skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Review
Even with all its variations through the 20th century – gloomy noirs, renegade cops, serial killers – the American crime film goes back to one source. With the birth of sound on film, the gangster grew from a hazy caricature of silent melodrama into an icon that would help to define cinema's golden age. Even if the chatter of Cagney and the like was destined for parody, the rattle of a tommy gun became one of the first trademarks of sound cinema, notably used in “Scarface's” machine-gun fire tearing through pages of a calendar. Even today, no image quite captures triumphant rebellion like gangsters perched on a running board, firing back at the coppers chasing them.
To look fondly on the 1930s gangster film would produce pastiche, fine for its own sake. Yet in “Public Enemies” Michael Mann, who's proven himself over and over again to be a master commentator on crime genres, at once recalls the early sound era, the revisionary gangsters of the late-60's/early 70s, and the historical source material to produce a transcendent vision of American cinema. It's almost dreamlike to see this rich cross-pollination revealed through the crisp, controlled eye of Michael Mann. He may be the only director who never forgets the world surrounding the sensational crime.
His narrative is technically a piece of history, but one so submerged in legend that it is moreso folklore. More people learned of John Dillinger's robberies from word of mouth than the headlines. Hence, his rise and fall perfectly suits a broad statement like Mann's, for it maps a path much like the classic gangster's (here, Depp as the immoral hero), while not forgetting the G-Men (enter the ever serious Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis), while eying the political machinations that dealt with organized crime (Billy Crudup in a flattering portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover).
Casting Deep as Dillinger is almost a no-brainer, and not for his near endless range alone. Consider the actor's introduction in Robert Rodriguez's b-grade jalapeno popper, “Once Upon a Time In Mexico.” Rodriguez intended to channel Leone for the final entry of his Mariachi series, while the series itself has proved forgettable save his micro-budget miracle of an opener. In “Mexico” Depp plays an FBI agent who manipulates the Mexican underworld to America's benefit. The story hardly has room for such a character to live out such a purpose – yet when Depp delivers his character's motivation as if he were equal parts politician and confidence man, we buy right in to Rodriguez's hokum, thanks to wise casting.
In “Enemies,” Depp depicts such conviction, as he sneaks into a prison to break out his gang, then leads bank jobs in little over a minute's time. He meets cute with coat checker Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) with just as much purpose, even if initially encountering her resistance in a nice turn on what could have been a routine moll. Mann himself admitted that the romance between she and Dillinger attracted him to this story, which itself had a long, uneasy path to the big screen. The filmmaker makes the most of the subplot, though it can hold only so much space in this epic scope. She serves as more of a motivation for Dillinger, once they are separated, than as a character driving the narrative. When authorities on the hunt apprehend and, quite shockingly, torture her, it appears that Mann eyes current U.S. policies beyond our crime tradition.
Depp gets the more human role, while Bale's Purvis operates like a machine – he's introduced when downing an almost free-and-clear Pretty Boy Floyd with a marksman's ease. I'd guess that Bale lives for such roles, ones that reflect the full-blooded commitment that he saturates into his work. The role is undoubtedly one-note, the only variations being occasional frustration and bemusement at the evidence of Billie's torture by one of his own. But complexity isn't on order: he is, after all, the man who will take down a legend outside Chicago's Biograph theater.
And what a legend it is, one that Mann and his cowriters Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman are worthy of channeling. When the feds depart on a lead, Dillinger walks right into the unbelievably named “Dillinger Squad” headquarters and, by viewing photos, headlines, and various evidence, surveys his own legacy. Much more than a narrative recap as Act 3 nears, this moment extends out to the folkloric tradition of depression-era heroes on the wrong side of the law, while channelling the grandeur of mythical storytelling in any form – yet more threads that Mann weaves into his multitudinous masterwork. This is the purest of American narratives, and this, indeed, is one of our finest storytellers.
Review
The animated comedy Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the eighth movie Hollywood has released this year in 3-D. By the end of 2009, there will have been 13 films for which audiences will have worn special polarized glasses, compared with just one in 2003 — and none at all in the decade before that.
The 3-D revolution is really and truly with us, in other words — so without pretending we're going into too much depth, let's have a look at three dimensions of the latest Ice Age iteration that really matter:
Dimension One: Characters. Start with Scrat, that single-minded saber-toothed squirrel, still sniffing and snuffling in search of his beloved acorn.
As always, he finds it, and as always, something keeps him from enjoying it — in this case a squirrel-fatale who's every bit as acorn-crazed as he is. At first they have a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote-type relationship, but her hold over him becomes progressively more domestic until he's a henpecked hubby, rearranging the furniture in their love nest while gazing longingly at the acorn from afar.
Also back for another round: woolly mammoths Manny and Ellie (voiced by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah), who have a mini-mammoth on the way. That happy expectation means their hapless little chosen family of ice-age misfits — Diego (Denis Leary), a saber-toothed tiger who's learned not to eat his buddies, and Sid (John Leguizamo), a sloth whose mental ice tray is a couple of cubes short — are feeling left out.
Which brings us to Dimension Two: Plot. When Sid falls through a hole in the ice into a warmer, center-of-the-Earth-style world, he finds three enormous eggs and decides to use them to start a family of his own. Alas, their biological parent — a T. rex — isn't pleased, and she spirits the hatchlings and Sid down to her world, whereupon adventures ensue.
Some of those scrapes involve a swashbuckling weasel, who I'm afraid I left out in Dimension One. Which is no small oversight, because he's voiced by Simon Pegg as a cross between Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp at his Jack Sparrow-est. As the lone resident mammal in the otherwise reptilian world under the ice — he apparently fell through long ago and got acclimated — he more or less takes over the second half of the picture.
And so we arrive at Dimension Three: How does the Ice Age message — basically, "Can't we all just work past our differences and get along?" — translate to 3-D?
Well, it certainly plays out with more visual depth, though the animators don't insist on shoving things into your lap every three seconds.
Don't get me wrong: When pterodactyls fly over your shoulder, it's plenty persuasive, but the effect is becoming natural enough that I actually forgot for much of the picture that I was wearing glasses. Dimensions One and Two — characters and plot — are primary here, as they should be, technical wizardry notwithstanding.
In fact, unlike say, Monsters Vs. Aliens, which would have been nothing at all without its special-effects spectacle, this is a sweet little comedy, both family-friendly and centered on a nontraditional family, and so suitable for pretty much everyone.
Everyone, that is, who can get past the not-really-minor, probably inescapable fact that come next fall, elementary-school teachers everywhere will face classes full of kids absolutely convinced that an ice age marked the dawn of the dinosaurs.
They'll have seen it at the movies, after all — and in lifelike 3-D, too.
Review
"I Hate Valentine's Day" reps a return to scrappy, low-budget filmmaking for Nia Vardalos, who scored one of the most profitable indies of all time with her screenwriting debut, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," only to struggle with successive follow-ups. However, the off-kilter warmth of that film is nowhere to be found in this one, a plodding mediocrity with an almost mercenary adherence to formula. Reteaming of Vardalos with her "Wedding" co-star John Corbett should up the interest level in advance of pic's July 3 release, though it's doubtful that word of mouth will carry it very far.
First seen turning the world on with her smile, scripter and first-time director Vardalos stars as Genevieve, a flower shop owner who is the darling of her impossibly cuddly Brooklyn neighborhood. Working with her pair of prancing gay assistants (Stephen Guarino and Amir Arison, both playing stereotypes imported from the early '90s), she cheerfully opens up her store for the Valentine's Day rush, blessed with a preternatural gift for advising clueless men on the best ways to woo their sweethearts (among her suggestions: chocolates, flowers).
Yet despite all her wisdom, Genevieve is afflicted with a self-inflicted dating handicap: Since she loves romance and hates relationships, she refuses to go on more than five dates with any one particular man, thus summarily cutting off all affairs before the giddiness of early infatuation can begin to decline. No one in Genevieve's huge circle of colorful friends remarks on the utter preposterousness of this policy and, in fact, they all flock to her for advice on their own love lives.
Of course, Genevieve's system comes immediately under fire when studly charmer Greg (Corbett) strolls into the shop. A former lawyer who has just quit the firm and bought a neighboring restaurant space in order to start up a tapas bar, Greg is dating a flight attendant yet unsure if the relationship is going anywhere (all the preceding backstory is spilled in the course of ordering a few roses). Things quickly go sour with the flight attendant, and Greg confides in Genevieve during the first of their five circumscribed dates, immediately hitting it off. Anyone who can't see where this is going should have their driving privileges immediately revoked.
From here, "I Hate Valentine's Day" hits all the requisite beats of the romantic-comedy liturgy with precision, but does so perfunctorily, as though filling out a quota. The central premise is unbelievable without being interesting or audacious, and its late attempts to expand the emotional palette palate just simply don't come off.
Toplining her second movie of the season, after the recent "My Life in Ruins," Vardalos is a decent comedic actress, but she clearly lacks the experience to direct herself on camera: For much of the film she wears a strained beauty-queen smile, delivering her lines like a kindergarten teacher explaining the metric system. Yet the biggest problem with her perf seems to revolve around a misunderstanding of her appeal. In "Wedding," she radiated an awkward Everywoman vulnerability; here, she is effortlessly successful, smart, glamorous, beloved by friends who hang on her every word and able to pick and choose from handsome men she cruelly dismisses in accordance with her bizarre rules. Why the audience should sympathize with her plight is not a question that seems to have been raised.
Save for a few forced laughs at the expense of a heavily accented Indian man, the film is at least bereft of any ethnic caricature. Supporting characters run the gamut from Greg's law-school buddy Cal (Gary Wilmes), who is so loathsome and irritating that he ceases to be recognizably human, to Genevieve's adorably pathetic friend Tammy (the wonderful Zoe Kazan), who confuses courtship with stalking and who seems to have been beamed in from a smarter, cuter film.
Review
If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of "My Sister's Keeper" have done. The audience manipulation -- if one wants to call it that -- comes from your understanding of these people and how this particular family operates in an atmosphere of love and mutual concern. The tragedy that forces its way into their midst is fought with tenacity, and the conflicts within the family are portrayed in such a manner that no one is a bad guy.
A film about a child with leukemia understandably has a small theatrical audience. Indeed, Jodi Picoult's novel, on which Jeremy Leven and director Nick Cassavetes' screenplay is based, might seem more at home on television, where illness, doctors and hospitals somehow feel less alarming. But "My Sister's Keeper" does benefit from a sagacious big-screen treatment: It allows for nuances and takes time to focus this story of an illness on all the people it affects.
The movie begins with a bit of misdirection when 11-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) sues her parents. It looks like you're headed into a fascinating legal drama dealing with a thorny ethical issue.
Anna has always known she is a "donor child." When her parents, Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), discover their first daughter, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), has leukemia, they choose to conceive another child through genetic engineering who would be a perfect genetic match with Kate. Thus, Anna can donate blood or whatever else is necessary to keep her elder sister alive.
The two girls love each other dearly, so Anna never complains. Then, 11 years into this routine, Kate's kidneys are failing and she'll need one of Anna's. Anna finally says no. She hires a big-shot lawyer (Alec Baldwin), whose face adorns billboards and buses all over Los Angeles, and goes to court seeking her "medical emancipation." But her mom, who gave up a law practice to care for her ailing daughter, will make a ferocious opponent.
The movie isn't about a court battle. The film moves back and forth in time to show how decisions were made and how this illness impacts everyone, including older brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson), who at times feels overlooked because of his sisters' relay team in body parts. The movie reflects back on the joys and sorrows of a family and how love can be just as strong whether the answer is yes ... or no.
The film takes time giving you the background on everyone, and that includes the judge (Joan Cusack) who will decide the issue and a fellow cancer patient (Thomas Dekker) who becomes Kate's love interest.
OK, maybe everything is a little too neat, too perfect. If you're going to be in a hospital, you would want David Thornton's Dr. Chance for your doctor. He's compassionate, honest, smart and -- this element veering into science fiction -- always available for consultation.
You would want your mom to be running over everyone else's feelings in fighting for your life. You'd want a dad who continues to do his job -- as a fireman, no less! -- even though the illness marginalizes him within his own family. You'd want a brother and sister this loving, but would that ever happen?
The ugliness of the illness also is not depicted in detail. Even the vomiting is mostly offscreen. And the ending is dragged out unnecessarily. It is the one occasion where you might legitimately complain about manipulation.
Nevertheless, the actors work with a beguiling earnestness. Diaz goes without any discernible makeup and even shaves her head at one point (so her daughter won't feel "ugly" following chemotherapy.) All the work pays off: This family feels like a family and not an ensemble thrown together in the casting process. When they gather around Kate's hospital bed, the whole things seems very real. Thus, the tears.
Review
Near the beginning of Colette’s novel Chéri, she gives her young lover a necklace with 49 pearls. We can imagine there is one pearl for every year of her age. Her lover is 24 years younger than she. Therefore, 25. Six years pass. In a way, the movie "Chéri" is about how 25 and 49 are not the same as 31 and 55. Colette tells us their tragedy is they were destined to be the only perfect love in each other’s lives, yet were not born on the same day.
The success of Stephen Frears’ film "Chéri" begins with its casting. Michelle Pfeiffer, as Lea de Lonval, is still a great beauty, but nearing that age when a woman starts counting her pearls. Rupert Friend, as her lover Chéri, is 27 and looks younger — too young to play James Bond, although he was considered. They are both accomplished actors, which is important, because "Chéri" tells a story of nuance and insinuation, concealed feelings and hidden fears.
Lea is a courtesan, currently without court. She has a lot of money and lives luxuriously. Chéri is the son of a courtesan, Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates). She and Lea have been friends for years; courtesans may be rich and famous, but they cannot really talk freely with women not like themselves. Lea was constantly in the life of her friend’s son, named Fred but called Chéri ("darling") by one and all. One day, Madame Peloux comes to her and asks her to take in the boy. She does not quite say (as Lee Marvin tells a whore in "Paint Your Wagon") "I give you the boy. Give me back the man," but she might as well have.
Chéri is far from a virgin, but he needs some reining in. It turns out he accepts Lea’s saddle quite willingly. What begins as lovemaking quickly becomes love, and they float in a perfumed world of opulent comfort, Lea paying all the bills. The two things a courtesan cannot ever do are really fall in love and reveal what she is really thinking. Lea fails at the first.
You need not be told what happens in the story, or how thoughtless and cruel Chéri can be when it suits him. Be content to know that Lea knows sooner and Chéri later that what they had was invaluable and irreplaceable. Chéri became Colette’s most popular book because of its air of describing familiar lives with detached regret, and that is the tone Frears goes for: This is not a tearjerker, but a record of what can happen when people toy with their hearts.
How well I remember that day in 1983 when I walked across Blackfriar’s Bridge in London and came upon an obscure little used book shop and inside discovered a set of the works of Colette, small volumes, bound in matching maroon leatherette, with cloth bookmarks. I have been in awe of her writing ever since. When Donald Richie, the great authority on Japanese cinema, was moving to a smaller flat in Tokyo and had to perform triage on his library, he gave away Shakespeare, because he felt he had internalized him, but could not bring himself to give away Colette.
Colette, who was 81 when she died in 1954, is probably best known to you as the author of Gigi. After leaving an unfaithful first husband, Colette, already a successful author, supported herself as a music hall performer, knew many courtesans in the era of La Belle Epoque, had affairs with women, shocked tout le monde with the first onstage kiss between two women, married the editor of Le Matin and was divorced at 51 after she had an affair with his 20-year-old stepson. So Chéri is not entirely a work of the imagination.
Colette’s many books are considered difficult to film because much of what happens is based on emotions rather than events. This is a challenge Frears and his screenwriter, the British playwright Christopher Hampton, have accepted. The film is about how to behave when you live at a distance from your real feelings. It is fascinating to observe how Pfeiffer controls her face and voice during times of painful hurt. It is bad to feel pain, worse to reveal it; a courtesan has her pride.
The performances seem effective to me, including Bates as Charlotte, who like many an older prostitute plays a parody of her profession. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. The cinematography by Darius Khondji and costumes by Consolata Boyle are meticulous in evoking decadence. The most emotional moments at the end occur off-screen and are related by the narrator (Frears himself). That is as it should be. Some things don’t happen to people. They happen about them.
Review
The Islamic practice of stoning women and the Christian practice of burning them as witches are both born not from religious reasons but of a male desire to subjugate women and define them in terms of sexuality. Is this in dispute? Are there any theologians who support such actions? Of all the most severe punishments of both religions, this is the one most skewed against women, and the one most convenient for men.
To be sure, no witches have been burned at the stake in many long years, and few ever were. But women are still stoned to death in some Islamic countries, including Iran, where “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is set. The practice survives in backward rural areas, and the law turns a blind eye. It is rare, and Iran denies it, but the French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s best-selling The Stoning of Soraya M. (1994) appears to be quite authentic. A woman really was stoned to death on trumped-up adultery charges, brought for the convenience of her husband, who desired to marry a young girl.
Cyrus Nowrasteh’s “The Stoning of Soraya M.” does not dramatize this story in a subtle way. You might argue that the stoning of a woman to death is not a subtle subject. But it would be helpful to have it told in a way that shows how almost the entire population of a village allows it to happen, even though most of them know of the woman’s innocence and her husband’s vile motives. How does a lynch mob form? Instead, we’re given a village populated primarily by overacted villains and moral cowards.
Against them is one strong voice: the widow Zahra, Soraya’s aunt. She’s played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, the Oscar nominee from “House of Sand and Fog” (2003). She knows all the players and all the motives and publicly calls them on it, to no avail. She’s a “crazy woman,” says the husband, Ali (Navid Negahban). The phrase crazy woman can fall easily from the tongue, and it’s worth remembering that in Victorian England a wife could be locked in an asylum for life on only her husband’s signature (see the great novel The Quincunx).
Ali the husband is an immoral monster. His intended child bride has not been asked if she wants to marry him; the marriage has been arranged. The village mullah goes along because Ali threatens to blackmail him about an old prison sentence. The mayor knows it is wrong and doubts Allah desires it but lacks the courage to do much more than mutter.
The stoning sequence itself is one of the most unbearable experiences I have had at the movies. I learn it lasts nearly 20 minutes. Soraya (Mozhan Marno) is buried in a hole up to the waist. Village boys collect stones of a good throwing weight in a wheelbarrow. We see blow after blow, as blood pours from her face and body. She accepts this as her fate, as indeed it is. She did nothing that was not innocent and kind.
The stoning took place in 1986, after the Islamic Revolution. Fundamentalists were in power then and enforced their strictures. The measures they introduced are being challenged today in the streets of Iran, and similar extremism is the practice in our dear friend Saudi Arabia. Those with objections fear crushing reprisal. The enforcers have power, position and wealth to gain and dare their enemies to go against what they say is God’s will.
The message is that if a religion requires practices that seem evil to its members, they should resign from that religion. If it condones a death penalty that is visited unequally on members of a specific gender, race or class, it is immoral. There cannot be a reward for following it blindly, because only a thoughtful choice has meaning. At heaven’s gate you cannot say, “I always followed the herd.”
“The Stoning of Soraya M.” has such a powerful stoning sequence that I recommend it if only for its brutal ideological message. That the pitiful death of Soraya is followed by a false Hollywood upbeat ending involving tape recordings and silliness about a car that won’t start is simply shameful. Nowrasteh, born in Colorado, attended the USC Film School. Is that what they teach there? When you are telling the story of a woman being stoned to death, you may not be able to use everything you learned in class.
Review
Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq—documentary or fiction—that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines of a war fought not in jungles but in cities, where bombs rise up from the ground instead of raining down from the sky, every narrow alley portends an ambush, and every onlooker is a potential insurgent. It's an experiential war movie—one that calls to mind the title of the 1950s docudrama series You Are There—but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier's psyche, a diagram of what motivates the volunteers in a volunteer army.
The movie begins with a typically bracing set piece in which the soldiers of Bravo Company's Explosive Ordnance Disposal team come upon an IED planted in the center of a busy Baghdad marketplace. When their remote-controlled bomb-detonating robot hits a snag, the team's affable leader (Guy Pearce) dons a thick Kevlar suit and attempts to set the charge manually. He does not return. His replacement, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is a career soldier of an entirely different breed, one who prefers to handle bombs up close and personally instead of by remote control, and whose Kevlar suit is part of his daily wardrobe—not just for special occasions. At first glance, Sgt. James seems like the closest thing to a stock character—the gonzo alpha male living out his childhood cowboy fantasies—in a picture markedly devoid of small-town rubes, poetry-quoting intellectuals, or any other easily reducible war-movie "types." But like most things in The Hurt Locker, there is considerably more to him than meets the eye. Beneath his blustery macho surface, he may be the movie's most intricately wired explosive device.
Written by former Voice columnist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow's work—including her biker-gang debut The Loveless and the bank-robbing-surfers caper Point Break—devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities, the men who choose to live in them, and those who emerge as their leaders. Sgt. James is one such character, and Bigelow, Boal, and especially Renner excel at showing us how his reckless displays of bravado are both a coping mechanism and an addiction, a battlefield genius and a form of madness. A secular god with sports hero stats (873 disarmed bombs and counting!), he inspires envy in some, contempt in others, and both in the men under his command—two comparatively by-the-book sergeants (very well played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) who also want to prove their mettle as men of war, as long as they go home in one piece. But for James, who has an ex-wife and child waiting for him somewhere, the adrenaline-rush alterna-reality of Iraq is vastly preferable to the home front, with its prison of domestic responsibility. Like the jacked-in wire trippers of Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, he yearns for something more visceral, more cinematic than everyday life.
With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today's dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. Not that The Hurt Locker, which I take to be the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, much resembles any war movie we've ever seen before. Here, combat is more often a solitary rather than a group endeavor—a lone man tracing a rat's nest of wires back to its source, or exchanging long-distance fire with a single sniper across a vast desert expanse.
There is little, if any, talk about patriotism or homeland security, and there are fewer American flags on display than in any American war movie in memory. When The Hurt Locker premiered last fall at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this prompted some observers to tag it as an "apolitical" war picture, which is really a way of saying that Bigelow's film is mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment—something Bigelow does with a conceptual rigor usually associated with those directors whose work is confined to film societies and art houses.
Time is Bigelow's organizing principle here—the time left in Iraq for the men of Bravo company (displayed on the screen as chapter headings throughout), the time that ticks away between the discovery of a bomb and its eventual disarming or detonation, and the time that, in those unbearably tense moments, seems to stretch out indefinitely toward the horizon. War may be hell, but in The Hurt Locker, it's also an incredibly pellucid waking dream.
Review
JENNIFER Lynch, the spawn of David Lynch, has returned to spew "Surveillance," which is either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.
Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman play FBI agents who arrive in a small town on the ol' lonely highway to grill cops and motorists about a murder rampage/traffic wreck. Much debate about who might be telling the truth suggests the aim is a grindhouse "Rashomon."
Entirely gratuitous violence, a masked freak, a chuckling maniac, girl-on-girl action and screamingly bizarre dialogue ("Bring the butter! We're gonna have toast!") amp up the camp factor in a second film from the woman who gave us the 1993 cinematic anti-legend "Boxing Helena." Unlike Lynch's father's latest, "Inland Empire," this one isn't a bore. It may enjoy a life in the after-midnight slots of obscure pay-TV channels.
A viewing state of nonsobriety is strongly recommended.
Review
With machines that are impressively more lifelike, and characters that are more and more like machines, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" takes the franchise to a vastly superior level of artificial intelligence. As for human intelligence, it's primarily at the service of an enhanced arsenal of special effects, which helmer Michael Bay deploys like a general launching his very own shock-and-awe campaign on the senses. Otherwise, little seems new compared to the first installment, except that this version is longer, louder, and perhaps "more than your eye can meet" in one sitting. It will reap similar B.O. rewards worldwide.
Kicking off where the initial entry ended, part two of an eventual trilogy continues to carry Hasbro's toys and cartoons of the '80s to the heights of 21st-century CGI and moviemaking technology. Focusing even more on what auds seemed to appreciate last time around -- that is, the stupefying sight of colossal alien robots morphing quite realistically into earthly contraptions, and vice versa -- the plot serves as merely a pretext to showcase lots of well-designed creations, which run the gamut from a remote-control toy car to an actual Stealth fighter.
After a prologue set in 17,000 B.C., we once again team up with U.S. Army grunts Capt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), now members of an elite squad called NEST, which uses humans and Autobots to hunt down rogue Decepticons across the globe. Hoping to free their leader, Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving), who was previously imprisoned at the bottom of the ocean (why he wasn't melted down into scrap metal is a question only franchises can answer), the baddies are hoping to uncover the remaining shards of the powerful cube ("the Spark") that was destroyed at the end of the first pic.
As was the case before, nerd-cum-hero/heartthrob Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) happens to hold the key to the Decepticons' shot at world domination. Only this time, he's left both his goofy parents (Kevin Dunn, Julie White) and hot mechanic g.f. (Megan Fox) behind for a college whose students all look like twentysomething actors, and whose frat parties seem to take place at expensive strip clubs. In fact, on his first night out, Sam is treated to a sort of lap dance by a Decepticon posing as a nymphomaniacal freshman -- one of several more overtly sexual nods in this episode (including a shot of John Turturro in a G-string).
Cutting schematically between the military's efforts to thwart the Decepticons and Sam's prophesying tics (scribbling foreign symbols, speaking in tongues) provoked by the Spark, the opening hour culminates in a massive, forest-set battle that leaves the Autobots' leader, Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), ripe for the junkyard.
Like the other extensive combat scenes -- including a closing, all-out war that appears to take place in the same desert location as in the first movie -- the sheer amount of ripping steel, exploding mechanical parts and mutating vehicles of all shapes and sizes is something to behold. Industrial Light & Magic's superb handling of these sequences, which are like a little boy's playtime fantasy taken to Wagnerian proportions, are the veritable centerpieces of a narrative that makes little effort to set up the fights.
The effects are captured in varying earth tones by d.p. Ben Seresin ("Best Laid Plans"), who does a terrific job matching the CG and live-action sequences, while delving into Bay's usual combo of a few slow-motion dramatic moments and lots of widescreen, airborne pandemonium. Likewise, a new team of editors pieces everything together seamlessly.
A few surprises arrive in the second half -- involving bigger, deadlier pieces of metal, including a character, the Fallen (Tony Todd), that gives the pic its title -- when the action heads to Egypt and Jordan. But returning scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman -- joined this time by Ehren Kruger ("The Ring," "The Brothers Grimm") -- seem to be mining conventional motifs from "The Mummy" and "Indiana Jones" series.
Although the writers propose a similar dose of tongue-in-cheek dialogue for Sam, his parents and his techie roommate (played by Ramon Rodriguez of "The Wire"), the actors often have to shout it over constant music or thunderous bursts of crunching hardware. LaBeouf has a few strong moments during the college-set scenes, and Turturro -- whose character has been demoted from a government agent to a butcher in a Brooklyn deli -- once again offers some much-needed zaniness in the heavy later stages.
But the true stars here are the Transformers themselves, who continually steal the spotlight from the flesh-and-blood cast, even in scenes of tragic death or comic relief usually reserved for real actors.
"If God made us in his image," ponders Optimus Prime early on, "then who made him?" If such a question seems to be hinting at a veritable Autobot creation myth, it may explain why humans here have become backseat drivers to these extremely cool cars.
Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen), Ben Seresin; editors, Roger Barton, Thomas Muldoon, Joel Negron, Paul Rubell; music, Steve Jablonsky; production designer, Nigel Phelps; supervising art director, Jon Billington; art director, Julian Ashby, Naaman Marshall, Ben Procter; set designers, C. Scott Baker, Jann K. Engel; set decorator, Jennifer Williams; costume designer, Deborah L. Scott; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Geoffrey Patterson; supervising sound editors, Ethan Van der Ryn, Erik Aadahl; re-recording mixers, Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers; visual effects supervisor, Richard Kidd; visual effects, Industrial Light & Magic, Asylum, Digital Domain; special effects supervisor, Wayne Toth; stunt coordinators, Kenny Bates, Bob Brown; associate producer, Matthew Cohan; assistant directors, K.C. Hodenfield, Bruce Moriarty; second unit director, Bates; casting, Denise Chamian. Reviewed at Odeon Leicester Square, London, June 15, 2009. (In Los Angeles Film Festival -- Special Screenings.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 149 MIN.
Review
Dawn-of-time music thunders portentously from the soundtrack as a band of primitive hunters track down a wild boar. For about 30 seconds of "Year One," we could be watching a drama - or something even more ridiculously straight-faced and somber, such as a historical re-enactment in a TV documentary. And then one of the hunters screws up, badly, and we meet Jack Black as Zed, an overly confident, loudmouth caveman who somehow can't find his place in prehistoric culture.
"Year One" has one joke, but it's a good one, played for many variations over the course of an often very funny comedy: It's the contrast between the modern sensibility embodied by Black and Michael Cera and that of a brutal, early period of history. The comedy turns on the spectacle of a pair of modern-seeming people who keep finding that their best attributes - wit, sensitivity, loquaciousness, inventiveness - are completely useless in a world in which courtship consists of hitting a girl over the head with a club and dragging her back to the hut.
Black and Cera's comic styles are quite different. Onscreen, Black's persona tends to be self-promoting and easily exasperated, a character in constant collision with his environment, who acts before he thinks and tries to get by on bluff. Cera, by contrast, is watchful and paranoid, sardonic and full of dread, and thinks hard before he commits himself in any direction. These contrasts make them a superb comic duo, and so does their one similarity: They both operate under the implicit assumption that the world is a threatening place that must be mastered, either by forceful action (Black) or careful thought (Cera).
Actually, Black and Cera have something else in common: They are both very skilled, very precise comedians. In the case of Black, this is well known, and in the case of Cera, it's no surprise, considering his performance in "Superbad." Still, it's a striking thing to find a 21-year-old actor with such self-assurance, such innate timing and such a thorough understanding of himself as a screen entity. Even Buster Keaton and Chaplin didn't really get under way until they were about 25.
Director Harold Ramis, who wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay, never lets "Year One" settle. He keeps the plot moving, introducing new elements and finding new opportunities for comedy. He mines each environment for laughs and moves onto another, and he doesn't worry about anachronisms.
And so the two cavemen, presumably living about 20,000 years ago, come down from the mountains and run into the farmers, Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd).
Soon we find ourselves in early biblical times, with Zed and Oh (Cera) running into Abraham (circa 2000 B.C.) at a crucial moment. "We are the Hebrews," Abraham announces, "righteous people, but not very good at sports."
Abraham tells them about Sodom and Gomorrah, which he describes as horrible cities in which people drink and celebrate all day, and where the women are so licentious that sex is given freely, to anyone, just for the asking. Watch Black's face as he hears this description. His eyes practically roll up into his head as he tries to figure out how to politely ask for directions.
"Year One" is not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it's always lively. After 30 years of writing and sometimes directing some very fine comedies ("Groundhog Day," "Analyze This," "Caddyshack," "Ghostbusters," "Animal House," "Stripes"), Ramis knows exactly what it takes to hold an audience's attention in comedy. Every character is made vivid and absurd, from the breezy but wicked Cain, to the righteous but oblivious Abraham (who thinks everybody should want to be circumcised), to the flamboyant (and hirsute) high priest of Sodom (Oliver Platt).
Ramis never lets his guard down, never gives the audience a chance to relax, even if it means hanging a lead character upside down and making him urinate on his own face. There's no vulgar or not vulgar here, just funny or not funny. "Year One" shows what has been true since the beginning of time: that it's anything for a laugh.
-- Advisory: Sexual situations and crude humor.
Review
Bottom Line: Diverting romantic antic about a sham engagement is sparked by the bright chemistry and comic timing of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.
Sandra Bullock is one of the most likable and skilled comedians in movies today, but she hasn't had a comedy hit since the first "Miss Congeniality" nine years ago. That's about to change with "The Proposal," an engaging, well-crafted lark that proves "high concept" isn't necessarily a tired tactic.
Bullock also is talented enough to play convincingly against her genial image here as the proverbial boss from hell, Margaret Tate, a hard-driving New York book editor. Choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher ("27 Dresses," "Step Up") delivers a well-paced, highly attractive production. Summer audiences, especially the female segment, should have no hesitation accepting this "Proposal."
Peter Chiarelli's script borrows a page or two from "The Devil Wears Prada" in the opening scenes, as Margaret's fearsome reputation literally precedes her among her frantic office staff. Chief among these is her younger, underappreciated assistant, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds), who harbors his own ambitions to become an editor.
Margaret has been so focused on her career, she's neglected a few legalities and is suddenly informed that she faces deportation to her native Canada. Desperate to keep her job, she impulsively "confesses" that she and Andrew are engaged to be married. Andrew grudgingly agrees to the charade, on condition that he finally gets that book editor position.
The forced romance coincides with a major family celebration back in Andrew's hometown of Sitka, Alaska, where, Margaret discovers, the Paxton tribe is a very big, affluent deal. Andrew's mother, Grace (Mary Steenburgen), is warm and welcoming, but his formidable dad, Joe (Craig T. Nelson), who has always resented his son's rejection of the family business, is skeptical about this older woman in Andrew's life.
And then there's Annie, the outspoken and mischievous 90-year-old matriarch played with scene-stealing ebullience by TV icon Betty White. Also in the mix is Gertrude (Malin Akerman of "Watchmen"), the sweet, pretty Alaska girl Andrew abandoned for the big city.
Chiarelli's script mines all the fish-out-of-water humor of the business-dressed, cell phone-dependent Margaret's immersion in the more laid-back and sometimes downright odd culture of picturesque Sitka (actually doubled by towns in Massachusetts).
Starting the film as a borderline caricature of an unpleasant workaholic, Bullock convincingly peels back the layers of Margaret, revealing the pain behind her steely facade and the vulnerability that surfaces as she and Andrew get to know each other better amid the tense masquerade. By midpoint, we're actually rooting for this erstwhile office gargoyle.
It helps immeasurably that Bullock has tremendous chemistry with Reynolds. The former TV actor and "Van Wilder" cutup has been getting a lot of work lately but hasn't quite broken through as a star. "The Proposal" should remedy that.
He matches Bullock's comic timing note for note and conveys all of Andrew's frustration, exasperation and growing attraction to Margaret. (His remarkably fit physique also is a boxoffice plus.) The situations might be formulaic, but the teamwork of the two leads brings them to sparkling life.
Review
Not everything works in Woody Allen’s first New York–based movie in five years (he’s gone European). Whatever Works feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell, Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. The grumpy old Jew at the center of this comedy of complaints — divorced physicist and two–time suicide attempter Boris Yellnikoff — is played not by Allen, 73, but by Larry David, 61. Allen wanted to go younger and angrier. Enter David, the fulminating joke engine of Curb Your Enthusiasm, whose Boris kvetches at the camera (meaning us) just like Allen’s Alvy Singer did in Annie Hall in 1977. “The universe is expanding,” a worried young Alvy tells his mother. Her retort, “What is that your business?” is a call to arms. Boris has made the universe his business. He thinks we’re racing toward extinction while space and time laugh at “our sad little hopes and dreams.”
(Watch Peter Travers' video review of Whatever Works.)
Boris is moving on down from the East Side to a funky crib near Chinatown. He rants at colleagues (Michael McKean, Conleth Hill) and kids he calls “submental cretins.” Allen’s characters have trouble expressing rage. As Woody said in Manhattan, “I grow a tumor instead.” Not Boris. He rails against the “mindless zombies” eating away at the city’s intellectual life.
(Get more news and reviews from Peter Travers on the Travers Take)
Into the toxic space of this misanthrope comes Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a runaway Dixie beauty queen just past jailbait age. Think Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s before she started hooking. Wood is totally beguiling in the role, absorbing Boris’ cynicism but still charming him into marriage. Though we never see Boris macking on his bride, there is an “ew” reference to Viagra. The laughs fly when Melody’s God–fearing mom, Marietta (the captivating Patricia Clarkson steals every scene she’s in), hits the Big Apple to bring her baby home and stays to become hilariously corrupted. And that’s it for spoilers. On its way to an ending of surprising serenity, Whatever Works stutters and stumbles. Allen is covering familiar ground, and the timely reference to Obama just seems wrong. But no true movie fan will want to miss the comic mind–meld of Woody and Larry. On that level, at least, there’s no need to curb your enthusiasm.
Review
.
Thanks to the smart, expertly shot documentary "Food, Inc.," I now know why it's so hard to find a supermarket tomato that tastes like, well, a tomato. That's because tomatoes, like so much of our food, aren't farmed or grown as much as they are engineered to satisfy rigid corporate and economic mandates.
And don't get producer-director Robert Kenner started on beef, chicken, pork or that No. 1 public enemy: corn -- the manipulated mass production of each is concisely and rivetingly scrutinized here.
Suffice it to say, after the film's disturbing glimpses inside the meat industry, along with its blunt indictment of fast food giants, you'll think twice before eating just about anything nonorganic.
This is, of course, a good -- and doable -- thing, even if the handful of multinational companies that control the bulk of our nation's food supply won't be thrilled with Kenner's vivid portrayal of their near-Orwellian methods of doing business. The U.S. government doesn't get off scot-free here either.
The film also gives an eloquent array of writers, activists and farmers time to enlighten us about the perils on our plates, but not without offering hope for a safer future. "Food, Inc." is essential viewing.
Review
THE hills are alive with the sound of skiers screaming for their lives as they battle a battalion of Nazi zombies left over from World War II.
It's not that the seven horny young vacationers (one couple gets it on in an outhouse) weren't warned.
On their first night in a remote cabin in the Norwegian Alps, they have a visitor who cautions, "There's an evil presence here."
There sure is, and it takes the form of uniformed Nazi troops driven into the hills by locals during the war, never to be seen again -- until now.
Under director/co-writer Tommy Wirkola, "Dead Snow" recalls countless other splatterfests, especially Sam Rami's 1983 "The Evil Dead."
But Wirkola keeps the narrative taut, wasting not a frame; and he throws in funny moments, one involving a Nazi's icky intestine. Matt Weston's cinematography adds to the twisted charm.
Review
Given the inherent three-dimensional quality evident in Pixar's cutting-edge output, the fact that the studio's 10th animated film is the first to be presented in digital 3-D wouldn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking in and of itself.
But what gives "Up" such a joyously buoyant lift is the refreshingly nongimmicky way in which the process has been incorporated into the big picture -- and what a wonderful big picture it is.
Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.
It's also the ideal choice to serve as the first animated feature ever to open the Festival de Cannes, considering the way it also pays fond homage to cinema's past, touching upon the works of Chaplin and Hitchcock, not to mention aspects of "It's a Wonderful Life" "The Wizard of Oz" and, more recently, "About Schmidt."
Boxoffice-wise, the sky's the limit for "Up."
Even with its PG rating (the first non-G-rated Pixar picture since "The Incredibles"), there really is no demographic that won't respond to its many charms.
The Chaplin-esque influence is certainly felt in the stirring prelude, tracing the formative years of the film's 78-year-old protagonist, recent widower Carl Fredricksen (terrifically voiced by Ed Asner).
Borrowing "WALL-E's" poetic, economy of dialogue and backed by composer Michael Giacchino's plaintive score, the nostalgic waltz between Carl and the love of his life, Ellie, effectively lays all the groundwork for the fun stuff to follow.
Deciding it's better late than never, the retired balloon salesman depletes his entire inventory and takes to the skies (house included), determined to finally follow the path taken by his childhood hero, discredited world adventurer Charles F. Muntz (Christopher Plummer).
But he soon discovers there's a stowaway hiding in his South America-bound home in the form of Russell, a persistent eight-year-old boy scout (scene-stealing young newcomer Jordan Nagai), and the pair prove to be one irresistible odd couple.
Despite the innate sentimentality, director Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") and co- director-writer Bob Peterson keep the laughs coming at an agreeably ticklish pace.
Between that Carl/Russell dynamic and Muntz's pack of hunting dogs equipped with multilingual thought translation collars, "Up" ups the Pixar comedy ante considerably.
Meanwhile, those attending theaters equipped with the Disney Digital 3-D technology will have the added bonus of experiencing a three-dimensional process that is less concerned with the usual "comin' at ya" razzle-dazzle than it is with creating exquisitely detailed textures and appropriately expansive depths of field.
Description
Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi's delirious psych-out of a horror film, is a candy-colored ghouls-gone-wild nightmare that treats every shock as a joke — or, at least, as an invitation to crack up at your own gullibility. Raimi, like Roman Polanski in his classic Repulsion (1965), surrounds a comely blond lass (Alison Lohman) with demons that seem to be erupting right out of her head. He gets into our heads, too; he scares the unholy living bejesus out of you. Raimi's operating model is the fun house, with its jack-in-the-box terrors, but he doesn't just toy with the audience. He plays it, like a maestro. He orchestrates a tongue-in-cheek symphony of fear.
Lohman, with her slightly dazed, rabbit-toothed sensuality, plays a bank worker who refuses to renew the mortgage of a one-eyed, rotten-toothed old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver). Lohman then spends the rest of the film fighting off the curse the gypsy has placed on her. She's assaulted by flash-cut visions of baroquely grotesque and evil things, starting with the gypsy herself, a hideous crone
who has a way of taking out her false teeth and, well, doing stuff without them. Their first encounter in a parking garage is like
a slasher showdown crossed with a wrestling blowout; it unites the audience in a collective moan-laugh-shriek. The bedroom nightmare that follows is so gross it redefines the phrase in your face, and from then on we're clamped into a state of tingly anticipatory anxiety.
Raimi directed all three Spider-Man films, but in the '80s, before he went Hollywood, he made The Evil Dead and its sequel — splendid exercises in slapstick mutilation and whooshing-camera dread. Drag Me to Hell marks a return to their spirit — even if it's only PG-13! — but it's also a deftly unified freak show that keeps intensifying as its wormy-devil images keep spewing. Going back to his roots, Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years. A
Review
Death is for the living and not for the dead so much.
That observation from the mourner of a dead dog in Errol Morris' "Gates of Heaven" strikes me as simple but profound. It is the insight inspiring "Departures," the lovely Japanese movie that won this year's Oscar for best foreign film.
The story involves a young man who apprentices to the trade of "encoffinment," the preparation of corpses before their cremation. As nearly as I can recall, there is no discussion of an afterlife. It is all about the living. There is an elaborate, tender ceremony carried out before the family and friends of the deceased, with an elegance and care that is rather fascinating.
The hero is a man who feels he is owed a death. The father of Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) walked out on his mother when the boy was 6 years old, and ever since Daigo has hated him for that abandonment. Now about 30, Daigo is a cellist in a small classical orchestra that goes broke. He and Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), his wife, decide to move back to a town in the north of Japan and live in his childhood home, willed to him by his recently departed mother. He finds no work. He answers a want ad for "departures," which he thinks perhaps is from a travel agency.
The company serves clients making their final trip. Daigo is shocked to discover what the owner (Tsutomu Yamazaki) does; he cleans and prepares bodies and painstakingly makes them up to look their best. The ritual involves undressing them in behind artfully manipulated shrouds in front of the witnesses. The owner is a quiet, kind man, who talks little but exudes genuine respect for the dead.
Daigo doesn't tell his wife what he does. They need the money. His job is so low caste that an old friend learns of it and snubs him. The clients are generally grateful; one father confesses cheerfully that the process freed him to accept the true nature of his child.
A lot is said about the casting process for a movie. Director Yojiro Takita and his casting director, Takefumi Yoshikawa, have surpassed themselves. In a film with four principal roles, they've found actors whose faces, so very human, embody what "Departures" wants to say about them. The earnest, insecure young man. His wife who loves him but is repulsed by the notion of him working with the dead. The boss, oracular, wise, kind. His office manager, inspirational but with an inner sadness. All of these faces are beautiful in a realistic human way.
The enterprise of undertaking is deadly serious, but has always inspired a certain humor, perhaps to mask our fears. The film is sometimes humorous, but not in a way to break the mood. The plot involves some developments we can see coming, but they seem natural, inevitable. The music is lush and sentimental in a subdued way, the cinematography is perfectly framed and evocative, and the movie is uncommonly absorbing. There is a scene of discovery toward the end with tremendous emotional impact. You can't say it wasn't prepared for, but it comes as a devastating surprise, a poetic resolution.
Some of the visual choices are striking. Observe the way Takita handles it when the couple is given an octopus for their dinner and are surprised to find it still alive. See how vividly Daigo recalls a time on the beach with his dad when he was 5 or 6, but how in his memory his father's face is a blur. And how certain compositions suggest that we are all in waiting to be encoffined.
In this film, Kore-eda's "After Life" and of course Kurosawa's great "Ikiru," the Japanese reveal a deep and unsensational acceptance of death. It is not a time for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. It is an observation that a life has been left for the contemplation of the survivors.
Review
Part of the problem with the movie version of The Da Vinci Code was that it took itself too seriously. You had these people dashing around Europe, investigating obscure clues and uncovering outrageous conspiracies, but the only person who seemed to be having any fun with it was Ian McKellen. "Tom Hanks has never seemed so dull," I wrote in my review.
Well, say what you will about Ron Howard as a director, but at least he's consistent. Angels & Demons, the Da Vinci Code sequel, is as overly serious as its predecessor, and poor Mr. Hanks -- the world's most likable man, for crying out loud! -- is still dour and intense. I get that saving the world from disaster is important business, and the characters may not have time to smile and joke and enjoy themselves. But is it too much to ask for it to be fun for the audience?
Not having read Dan Brown's Angels & Demons novel (which actually came before Da Vinci, not after), I was able to find some entertainment in the mechanics of the plot -- not knowing how the mystery would be unraveled, curious to see what the clues would mean. The screenplay, by veteran action writer David Koepp (Panic Room) and Ron Howard regular Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), basically adheres to a limited point of view -- we don't know any more than the Hanks character, Robert Langdon, does. For viewers who already know where things are going, there may not be much pleasure in watching Langdon figure it out, unless the movie has deviated significantly from the book.
This time around, Langdon, relived of his absurd haircut and back at Harvard University, is summoned by the Vatican after four high-ranking cardinals are kidnapped. The Vatican, in a state of high alert anyway due to the pope having just died, believes the evildoers are members of the super-secret group known as the Illuminati. The reason they believe this is that whoever abducted the cardinals left behind a piece of paper that says "ILLUMINATI" on it.
Langdon's expertise is needed because this "ILLUMINATI" symbol is written in the form of an ambigram, i.e., it reads the same right-side-up and upside-down. (Look at how Angels & Demons appears on the cover of the novel.) Allegedly, this is an ancient secret, the sudden appearance of which can ONLY mean the Illuminati have come out of hiding, because surely no one else could have figured out how to design an ambigram out of "Illuminati."
The kidnappers have also swiped a canister of anti-matter from a Vatican-funded lab in Switzerland, with the apparent goal of using it to blow up Vatican City. In the meantime, they've left a video message for the Vatican in which their language sounds normal but is actually densely packed with clues about their plans and whereabouts. Langdon deciphers these clues and, with a scientist named Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) at his side, dashes all over Rome in an effort to thwart the evildoers. It kind of makes you wonder why the evildoers went to the trouble of hiding clues in their message, unless they wanted to be thwarted. Maybe it was a cry for help?
Assisting Langdon is Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor), chamberlain to the late pope and current acting head of state of Vatican City (something of a placeholder until the college of cardinals chooses a new pontiff). An orphan, Patrick is devout and humble, and unafraid of uncovering the truth, no matter what it may be. Somewhat fussier and more old-fashioned is Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard), the head of Vatican City's police force, who scoffs at Langdon's code-breaking and old-sculpture-interpreting.
As I said, there's a certain rote enjoyment to be had in seeing the elaborate story unfold, a basic thrill in wondering what's going to happen next. What it lacks is a human touch. Vittoria Vetra is a total blank who might as well have been played by a pile of socks for all the personality she brings. Patrick and Richter are generic types, a Sympathizer and Antagonist, respectively, whose characters never get fully fleshed out. Even Langdon -- being played by the world's most likable man, for crying out loud! -- seems like nothing more than a perturbed academic who must hastily solve riddles and save Rome. He's busy and frantic, but that is not the same as being interesting.
The film also lacks a crisis that can measure up to the one in The Da Vinci Code. That story was ultimately about the divinity of Jesus Christ, with secrets emerging that threatened to shake the Roman Catholic Church at its very foundation! Angels & Demons is about imperiled clergymen and a terrorist plot to destroy Rome -- big deals, sure, but hardly on a par with what sequel-goers are expecting. As a means of dealing with that shortcoming, Angels & Demons flirts with bigger issues, including science vs. religion, and briefly claims that the anti-matter relates to "the creation of life." But this is merely bluster, an effort to make us think the film is deeper than it is. It's ultimately just a 24-style murder-and-mayhem thriller -- which is a fine thing to be. Why take it so seriously, though?
Review
Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.
Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrian Brody) have grown up on the make, in a world of, as Jay's stage-setting narration puts it, "... grifters, ropers, faro fixers, tales drawn long and tall. ..." Stephen builds cons; Bloom gets close to the marks. Stephen's work on their scams is a weird, lucrative form of self-expression; as Bloom puts it, "My brother writes cons the way Russians write novels. ..." Bloom's work on their schemes is a weird, lucrative form of self-loathing; Bloom learns early on that playing a part means never having to be yourself, that he, when " ... being as he wasn't, could be as he wished to be." Stephen wants more. Bloom wants out.
In any con game film, we expect to hear the phrase " ... one last job," just as we expect to hear a magician cry out " ... nothing up my sleeves." Much like a sleight-of-hand artist's stage gestures, Johnson's work here is broad and bold and sweeping, all the better to hide the careful planning, tight-sprung engineering and thoughtfully considered execution behind the distractions and delights. Along with their comrade-in-cons Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), an enigmatic hipster with a flair for explosions, the brothers find one last target, a lonely heiress named Penelope Stamp, played by Rachel Weisz; while Bloom and Stephen and Bang Bang commit several felonies and misdemeanors in the course of The Brothers Bloom, it's nothing compared to the act of grand (in every sense of the word) larceny Weisz commits in stealing the film. Penelope's weird and unique, but she's also real and sincere; a montage where Penelope demonstrates how she, in her words, 'collects hobbies' is a minor miracle of comedy that also speaks to a character's lonely heart.
Stephen's concocted a plan to bilk Penelope out of her inheritance, which requires Bloom to get close to her; Bloom, as we expect, gets too close; later, we understand how Stephen may have expected that, too. As Stephen, Ruffalo gets to play a rumpled, roguish conniver, eyes twinkling as they catch a glimpse of the next chance to trick and take; Brody's hangdog looks and deliberate manner mesh perfectly with Bloom's melancholy manipulations. Kikuchi's stylish, silent Bang Bang provides cool, crisp comic relief that somehow still works within the film's context of stakes and risks. In fact, you could say that all of The Brothers Bloom walks a careful, closely-watched line where there's peril and possibility enough to keep the film moving forward and keep us in suspense, even as the tone still feels light-footed and bright.
Some naysayers deride Brick, Johnson's first film, as a gimmick masquerading as a movie; I'm of the opinion they're wrong, but that's another story. The Brothers Bloom demonstrates, however you may feel about Brick, that Johnson's a real storyteller, much like his protagonist antiheroes here; you can feel here how much he loves to make us ask 'What happens next?' and how well he knows that having a good answer to that question matters. The Brothers Bloom is about a con, but it's also about storytelling -- and how all storytelling is, in its way, a con.The production design, costumes and music in The Brothers Bloom are all top-notch, but they never get in the way of the movie; the games and gags in it don't detract from the film's real meaning or the connection between the characters. Bloom says he doesn't want to live "an unwritten life"; he -- and we -- are told "There's no such thing as an unwritten life, just a badly-written one." The Brothers Bloom has immediate, kicky pleasures and laughs, but it also sneaks up on you with how much Bloom and Stephen care for each other, and how much Penelope and Bloom find their true selves through a series of deceptions. The Brothers Bloom may look slight, but as the intricate tricks and twists of it unfold, all of the cunning and cons in it reveal a sincere, beating heart behind the flash and fun.
Review
It takes half an hour — forever in movie time — for this relationship comedy to get going. But when it does, Jennifer Aniston, as a corporate type who buys ghastly motel art, and Steve Zahn, as the night manager at his parents' Arizona motor inn, do quiet wonders. Smarting from her split from a yogurt tycoon (a splendid Woody Harrelson), she lets the nerd touch her butt. Something happens. I can't describe it. But it's not formula and it's not TV. Playwright Stephen Belber (Match), in his directing debut, comes close to the sweet spot. He's not there yet. But he'll be worth watching next time.
Review
The offbeat Norwegian director Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories, Factotum) has a wonderful eye. This deadpan comedy about a newly-retired train driver (Bård Owe) might be the best-looking film of the week.
Even for Hamer, it’s aimless, though, and you keep hoping the aimlessness is going to crystallise into a point. The film’s frostbitten sense of mortality is something we’re meant to feel in our bones.
Review
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sci-fi action and violence, and brief sexual content
Starring John Cho, Ben Cross,, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg,, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto,, Winona Ryder, Zoe Saldana,, Karl Urban,, Anton Yelchin,, Eric Bana, and Leonard Nimoy
The greatest adventure of all time begins with Star Trek, the incredible story of a young crew's maiden voyage onboard the most advanced starship ever created: the U.S.S. Enterprise. On a journey filled with action, comedy and cosmic peril, the new recruits must find a way to stop an evil being whose mission of vengeance threatens all of mankind. The fate of the galaxy rests in the hands of bitter rivals. One, James T. Kirk, is a delinquent, thrill-seeking Iowa farm boy. The other, Spock, was raised in a logic-based society that rejects all emotion. As fiery instinct clashes with calm reason, their unlikely but powerful partnership is the only thing capable of leading their crew through unimaginable danger, boldly going where no one has gone before!
Review
Life isn't going smoothly for Leo Jackson. He still lives at home, he just broke up with his co-worker girlfriend and he's had so many complaints about his sloppy work habits that his own mother is threatening to fire him. But Leo isn't one to let a few bad breaks ruin his day—as long as he's got plenty of weed to take his mind off his troubles. But when the wacked-out courier accidentally delivers a box containing 10 kilos of high quality cocaine to the wrong apartment, it sets in motion a hilarious and harrowing chain of events that could cost him his life.
Review
Beto and Tato Verdusco are brothers who work at a banana plantation and also play soccer for the village team. Nicknamed “Tough” because of his personality and football style, Beto dreams of becoming a professional soccer player; Tato’s dream is to be a famous singer, and both share the dream of building a house for their mother, Elvira. They have a change in luck when “Batuta”, a soccer talent scout, discovers them accidentally. Tato is the first to move to the big city where he becomes the star goal scorer for the prestigious Deportivo Amaranto. His baroque playing style earns him the nickname of “Corny”. Although Beto feels he has been betrayed and left behind, he soon travels to Mexico City to become the goalkeeper for Atlético Nopaleros. At the peak of glory, they forget all animosity, although it does not last long. At the very real possibility of fulfilling all of their dreams, the siblings must face an innate rivalry as well as their own demons and limitations. Beto is a gambler and allows his addiction to drag him down; Tato is unable to recognize his true talents and squanders every opportunity by pursuing a false idea of celebrity and status. The dream seems to slip through their fingers. And it is at their worst moment that the brothers find forgiveness trying to help each other while casting headlong towards their individual destiny.
Review
It was a ripe time to live at the Students' Residence in Madrid and study at the School of Fine Arts. When he arrived from Catalonia in 1922, Salvador Dali met the future poet Federico Garcia Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Dali was a case study, dressed as a British dandy of the previous century, with a feminine appearance. No doubt he was a gifted painter. He was to become a rather loathsome man.
"Little Ashes" focuses on an unconsummated attraction between Dali (Robert Pattinson) and Garcia Lorca (Javier Beltran), who in the flower of youthful idealism and with the awakening of the flesh, began to confuse sexuality with artistry. Not much is really known about their romance, such as it was, but in the conservative Catholic nation of the time, and given Dali's extreme terror of syphilis, it seems to have been passionate but platonic.
It found release in their roles in the developing Surrealist movement, in which church, state, ideology, landowners, parents, authorities, laws all were mocked by deliberately outlandish behavior. In 1929, Dali wrote and Bunuel directed probably the most famous of all Surrealist works, the film "Un Chien Andalou" ("The Andalusian Dog"), with its notorious images of a cloud slicing through the moon and a knife slicing through a woman's eyeball. In a time before computer imagery, it was a real eyeball (belonging to a pig, not a woman, but small comfort to the pig).
By 1936, Garcia Lorca was dead, murdered by Spanish fascists. The story is told in the film "The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca" (1997). Bunuel fled Spain to Mexico, then later returned as one of the world's greatest filmmakers. Dali betrayed his early talent, embraced fascism, Nazism and communism, returned repentant to the church, and become an odious caricature of an artist, obsessed by cash. "Each morning when I awake," he said, "I experience again a supreme pleasure -- that of being Salvador Dali." Yes, but for a time, he was a superb painter.
"Little Ashes" is a film that shows these personalities being formed. Because most audiences may not know much about Dali, Garcia Lorca and Bunuel, it depends for its box-office appeal on the starring role of Robert Pattinson, the 23-year-old British star of "Twilight" (which was shot after this film). He is the heartthrob of the teenage vampire fans of "Twilight," but here shows an admirable willingness to take on a challenging role in direct contrast to the famous Edward Cullen. Is it too much to hope that "Twilight" fans will be drawn to the work of Garcia Lorca and Bunuel? They'd be on the fast track to cultural literacy.
Biopics about the youth of famous men are often overshadowed by their fame to come. "The Motorcycle Diaries," for example, depended for much of its appeal on our knowledge that its young doctor hero would someday become Che Guevara. "Little Ashes" is interested in the young men for themselves.
It shows unformed young men starting from similar places, but taking different roads because of their characters. Garcia Lorca, who is honest with himself about his love for another man, finds real love eventually with a woman, his classmate Margarita (Marina Gatell). Dali, who presents almost as a transvestite, denies all feelings, and like many puritans, ends as a voluptuary. Bunuel, the most gifted of all, ends as all good film directors do, consumed by his work. I am fond of his practical approach to matters. Warned that angry mobs might storm the screen at the Paris premiere of "Un Chien Andalou," he filled his pockets with stones to throw at them.
"Little Ashes" is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward. The more we know about the three men the better. Although the eyeball-slicing is shown in the film, many audiences may have no idea what it is doing there. Perhaps Dali's gradual slinking away from his ideals, his early embrace of celebrity, his preference for self-publicity over actual achievement, makes better sense when we begin with his shyness and naivete; is he indeed entirely aware that his hair and dress are those of a girl, or has he been coddled in this way by a strict, protective mother who is hostile to male sexuality?
Whatever the case, two things stand out: He has the courage to present himself in quasi-drag, and the other students at the Students' Residence, inspired by the fever in the air, accept him as "making a statement" he might not have been fully aware of.
I have long believed that one minute of wondering if you are about to be kissed is more erotic than an hour of kissing. Although a few gay Web sites complain "Little Ashes" doesn't deliver the goods, I find it far more intriguing to find how repressed sexuality express itself, because the bolder sort comes out in the usual ways and reduces mystery to bodily fluids. Orgasms are at their best when still making big promises, don't you find?
Review
Outrage is a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians with appalling gay rights voting records who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to. Boldly revealing the hidden lives of some of the United States' most powerful policymakers, Outrage takes a comprehensive look at the harm they've inflicted on millions of Americans, and examines the media's complicity in keeping their secrets. With analysis from prominent members of the gay community such as Congressman Barney Frank, former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey, activist Larry Kramer, radio personality Michelangelo Signorile, and openly gay congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, Outrage probes deeply into the psychology of this double lifestyle, the ethics of outing closeted politicians, the double standards that the media upholds in its coverage of the sex lives of gay public figures, and much more.
Summary
The film tells the story of Senn (Justin Long) and Mala (Evan Rachel Wood), two rebellious alien teens living on the beautiful planet Terra, a place that promotes peace and tolerance, having long ago rejected war and weapons of mass destruction. But when Terra is invaded by human beings fleeing a civil war and environmental catastrophe, the planet is plunged into chaos. During the upheaval, Mala befriends an injured human pilot (Luke Wilson) and each learns the two races are not so different from one another. Together they must face the terrifying realization that in a world of limited resources, only one of the races is likely to survive.
Summary
Celebrity photographer Connor Mead loves freedom, fun and women... in that order. A committed bachelor who thinks nothing of breaking up with multiple women on a conference call, Connor's mockery of romance proves a real buzz-kill for his kid brother, Paul, and a houseful of well wishers on the eve of Paul's wedding. Just when it looks like Connor may single-handedly ruin the wedding, he is visited by the ghosts of his former jilted girlfriends, who take him on a revealing and hilarious odyssey through his failed relationships--past, present and future. Together they attempt to find out what turned Connor into such an insensitive jerk and whether there is still hope for him to find true love...or if he really is the lost cause everyone thinks he is.
IMDB RANK = Not ranked yet
Summary
Set in contemporary Spain, the story of a mysterious loner--a stranger--whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a criminal job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged.
Review
I know I am included in the many people who go on and on about Hollywood constantly cranking out drivel over and over again but why? Why does Hollywood do this? Well it is because many people pay to see it and those of us who complain about this product do not go around shelling out our hard-earned money for this crap but many of you support this; you know who you are. I think…no, I know that it will only get worse. Most movies nowadays are really no longer about being story driven; however it's more and more commercialized garbage of who can sell the most tickets. Well you and I know that most of the demographic that goes to the movies are teenagers and it is no speculation that many of them do not care about character and/or dialogue driven or intricately plotted films. No this is fast food, talk show entertainment; no thought required. In this case, we have this weekend's bad movie called Obsession, well there is another one called Fighting which is a Never Back Down Fight Club, but that is for another page. By the look of the movie poster, I initially thought it would be something directed straight to DVD but no sadly it is not. I guess this is mostly for people who don't even remember Fatal Attraction and geared toward mostly the Lifetime audience.
Plot, let's see, successful Idris Elba receives huge promotion at some company he works for (does it matter what?), is happily married to Beyonce and they have a nice house with a white-picket fence out in the suburbs. It's the American dream come true, right? But no wait, there's a new temp in the office (Ali Larter) and the two of them hit it off but only after he gives her a snotty look with the remark, "You're a temp?" and they go out to a flashy glitzy club and share drinks and before you know it, they're all over each other right away. There is no nudity or explicit sex involved; well it's PG-13 so it's very tame. There's just a lot of groping and grinding, sorry boys. So during throughout the middle, Ali Larter becomes, well…Obsessed and Idris has a hard time confessing his affair but finally does after Ali's escalating bizarre behavior but not too bizarre, this is PG-13 folks. Then Beyonce becomes more and more frustrated. Plus the fact that she knows whom he has slept with because they met earlier in the movie. Oh Beyonce is going to take her down, at least she's says so because Idris doesn't want to take full control of the situation fearing that this could possibly destroy what he has worked oh so hard for.
Then there's the howling, scathing catfight between Ali and Beyonce, whoo-hoo!!! Little blood is shown, remember this is PG-13 and everything ends on a happy note and all is forgiven. Could this be a social commentary on race relations? Hardly. Also, there are many people talking about a possible "big twist". No, no twist. Believe me, if there were, it would be advertised totally differently, like the movie's tagline would be something like, "Who's doing what to whom?" in such the dramatic voice. Yeah go suckers, give 'em your money.
Description
In Fighting, the NYC underground boxing scene is a kind of moveable feast where everyone keeps bumping into one another. Shawn calls it fate; you could call it Teen Fight Club, because they run in such a tight circle they might as well all be attending the same high school. On the same night Shawn again encounters Zulay, he exchanges evil glares with Evan Hailey (Brian White), the acknowledged superstar of the extreme fighting scene. Evan wrestled on the same team with Shawn in college until Shawn had a major blow-out with his father, who was coaching the team.
Description
(Per an advance preview:) JAMIE FOXX does a fantastic job playing a homeless guy in Los Angeles who was once a gifted musician at Julliard who later developed various schizophrenic & emotional problems as he wanders the rough streets. This film tells the true story of how a local newspaper columnist (finely played by ROBERT DOWNEY JR.) chances to meet Foxx, writes about his story, and his many efforts to try to make life EASIER for him-- by encouraging him to return to playing the cello, to find a safer and better place to live and to interact with other homeless people. Because of the difficulties inherent in Foxx's psyche, his ramblings & recurrent departures from reality, Downey has a frequently tricky and demanding time in dealing with him and others in his life (including his ex-wife & co-worker CATHERINE KEENER). The film effectively portrays the young Foxx, his growth and his later descent into a life filled with problems. It's not always easy to deal with, but it's uplifting seeing the progress that the homeless and otherwise disadvantaged can make.
Description
It's the year 2707. Earth's natural resources have been exhausted by mankind. Battle rages between the soldiers of four leading Corporations: the Capitol, Bauhaus, Mishima and Imperial.
Mitch Hunter and Nathan Rooker, battle hardened Capitol soldiers, fight a desperate battle against a Bauhaus advance. When an errant shell destroys an ancient stone seal, they find themselves facing a new enemy: hideous necromutants, with boneblades that grow from their arms. Mitch barely manages to escape. Nathan does not.
The mutants multiply by millions and they destroy all before them. The Corporations' leader, Constantine, is about to abandon the planet and leave countless innocents to their desperate fate, when he is approached by Brother Samuel, leader of the Brotherhood, an ancient monastic order.
Samuel is the keeper of the Chronicles, a book that prophesies both the rise of the Mutants, and of the 'Deliverer' that will destroy them. Samuel believes he is that Deliverer destined to journey deep into the earth and destroy the source of the mutant scourge.
He manages to recruit Mitch, along with a handful of like-minded soldiers: Steiner, honor bound Bauhaus officer; sword wielding Severian; street fighter El Jesus; fearless beauty Duval; and stoic warrior Juba.
"Mutant Chronicle" follows Mitch and Samuel's mission to venture into the very heart of the darkness in an attempt to save the planet from marauding hordes of deathless mutants.
Description
I quite enjoyed Aluisio's critique of the film. I did not agree with him on all of his points, but most definitely with the Altman criticism. My problem with the film was the lack of "style" or commitment to a "look". It just missed. Here you have all these elements to capitalize on to help you illustrate the '80's in LA and you choose "Raybans" as the center piece. So-o-o-o many pairs of Raybans, that it became laughable. My other problem was the loss of one of the presumed major characters at the Beverly Hilton "wake"...he just vanished from the story after his crying fest amongst his nonchalant coked-up buddies on the deck over-looking the infamous pool, with its cabanas. I did enjoy the portrayal of the music scene and the infiltration of the British band on that scene and his dark, complex self-destructive character...the actor was great! It appeared to me that Mickey Rourke shot his portion of the film in one afternoon (probably a long one). I thought the young actors were there prepared to give to the script, but there was a definite lack of cohesive representation of this rich period in LA. Mr Thornton and Miss Basinger seemed to give effortless performances that were on the verge of being memorable but did not quite hit the mark. I think that this film would have been a lot better with more time put into it. It appeared that the film maker was rushed in his efforts. I found him to be such a pleasant person at the introduction at Sundance that I believe that he is a talent to look out for, but for goodness sake, give him the time to produce his art!
Click here to watch the full movie online
