw that an extended version of the film was available on DVD in early 2008, I snapped it up.  I’ve really enjoyed the extended versions of several others of Ridley Scott’s films, most particularly the extended version of the afore-mentioned Kingdom of Heaven, which is a revelation in contrast to the theatrical release, so I was excited to see this new version of American Gangster.  But, for whatever reason, I just never got around to watching the DVD until recently.

American Gangster tells two parallel stories.  One half of the film is about Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington.  The movie opens with the death of Frank’s mentor, the powerful Harlem drug-dealer Bumpy Johnson.  Frank marshals his keen intellect and all that he learned from Bumpy in order to take control of the Harlem drug scene.  His boldest move was to travel to Southeast Asia in order to purchase heroin straight from the source, enabling him to bypass all the other crime-figure “middle managers” and sell a more powerful product at cheaper prices than his competition.  That coup, combined with his patience and his near-fanatical focus on avoiding the spotlight, enabled him to amass an extraordinary amount of power and money all while operating under the noses of what local law enforcement officials weren’t on the take.

Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, a New Jersey cop with a fierce sense of honesty.  In an infamous story depicted early in the film, he finds a million dollars in cash but turns it over to his superiors in the department rather than keeping it for himself.  In contrast to those qualities, his personal life is a disaster, and when the film opens his wife (the wonderful Carla Gugino) has decided to divorce him.  Richie eventually gets himself involved with (and becomes a key figure in leading) the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where his investigative skills and a decent amount of luck puts him on the trail of Frank Lucas.

American Gangster is a film dancing on the edge of greatness.  Washington and Crowe both turn in powerhouse performances, and they’re both so engaging that… [continued]

Charlyne Yi (who you might recognize from Knocked Up) doesn’t really believe in the concept of falling in love.  She’s not sure such a thing as love truly exists — and if it does, she’s not sure it’s something that she’s capable of.  So she sets out with her friend, director Nicholas Jasenovec, to film a documentary about love.  The two travel across the U.S., interviewing all sorts of everyday people (along with the judge in a divorce court, an Elvis who marries folks in Vegas, Seth Rogen, and a few other not-quite-so-everyday folks) about their thoughts regarding true love.  Things get more complicated when, while filming the documentary, Yi meets Michael Cera at a friend’s party, and the two hit it off and begin dating (an awkward process captured on camera by the documentary crew).  Do her interviews with people — or her burgeoning relationship with Michael Cera — change Yi’s feelings about love?

If Yi’s happening to fall into a relationship with Michael Cera while at the same time filming a documentary about love seems like a wild coincidence to you, then you’d be right!  Because things aren’t quite what they seem.  The interviews that Yi conducts are absolutely real.  But the Nicholas Jasenovec that we see on-camera isn’t actually the Nicholas Jasenovec who directed this film — it’s an actor, Jake M. Johnson!  And while Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi did date, their courtship as we see it was staged for the camera.

What we’re left with is a rather bizarre hybrid film.  The movie is constantly bouncing back-and-forth from the real footage (the interview segments, which are like much more in-depth versions of all the couples we see telling their how-they-met stories from When Harry Met Sally) to the staged footage (of Yi and Cera, and of Yi and Johnson/Jasenovec).  What’s really intriguing is the way the film doesn’t hesitate to make clear to us that that footage is staged — or, at the very least, manipulated.  Almost every time that we might find ourselves drawn in to Yi & Cera’s story, the film draws our attention to the artificiality of those moments.  (In one scene, we see Yi and Cera playfully interacting on a beach, and then beginning to walk hand-in-hand down the shore-line.  It’s a tender moment… until we see Johnson/Jasenovec run into the frame wondering if perhaps they could do another take.  In another scene in Yi’s apartment, we see her first kiss with Cera… and then the camera pulls out to see a camera-man and a sound-guy perched on the next couch, recording the moment.)  Even the interview footage is played with, as we often cut away from the people telling their… [continued]

When unsuspecting passers-by step through the magic mirror in Doctor Parnassus’ traveling imaginarium, they find themselves transported into a world in which their innermost thoughts and desires are brought to life.  Watching The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, I feel as though I have been treated to a similar experience: a trip inside the very mind of writer/director Terry Gilliam.

It’s pretty astonishing to me that Terry Gilliam has only directed seven films since Brazil back in 1985, and only thirteen feature films in his entire career.   (I’m including in that count Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which he co-directed, and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, in which he directed the opening short film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance.)  Mr. Gilliam has had an extraordinary string of bad luck, over the years, in his attempts to make the movies he sets his heart on making (click here for more information on his doomed effort, at the start of the decade, to bring to life his film version of Don Quixote, which was to star Johnny Depp), which in part accounts for the sparcity of his films.

Therefore, any new Terry Gilliam movie should be a source of much rejoicing.  And yet, I much confess that I have not actually seen the three films that Mr. Gilliam has directed since Twelve Monkeys in 1995: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Tideland (2005), and The Brothers Grimm (also released in 2005).  I’m not sure why, exactly.  Something about those three films just didn’t appeal to me.  But ever since first reading about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus a few years back, I was excited and intrigued to get a gander at what Mr. Gilliam was putting together.

As in many of Mr. Gilliam’s films, Parnassus has a twisty plot that would be extraordinarily difficult for me to really explain to you, nor am I all that sure that I should even try.  I will tell you that Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) has apparently been engaged in a thousand-year duel with the devil (Tom Waits) over whether mankind’s imaginations or our more prurient instincts represent the dominant force in our nature.  Their latest wager involves the fate of Parnassus’ young daughter Valentina (Lily Cole).  Hard times have befallen the aged Parnassus and his small troupe, which includes the wise Percy (Verne Troyer) and the young Anton (Andrew Garfield).  It seems that, in our modern world, Doctor Parnassus’ traveling imaginarium doesn’t attract anyone’s attention or interest any longer.  But things change when Lily rescues an enigmatic and amnesiac young man named Tony (Heath Ledger) from an attempted suicide.  Will Tony help Doctor Parnassus, or wind up destroying him?

Heh.  That’s certainly… [continued]

I read all the bad reviews when Woody Allen’s latest film was released this past summer.  But I was dubious.  Larry David starring in a Woody Allen film seemed like a genius idea, to me.  How could a combination of those two neurotic, grumpy Jewish comedians not yield something at least remotely interesting?

Well, go rent Whatever Works and find out.

Or better yet, trust me, DON’T.

Whatever Works is a catastrophe of epic proportions and one of the worst films I have seen in a long, long time.  After 30-40 minutes of the film had elapsed, I was already supremely bored, and only sheer force of will (and the hope — ultimately dashed — that maybe something funny was just around the corner) allowed me to finish the film.  It is certainly one of the worst Woody Allen films I have ever seen.  (Celebrity has always been, in my mind, Woody’s worst film — though now it has strong competition.)

Larry David plays Boris Yelnikoff (as Woody Allen a character name as you’ll ever find), a man described as a genius physicist but who we mainly see as an irritated complainer hanging out in his bathrobe in and around Grennich Village.  Unhappy in life and love and convinced (as so many Woody Allen protagonists are) that life is meaningless and that he is surrounded by an unending parade of idiots and incompetents, Boris spends much of the film vacillating between miserable and merely unhappy.

One night a beautiful homeless Southern girl, Melody (played by Evan Rachel Wood), follows Boris home.  Despite her stunning beauty, Boris is entirely uninterested in her (and indeed spends much of his time berating her for her stupidity).  He does, though, take some pity on her and allows her to stay with him in his apartment.  Then, in one of the most staggering and unconvincing plot twists I have ever seen in a movie (and I have seen a lot of movies with space aliens and time travel), Melody falls in love with Boris and the two get married.

The above paragraph summarizes the entire first half of the film, all of which seems to be nothing more then a lengthy set-up for what was, I supposed, intended to be a hilarious comedy of culture-shock when Melody’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) and, later, her father (Ed Begley Jr.) show up in New York looking for her.  While the movie does, briefly come to something-approaching-life for a few minutes following Ed Begley Jr.’s introduction into the film (at about the one hour mark), it’s far-too-little and far-too-late.

Woody Allen’s movies have often been characterized by some condescension to non-Manhattenites, but Whatever Works is overflowing with it, and… [continued]

Having watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, the phenomenal new stop-motion animated film from director Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited), I am almost forced to reconsider all of his previous (also wonderful) films.

Mr. Anderson’s work has always been characterized by an extraordinarily stylized look to his sets and staging.  (The Royal Tenenbaums, my favorite of Mr. Anderson’s films, must be considered a triumph of art direction amongst its many other great qualities.)  Now it seems to me that Mr. Anderson has always been approaching his movies as if they were animated films: pouring never-ending attention into the creation of the artificial worlds that his characters inhabit.  (In animation, this is of course necessary: there are no “standing sets” to use – everything must be designed from the ground up.)

Or maybe I should put it this way: in stop-motion animation, Mr. Anderson has found a perfect stylistic vehicle for his particular idiosyncratic method of storytelling.

Adapted from a book by Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox focuses on a family of foxes who enter into an escalating feud with three cruel farmers: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean.  What is remarkable is that this animated fox family is just as fully-realized as any of the clans seen in Mr. Anderson’s previous films.  Each character is filled with flaws and with strengths.  Each feels, well, human!  George Clooney voices the title character, Mr.  Fox, who is inventive and fearless… but also dangerously reckless and oblivious to the walls he is inadvertently building up between him and his son.  Jason Schwartzman plays his son, Ash, a teenaged (in fox-years) boy who idolizes his father but, sensing that he is not going to get the approval he seeks, has withdrawn into teenaged “this is all stupid” rebellion (that includes the wearing of bizarre outfits).  Meryl Streep is the patient mother of the brood who deeply loves her husband yet must admit, in a powerful moment late in the film, that she never should have married him.

Does this sound like your every-day animated film so far?

It’s just amazing, really, how Mr. Anderson (working with co-writer Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the magnificent film The Squid and the Whale) has shaped Roald Dahl’s tale into a film whose character drama fits perfectly in with the rest of Anderson’s filmography.  But he has done so without losing the charm and heart of Mr. Dahl’s original tale – particularly when it comes to bringing to life the increasingly escalating lunacy (and violence) of Mr. Fox’s back-and-forth feud with the farmers.

I haven’t even mentioned the enormous ensemble that surrounds the Fox family.  As in Mr.… [continued]

I missed Coraline in theatres when it was released back in February of 2009, so I was thrilled to finally have a chance to watch this wonderful film on DVD last month.

Adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman (a legend among comic-book fans for his beautiful series The Sandman), Coraline is the story of a precocious, lonely little girl named (you guessed it) Coraline.  She and her parents move into a new house, and the energetic and creative girl is soon left to her own devices as her parents busy themselves with their work and the business of setting up a new home.  Her parents are not the over-the-top hateful, neglectful sort that one sometimes finds in children’s fantasy films, but both seem overworked and overtired, and are unable to give Coraline the attention she craves.

Things seem to change for Coraline when she discovers a tiny secret door in her room that leaves her into a parallel world filled with happier doppelgangers of everyone in her life.  Her “other-mother” and “other-father” are cheerful and incredibly attentive to Coraline’s desires, cooking her enormous delicious meals and putting her to sleep in a beautifully decorated bedroom.  True, the buttons that these “other-folk” seem to have instead of eyes are weird, but so what?

You can probably guess that this idyllic other-world has a scary dark-side hidden not-too-far underneath all the wonder, and soon Coraline must use all of her wits to save herself and her family.

Coraline is a jaw-dropping, gorgeous wonder of stop-motion animation.  The fantasy tone with an undertone of great creepiness brings to mind Tim Burton’s exercises in this genre (The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride), but Coraline has a look and style all its own.  Co-writer and director Henry Selick and his talented team of artists and technicians have brought every tiny detail of this world to life, and they quickly prove as capable of capturing the loneliness of an empty, old house as they are at the fantastic merriment of a performance of circus mice in the other-world that beguiles Coraline (at least temporarily).  Each frame of this film is stuffed-to-overflowing with glorious eye-candy.  But I am happy to report that the “just how did they do that?” wonderment of this life-long animation fan quickly faded into the background as I stopped thinking about the technical aspects of the film and just found myself swept along in the ride.

The voice-cast acquits themselves well.  There are some famous names in the mix (Dakota Fanning voices Coraline, Teri Hatcher is her mother and John Hodgman is her father) but no one overshadows the material.  Each actor is a fine fit with his/her character.  In… [continued]

Ever since Snatch back in 2000 I’ve been waiting for Guy Ritchie’s next great film.  Finally, just squeaking in before the close of the decade, it has arrived: Sherlock Holmes.

As you’re all probably very well aware, Sherlock Holmes stars Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, and represents Mr. Ritchie’s reinvention of the Holmes mythos.  Though perhaps reinvention is entirely the wrong word, as in many respects Ritchie & his collaborators have stripped away a lot of the baggage that the character has accumulated over the years (and over many, many, many film and TV depictions) and brought Holmes & co. a lot closer to their original literary origins in the prose of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I am most pleased to report that this new film is an absolute delight.

Let’s begin with the cast.  Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly cast as Holmes.  The intelligence, roguish arrogance, and manic energy that Mr. Downey Jr. has brought to his best roles is in full evidence here.  His Holmes is a man just-on-the-edge of psychosis.  He thinks so much faster than the ordinary man that, when his intellect is not engaged by a difficult case, he hits a wall of boredom that borders on desperation.  Downey’s depiction brings this almost dangerous aspect of Holmes’ personality to the forefront — one never knows quite what this man is going to do next.

A lot of reviews have, I felt, needlessly spoiled the clever way in which Mr. Ritchie & his collaborators have brought to life Holmes’ faster-than-belief thought processes, so I won’t go into detail here.  I’ll just say that it’s an engaging device that serves as an excellent storytelling tool.  It also connects this version of Holmes to the world of the super-hero (I’m reminded of the visual method in which Sam Raimi illustrated Peter Parker’s faster-than-the-eye Spider-Sense in the first Spider-Man film) and this is not a complaint.  With his incredible intellect, Holmes is a super-hero in many ways, and the way in which Ritchie & co. don’t shy away from these pop connections is part of what makes the film so relentlessly entertaining.  But more on that in a minute.

Jude Law is also perfect as Watson.  I’ve always respected Jude Law as an actor, but frankly it’s been quite a while since I was really taken by one of his performances.  (I might have to go all the way to his standout role in the otherwise terrible A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.)  Law’s Watson is no goofball, no bumbling idiot as the character has often been played.  Rather, Law’s Watson is tough, intelligent, persistent, and incredibly loyal to his friend Holmes — a man who seems… [continued]

I finally signed up for Netflix, and my first selection was quite a winner: the small Irish film Once.

This is an extraordinarily delightful film, exactly the kind of unique little movie with a voice all its own that I love to be surprised by.  I’d read about the film when it got some acclaim on the festival circuit a few years back, and I remembered the endearing Oscar acceptance speech by it’s two lead actors/musicians.  But I went into the film knowing almost nothing else about it, only to immediately find myself quite taken with the film as the story unfolded.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play the leads, whose names are never given.  He’s a guitar player who plays his music on a street corner in Dublin when not working in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop.  His music is brilliant, but he seems stuck in a rut and having trouble getting over a relationship that apparently ended poorly.  She cleans houses and sells roses on the street, and lives in a small apartment with her mother and daughter.  She’s married, but apparently on poor terms with her husband who lives elsewhere.  It also turns out that she is an extraordinary musician herself, but she has little avenue for artistic expression.  She hears Glen Hansard’s character perform on the street one day, and the two strike up a friendship that turns into a musical collaboration.

I am an avowed hater of “chick flicks,” but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy films with deep emotion.  Quite the contrary: I absolutely love being swept away by the emotions of a film with heart.  I just can’t stand films that are filled with manipulative schmaltz, or paint-by-numbers plots that lead to simplistic happy endings.

I can imagine someone reading my above description of the plot and thinking that they know for sure how the story of this man and woman will unfold, but trust me, Once is anything but a typical romantic film.

The film consistently avoids taking the usual narrative path.  (With one tiny exception: The filmmakers did include a scene where a bored technician/producer dismisses their music but then comes around after hearing one song.  After seeing John Michael Higgins absolutely eviscerate that exact type of cliche scene in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, I can never again watch that familiar scenario unfold without a laugh.)  OK, but other than that I was extremely pleased to see the film avoid all the usual DRAMATIC with a capital “d” moments and predictable complications that one might expect to see in this type of film.

Which is not to say that the film is not extremely romantic.  I… [continued]

An indeterminate number of years in the future, mankind has ravaged the Earth and is forced to turn to alternative sources of energy.  By far the best is the ore nicknamed “unobtanium” (talk about a macguffin) that has been discovered on the alien world called Pandora.  Unfortunately, Pandora is home to a bunch of pesky natives, the Na’vi, who don’t take kindly to the shiploads of humans arriving on their planet with their giant bulldozers.  So the company supervising the mining sub-contracts the Marines to protect their workers and, of necessary, destroy any belligerent Na’vi.

But some scientists, lead by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), would prefer to find a diplomatic solution to the escalating violence with the Na’vi.  As such, they have constructed artificial Na’vi avatars — fully lifelike and functional Na’vi bodies that can be controlled by a human mind.  The idea is that these Avatars will be able to assimilate into the Na’vi culture better than a human ever could — learning about them, and hopefully eventually being able to reach an understanding with them.  Tom Sully was one of the highly-trained humans who had been preparing to control an Avatar, but when he is killed, the company must turn to his twin brother, Jake.  (Since the Avatars are apparently created specifically to match the genetics of their individual human controller, only Jake can substitute for his brother.)  Jake, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs, is excited by the chance to be useful again, and even more overwhelmed by the sensations of controlling a Na’vi body, through which he can at last walk (not to mention run, jump, etc.).  Things get even better for Jake when the mutilated Colonel Quaritch, who supervises the Marines on Pandora, approaches Jake with an offer: if Jake will feed him all the tactical information he gains about the Na’vi during his Avatar’s time amongst them (which the Colonel can use to wipe the Na’vi out once and for all), the Colonel will see that the military pays for the expensive medical procedures necessary to restore Jake’s legs.

Of course, once Jake’s Avatar actually gets accepted into Na’vi society, things become a lot more complicated, morally, for Jake, and he finds himself caught between two societies that are rapidly heading for a collision.

Avatar brings with it an enormous amount of hype and expectation — almost more than any movie could possibly live up to.  It’s the first narrative feature film from Director James Cameron since the extraordinary success of Titanic back in 1997.  Mr. Cameron has directed some of the most influential sci-fi films ever made (and also some of the very best): Aliens, Terminator, T2, The… [continued]

Director Jason Reitman continues his winning streak with his third film (after Thank You For Smoking and Juno), Up in the Air.

George Clooney (continuing to prove that he is a far better actor than you might think a fellow with his movie-star good looks and fame would need to be) plays Ryan Bingham, a man whose job is to fire employees at companies whose bosses don’t have the desire or the guts to do so themselves.  Every day, Ryan flies to a different city, back-and-forth across the United States, to fire different people from a different company.  It’s a job that most would probably find tremendously distasteful.  But Ryan loves it.  It’s not that he gets pleasure from firing people.  (Actually, he’s quite skilled at helping newly-fired employees get over the shock and anger of being fired — and by someone they’ve never met, to boot — and he seems to enjoy the moments of human connection when he’s able to help one of those unfortunate souls find some shred of a silver lining to their situation.)  It’s more that he loves the unattached, free-as-a-bird lifestyle that his constantly-traveling ways allow him.

Ryan relishes having no ties.  His apartment (that he barely sees) is completely empty and unadorned.  He isn’t married, doesn’t have any kids, and is distant from his family.  While most Americans would probably side with me in hating the experience of flying, Ryan loves it.  He relishes having frequent flyer cards and valued customer status at airlines, car-rental organizations, and hotels across the country that enable him to zip in and out (cutting ahead of the rest of us poor folks waiting in endless lines) with just the swipe of a gold card.  He loves staying in hotels, he loves having a drink in airport VIP lounges, he loves flying.  In Ryan’s mind, he is entirely free.

Ryan’s perfect-to-him life is shifted, though, by two developments.  One is positive: at a hotel bar one evening, he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful woman who, it turns out, is just as much of a travel-junkie as he is.  The woman is Alex, played by the luminous Vera Farmiga (Matt Damon’s girlfriend in The Departed), and she and Ryan seem to immediately realize that they have each found a special connection with the other.  The other change is much more negative to Ryan: an ambitious young woman named Natalie (Anna Kendrick), newly hired by his company, has developed a system in which Ryan and his peers can fire people without every leaving their company headquarters.  Instead of paying enormous sums to fly back and forth across the country, they could instead use today’s… [continued]

This, my friends, is how you follow up a Best Picture Oscar win.

After No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers released the wonderfully bizarre Burn After Reading (read my review here). Less than a year later, they have bestowed upon us the even more wonderful (and even more bizarre) new film, A Serious Man.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics professor living in Minnesota. Despite (or perhaps because of?) his seemingly gentle, meek nature, trouble upon trouble piles atop poor Larry’s head, as if he were an American suburban reincarnation of the prophet Job. Larry’s son is constantly getting into trouble in Hebrew school, and seems less interested in preparing for his Bar Mitzvah than he is in watching TV and listening to records. His daughter rushes out of the house whenever she can. His wife has informed him that she is having an affair with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed, creating one of the most stand-out characters I’ve seen on the big screen recently in just a few scenes). Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind, a familiar face from Spin City and Curb Your Enthusiasm), who might be a genius or who might be completely mad but who definitely has problems, has moved into the house with them. Meanwhile, Larry is up for consideration for tenure, but the head of the university board has informed him that someone has started writing them letters that are enormously critical of his teaching abilities. Also, a Korean student failing his class has attempted to bribe him for a passing grade and becomes belligerent when Larry tries to turn down the offer of money.

The Coens (ably assisted by terrific performances across the board from their cast) do a masterful job in creating a slow-burning feeling of powerful dread. It seems clear from the opening frames that things are not going to go well for this Jewish suburban family.  Although this is a very funny film, it is also one that does not shy away from examining the small miseries that can accumulate in a modern life. In addition to the Coens and their actors, credit must also go to the haunting score by Carter Burwell. (There’s a short theme of several notes on a piano that recurs throughout the film that I found to be at once poignant and also evocative of coming doom.)

The narrative is strengthened by the Coens’ care in ensuring that the troubles that beset Larry aren’t over-wrought typical “movie” problems, but more mundane (though no less crushing) sorts.  I particularly appreciated the fact that (small spoiler ahead) a scene that shows us that Larry has engaged in… [continued]

The exclamation point in the title of Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant! should tip you off right away that this isn’t another ultra-serious film about a corporate whistle-blower a la The Insider.  (That’s not a knock against The Insider, by the way, which is a terrific film.)  But Steven Soderbergh has something else in mind with this movie.

A plump Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a biochemist who is also the youngest vice president of A.D.M., a giant manufacturer of, among other things, the amino acid lysine that is a core component of much of the food that we eat here in the U.S.  In the 1990′s, Mark supplied the F.B.I. with evidence implicating A.D.M. in a price-fixing scheme with several other worldwide companies in their business.  But, of course, this based-on-a-true-story tale (originally covered in the book The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald) is a lot more complicated than that.

Steven Soderbergh is an extraordinarily intelligent filmmaker, and when his films work for me (Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Full Frontal) or when they don’t (The Good German, Solaris, and Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve which convinced me I didn’t need to see Thirteen), I always know that there will be something there of interest in the viewing.  Each of his films that I have seen has been remarkably different in style and tone from all the rest.  He consistently reinvents himself as a movie-maker, and that is endlessly fascinating to me.

Here in The Informant!, he has managed to tell what is really a very serious story in a manner full of whimsy.  Matt Damon dances along the fine line between drama and farce with the elegance of an actor skilled in both arenas.  His bizarre, rambling voice-overs that run throughout the film are wonderful — my favorite part of the movie.  Not only are his non sequitur observations hilarious, they also embody the idea that this numbskull is really the hero of his own story.  This idea is further enhanced by Marvin Hamlisch’s wonderfully over-the-top score (in which he practically gives Mr. Whitacre his own theme music!).  All of that silliness could easily tip the film over into total lunacy, but Mr. Soderbergh keeps his hands firmly on the reins, making sure than the audience is kept engaged with Mark’s unfolding story.

I should also mention here that it’s absolutely terrific to see Scott Bakula (Dr. Samuel Beckett himself) in a big role as F.B.I. Special Agent Brian Shepard.  Bakula’s best roles have been mostly confined to TV for the past two decades, but he really is a wonderful actor with a lot of charisma.  He does great work here, and I’d love to… [continued]

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, starts off strong.  The film juxtaposes narration from a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with images of the United States of America from the last year and a half.  Moore’s point is clear.

It is hardly surprising, for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore film before, that Mr. Moore is taking this position.  After movie after movie filled with enormous criticism of the actions of the auto industry, the medical & health insurance industries, and more, Capitalism: A Love Story seems to be the ultimate, logical progression of Mr. Moore’s anger: an attempted condemnation of the overarching system of life here in the U.S.: Capitalism.

So how well does he make his case?

After the terrific opening, I felt the first half of the film floundered somewhat.  Mr. Moore presents several anguishing stories, each of which are certainly tragic and worthy of outrage.  (One vignette that sticks with me is the plight of a group of kids sentenced to lengthy stays in a privately-owned juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, by a judge in the pocket of the owners of that center.) But this first half of the film feels all over the place.  The vignettes are sad, but the connection to Moore’s overall message about the inherent evils of Capitalism seems thin.  (Judges and other important officials have certainly been bribed in non-Capitalist countries…)

There are other flaws with this first half.  Early on we meet several families being evicted from their homes, and we’re clearly meant to feel great sympathy for them.  But we don’t learn more about the circumstances of their evictions until much later in the film.  Without that background, I didn’t find the images of these families to be all that effective — frankly I responded the opposite way, reacting against what I perceived as Moore’s attempt at manipulation of the audience.  Yes, families being kicked out of their homes is a terrible sight.  But until and unless we, the audience, learn the reasons behind their evictions, watching those images unfold did not, for me, help Moore make his point.

Then there is the time spent with actor Wallace Shawn.  I absolutely adore Wallace Shawn (and not just for his most famous role as Vizzini in The Princess Bride), but what the heck do I care what he has to say about the economic situation in America today?  That’s nice that he seems to agree with Mr. Moore, but so what?  I was quite perplexed by the focus on Mr. Shawn in the film’s early-going.  It just added to my sense that the first half of the film was bouncing around aimlessly.… [continued]

The story of The Invention of Lying, as you’ve probably figured out from the trailers, unfolds in a universe almost identical to our own.  Except that, in this world, no human being has ever told a lie.  Ricky Gervais plays a rather Ricky Gervais-like character named Mark Bellison, an affable fellow who has not found himself particularly lucky with his advancement at work or with his love life.  And yet, as the film unfolds, something extraordinary finally happens to him — in a moment of desperation, something shifts in his brain and he tells a lie.

Things spiral a little bit out of control from there.

I’ve read and heard some negative reactions to this film, but don’t you believe them!  The Invention of Lying is a wonderful film, one of my favorites of the year.

The film is being sold as a comedy, and indeed, it is a very funny film.  Ricky Gervais (who, in addition to starring in the film co-wrote and co-directed it with Matthew Robinson) is a riot, and he brings a lot of whimsy to every aspect of the movie.  (There’s a particularly wonderful opening narration by Mr. Gervais that kicks off the film on exactly the right note.)  Supporting Mr. Gervais are a number of talented comedians who are along for the ride, such as Tina Fey (30 Rock), Louis C.K. (currently knocking ‘em dead in a recurring guest role on Parks and Recreation), Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show, Arrested Development) as well as a number of familiar funny faces in small cameos, such as Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks), Christopher Guest (Spinal Tap, Waiting For Guffman), Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) and The Daily Show vets Nathan Corddry and John Hodgman.

But while The Invention of Lying is a very funny film, I don’t really consider it to be a comedy.  Rather, I think of it as a fascinating piece of speculative fiction.  What the film does is to take a central idea (in this case, a world where no one has ever told a lie), and explore in great depth what that world would actually be like.  No one can lie — what would that mean for all of the daily, casual interactions we have with one another?  What would that mean for dating?  How about advertising?  Or writing?  (Gervais’ character is a screenwriter, and the film’s depiction of a screenwriter’s job in a world where fiction does not exist is just one of the many clever little touches that brings this parallel universe to life.)

This is also a film that, gasp, actually has something to say, and I was surprised by the left-hand turn that the film takes in a… [continued]

I’ve been reading about Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s deservedly beloved children’s book Where The Wild Things Are for a long time — years, now — and I am so thrilled to be able to report that the finished film which has finally been unveiled for the world to see is every bit as wonderful as I could have hoped.

Quite a lot has been written about this film’s torturous path to the big screen.  A few weeks ago I posted a link to this lengthy piece from the New York Times that charted the almost decade-long journey of Mr. Jonze to bring this film to life.  I remember reading the post from CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under development) that the Times article refers to in its opening paragraph.  Click here to read that article, from February 20, 2008, in which Devin Farici broke the story that executives at Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures were seriously considering abandoning Mr. Jonze’s version and entirely reshooting the film.

Thank the movie gods that that moment of crisis for the film came and went, and Mr. Jonze was able to bring his vision to completion.

The result is a delightfully unique, idiosyncratic film, truly unlike any other childrens book adaptation I have ever seen.

The film is enormously epic, a visual feast, but it is also astonishingly intimate.  Right from the very beginning (with the wonderfully messed-with opening titles which lead into Max’s wild rumpus with his dog), Mr. Jonze puts the viewers right in the face, and the mind, of young Max.  Max (played by Max Records) is clearly a very imaginative, creative little boy.  He also seems to be extraordinary lonely and, like any nine-year-old who doesn’t yet know how to express all of the feelings roiling around inside of him, he is prone to terrible outbursts.

This early, pre-Wild Things section of the film is an intriguing — and very, very clever — elaboration upon Mr. Sendak’s original book.  In Tim Burton’s film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he added a flashback that fleshed out Willy Wonka’s backstory (a sad childhood with his terrible father) that I felt was ridiculous and completely out of place.  But these early scenes with Max, in which we get to know him and understand his situation and why he feels the way he does, are wonderful and, I would argue, totally critical to the film’s success.  We need to understand who Max is, and why he is ultimately driven to run away from his family and escape (for a time) into fantasy.

What makes this early section of the film work, is Mr. Jonze (and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers)’s care… [continued]

Last week I had the pleasure of taking in a double-feature of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, re-done in beautiful 3-D.  What a glorious time in a movie theatre!

It seems that 3-D is really starting to be embraced by the studios.  There have been a number of big 3-D releases in the past year, with a LOT more on the horizon.  (Personally I’m looking forward to James Cameron’s Avatar and, further in the future, Steven Spielberg & Peter Jackson’s collaboration on Tintin.)  I’ve skipped most of the recent 3-D films since they really didn’t interest me.  I did see Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (from 2007), and while the 3-D was cool, it still made my head hurt at times, and the film itself (minus the excitement of the 3-D effects) was entirely forgettable.  After that I stayed away from 3-D films until I saw Pixar’s Up this summer (read my review here), which was magnificent.  The film itself was wonderful, and the gorgeous visuals were only enhanced by the beautiful, immersive 3-D.

Pixar’s big release for summer 2010 will be the long-awaited Toy Story 3, which will be presented in 3-D.  To build some anticipation for the film, Disney and Pixar have re-done the first two Toy Story films in 3-D, and released them to theatres for a limited 2-week engagement this month.

Even without the 3-D, it was an enormous pleasure to re-watch those two films.  I really liked the first Toy Story, and I was bowled over by Toy Story 2 when it came out — I thought it was endlessly clever, quite effectively emotional, and also totally hysterical.  The Toy Story “Toy Box set” (containing both films plus a third disc filled with special features) was one of the very first DVDs I ever bought, and I watched Toy Story 2 several times those first few years.

So while I know Toy Story 2 really well, it had been quite a while since I had last seen the first Toy Story.  I was really pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up.  There are moments when it is clear how far Pixar’s animation has progressed (the fur on Sid’s dog, for instance, is pretty much just a solid shape, as opposed to the dynamic fur effects we’d see later on with Sulley and the Abominable Snowman a few years later in Monsters, Inc.), but over-all the animation holds up wonderfully.  The characters move naturally and — more importantly — really feel ALIVE as opposed to being just nicely-rendered CGI constructs.  This is helped by the genius voice-casting.  Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are absolutely perfect in the roles, and their relationship is the heart of… [continued]

Here’s how not to get me excited about a film: start it off by trailers for Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself, Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster flick 2012, Rob Marshall’s latest musical Nine, and about five other movies that you could not pay me enough to go see.  Ugh.

Luckily, our feature presentation of Julie and Julia turned out to be rather more entertaining than those dreadful trailers.

Julie and Julia is adapted from “My Life in France,” Julia Child’s posthumously published autobiography, and “Julie & Julia,” New Yorker Julie Powell’s book about her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 365 days.  The film intercuts the stories of the two women as they each find themselves through cooking.

We first meet Julia Child (Meryl Streep) living in Paris in the 1940′s.  She is married to Paul (Stanley Tucci), an American diplomat, and trying to decide just what she “should dooooo” with her time.  Make hats?  Play bridge?  Her love of French food prompts her to take a cooking class, which she quickly masters.  Gradually she comes upon the idea (working with two fellow chefs) to create a cookbook of French recipes designed for Americans, and the movie charts her multi-year struggle to write, and then find a publisher for, this lengthy tome.

We first meet Julie Powell (Amy Adams) living in Queens in 2002 and working a terrible cubicle job (which seems to involve dealing with insurance claims from the families of 9/11 victims).  Looking for some sort of direction, she seizes upon the idea of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook and blogging about the results (her Julie/Julia blog project).

Both lead actresses in this film are quite magnificent.  Meryl Streep absolutely nails Julia Child, starting with that distinct voice and including the way she carries herself — her Julia dominates every room that she’s in.  I’m not quite certain how much this “with malice towards none” depiction of Julia squares with the genuine article (and indeed, it’s hard to square this version with the Julia who later in life was dismissive of Julie Powell’s blog, a moment seen in the film only from Julie’s perspective), but Mrs. Streep certainly captures how I have always imagined Julia based on watching her on TV.  As for Amy Adams, she is, as always, a delight, whether conveying Julie’s quiet desperation, early in the film, sitting at a table with her far-more successful college chums, or her great delight all the times we see her getting one of Julie’s recipes just right.

I’ve read a lot of critics (including A.O. Scott of the New York Times)… [continued]

I know some people who can’t stand to see a movie a second time — they think “been there, done that, I’d rather see something new.”  I certainly don’t have anything against seeing something new, but I’m also someone who loves seeing movies for a second time — and, if it’s a good movie, seeing it many more times after that!  (I’m the same way with books, comic books, etc. — I love re-reading stories that I enjoyed multiple times.)

I find that my feelings upon watching a film for a second time often vary wildly from the experience of seeing it originally.  I can absorb the film without all the baggage of hype, my anticipation, etc.  I can also more accurately judge the movie for what it is, rather than what I had hoped it would be or was expecting it would be.

During September I had a chance to take a second look at three films that I really enjoyed during last year’s Oscar rush of films (in late December 2008).  Did my feelings about them change, for better or for worse, upon a second viewing?  Read on!

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — read my original review here.  Benjamin Button was one of my very favorite movies from last year (it ranked as no. 6 on my list of my favorite films from 2008) and, if anything, I was even more in awe of it the second time around.  The film is magnificent.  It is one of those special collaborations where every single element works just perfectly, from the gorgeous sets and costumes, to the jaw-dropping visual effects (that create fully-realized environments from France to Russia to a tug-boat in the middle of the Pacific, not to mention the completely convincing creation and de-aging of Benjamin Button himself that is as wonderful a combination of makeup, prosthetics, and incredible CGI as I have ever seen), to the wonderful performances by Brad Pitt (who proves in every film he’s in why he is so deserving of his movie-star fame), Cate Blanchett, and a wonderful array of other talented actors.  Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) knows how to incorporate cutting-edge visual effects into a film without ever letting those effects overpower the film, and he knows how to tell a deeply emotional tale without ever veering into schmaltz.  As I said: magnificent.  (I also had the fun of watching this film on Blu-Ray, and let me say that my jaw was on the floor at the clarity of the images, the colors, everything.  As the enclosed booklet notes, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was created in the digital realm without ever being output to… [continued]

So let’s get this out of the way:  Office Space is one of the greatest films ever made.  Just a phenomenal movie.  Writer/Director Mike Judge’s second film, Idiocracy, was much, much weaker (although not so horrible that it deserved the way it was basically dumped direct-to-DVD by 20th Century Fox).  Judge’s new film, Extract, falls somewhere in between those two films in terms of quality.

Jason Bateman plays Joel, the sad-sack owner of a small plant that produces flavored almond extract.  His wife (Kristen Wiig) doesn’t want to sleep with him, he lives next door to an extraordinarily annoying neighbor (David Koechner), and his factory workers are all, well, morons.  To make matters worse, Joel’s plans to sell the plant are put into jeopardy by a freak accident that causes an unfortunate injury to his plant’s wannabe-floor manager, the fairly-clueless Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), AND Joel has just mistakenly hired a money-chasing con artist (Mila Kunis) who is after the money that Step will probably make if he sues Joel’s company.  Oh, and Joel really needs to stop listening to the terrible advice doled out by his bar-tender, Dean (a very hairy Ben Affleck).

What follows is an amusing look into the lives of a group of powerfully ordinary Americans, most of whom are either very unhappy or very dim.  I enjoyed the film, but it’s not at all the laugh-riot I was expecting from Mike Judge and a cast of that pedigree.

The beauty of Office Space is that, while most of the main characters are unhappy (as they are in Extract), we completely feel for them in their unhappiness because of all the cubicle bullshit that we see they have to put up with on a daily basis.  Furthermore, while exaggerated, all of that office-life nonsense rings true.  That core of truth is, I think, critical in the audience being swept along by all of the silliness that then transpires in the film.  But much of the set-up of Extract feels slightly false to me.  For instance, the major issue between Joel and his wife (that she won’t have sex with him after 8 PM, and he can never get home before then) is good for a few laughs but also seems rather ridiculous.  Kristen Wiig plays Suzie as a decent person who does seem to like her husband — so it seems like the type of thing that they could easily work out with a simple conversation.  Of course, if they did, there’d be no movie, but I’m always bothered when I notice characters only acting a certain way because that’s what the plot demands.

Still, there is some good fun to be had.  Most reviews of… [continued]

I saw a lot of films in 2008 — but, of course, there were many that I wanted to see but just didn’t get to.  (I listed several when I compiled my list of the Best Movies of 2008.)  Of the films that I missed, the one I was most bummed about was Waltz With Bashir.

For almost a year now I’ve been hearing and reading about what a success this film is.  Well, last month I finally had an opportunity to watch Ari Folman’s magnificent “animated documentary” (as he refers to the film on the DVD’s special features).  It is a beautiful, haunting, truly unique film.

A meeting at a bar with one of his former comrades from the Israeli army prompts Mr. Folman to realize that he has no memories of his time fighting in the Lebanon War of 1982.  Despite that lack of concrete memories, he finds himself increasingly haunted by a bizarre image that he dreams about — of him, and several other Israeli soldiers, emerging naked from the water, watching flares illuminate a deserted Lebanese city block.  Trying to determine the meaning of that image, and to sort out exactly where he was and what he did during the war, Mr. Folman travels around Israel, and beyond, meeting up with several surviving comrades from the war and listening to their stories.

The film is structured around these interviews/conversations.  (These are almost all real interviews with real people, who voice themselves — with just two exceptions, according to the DVD features — in the film.)  Why then, you might be wondering, is the project animated?  Why didn’t Mr. Folman simply film and then edit together these interviews the way most documentarians do?  Within the answer to that question lies the film’s surprising power.  Folman and his team use animation as a way to recreate, before our eyes, what the interview subjects are describing, whether that be their best recollection of events that they lived through, or the dreams that they’ve had in the years since.

While certainly there is an attempt, on Mr. Folman’s part, to educate himself (and his audience) about the events of the Lebanese War — and, specifically, the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Phalangist fighters — there is so much more going on in this film than just a recreation of those events.  Waltz With Bashir represents a soldier’s attempt to come to grips with actions that he might have taken — or allowed others to take — or even just witnessed — during war-time.  As such, this could be a film about almost any conflict.  Yes, over the course of the film,… [continued]

My wife borrowed the French movie Diabolique from her step-father, but after reading the description on the back of the case, which described the film as “an acknowledged influence on Psycho,” she decided that it would probably be too scary to watch.  I, however, had never seen the film, and was intrigued enough by what I’d heard about it to give the DVD a spin.

Diabolique (which is apparently the film’s title in the U.S., although the title card of the film itself reads Les Diabolioques — “The Devils”) was made in 1954 by acclaimed French director Henri-Georges Clouzot.  The film is in black-and-white, and is in French (with English subtitles).

Christina and Nicole are an unlikely pair.  Christina is married to the cruel Michel Delasalle, who runs a fairly shoddy boarding school for boys.  Nicole is one of the teachers, and is also Michel’s mistress.  Christina and Nicole have bonded over their mutual hatred of Michel, who is vicious in his treatment of them both.  Ultimately, the two women hatch a plan to escape their troubles by murdering Michel.  While being sure to carefully cover their tracks, they carry out the grisly deed and dump Michel’s body in the school’s swimming pool.  Their hope is that Michel’s corpse will soon be found, and people will assume that he committed suicide.  But when the pool is drained soon after by the school’s groundskeeper, the body is gone.

Part of the charm, for me, in watching older movies often has to do with the leisurely pace at which they unfold, and Diabolique is no different.  The film takes its time, introducing the small group of teachers at Mr. Delasalle’s sad little school, and allowing us to see exactly why Christina and Nicole feel that murder is their only escape from their current situations.  But the pacing of the film is also, to me, its greatest flaw.  The real fun of the film doesn’t start until the pool is emptied and the two women realize that Michel’s body has vanished.  The mystery of just-what-is-going-on, and the two women’s descent into fearful paranoia as they grow convinced that somehow Michel is not actually dead, is the real heart of the film.  But it takes quite a long time (over an hour) to get to that point — a little too long, for my tastes.

That being said, I quite enjoyed the film.  It’s a pretty grim little tale, filled with characters who are either cruel or hopeless or both.  The actors are all fairly naturalistic — there’s none of the stilted “Hollywood-speak” that one can find sometimes in older films.  The photography is also very well done — the black-and-white imagery is quite… [continued]

I walked into Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums totally unprepared for the idiosyncratic work of genius I was about to see.  I had seen Rushmore on video a year or so earlier, but I’d gone in expecting a goofy Bill Murray comedy and so didn’t quite know what to make of the film I actually saw.  While Rushmore had gotten a lot of acclaim upon its release, the film didn’t exactly blow my skirt up (to borrow one of my favorite lines from True Lies).  But I’ll watch Gene Hackman in almost anything, and the rest of the ensemble cast of Tenenbaums looked intriguing, so I decided to check out the film when it came out in theatres.  I was absolutely blown away by what I saw: the film was emotional and very, very funny, but even more than that, every frame seemed to be absolutely unique, unlike any other film I’d ever seen before.  This was the work of an accomplished, singular filmmaker.

The Royal Tenenbaums remains my favorite film by Wes Anderson, but I’ve also quite enjoyed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (a much-underrated film that I have really grown to like upon repeat viewings) and The Darjeeling Limited.  Despite my appreciation of those films, though, I had never sought out Mr. Anderson’s first film: Bottle Rocket.  There’s no particular reason for that — I wasn’t avoiding seeing it — it’s just a film that I never got around to watching.  But when the Criterion Collection (always known for their high-quality presentations of notable films) released Bottle Rocket on DVD last spring, I knew I had to take the plunge.

Bottle Rocket focuses primarily on the friendship between three young men: Anthony (Luke Wilson), Dignan (Owen Wilson), and Bob (Robert Musgrave).  The three guys — Dignan in particular — harbor aspirations of becoming master criminals.  When we meet them at the start of the film, though, they’re pretty hapless.

Bottle Rocket isn’t strong on plot, exactly.  That’s not to say that nothing happens in the film — quite a lot happens, actually.  But there isn’t really a strong dramatic through-line to the events — the movie feels more like a series of vignettes.  That hurts the pacing of the film somewhat, but adds to the naturalism of the story.  These three friends aren’t typical movie-heroes caught up in BIG DRAMATIC events.  They’re just sort-of hapless schmoes trying their best to figure out their own lives and find their way in the world.  And therein lies the movie’s charm.

The two Wilson brothers and Robert Musgrave all turn in strong performances — especially Owen Wilson, whose character of Dignan is a truly unique creation.  The great James… [continued]

Romantic comedies are not really my thing.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy movies that deal with romance.  I often say that When Harry Met Sally is one of my three very favorite films (along with The Godfather and The Empire Strikes Back, if you must know).  It’s just that I have a strong dislike of the silly Hollywood boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-are-separated-by-some-ridiculous-misunderstanding-or-other-comic-or-dramatic-obstacle, boy-and-girl-work-everything-out-and-live-happily-ever-after type of movie.  Yech.

Luckily, there’s none of that unpleasantness to be found in the absolutely delightful new film, (500) Days of Summer.  This film has been getting a lot of favorable press since it’s release, and rightfully so.

The film focuses on a love-affair, between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the fact that this is the same actor who also played Cobra Commander in the recent big, loud, and dumb G.I. Joe movie is astounding) and Summer (the beguiling Zooey Deschannel).  But right from the opening voice-over, the film is clear: “this is not a love story.”  Thank heaven.  While (500) Days of Summer deals with matters of the heart, the film stays well clear of schmaltz.

In many ways, (500) Days of Summer reminds me a lot of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.  (That is high praise from me, as Annie Hall is a masterpiece and, while it not be among my top 3 favorite films, it’s definitely in the top 10!)  Both films deal with the ups and down of a relationship, balancing comedy and drama from moment to moment.  But what really drew the connection, in my mind, is the gleeful playfulness both films have with the structure of their narrative.

As you probably know, (500) Days of Summer isn’t structured chronologically — it jumps back and forth throughout the 500 days of Tom and Summer’s relationship.  This is a clever device, and one that is well-handled by the filmmakers.  The jumps in time aren’t at all confusing and, in fact, they help draw connections between different moments to illuminate the goings-on (for either comic or dramatic effect).  But it’s as if the filmmakers, once they decided not to us a simple chronological structure, felt emboldened to have all sorts of other fun with the narrative.  Suddenly there’s a voice-over.  Suddenly the characters are all looking into camera to describe their true love.  Etc. etc.  Again, this compares very favorably, in my mind, to the free-wheeling structure of Annie Hall, in which suddenly, in one scene, we can read the characters’ thoughts in sub-titles at the bottom of the screen, or there’s suddenly a split-screen showing the differences between dinner at the Singer and Hall households, or Woody can suddenly bring in the real Marshall McLuhan to settle a debate.

Both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey… [continued]

Even before Watchmen was released in theatres, director Zach Snyder made clear, in interviews, that we’d be seeing his longer Director’s Cut released on DVD/Blu-Ray before too terribly long.  

Well, Watchmen: The Director’s Cut is indeed now available for all to see, and I am happy to report that it’s quite excellent.

This Director’s Cut isn’t a total reinvention of the film.  The film unfolds as it did in its theatrical form.  There are no revelatory story-lines or spectacular action sequences added back in.  This Director’s Cut isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about Mr. Snyder’s adaptation of the comic book masterpiece by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  If the film didn’t grab you in the theatres (and if you’re reading this while thinking to yourself, “twenty-four extra minutes added on to a film that was already two and a half hours??  No thanks!!”) then nothing I’m going to write here will cause you to think any differently.  But if you were as taken with the theatrical version as I was (check out my original review here), then this new extended version is a delight.

As I wrote above, the film hasn’t been dramatically re-edited (the way, for example, the first half-hour of The Fellowship of the Ring was entirely re-worked in Peter Jackson’s magnificent extended edition), and there’s no “Wow!  What a cool sequence that they’ve restored to the film!” moment (such as the astounding revised ending of James Cameron’s Director’s Cut of The Abyss).  No, what has been added back into the film are a lot of little moments, little bits of texture to the story from the original comic book.  Scenes now start a few moments earlier, or end a few moments later.  Many of the characters now get a few extra moments.  Bits of background detail are added.  These accumulate to result in a film that is a bit more leisurely paced than the theatrical version, but where the world of the story has been a little more fleshed out.  

One of the very first changes is also the most perplexing one, and really the only change I objected to.  There’s a little button added on to the scene where Rorschach investigates the Comedian’s apartment, after his murder.  Now, as Rorschach is leaving, a cop finds him in the apartment, and tries to shoot him.  For some reason, the bullets don’t seem to connect with Rorschach, and when the cop looks back at him, he is gone.  Whereas most of the rest of the additions in this new cut result in the re-incorporation of small moments or details from the original graphic novel, this addition is a complete invention of the filmmakers, and… [continued]

How many really great sci-fi films have there been in the last decade?  It’s pretty slim, right?  OK, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie was pretty good… but before that?  I can think of Cloverfield (2008), Children of Men (2006), Serenity (2005), The Matrix (1999), Galaxy Quest (1999)… what else?  Signs (2002) and Vanilla Sky (2001) have a sci-fi twist to them so maybe they count.  That’s eight films.  Not a pretty substantial list, huh?

Well, here’s one to add: Neil Blomkamp’s District 9.  

You’re best off entering the film armed only with what little was revealed in the intriguing trailers: twenty years ago an enormous alien craft came to a halt in the sky over Johannesburg.  Almost one million aliens (derogatively called “prawns” by the locals) are rescued from the powerless craft.  These homeless creatures quickly develop into a new underclass in the city, dwelling in an enormous slum designated District 9.

That’s just the set-up.  I went into the film completely clueless about the actual plot of the film (and what a delight that was, by the way, in this age of movie spoilers!) and I won’t spoil it for you either.  I will tell you only that actor Sharlto Copley (a fresh face who I had never seen in a film before) does a tremendous job in the central role of Wikus van der Merwe.  Mr. Copley takes Wikus (and the audience) along on a staggering emotional journey over the course of the film.  When first we meet MNU (Multinational United) agent Wikus, he’s something of an affable buffoon, but his responses to the extraordinary events that follow are the meat and potatoes of the story , and when we leave him at the film’s end it’s hard to believe we’re leaving the same character.  It’s a tremendous performance, and one the success of the film really hangs on.

Well, that and the film’s astounding visual energy.  Mr. Blomkamp demonstrates terrific visual flair at the helm of this film.  District 9 was famously made after the film version of Halo (which would have been produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Mr. Blomkamp, as District 9 wound up being) fell apart.  District 9 was made on a very small budget (reportedly 30 million dollars) and shot in South Africa.  I have no idea how Mr. Blomkamp and his team possibly pulled this film off on that tiny budget, but my hat is off to them.  The film is a visual feast.  I have no idea how they brought all the “prawns” to life — CGI?  Make-up and prosthetics?  Some combination?  – but they are a phenomenal achievement.  The aliens are completely believable — and they’re also, by the… [continued]

I still remember the first time I saw Pulp Fiction.  I didn’t know anything about this guy Quentin Tarantino, and I hadn’t yet seen Reservoir Dogs.  But in reading about the film in advance of its release, it looked like it had a pretty spectacular cast, and I thought the trailers looked pretty cool.  So, when the film came out in theatres, I corralled a bunch of my high school buddies to go see the flick with me.  Boy, were we totally unprepared for what we were about to experience in that darkened theatre in Milford, CT!  We pretty much had our brains blown right out of our heads.  When the film was over, none of us could really speak — or even move!  My friends and I just sat silently through all of the credits, slowly absorbing everything that we had just seen.  What a movie!  Walking out of that theatre it was pretty much assured that, from then on, I’d buy a ticket to any movie that Quentin Tarantino ever directed.

And, well, I have, and he hasn’t let me down since.  Jackie Brown, Kill Bill (volumes I and II) and Death Proof (Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse — and please lord, can we someday get the complete theatrical version of Grindhouse released on DVD???) all proved to be relentlessly entertaining.  What has really impressed me, though, is that while all retain the distinct signature of Tarantino’s style of movie-making, those four films are all quite different from one another in terms of content and tone.  I am happy to report that I can say exactly the same of Mr. Tarantino’s latest work, Inglourious Basterds.

This is a spectacular film, one of my very favorites of this mediocre summer of movies.  (My other favorite would be Pixar’s Up — see my review here — and two more different movies I could scarcely imagine!)

As with most of Tarantino’s movies, Inglourious Basterds kicks off with a powerhouse of a first scene.  In Nazi-occupied France, dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet, looking quite a lot like Gerard Butler in 300) is paid a visit by “the Jew Hunter,” S.S. officer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who is seeking to determine if Monsieur LaPadite or any of the other local farmers are hiding a family of Jews who have disappeared.  Tarantino is a genius at being able to craft exquisite tension from scenes of simple conversation, and this opening sequence is a master class in this skill (rivaling, in my mind, the deservedly famous “say what again!” interrogation scene from Pulp Fiction).

By the end of this prologue, only young Shosanna (and why her name is spelled that way, rather than Shoshanna,… [continued]

Growing up, my two favorite cartoons, by an order of magnitude, were The Transformers and G.I. Joe.  That makes it sort of hard to believe that this summer saw the release of  a live-action, big-budget movie version of both of those beloved (by me, at least!) old TV shows.

Wish I could say either one of them was any good!

Although, I must confess that I enjoyed G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra way more than I expected to, and a good deal more than the really undeniably terrible Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  I mean, take a look at these two trailers:

Doesn’t Transformers look awesome, and G.I. Joe pretty terrible?  But the reality is that G.I. Joe wound up being a far-more entertaining and coherent film.

Heh.  Coherent.  That’s a funny word to use to describe G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a film that is completely over-the-top and ridiculous from the first frame to the last.  But, whereas Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a film that made absolutely not one lick of sense (and click here if you don’t believe me), with nothing even remotely resembling a logical progression from one scene to the next, G.I. Joe is actually a pretty straightforward adventure film.

Army grunts Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) witness the complete annihilation of their convoy by a highly advanced terrorist organization, and get swept up in the efforts of G.I. Joe, an elite multi-nation fighting force, to stop the bad guys.

Again, I realize the silliness of my calling this film “straightforward.”  Though it’s live-action, this movie is a complete cartoon, filled with soap-opera entanglements for almost all of the main characters and one crazily insane action sequence after another.  But in contrast to Transformers, there is a coherency to the plot.  There is some sense as to how one event leads into the next, and while I had to check imdb to figure out some characters’ names (for instance, I had no idea that Lost‘s Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was supposed to be Heavy Duty), I didn’t have any trouble telling any of the myriad good guys and bad guys apart from one another (again, in marked contrast to Transformers).

The actors all seem to be having a lot of fun, and the cast is, for the most part, pretty solid.  I have never really understood the need for comic relief characters in films like this, but Marlon Wayans’ Ripcord isn’t too terribly annoying.  Channing Tatum’s Duke is fairly stiff, but I guess he’s supposed to be.  Dennis Quaid (looking more and more like Harrison Ford with each passing year) chews great scenery as General Hawk.  (I wish his character… [continued]

Try as I might, I must admit that my expectations do sometimes color my opinions about a movie that I see.  Occasionally I go into a film with very low expectations — and even if the movie is mediocre, I come out pleased because it was better than I expected.  Conversely, if I go into a film with very high expectations, if it falls below those expectations I can come out disappointed, even if in hindsight I can recognize that the film really isn’t that bad.

Well, after weeks of people telling me that The Hangover was a comedic triumph, maybe my expectations just got raised a bit to high because, when I finally saw it a few weeks ago, I didn’t really think it was all that.

Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) head to Vegas with with their good buddy Doug (Justin Bartha) to celebrate Doug’s impending marriage.  Cut to the next morning, when the guys wake up in a trashed hotel room with no memory of what transpired the night before, and discover that Doug is missing. The film follows their increasingly frantic efforts to reconstruct the events of that hedonistic night and locate their buddy in time for the wedding.

I really shouldn’t be too much of a grouch — much of The Hangover is very, very funny.  But I guess that after the past several years of so many brilliant Apatow-style comedies, in which no matter how lunatic the situations (such as a 40 year-old virgin getting his chest waxed), everything is still grounded in relatably human characters and situations, I have sort of tired of movies based on outlandish wacky comedy premises.

The film’s greatest strength is the terrific chemistry between Cooper, Helms, and Galifianakis.  Each is a great actor and comedian in his own right, and together they have a deliriously nutty energy.  There are far worse ways to spend two hours than watching these three lovable numbskulls bounce off of one another.

Still, while The Hangover was a fun two hours in a movie theatre, I can’t imagine that this will be a film I wind up revisiting too often in the future.  (Whereas I am already eager to see the much-less-well-thought-of Funny People again on DVD.)

I read somewhere a reviewer refer to Judd Apatow’s new film, Funny People, as his “James L. Brooks movie.”  Well, if James L. Brooks isn’t making James L. Brooks movies anymore (his last film was 2004′s Spanglish, which not coincidentally was also the last time, before Funny People, that I enjoyed a movie starring Adam Sandler), then I for one am more than happy to see Judd Apatow fill the void!

I’ve been hearing a lot of disappointment from people who have seen Funny People.  I suppose if one goes in expecting the laugh-a-minute experience of The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up, one would be disappointed.  There is a lot of very funny humor in Funny People, but also some lengthy stretches without any laughs at all.  This would be a big problem if what was happening in those laugh-free-zones wasn’t compelling — but I found everything to be VERY compelling.  Funny People is a much more adult, nuanced film than Mr. Apatow’s first two movies, and while I positively ADORED those first two films, I am also thrilled to see him exploring some deeper territory here.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a wildly successful comedian and star of many hugely popular and sort-of-juvenile, well, Adam Sandler-type movies.  Despite his success, he is all alone in his huge mansion (except for his house-keeping staff, of course), and struggling to deal with the news that he has been diagnosed with a form of leukemia.  Seth Rogen plays Ira Wright, a young man trying to break into the brutally tough world of stand-up comedy.  Their paths cross one evening when George drops by a comedy club where Ira is waiting to perform, and Ira quickly gets sucked up into George’s orbit.  Ira is star-struck by getting to spend time with his idol, and desperate to taste some of the massive fame to which George has become inured, and George — though he’d never admit it — is lonely and looking for some sort of companionship, having driven away all of his former friends, girlfriends, and family.

Rogen and Sandler are both at the top of their games, creating fully believable, lived-in characters that feel completely real.  I have often said that I really like Adam Sandler’s comedy, but that I can’t stand his movies.  This remains true for me.  But I have really enjoyed the few films in which Sandler has actually tried to ACT — films like Spanglish, and Punch-Drunk Love.  In those movies, I was quite impressed that Sandler could actually create a real, sympathetic character, and he does similarly high-quality work here.  Rogen too turns in probably his most human performance here (at least since Freaks and… [continued]

I’ve written about a few of the films that I’ve seen this summer (click here for my review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, here for my review of Year One,  and here for my review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) but there are a lot more that I’ve seen but haven’t had time to write about.  Hence, this first installment of my Summer Movie Catch-Up!

Let’s start with Pixar’s latest opus, Up.

Carl (voiced by the great Ed Asner) is an elderly widower, living alone in his small house.  When we meet him, it seems that all of the happiness has been drained from his life, and the only thing that gives him any energy at all is his cranky refusal to sell his home to the real-estate developers who want to purchase his land.

When things take a turn for the worse, and it looks like Carl is going to lose his home after all, he comes up with a cartoon movie plan to escape — and also to fulfill one of the life-long dreams that he and his wife shared.

The trailers for this film were remarkably successful in refusing to spoil any of the wonderful weirdness that happens next, and I won’t either.  Suffice it to say, after a fairly serious beginning, to my delight and surprise the movie takes several sharp left turns into loony mayhem.  It winds up channeling almost as much adventure-serial energy as did The Incredibles — something I was not expecting but really enjoyed.

Much has been written about the beautiful, haunting prologue to the film in which we learn everything we need to know about Carl’s life and his relationship with his wife.  Those scenes are Pixar at its very best — dazzlingly economical storytelling that is tender and poignant, and not at all the way one might expect an “all-ages” film to begin.  It’s every bit the work of genius that you might have heard, and luckily the rest of the film is able to live up to the incredibly high bar set by that prologue.

I had the pleasure of seeing Up in 3-D, and it was magnificent.  Before the movie started, the theatre played several trailers for upcoming 3-D movies, and those were filled to the brim with all sorts of annoying in-your-face 3-D gimmicry.  But I am pleased to report that there is very little of that in Up.  Rather, the artists at Pixar have used the 3-D in an entirely different way: to subtly enlarge the visual palette of the film, adding enormous depth to the visual wonders on display.  As Carl and his house, born aloft by an enormous… [continued]

Last month I wrote about discovering and really enjoying, in college, some films from what I consider to be Steven Spielberg’s “middle period,” in which he began moving from the crowd-pleasing adventure films that he did so well (epitomized by Raiders of the Lost Ark) to more serious dramatic material (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, etc.)  Rewatching The Color Purple for the first time in a decade, I found that there was still a lot to enjoy, though in some ways I felt the film was a bit simplistic.  (Click here for my full review.)

But I found myself quite mesmerized by Empire of the Sun when I re-watched it last month (also for the first time in about ten years).  This is a dramatically under-rated movie, and a strong piece of Mr. Spielberg’s over-all filmography.

Young Jim Graham is a spoiled British schoolboy, living with his parents in great luxury in Shanghai in 1941.  When the Japanese invade, he is separated from his parents in the chaotic evacuation of British citizens and is left to his own devices to try to survive in the dangerous war-time world.

Whereas I found The Color Purple to have a bit too much schmaltz, Empire of the Sun is surprisingly tough in its depiction of Jim’s four-year ordeal in war-torn China.  Although the film centers on a young boy (as do many of Spielberg’s films — see ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, AI: Artificial Intelligence, etc.), this is — for the most part — a tough, honest film.  There are moments of Spielbergian romanticization — mostly having to do with Jim’s fascination with airplanes — but I found those to be moving scenes that furthered my emotional connection with the story being told, rather than distracting me from the reality of Jim’s situation.

That’s a tough balance to find — but when he’s at the top of his game, no one is better at finding that balance than Steven Spielberg.  And he does fine work here.  There are long stretches of the film without any dialogue, propelled by the gorgeous and haunting imagery (and a lush but not overly intrusive score by John Williams).  When there is dialogue, it’s tight, well-written stuff penned by Tom Stpppard (Brazil, Shakespeare in Love).

Spielberg is well known — and rightfully so — for his skill in getting strong performances from his child actors, and Empire of the Sun is a stand-out in that department.  Jim is played by a young Christain Bale (who’s been having quite a moment, playing Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins & the Dark Knight as well as a variety of other high-profile roles in films such as The Prestige, Terminator: Salvation, and Public… [continued]

In one of my very first posts for this site, I mentioned that I’d really enjoyed Cloverfield when I saw it on the big screen, but I wondered how it would hold up to a second viewing (especially on a TV screen as opposed to on an enormous movie theatre screen).

I was eager to find out, so I scooped up Cloverfield on DVD when it came out, about a year ago.  But, for some reason, that DVD sat on my shelf, unwatched.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe other films just caught my attention.  Maybe I didn’t want to discover that the film didn’t work on a second viewing.

But a few weeks ago I finally decided to pop in that DVD.  And you know what?  I am pleased to report that I enjoyed the film just as much as I did the first time I saw it!

The first 10-15 minutes of the film could be the start of any type of urban dramedy.  A group of friends gather in an NYC loft to throw a good-bye party for one of their friends, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is leaving town for a new job in Japan.  Through some fun banter we begin to get a sense of the dynamic between the group of friends, and learn hints at a romance that went wrong between Rob and Beth (Odette Yustman).  Then the power cuts out, they see a huge explosion across the city skyline, and the party-goers rush out of the building in a panic only to see the severed head of the Statue of Liberty smash into the street.

Then, you know, things get worse from there.

The conceit of the film is that one of the friends, Hud (T.J. Miller), who was filming the good-bye party as a favor, winds up capturing on his digital video camera the entire nightmarish scenario that follows.  The entire movie is seen from the point of view of his camera.  This is an enormous conceit, to be sure, and certainly there are a few times in the film where you might find yourself wondering, “I can’t believe he still has the camera on!”  But I think the filmmakers do a pretty credible job at maintaining credibility to this idea throughout the film.  (And, interestingly enough, while on my first viewing I did find myself evaluating, from scene to scene, whether I could really believe that Hud would have been able to capture what I was seeing, on this second viewing I didn’t think about that at all.  I totally accepted the scenario.)

I have to praise the filmmakers, camera-men, editors, etc., for the skill with which the shots were created and… [continued]

Let’s establish right from the get-go that I have not read any of the Harry Potter books.

Well, actually, that’s not quite true.  The day before the first Harry Potter movie opened, the friends I was going to see the movie with found out that I hadn’t read the book, and insisted that I do so before seeing the movie.  So I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in a few hours, the night before seeing the flick.  To be honest, I didn’t much care for the book, nor did I much care from the movie.

Despite that less-than-auspicious beginning, I have seen all of the other Harry Potter films.  I found the second film to be as uninspired as the first, and while I enjoyed Alfonso Cuaron’s direction of the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, that movie’s story remains my least favorite of the entire series, mostly due to all of the time-travel silliness.  Things picked up with the fourth installment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I found to be much more complex and interesting than the first three tales (many of my friends say the same of the novel).  But it was only with the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that I walked out of the movie theatre completely dazzled by what I had seen.  I truly loved that film, finding it to be dramatic, emotional, and completely engaging from the first scene to the last.  Having not read the rest of books, that movie left me quite desperate to see the sixth installment, so I could find out what happens next!

So, did Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince live up to my feelings about the Order of the Phoenix?

Well, not quite, but I did still find it to be a delightfully entertaining and compelling film, one that is very successful in its own right.

My greatest pleasure from watching the Half-Blood Prince (and, frankly, ALL of this series so far) has been seeing the terrific group of kids grow up from film to film.  I’m thinking of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, of course, but also of all the other kids in supporting roles who we have come to know and love while watching them in six movies.   The kids are all terrific, and the consistency of their presence (even those of them who only appear in small, background roles) really helps bring the story to life, and lends Hogwarts the feeling of a living, breathing community.  It’s quite an astounding thing to sit back and contemplate that not a single actor has had to be re-cast from the first… [continued]

I love Harold Ramis.  For his performance as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters (and Ghostbusters 2) alone, the man deserves to be recognized as a comic genius.  When you also consider his involvement in films such as Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, Groundhog Day, Anaylze This, and so many more, then you have to realize what an impact he has had on film comedies over the past 30 years.

And yet, it seems like Mr. Ramis has fallen out of the spotlight in the aughts.  He’s had some great (albeit small) acting roles (in Orange County, Knocked Up, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), but none of the films he has directed recently have made much of an impact: Bedazzled (in 2000), Anaylze That (the misbegotten sequel to Analyze This from 2002), and The Ice Harvest (in 2005) all came and went without much fanfare.

So I was very excited when I read, last year, that Mr. Ramis was hooking up with Jack Black and quite a few members of the Judd Apatow comedy troupe (Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as well as a number of other very funny people (Oliver Platt, David Cross, Hank Azaria) for the Biblical-comedy Year One.

For a movie crafted by so many talented folks, though, the result is surprisingly mediocre.  Oh, it’s funny, don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of big laughs.  But there are also plenty of scenes that are very flat, with few if any laughs at all.  And, even of the jokes that work, a lot of the humor of the film feels rather tame, rather familiar.  Stacked up against the great comedies of the past few years (mostly from the Apatow brand) like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, etc. etc., — comedies that took your breath away they were so funny, and, even more than that, felt like original, unique works, very different from any movie comedies that you’d ever seen before — Year One pales in comparison.

My biggest joy in watching the film came from sitting back and watching the great cast at play.  Oliver Platt, in particular, is just marvelously loony as Sodom’s High Priest.  I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of screen-time that the great David Cross (who plays Cain) got.  I didn’t expect him to reappear after the early scene with his brother Abel (Paul Rudd), so I was pleased by his large role in the second half of the film.  I should also mention Xander Berkeley (George Mason from the early days of 24) who is just terrific as the King, and Vinnie Jones (a familiar face from Guy Ritchie’s films) as the menacing soldier Sargon.  (I had… [continued]

I was pretty forgiving when I saw Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie in theatres for the first time, two summers ago.  Sure, it had its flaws, but nevertheless it was just an enormous amount of fun to see a live-action Transformers movie realized, complete with amazing over-the-top Michael Bay-style mayhem.

Even through my enjoyment, though, it was clear to me that this wouldn’t be a movie that would hold up well upon subsequent viewings.  (And, indeed, when I watched Transformers on DVD last year I was much less captivated that I had been that first time seeing it on the big screen.)  I immediately began to think of Michael Bay’s Transformers as a movie just like Independence Day — a sci-fi action spectacle that was a TON of fun to see in a packed theatre on an enormous screen, but one that would be hobbled, upon repeat viewings, by the simplicity (and often-times stupidity) of its script.

So what did I think of the recently-released sequel, Revenge of the Fallen? Well, to an astonishing degree, it has exactly the same strengths and weaknesses that the first film had.

As in the first film, Bay’s ability to stage enormously complex, epic action sequences filled with intense, visceral robot-on-robot combat is pretty jaw-dropping.  These movies look EXPENSIVE.  There’s no trickery used to hide a limited effects budget.  No, what we get are wall-to-wall chases, explosions, exotic locales, and a staggering array of CGI characters (mostly beating the stuffing out of one another).

Also as in the first film, sadly, there is a lot of annoying, unfunny attempts at comedy that feels like time-wasting to me.  And, as in the first film, I was constantly frustrated by the movie’s unwillingness to allow us to get to know any of the robot characters other than Prime and Bumblebee to any sort of degree.  There are an ENORMOUS number of robots in these films — and it’s a strength of Bay’s that he is unafraid to think BIG — but it’s a terrible shame that I couldn’t tell most of them apart from one another, and even if I could, I didn’t get a chance to know or care about any of them one whit.

Let’s flesh out the above statements a little bit.  (Some minor spoilers ahead.)

There were definitely a lot of things I liked about Revenge of the Fallen.  There were so many robots of so many different shapes and sizes, that it was a lot of fun to keep seeing what new robot would be in the next scene.  I particularly enjoyed getting to see Soundwave this time (who was utilized very well by the story, by the way — very… [continued]

The Color Purple, released in 1985, finds director Steven Spielberg at an interesting point in his career.  After having directed the first two Indiana Jones films as well at E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in the early eighties, Spielberg apparently had a desire to move towards more weighty, dramatic material.  But his “serious” films of the late eighties (The Color Purple, along with Empire of the Sun and Always) didn’t meet with an enormous amount of critical acclaim (compared to his successes in the nineties with films such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan).  But, in college, I decided I wanted to take a look at those “middle period” Spielberg films, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by their quality.  It’s been a while since I’ve last seen those films, though, so when I spotted The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun in the discount DVD bin at my local Newbury Comics, I snatched them both up.

I haven’t had a chance to get to Empire of the Sun yet, but my wife and I watched The Color Purple last month.  It wasn’t quite as good as I had remembered it, but I still think it’s a better film than people tend to think.

Adapted from the novel by Alice Walker, The Color Purple tells the life story of an African American woman, Celie.  Growing up in turn-of-the-century Georgia, the poor girl struggles through hardship after hardship.  She is raped by her father as a young girl, and gives birth to two children who he takes from her.  She is married off to a cruel local farmer (Danny Glover), who beats her and forcibly separates her from her beloved sister, Nettie.  Later in life she forms an unexpected friendship with her husband’s mistress, the vivacious singer Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), who sets Celie on a path towards finally coming out of her shell and finding some happiness for herself.

The Color Purple is notable for some terrific performances from some well-known actors who, looking back on the film now, are unbelievably young here.  Whoopie Goldberg, in one of her very first screen appearances, plays Celie, and she is fantastic — soulful and full of life, even though she has very little dialogue in the film.  Whoopie is a talented comedian, but I have found that I’ve always preferred her in straight dramatic roles, and this is no exception.  Danny Glover doesn’t often play the “bad guy” in films, but he does a great job here as the monstrous Albert.  He cuts quite a menacing figure.  Oprah Winfrey appears, also in one of her first screen appearances, as the vivacious and strong-willed Sofia.  Her performance is a little over the top, but… [continued]

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the few films from the past several years that Judd Apatow has had a hand in (he co-wrote the film and was one of its producers), that, despite his involvement, did not receive a lot of love from audiences upon its release.  My own recollection of seeing it in theatres was that it was sort of funny but not fantastic.  However, upon a second viewing on DVD last month, I must say that I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this film!

Walk Hard is, first and foremost, an evisceration of a very specific type of film: the Oscar-bait musical bio-pic (like Ray, Walk the Line, etc.).  In scene after scene after scene, the film mercilessly sends-up every single ridiculous cliche of those types of movies.  

We meet young Dewey growing up in a ramshackle farm down South, enjoying an idyllic life.  But a day of fun with his brother (“ain’t nothing horrible gonna happen today!” the doomed tyke promises) ends in tragedy after a machete-fighting accident.  Out of that grief, Dewey discovers his musical ability, playing the blues (“I got the blues… cut my brother in half…”).  A few years later, a nervous Dewey performs at a High School concert.  (Starting here, Dewey is played by John C. Reilly, despite the fact that the character is only 14 in this scene.  As Apatow and Director/co-writer Jake Kasdan note in their DVD commentary, they were interested in poking fun at  ”just how young the lead actor THINKS he can play” in these sorts of movies.)   Despite the innocuousness of the pop ballad Dewey performs (entitled “Take My Hand”), the concert erupts into a frenzy of sexualized dancing (as, you know, Rock and Roll is wont to cause).  After being condemned by the local priest (“You think we don’t know what you’re talking about when you say take my hand?!”) and his father (“The wrong kid died!”), Dewey decides to leave home and set out on a musical career.

What follows reads like a crazy check-list of the types of scenes one could expect in these sorts of films, charting our hero’s rise and fall and eventual redemption.  Dewey gets an opportunity to perform his music for a disinterested record company executive (played brilliantly by John Michael Higgins, who proclaims: “You have failed conclusively!  There is nothing that you can do, here in this room, to turn that around!”) but, of course, once Dewey plays one of his own songs (the titular “Walk Hard”), the executive is blown away, as are his Hassidic Jewish backers (Harold Ramis — yes, Harold Ramis — Phil Rosenthal, and Martin Starr in delightfully over-the-top Hassidic get-up… [continued]

As with Charlie Wilson’s War (which I wrote about on Wednesday), The Departed is a movie whose DVD has been sitting on my shelf for a while now, waiting for me to revisit it (after really enjoying my first viewing when I saw it in theatres).  I am pleased to say I enjoyed the film during its second viewing as much as I did during its first.

The Departed is a sprawling film that focuses on two young men who are, in many ways, the mirror opposites of one another.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a state cop assigned to infiltrate the mob run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), while Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, one of Costello’s men who is assigned to infiltrate the state police.  The film deftly follows their two stories, as each one works to make a name for himself in his new world, all the while scrambling to stay one step ahead of discovery.  William Monahan’s script is taut and smart, giving DiCaprio and Damon plenty of great character material to work with, while also fashioning a throughly entertaining, twisty narrative.  (I am becoming an enormous fan of Mr. Monahan’s writing, by the way.  In addition to his work in The Departed, I thoroughly enjoyed his script for Ridley Scott’s criminally-underrated Kingdom of Heaven.)

As good as Damon and DiCaprio are, though, they almost have the movie stolen right out from under them by Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg, who are both absolutely magnificent playing two gleefully profane Boston detectives.  Martin Sheen is a great father figure as Police Captain Queenan, and Jack Nicholson — well, he’s Jack!  Completely over-the-top but somehow still believable as the dangerous Costello.

Having lived in both Providence and Boston, I really enjoyed the film’s focus on the distinct flavors of those two great cities.  I love movies that dig into a particular subculture, whether that’s a documentary such as Spellbound or Wordplay, or a movie like Adventureland (which I reviewed here) that captures the life of kids working a summer job at an amusement park.  So it’s no great surprise that I was tickled by The Departed‘s focus on life in Providence and Boston, two cities that are both quite different than, say, New York.  Now, I can’t really vouch for the veracity of the depiction of the crime families of those two towns, but I can say that I think Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators really captured the unique FEEL of those two cities.  

This is a big story being told, taking place over many years and with a lot of characters and a lot of narrative twists and turns.  It is all held together… [continued]

Picked this up off the DVD shelf recently, and I must say I enjoyed it as thoroughly as I did when I saw it in theatres last year.  In his review of the film for the New York Times, A.O. Scott described Charlie Wilson’s War as “more of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.”  I must say that I entirely agree!

Tom Hanks plays Charlie Wilson, a representative from Texas’ Second Congressional District to the U.S. House of Representatives.  Hanks imbues this good ol’ boy with an inordinate amount of charm, whether he’s flirting with women in a hot-tub or debating the intricacies of Constitutional law with a constituent.  Charlie quickly finds common purpose with short-fused, take-no-nonsense C.I.A. operative Gust Avrakotos, played with great vigor by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  (His opening scene, in which he viciously tells off his boss at the C.I.A., is an absolute riot.)  Hoffman’s Gust is the polar opposite of Charlie — ornery, blunt, and poorly-dressed.  But the two find a strange sort of kinship in their realization of the importance of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

While Hanks and Hoffman get most of the fun (and most of the film’s best lines), the supporting cast is superb as well.  Julia Roberts is beautiful and imposing as the wealthy Joanne Herring; Amy Adams is sassy and smart as Charlie’s assistant Bonnie Bach (though I do wish she had a bit more to do in the film); and I don’t want to forget the delightful Ned Beatty (forever known to my generation as Lex Luthor’s oafish henchman Otis from the Richard Donner Superman movies).

But the real stars of the film are writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols.  These two gentlemen know comedy, and they know drama, and they know how to combine the two.  Sorkin’s script is filled with memorable lines (my favorite being Charlie’s response to Joanne’s question as to why Congress is saying one thing and doing nothing: “tradition, mostly”) and the rat-tat-tat dialogue exchanges that he is famous for, but not in a way that overwhelms the story being told.  And Nichols’ direction gives the film a light, enjoyable tone, while not shying away from some difficult questions that any look at the U.S.’s actions during this period must lead to.  This is a film with a clear point to make about today’s political realities, but the filmmakers are confident enough not to hit you over the head with it.  Most importantly, Nichols and the skilled actors with whom he is working are able to create fully-realized characters to populate the film, not… [continued]

Hamlet 2 tells the story of frustrated actor-turned-high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (a nearly-unpronounceable last name, for which I was eager to learn the correct spelling by watching the film’s end credits) played by Steve Coogan (so funny this past summer in Tropic Thunder).  Dana is not-dissimilar to Christopher Guest’s Corky St. Clair (from the terrific film Waiting For Guffman) although rather more pathetic (and more prone to accidentally flashing his genitals).  Even in teaching, Dana is struggling to find success.  He only has two loyal students, and the school plays that he supervises (such as a recent stage version of Erin Brockovich) are continually savaged by the school paper’s young drama critic.

Things go from bad to worse when the school decides to cut most of its electives, filling Dana’s drama class with an unruly mob of kids who have no desire to be there.  But Dana is inspired to write a new play — a musical sequel to Hamlet that will correct that play’s downer ending — and sets out to get all of his kids involved.  What follows is a sort-of-insane mish-mash of inspiring-teacher movies (Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds) with kids-coming-together-to-create-a-musical films.

The movie is all over the place.  It’s at its best when it allows Mr. Coogan to depict his slow-burn desperation to connect with the kids in his class.  There are also a number of amusing digressions, such as Dana’s encounter with Elisabeth Shue (playing herself), who has decided to give up acting in favor of life as a nurse; explorations of his home-life with his bitter wife Brie (the very funny Catherine Keener) and their new tenant Gary (David Arquette, who is hysterical in his nearly-silent role); and the appearance of civil liberties lawyer Cricket Feldstein (a fast-talking Amy Poehler).

There are also some stretches of the movie that don’t quite work, and a lot of jokes that are weird but not necessarily all that funny.  More problematically, there were times when, even in a ridiculous movie like this, I wished the characters had been fleshed out a little bit more.  There wasn’t that much depth given to most of the new students in Dana’s class, and I didn’t really believe that they would ever willingly decide to participate in Dana’s play.  That’s a key transition that the film needs to make, both for the plot and for all the character story-lines, and the fact that I don’t think it worked hurt the film for me.

But in the end, a film called Hamlet 2 lives or dies on the ultimate performance of the titular play itself — and let me tell you, those moments are gold.  You’ll be… [continued]

Writer/director Guy Ritchie’s films Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch rank among my favorite movies.  Both are incredibly clever, unique movies characterized by hysterical rat-a-tat dialogue and complex, interweaving plots filled to the brim with bizarre, violent, charismatic characters (most of whom are rather shady in nature).  And yet, despite my love for those two movies, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a Guy Ritchie film.  Swept Away (2002), starring his then-wife Madonna, didn’t interest me, and the critical drubbing it received didn’t inspire me to rush out and see it.  I was interested in seeing Revolver (2005), but I missed in in theatres, and the negative reviews that that film also received have contributed to my always choosing other movies to rent when visiting the video store.  But I was very pleased to recently have a chance to watch RocknRolla (released last year, in 2008).

RocknRolla has an incredibly complex plot that I’m not even going to begin to try to explain.  I’ll just tell you that it follows the intersecting lives and capers of figures at a variety of levels in the London underworld, from minor thieves like One Two (Gerard Butler, from 300), Mumbles (Idris Elba from The Wire), and Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy, much more entertaining here than he was in Star Trek: Nemesis), boss Lenny (Tom Wilkinson, from Batman Begins, Michael Clayton, In the Bedroom, and a lot of other great films) and his loyal right-hand man Archie (played by Mark Strong, who I’d never believe, if not for imdb, is the same actor who played Jordanian intelligence official Hani Salaam in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies), rock star Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), music promoters Roman (Jeremy Piven) and Mickey (Ludacris), foreign mobster Uri (Karel Roden) and his accountant Stella (Thandie Newton) and many, many other characters.

As with Lock, Stock and Snatch, the fun of the movie comes from listening to the terrific, joke-a-minute dialogue, and watching the talented ensemble of actors bringing all of their wonderful characters, each of whom could have a movie all their own, to life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that RocknRolla hung together as a complete film as well as those other two movies did.  As much as I enjoyed the enormous ensemble, I felt at times that there were too many characters, with too much going on.  RocknRolla doesn’t really have a main character, and I think that is the crux of the problem.  The closest thing would be Gerard Butler as One Two, and Butler is really terrific as the charismatic but slightly dim criminal.  But his character drops out of the movie for long stretches of time, and has almost no role to play whatsoever in… [continued]

In 2006, documentary film-maker Nanette Burstein and her team followed several teenagers through the course of their Senior Year of High School in Warsaw, Indiana.  While a number of students applied to participate, the final film focuses on five kids, who seem to fit into typical Breakfast-Club style stereotypes.  (”I grew up watching John Hughes movies, and the inspiration I had for this movie was to find these fictional teen narratives in real life,” Burstein said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.)

There is The Jock: Colin Clemens, the star of Warsaw High’s basketball team who is hoping to receive a basketball scholarship and afraid that, without the money to pay for college, he’ll have to enter the Army if he doesn’t receive one.  There is The Princess: Megan Krizmanich, a pretty, popular girl who is at the head of the pack of the social life at Warsaw High.  There is The Geek: Jake Tusing, a nerd with bad acne and a bad haircut, who loves video-games and is desperately looking to get a girlfriend.  There is The Heartthrob: Mitch Reinholt, who is popular and good-looking; he’s friends with Megan and plays on the basketball team with Colin.  Finally there is The Rebel: Hannah Bailey, who dreams of being an artist and a film-maker, who plays in a band and openly despises life in Warsaw and hopes to move out to California after graduation.

What is most fascinating about American Teen (and what prompted a flurry of articles upon the film’s release last year), are the questions it raises about the degree to which the kids do or don’t perform for the cameras that they must know are recording them, and what that says about the lives of teenagers today in the world of facebook, myspace, youtube,  and reality television.  There are a number of times during the film when you can see clearly that the kids are wearing microphones.  And yet, they seem to behave as if they are entirely unaware that the cameras are observing them.  I have no doubt the kids were coached about not looking into the cameras, but there are moments in the film when we see the cameras capture very intimate moments (an almost-hookup, a breakup, etc.) as well as moments of  teenage cruelty (such as Megan and her friends planning and executing a vicious prank).  This of course raises the question of whether the kids altered their behavior for the cameras.  On the one hand, it seemed that they didn’t — that the cameras quickly became a ubiquitous part of their lives, and that they carried on behaving the way they ordinarily would.  As the New York Times observed (in the… [continued]

Bottom line on Terminator: Salvation — It’s not as good a Terminator movie as I would have hoped for, but don’t believe the reviews, it’s not nearly the catastrophe you’ve been lead to believe it is.

Ever since James Cameron’s original masterpiece The Terminator (made in 1984, can you believe it??), we’ve been teased by glimpses of the post-Judgment Day future war against the machines.  With Terminator: Salvation, we’re finally being given a movie that is set entirely (except for a short prologue) in this post-apocalyptic world.  

The year is 2018, and things are looking pretty grim for mankind.  Most surviving humans are just focused on their own survival, but several small, rag-tag groups of resistance fighters are attempting to fight back against the machines.  John Connor is amongst them, but while his mother’s messages to him have provided him with valuable guidance, this John Connor has not yet become the leader of the resistance (nor has he sent his buddy Kyle Reese back in time).  Reese, meanwhile, is not yet a member of the resistance — he’s just a tough teenager trying to survive.  While Connor and Reese get a lot of screen-time, surprisingly, neither one of them is really the main character of the film.  That would be death-row inmate Marcus Wright, who signs his body over to Cyberdyne systems in 2003 and then wakes up in 2018 in a Skynet lab.

The way I see it, the film has three major weaknesses:

1.  Clearly this is a film written with the intention of focusing on a new character (Marcus Wright).  But when Christian Bale signed on to play John Connor, his role was significantly expanded.  The result is a movie that is split rather unevenly between those two characters and their storylines.  The film aspires to be an epic war-movie, telling multiple interweaving stories… but instead winds up losing the audience’s focus by not giving us a clear character in whose story we can emotionally invest.  Similarly to the way I can watch J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie and see clearly the way the character of old Spock was shoe-horned into the movie (Imagine that movie’s plot without old Spock — it would be NO DIFFERENT.   Kirk gets ejected onto the ice planet, finds Scotty, and utilizes Scotty’s engineering expertise to get himself beamed back to the Enterprise), I can clearly see how this film was not originally intended to focus on John Connor.  That explains why, despite Connor being in a lot of action scenes, he doesn’t have any real story-line in the film.  This isn’t a movie about his rise to the leadership of the rebellion, or about him running away from or… [continued]

Hoo boy.

One of my first articles, when I started this blog, was about great franchises that have fallen on hard times.  I was writing about my once-beloved Alien and Predator series, but we can all now safely add the X-Men films to that list.  What in the world has happened to this series??  X-Men and X2 were so spectacular — but after X3 and now the rather verbosely titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine I am sad to report that the series is batting only two for four.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a Fantastic Four caliber catastrophe.  Some talented actors appear on-screen, there’s some exciting action, some familiar X-Men characters pop up (one in particular really surprised me), and we finally get to hear Wolverine say on-screen, “I’m the best there is at what I do.  But what I do best isn’t very nice.”  But the scant enjoyment I felt from those moments was short-lived.   X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a rentlessly dour and joyless affair, one that consistently reveals itself to be a truly B-Grade effort.  What do I mean by that?  Allow me to elaborate:

The film is filled with plot-holes, but more than that, it doesn’t hold together at all as any sort of coherent narrative.  I respect the filmmakers’ ambition in trying to capture a number of different periods in Wolverine’s life, from his birth in the late 1800′s, through his experiences in a variety of wars (captured really well, actually, in an exciting opening credits sequence), through his time with Silver Fox, his involvement in the Weapon X program, and beyond.  But none of the bits and pieces hang together.  Instead of merging together to form an expansive back-story, each jump in time left me with countless unanswered questions: Why would Logan, a Canadian, fight in so many of America’s wars?  Right from the first scene, he is established as a gentler soul than his mean brother Victor — so why would Logan hang around with Victor for so many years?  If Stryker and the team were so upset when Wolverine left them, how and why did the whole group disband soon after?  And why would Victor, of all people, be the one to remain in Stryker’s service?  I could go on.

The film makes a total hash of the X-Men comic continuity.  There was a lot of precedent for this, of course, as the previous three X-Men films also mixed and matched characters and story-lines from different periods of the comics with great abandon.  But there’s a souless “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to this film as it ties a barrage of random Marvel Comics characters (Gambit!  Deadpool!  The Blob!) into Wolverine’s origin — and… [continued]

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a sex-addict who works at Colonial Dunsboro, an 18th-century re-enactment village.  He’s also a con-man whose routine is to pretend he is choking in a restaurant and then befriend the person who rescues him, ultimately hitting that unsuspecting “hero” up for a handout.  Oh yes, and after reading the diaries of his dying mother, he begins to suspect that he might be a clone of Jesus Christ.  Or, at least, a half-clone.

What a marvelously bizarre movie!!

At this point I’ve become convinced that I will watch Sam Rockwell in anything.  I first noticed him in Galaxy Quest, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind has become one of my favorite movies.  He’s even great is smallish supporting roles, as he was in Frost/Nixon.  The energetic way in which Rockwell embodies Victor gives this film its life.  Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), the movie could very easily have become a dour, joyless affair.  But Rockwell’s Victor is just so entertaining to watch, even when he is being a total jackass, that he carries the viewer without any complaint through some of the movie’s rougher patches.  

The supporting cast is equally phenomenal.  Brad William Henke (currently wondering what lies in the shadow of the statue on Lost) is hysterical as Victor’s somewhat dim friend Denny.  Anjelica Houston’s performance here reminds me of the similarly mysterious and flawed mother figure that she played in The Darjeeling Limited the year before, but that’s not a criticism.  She’s especially compelling in the flashback scenes, where we see how her particular brand of craziness sent Victor down the road to becoming the screwed-up fellow he is when we meet him.  Gillian Jacobs breathes a lot of heart and soul into her small role as Beth/”Cherry Daquiri.”  She is also, I might add, stunningly beautiful.  Speaking of beautiful, I found myself completely smitten (as is Victor) by Kelly MacDonald (Gosford Park, No Country for Old Men) as Paige Marshall, who Victor meets at the private hospital where his mother is being treated.  I can really believe that she is the individual who can shake Victor out of the terrible rut that his life has become.  

Choke deals quite frankly with sex and a lot of sexual situations.  In some indie movies I find that frankness to be a bit uncomfortable, but here the subject matter is treated with just enough of a touch of humor that I went along quite eagerly for the ride.  There’s a lot of weirdness to be found in Choke, and Victor’s habit of imagining the people he’s interacting with naked is just one small part of this!  As with The Wackness (which I reviewed [continued]

I saw this terrific movie on DVD last month, during the same week that I saw the lovely new film Adventureland (read my full review here), and although the settings are extremely different, I was struck by the similarities between the two films.  Both are “period pieces” set a few years back, and both tell coming-of-age stories, set over the course of a particularly transformative summer.

The Wackness takes place in New York City during the summer of 1994.  Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) has just graduated high school and is spending the summer hanging around the city and making money selling pot.  When we first meet him he’s in the office of Dr. Jeffrey Squires (Ben Kingsley), who is Luke’s psychiatrist and also one of his best clients.  At a post-graduation party, Luke reconnects with Dr. Squires’ daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), one of his class-mates but someone with whom he has had little interaction (because, as Luke puts it later in the film, she is “mad out of [his] league”).  

The hip-hop music and lingo of 1994 are an enormous part of the film, something which writer/director Jonathan Levine has recreated with great care.  I can’t vouch for his accuracy, but the music and the unique, specific “street-talk” really give the film a vibrant pulse and a distinct feel.

Over the course of the summer, Lucas has to grow up in many ways — he is faced with the ups and downs of his first real relationship and his exposure to the failings and imperfections of the adults around him.  Dr. Squires goes through similar emotional turmoil.  He sees in Luke many of the opportunities that he feels he has missed in life, and he has to face up to the sad, empty shell that his marriage (to his wife Kristen, played quietly by Famke Janssen) has become.  That description of a troubled adult and a troubled youth learning from one another and changing for the better sounds terribly cliche (I’ve seen Good Will Hunting and a hundred similar movies, as I’m sure have you), but The Wackness manages to deftly steer clear of predictable developments and movie-happy “I’ve grown and learned a lesson” endings.  It is also surprisingly funny.

Credit goes not only to writer/director Levine but also to his terrific cast.  Josh Peck is quite compelling as Luke Shapiro.  He makes the role his own, bringing life to Luke and embodying him with specific quirks and characteristics that make him a pretty unique movie young-adult lead.  Sir Ben Kingsley, under a terrifically ridiculous mop of hair, is similarly magnificent as the bizarre Dr. Squires.  His friendship with Luke is the beating heart of the film, and… [continued]

It’s been a long road.  After walking disgustedly out of the opening weekend screening of the catastrophically terrible Star Trek: Nemesis back in December, 2002, I knew that Trek was at a low point.  It seemed uncertain what, if any, future the franchise had after the release of that bomb and the subsequent cancellation of the last Trek TV show, Enterprise.  Then, about 3 years ago, word came that a new Trek film was in the works.  Gradually news began to leak out, some very exciting, some rather worrying, and I soaked up every tidbit with great anticipation, some nervousness, and extremely high hopes that one day Star Trek could be great again.  A few hours ago, I watched the result of J.J. Abrams and his team’s efforts: the simply-titled Star Trek.

Abrams and his brain-trust — consisting of Damon Lindeloff (one of the top minds behind Lost) and screen-writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman — dared to do what no man has done before: to re-cast the iconic roles of the Original Series characters.  As everyone knows by now, instead of creating new characters and situations and moving the Star Trek universe forward beyond the adventures of Picard-Sisko-Janeway-etc., they decided to go back and tell an Original Series story, with new actors playing younger versions of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and all the other familiar characters.  This was an incredibly risky move.  While similiar “how it all began” prequels such as Batman Begins and Casino Royale worked well, audiences had already become accustomed to seeing lots of different actors take on the roles of Batman and James Bond.  But could someone other than William Shatner play Kirk?  Could someone other than Leonard Nimoy play Spock?

Although sadly this film fails in some powerfully annoying ways (more on that in a few moments), I am happy to report that, in this respect — that is, in regards to the viability of rebooting and recasting Star Trek — the film succeeds magnificently.  Bravo to the choice of talented actors selected to be the new command team of the Enterprise — there is not a weak link in the bunch.  None of the actors resorts to mimicry, and yet they all, somehow, truly manage to embody their characters!

Let’s start with Chris Pine as James Tiberius Kirk.  He’s got the swagger, he’s got the arrogance, and yet he’s able to also convey a tremendous likability.  You can see that this is a man that others will follow.  The film doesn’t shy away from the “lady-killer” aspects of Kirk’s persona, but Pine never crosses the line into camp or, on the other hand, into boorishness.  Rather, there’s terrific fun to had watching, for example,… [continued]

In March, 1977, filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown) was arrested and charged with raping a 13 year-old girl at the home of his friend, Jack Nicholson (who was out of town at the time).  Polanski eventually agreed to a plea bargain and pled guilty to one felony count of illegal sex with a 13 yea-old girl.  In early 1978, before a sentence could be imposed, Polanski fled the country, never to return.

The above three sentences about sums up what I knew about this famous case.  (In all honesty, I probably didn’t even know quite that much before watching this film!)  What is most fascinating about the recent documentary by Marina Zenovich, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, is that the issue the film focuses on isn’t the act that Polanski committed, but rather on what happened afterwards.  

What actually occurred at Jack Nicholson’s house isn’t the subject of much debate, apparently.  There is a little bit of a “he said, she said” back-and-forth at the start of the film, as Zenovich compares and contrasts Polanski’s version of the story with that of the girl (Samantha Geimer).  There are a few important details on which they differ.  But Polanski does not deny having sex with the girl, nor does she seem to suggest that he forced himself on her.  The film does not spend a lot of time trying to defend Mr. Polanski’s actions, and rightly so.  Whether the sex was consentual or not, Polanski’s actions in sleeping with a 13 year-old girl were abhorrent.  

No, the focus of the film is on the even more shocking events that transpired after Polanski was arrested.  Ms. Zenovich lays out, in great detail, the ways in which the escalating chaos of the media circus and the publicity-hungry judge assigned to the case waylaid any attempt at justice.  Through a lively mix of fascinating archival footage from a whole host of sources and a wonderful array of insightful new interviews that Ms. Zenovich conducted with almost every single key figure in the case, including Samantha Geimer herself, viewers are walked through the stunningly tortured legal process as the case unfolded.  

The most fascinating elements of the film are the new interviews with Polanski’s lawyer, Douglas Dalton, and the Assistant D.A. who lead the case for the prosecution, Roger Gunson.  Both men come across as remarkably intelligent, honest men, and both are very candid in their interviews.  One might expect a film like this to demonize one side or the other, falling back on easy caricatures such as a depiction of Polanski the sadist defended by his showboating lawyer… or the stiff-laced DA blinded by self-righteousness.  But Zenovich resists any such… [continued]

Set in 1987, Adventureland takes place over the course of one summer in the life of James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), just out of college, whose dreams of traveling Europe with his friends have been dashed by his family’s financial problems.  Seeking a summer job instead, Jesse quickly discovers that his degree in literature doesn’t really qualify him for any sort of employment back home in Pittsburgh.  Thus, he winds up working at Adventureland, a somewhat tired old local amusement park.

Jesse befriends Joel (Martin Starr, who, as with most of the talented alumni of Freaks and Geeks, I would happily watch in anything), an intellectual loner, and quickly becomes smitten with the mysterious Em (the terrific, beguiling Kristen Stewart).  The self-contained universe of Adventureland is fleshed out by a variety of other interesting, quirky characters: park owners Bobby (Bill Hader) and Paulette (Kristen Wiig), handsome park mechanic Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), Jesse’s not-as-funny-as-he-thinks-he-is childhood friend Frigo (Matt Bush), the flirty Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), and many others.

Taking place in the eighties, Adventureland is a “period piece,” but it never beats you over the head with obvious references.  Rather, the movie uses the setting to lend the story a sweetly nostalgic feel.  I love the care with which the movie explores the sub-culture of the summer staff experience at Adventureland, with all of its unique peculiarities.  I’ve never worked at an amusement park, but I certainly have spent many summers working at a summer camp.  And while the specifics of my summer camp jobs didn’t resemble in any way the specifics of working at Adventureland, I did really connect with the way the film captured the way in which these summer jobs can be transformative experiences for young people, and the way a short summer can be an epic of highs and lows and experiences of all kinds.  I have warm feelings for my summer camp experiences, and the film creates a similarly warm glow around Jesse’s experiences, even the painful ones.

Credit writer/director Greg Mottola (who also directed Superbad) with doing a terrific job in setting that tone.  The film is funny, but I wouldn’t call it a comedy.  However, the shifts from humor to drama never feel out-of-place.  Rather the film feels like a true-to-life picture of the ups and downs of a kid’s summer.  I never seem to get tired of a good coming-of-age story, and this is definitely a winner in that category.

The film only makes one teensy tiny misstep, in my mind.  I don’t want to spoil anything about the ending, but suffice it to say there’s a dramatic moment between two characters in the rain that is the only moment in the film… [continued]

About two-thirds of the way through Observe and Report, the new film written and directed by Jody Hill (who also wrote & directed the criminally under-seen The Foot-Fist Way), one character observes to another: “I thought this would be funny, but it’s just kinda sad.”  A more perfect summation of this film, I could not imagine.

Seth Rogen stars as Mall-Cop (excuse me, Director of Mall Security) Ronnie Barnhardt, who sees himself as top dog in the kingdom that is his mall.  Ronnie is completely smitten by Brandi (Anna Farris), who works in the cosmetics department of one of the mall’s department stores.  Brandi, of course, wants nothing to do with him.  But when a pervert prowling the mall’s parking lot exposes himself to Brandi, Ronnie sees his moment to be a hero by solving the case and catching the pervert.  The two other major players in the story are Ray Liotta as the police detective assigned to the case (of whom Ronnie is immediately suspicious and dismissive), and Ronnie’s “right-hand man” Dennis (played magnificently by the almost totally unrecognizable Michael Pena).

I knew going in that this wasn’t going to be a laugh-a-minute comedy like Seth Rogen’s other recent films (The Forty-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, etc.).  Nevertheless, I was caught somewhat off guard by just how sad this story is.  Not sad in terms of being a get-out-your-handkerchief type of film.  This isn’t The Pianist or anything like that.  But rather than being laugh-inducing, I found watching that most of the exploits of Ronnie Barnhardt were just rather pathetic and sad.  If that’s what the film-makers were going for (and it very well might be) then bravo, mission accomplished.  But I can’t say that I got an enormous amount of enjoyment out of watching the movie.

Even the moments when I really laughed during the film weren’t moments of clever dialogue or humorous situations, but more from Borat-style “I can’t believe I’m watching this” shocks, such as Ronnie and Dennis’ brutal crack-down on the group of kids skateboarding in the mall’s parking-lot, or Ronnie’s chase after the pervert in the film’s climax.  Again, this isn’t necessarily a negative.  It just wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

This is a film that, as I think about it now, I RESPECT more as a well-made film, and one that is very brave for going to some extraordinarily dark places, as opposed to a film that I really LIKED.  If I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly, it’s mostly because some of those dark places that the film visits aren’t so much fun to watch!  On the other hand, Observe and Report is certainly a unique film, not at all a Hollywood… [continued]

In I Love You, Man, Paul Rudd plays Peter Klaven, an LA real estate agent who discovers, after getting engaged to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones), that he doesn’t really have any male friends he could ask to be his groomsmen.  With some help from Zooey and his brother Robbie (SNL‘s Andy Samberg), Peter embarks on a series on “man-dates” to try to find some guy friends.  After a bizarre but amusing encounter at one of his open houses, Peter strikes up a friendship with Sydney Fife (Jason Segal).  Not suprisingly, this new friendship quickly throws much of the rest of Peter’s life into disarray.

The success (and high quality — the two don’t always go hand-in-hand, you know!) of Judd Apatow’s films (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) have really sparked a wave of truly excellent comedies in a similar style.  But while these could have all wound up being pale imitations of Apatow’s films, it has been quite remarkable to see actors from his ensembles continue to work together and collaborate with other talented actors, writers, and directors to produce additional high quality films.  I Love You, Man is certainly a prime example of this.

Directed by John Hamburg (who directed several episodes of Apatow’s brilliant TV series Undeclared, as well as the film Along Came Polly, which I must admit to having had no interest in seeing) and written by Hamburg and Larry Levin (who wrote the classic Keith Hernandez episode of Seinfeld, “The Boyfriend”), I Love You, Man feels very similar in tone to me to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was released last year at almost exactly this time, and which also starred Paul Rudd and Jason Segal.  (Sarah Marshall was produced by Judd Apatow, although I Love You, Man was not.)  Both films have a real sweetness to them, while also being uproariously funny.  That blend of sweetness with fierce comedy is, to me, a big part of what I referred to a moment ago as the “Apatow style.”  Another mark of that style is a loose, almost improvisational feel to a lot of the comedy and the dialogue (Paul Rudd’s lengthy, intensely hilarious riff on the phrase “slapping the bass” in I Love You, Man is a prime example of what I’m talking about).

Of course, a big part of the “Apatow style” has also been the growing ensemble of brilliant actors who have filled out his films.  Rudd and Segal have both appeared in many previous Apatow works (Segal was in Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, Rudd was in The 40 Year Old Virgin, and both appeared in Knocked Up), but what I’m talking about isn’t just the recurrence of a lot… [continued]

I really enjoyed his two Hellboy films, but it was the beautiful, wonderful Pan’s Labyrinth that made me a fan of Guillermo del Toro for life.

Since I think so highly of his recent films, I decided it was high time that I sought out some of his older works.  Which lead me to The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro’s Spanish-language film from 2001.

As was Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone is set during the Spanish Civil War.  As the movie opens, a twelve-year-old orphan named Carlos is left at an orphanage in the middle of nowhere.  As Carlos struggles to settle in to his new home and find his place amongst the boys there (some of whom are friendly, and some of whom are cruel) and the stern adults (all of whom have their own stories and their own problems), he discovers what he believes to be “the one who sighs,” the ghost of a missing boy named Santi.  As the Spanish Civil War lurches towards its conclusion, the plight of everyone at the orphanage becomes more dire, and the terrible secrets of what happened to Santi at last come to light.

Del Toro is a master at combining emotional, character-driven stories with a touch of the fantastic.  Pan’s Labyrinth might be his masterpiece in this area (so far), but The Devil’s Backbone gives that film quite a run for its money.  Right from it’s opening moments it is gripping and genuinely creepy.  This isn’t a film that is all about special effects or big “money shots” of monsters and creatures.  No, it’s a story about desperate people in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.  The supernatural element is almost secondary — which, to me, is what makes that supernatural element so effective when it enters the story.

As I watched this film it became clear to me that del Toro has quite a way with child actors.  Just as Ivana Baquero was so terrific as Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, young Fernando Tielve is quite compelling here as Carlos.  So much of the film’s story rests on his shoulders, and he is just terrific. And he’s not alone.  There’s a large group of boys of varying ages at the orphanage, all of whom are very engaging.  The kids all feel real, and each boy has a distinct character and personality.  This is quite a feat.

I am not a fan of horror films, generally.  Scary, violent movies are a dime a dozen these days at one’s local cineplex.  But don’t dismiss The Devil’s Backbone because of all those other terrible films.  This is a terrific, engaging, unique story, and one that I can’t wait to watch again.

In the mean-time, I think I… [continued]

It’s been a busy month here, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking out a bunch of DVDs recently, new and old:

The Conversation — Released in 1974, this masterpiece was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II.  Gene Hackman stars as twitchy, secretive surveillance specialist Harry Caul, whose life is up-ended by a seemingly-innocuous conversation that he is hired to record.  Confidently directed by Coppola at the height of his abilities, the film is a perfect study of a slow burn as we watch Hackman’s character gradually fall to pieces.  This is Hackman’s film, without question, but it’s also fun to see the great John Cazale (Fredo in The Godfather) and an incredibly young Harrison Ford in supporting roles.  The film is also notable for the contributions of master editor Walter Murch (American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now) who created an incredible sound-scape that plays with sound and dialogue in some incredibly inventive ways.  The bravura opening sequence, in which Caul and his team records the titular conversation, is staggering — like Caul, we attempt to follow the couple and their conversation, but keep getting distracted by people talking, music playing, and a myriad of other background noises, with the conversation itself flittering in and out of our perception.  It’s really quite astonishing.  Everybody loves The Godfather these days, but I feel that The Conversation is a film that has fallen out of the popular consciousness.  Do yourself a favor and help remedy that by checking out this brilliant film!

Band of Brothers — Speaking of masterpieces, there is this 2001 HBO miniseries executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.  Adapted from the book by Stephen Ambrose, the series follows the men of Easy Company (of the US Army 101st Airborne Division) from their training in 1942 through to the end of the second world war.  I have watched this series through four times now since it was released, and each time I watch it I am just as over-come by the power of the story of these extraordinary heroes.  The production quality of this mini-series is unbelievable — each episode is really its own mini-movie.  The vistas are stunningly beautiful, and the action is gut-wrenchingly intense.  There are few movies. let alone TV shows, that are able to stage combat sequences with as much ferocity.  Over the ten episodes we follow and grow to love an enormous ensemble of characters: Damian Lewis as Richard Winters, Ron Livingston as Lewis Nixon, Donnie Wahlberg as Carwood Lipton, Scott Grimes as Donald Malarkey, Michael Cudlitz as “Bull” Randleman, James Madio as Frank Perconte, Neal McDonough as “Buck” Compton, Frank John Hughes as “Wild Bill”… [continued]

It’s a bit hard to fathom that I live in a world in which there actually exists a film version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s magnificent epic Watchmen.  

Long considered completely unadaptable, Watchmen (originally published as a 12-issue limited-series by DC Comics back in 1985-86, and re-printed countless times in the subsequent two decades in collected “graphic novel” form) is a staggeringly intricate, layered work that is at once a ripping super-hero yarn and, at the same time, a complete deconstruction of the entire idea of the super-hero adventure comic.  

What is fascinating is that the film version of Watchmen arrives at a unique time.  Over the past almost-decade (since the release of Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000), we have seen a flood of super-hero movies (a great many of them dreck, and a great many of them of pretty high quality).  This past summer alone saw the release of The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Hellboy II, among others — three very different films, yet all examples of super-hero movies that were quite extraordinarily well executed.  We’re at a point now when the general public has become very familiar with a lot of the tropes of the super-hero movie genre — and so are perfectly primed t0 see those familiar characters and themes and story structures completely up-ended by the movie of Watchmen, the same way that the comic book audience had all of their familiar super-hero comic ideas up-ended by the original Watchmen comic.  This movie, I think, is being released at just the right time.

And it is magnificent.

It’s hard for me to imagine what someone who has never read Watchmen would think of this film, because I have read the comic so many times that it is impossible to imagine not knowing (and revering) the story beat-by-beat.  But it seems to me that director Zack Snyder has done an extraordinary job of maintaining a great deal of the depth and complexity of the comic, while also making it very accessible to a first-timer.  That is no easy feat.  

Those of you who, like me, worship the source material, can rest easy.  Snyder’s film is a breathtakingly faithful adaptation of the comic.  The structure and story-line of the comic is replicated in great detail; almost all of the dialogue and narration has been lifted right out of the comic; and most importantly, the tone and atmosphere of the world that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created has been brought to life in a powerfully real, visceral way.   

To begin with, the film is a marvel of casting.  Thinking about Watchmen in the months leading up to the release, there were a lot of elements… [continued]

… [continued]