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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.
