Film Blather Blog

Zero Day

2009-05-17T12:24:00.003-05:00

Zero Day (Ben Coccio, 2003) - B

One of the flurry of Columbine deconstructions released shortly after the tragedy; the thesis here is that armchair psychoanalysis of Harris and Klebold, labeling them angry goth outcasts and blaming violent video games and heavy metal music for stoking their rage, is embarrassingly facile and wrong. Obviously very incident-specific, and the rebuke to the media's treatment of Columbine is a little on the nose (we probably didn't need the scene of Andre and Calvin throwing their possessions in a bonfire to prevent their latter dissection, or the part where they angrily insist that there are no reasons, so don't look for any), but the effect is genuinely chilling -- and probably far closer to the "truth" than the conventional understanding (or lack thereof) of the Columbine perpetrators. The video diary gimmick doesn't quite work (there are some contrivances to justify why such-and-such is being recorded, as there usually are in movies like this), but Coccio pulls it off better than, say, the unjustly acclaimed My Suicide, which cheated left and right. He has a flair for effortless naturalism, too; casual conversations and momentary appearances by supporting players (parents; cousins; a girlfriend) ring totally true, as does much of Andre and Calvin's showboating for the camera. Their hip, knowing casualness (striking poses and calling themselves the "Army of Two") seems forced at first, but finally makes total sense; there are hints that they are motivated by petty revenge (bullying, being ignored, the like), but the movie never posits it as a "cause," and suggests that it may just be rationalization. Coccio speculates that they're really after transcendence and escape -- being a part of something awful and grand -- but ultimately doesn't insist on any interpretation. Obvious counterpoint is Gus Van Sant's Elephant; Zero Day is less artful, but more convincing.

Lymelife

2009-05-08T01:37:00.002-05:00

Lymelife (Derick Martini, 2009) - C+

A shame that this doesn't really go anywhere interesting, because it has a jittery, nervous energy I enjoyed, and some unhinged moments that set it apart from your typical suburban malaise dramedy, at least for a while. Best part is the central family dynamic -- a hurricane of discontent, with rare rays of love and affection peeking through the thunderheads. But the Alec Baldwin character is more of a concept ("self-absorbed obsessive status-seeker") than a human being, some of the coming-of-age stuff is a standard-issue drag, the crazy Timothy Hutton thing is a bust, and the last act loses urgency despite Martini's best efforts. Probably still worth it for some gripping stretches and nice performances, including a beautifully layered one from Jill Hennessy, and a wired, volatile one from Kieran Culkin, who really should work more. Also, the trailer for this movie gives away far too much.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

2009-04-12T01:31:00.004-05:00

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2009) - C+

Mystified by the contempt for this perfectly watchable adaptation. Familiar story -- a kid breaks free from his tyrannical gangster father during the Summer That Changed Everything -- is told with feeling; the key is that Art not only asserts his independence but sheds his paralyzing indifference (the first dinner conversation with dad and the subsequent encounter with Momo are key), which is a more engaging and less clichéd journey. I don't think the love triangle has the depth that Thurber would like (all the talk about "saving" Cleveland is idle, really, except in the immediate sense of saving him from thugs), and the action climax is stupid, but the movie is likably earnest and admirable in its refusal to blow things out of proportion (I'm not sure I've ever seen a mainstream film treat an ostensibly straight character's bisexual experimentation so matter-of-factly). And Peter Sarsgaard is typically awesome. Crumbles in the last 15 minutes, which are a tone-deaf trainwreck, but the whole is far better than the weirdly dire reviews suggest.

The Edge of Love

2009-04-10T23:14:00.003-05:00

The Edge of Love (John Maybury, 2009) C-

Um. I'm not even sure what the thesis is here, if any, other than that Dylan Thomas was an insufferable lout. Certainly it doesn't work as a character piece, consisting as it does of unpleasant people doing boring things; the basic set-up is a pouty romantic and a needy pragmatist squabbling half-heartedly over a self-centered void, which sure isn't my idea of a good time. Cillian Murphy drops in occasionally and livens things up just by virtue of being an interesting actor, unlike the other three, but this is just brain-stabbingly dour stuff -- who could possibly have been passionate about this portrait of a pretentious starving artist and his two miserable groupies? There's one interesting moment early, when a tender love scene starts to literally fragment to foreshadow the rest of the plot, while Angelo Badalamenti's typically gorgeous score tenderly caresses us, but other than that, yeesh.

The Great Buck Howard

2009-04-06T00:30:00.002-05:00

The Great Buck Howard (Sean McGinly, 2009) - C+

Tepid showbiz comedy, ambling along predictably without any edge, suspense, momentum, or big laughs. It's leavened quite a bit by John Malkovich's totally singular weirdness (his Shatner-esque rendition of "What the World Needs Now" is pretty priceless) and a few other truly bizarre moments (e.g. George Takei's Regis and Kelly appearance), but mostly it just feels familiar, with a trite follow-your-dreams message that doesn't belong anywhere near a creation as perverse as Buck Howard himself. I have to say though that Tom Hanks' hopeful career brainstorming for his wayward son sounded eerily familiar to me personally. "Wait, get this: entertainment law!"

Adventureland

2009-04-05T00:21:00.003-05:00

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009) - B

Kristen Stewart's a revelation here, inhabiting a moody, genuinely troubled, perhaps depressed character in the middle of a goofy coming-of-ager, and doing it with confidence and poise instead of hysterics. Pairing her with Jesse Eisenberg in starring roles is a bold choice that pays off in spades: the script mostly just calls for a nerdy-virgin-romances-experienced-girl cliche, but Stewart's mesmerizing anger and vulnerability and Eisenberg's obvious intelligence elevate it. Movie's sincere, sweet, and often genuinely funny, though it's better in its looser, free-form moments than when the plot takes over (the whole "Lisa P" bit could probably have been tossed). Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig seem out of place, and the ending's a bit misjudged (the credits should have rolled 5 minutes earlier), but these are quibbles; the movie's smart and interesting basically the whole way through. It seems to have collapsed at the box-office, which is a shame and kind of inexplicable. It's worth your money.

Sunshine Cleaning

2009-03-31T01:52:00.005-05:00

Sunshine Cleaning (Christine Jeffs, 2009) - C+

An unbearably adorable little kid who talks to the heavens on a CB radio; the old man and his rotting shrimp; Mary Ann Rajskub as crazy blood lady; one-armed Clifton Collins Jr.; "I recommend the pecan pie"; not to mention the entire crime-scene-clean-up-as-therapy conceit: yep, it's a real quirk-o-rama up in this bitch. And it's maudlin, too, with the big thematically convenient revelation mucking shit up at the one-hour mark. But my love for Amy Adams conquers all, or nearly all: she perfectly nails the former-star-cheerleader-with-moxie-and-grit-but-low-self-esteem thing, and her insanely charismatic (yet, somehow, believably insecure) presence just about saves the film. A big step up for Christine Jeffs from the godawful Sylvia; moves at a good clip, with a screenplay that has a few big laughs and some nice subtleties in the earlier scenes (I particularly liked the way the movie lets us piece together the details of Adams' relationship with the Steve Zahn character). A little too immaculately cute for me, but certainly watchable.

Phoebe in Wonderland

2009-03-08T02:43:00.003-05:00

Phoebe in Wonderland (Daniel Barnz, 2009) - B

Massively self-sabotaging: making all the kids but Fanning and Colletti little horrors, and all the adults but the parents and Patricia Clarkson clueless caricatures was a huge miscalculation, giving the movie a rigged feel; the fantasy sequences add nothing, as the movie itself tacitly acknowledges; Felicity Huffman's big "I'm mad" speech is laughably theatrical, a quixotic piece of Oscar bait. But Phoebe in Wonderland is so unique and valuable that I was willing to forgive a lot: this is a singular portrayal of mental illness, sympathetic and accessible, but also difficult, uncompromising and uncondescending. The screenplay, meticulously constructed to reveal Phoebe's condition gradually, is partially to thank. But the bulk of the credit must go to Elle Fanning, who gives frankly the most astonishing child performance I've ever seen. I have no idea how it's even possible to get a performance like that out of a nine year-old girl. I was in tears through much of the movie, for all its flaws, so make of that what you will.

Taken

2009-02-07T13:32:00.003-05:00

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2009) - B+

Completely preposterous in the best possible way -- painted in broad strokes, but in ways that are clever and self-aware: the set-up is that Neeson quit the CIA to rebuild his relationship with his teenage daughter after neglecting it his entire career, and the way the movie establishes this is absurdly over the top, but made plausible by Neeson's humble performance and the screenplay's puppy-dog sincerity. (When Neeson proudly presents his daughter with a karaoke machine for her birthday only to be upstaged by her step dad trotting out a horse, I laughed like a hyena, most likely frightening everyone else in the audience.) It's an off-kilter but believable emotional core that makes the rest of the film truly suspenseful even when it's hilariously unlikely. (Neeson's trick of identifying the villain by voice would have been a dealbreaker in nearly every other movie.) It helps, too, that the movie busts out an occasional moody, sinister flourish, like the climactic auction. Just outstanding entertainment, and rare.

While the City Sleeps

2009-01-29T03:01:00.002-05:00

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956) - B-

As noir it's convoluted and all over the place; as a treatise on the downfall of good old-fashioned public-interest newspaper reporting in favor of profit-seeking, frenzied competition, and (most heretically) other news formats it's as best charmingly quaint. Would have been stronger if it were more credible; I just didn't buy that Andrews would set his fiance up as bait without even telling her, for example, or how the villain is ultimately caught; and John Barrymore Jr. is simply ridiculous as the serial killer. All of this is, however, very entertaining and at times hilarious, revealing a droll, deadpan sense of humor I didn't know Fritz Lang possessed; look out for a wonderfully unctuous performance by Vincent Price as an unscrupulous newspaper heir.

Scandal Sheet; Notorious

2009-01-25T04:00:00.001-05:00

Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952) - B+

A fantastically entertaining "newspaper noir" -- my first film at Noir City 2009, which has a newspaper theme this year. The central irony -- shameless tabloid journalist kills a woman and watches as his sensationalist rag brings about his own downfall -- is probably a bit too immaculate for me, especially with that groaner of a final shot, but it plays out in a way that's sly, suspenseful, and often hilarious. Subtly stylized, taking place mostly in an insular little four-character universe, with a wonderful contrast between Broderick Crawford's hard-bitten editor and John Derek's ultra-suave reporter; has moments of brilliant wit (the drunk who starts singing loudly as Henry O'Neill's Charlie Barnes attempts to make an important phone call; "a very rare item, a picture of a dame with her mouth shut") and striking beauty (the Hudson river peering out from the end of an alley as the villain does a dastardly deed). Just a straightforward, satisfying, non-guilty pleasure.

Notorious (George Tillman, Jr., 2009) - C+

Not very good at all, but it sort of won me over. First of all there are some towering performances: Jamal Woolard's perfectly convincing title turn, for one, but also Naturi Naughton, dead-on as Lil' Kim, and the incredible Anthony Mackie as Tupac; even the normally bland Derek Luke finds his groove as Puffy. Second, I liked the film's vision of these guys as basically good-hearted but tragically immature, not sufficiently weaned from the streets to handle the money and the power that comes their way; only Puffy, the consummate businessman, had his head on straight, and look at him now. Ultimately it's needlessly sappy and overstated, with atrocious use of voiceover and a style that tries to be propulsive but never finds a rhythm. Might be worth a matinee.

My Bloody Valentine; Ballast

2009-01-17T14:31:00.002-05:00

My Bloody Valentine (Patrick Lussier, 2009) [3-D] - B-

Never thought "charming" would be the best word to describe My Bloody Valentine 3-D, but here we are. Pretty much knew I would enjoy it when I saw the first shot: a blaring (and three-dimensional!) newspaper headline reading "BURIED ALIVE!" -- precisely the sort of silly grand gesture that makes me sit up and pay attention. What follows is an exuberant throwback to slasher flicks of old, set in a small mining town where everyone knows one another, with a goofy soap opera storyline stringing together the pickax impalements. Not remotely scary, ending is a not-terribly-clever cheat, and the 3-D doesn't really work (the background is flat and the foreground looms, which is the worst possible use of the technology; there's a scene where someone gets impaled through the head from the back, and it looks like the pole goes at a 45-degree angle), but I was willing to forgive all that for the sake of (for example) a scene where the female lead attacks the masked killer with frozen poultry.

Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2008) - B-

Went back and forth on the grade, but ultimately I think this is a bit affected, with Hammer's determination to disrupt conventional storytelling and screenwriting rhythms having the effect of making the characters (and the film) weirdly catatonic (and stupid: did those thugs pull over the woman and her son just to punch them in the face? I thought they'd at least take the car). It is otherwise an engaging, bleak, hopeful slice-of-life, three ordinary characters in a plausibly unremarkable situation, arriving at a simple, unobtrusive we-can-help-each-other message.

Charly

2009-01-14T03:53:00.003-05:00

Charly (Ralph Nelson, 1968) - C+

So there I was, admiring the movie's straightforward, unadorned feel -- which, oddly enough, makes Cliff Robertson in "full retard" mode a less grating presence by not drawing attention to it -- when it went off the deep end on me. I suppose the stylistic fireworks that ultimately dominate were necessary to obfuscate the fact that the movie doesn't really have time to tell this story properly. The last 40 minutes are a mad dash to the finish, with the central romance essentially confined to a brief abstract montage, the big diatribe against modernity coming out of nowhere, and the nightmarish (and frankly ridiculous) fantasy "chase" sequence evaporating as abruptly as it begins. The ending does work, and the whole thing can be read as a metaphor for humanity in general (the human species emerges from the ooze and gets to the point where it can consider its own consciousness and intelligence, only its technological progress threatens to send it back to the stone age), but this called for a more patient, less emphatic approach.

Bride Wars

2009-01-14T01:43:00.003-05:00

Gonna make an honest effort to get back into posting capsules here regularly. God help me.

Bride Wars (Gary Winick, 2009) - C

30 minutes in: "I actually kind of like this." 60 minutes in: "Uhhhhh..." 80 minutes: "Fuuuuuuuuuuuck." Offers some nice moments, which is more than I ever expect from these utilitarian rom-coms, e.g. Chris Pratt's proposal to Hathaway, with him explaining why he decided to propose on their couch rather than somewhere more glamorous; the lovely, fleeting pay-off to Hathaway's fretting about wearing her mom's wedding dress. And much of the cast is so charming that the movie's never too painful, although when I realized why Bryan Greenberg was in the movie despite having like seven minutes of screentime I kind of wanted to walk out (it might be the clearest illustration of the Law of Economy of Characters that I've ever seen). The movie gets clumsier and (even) less interesting as the central rivalry intensifies, and the resolution is just embarrassingly shoddy, desperate as it is to leave everything neat and squeaky clean. Not remotely worthwhile, but I've seen worse, and Kate Hudson as a Ropes & Gray "associate" is kind of a hoot.

The I Inside

2008-12-04T16:49:00.003-05:00

The I Inside (Roland Suso Richter) - D-

I haven't the slightest idea why this was in my Netflix queue. Maybe the freaky-time-traveling-mystery aspect drew me. Anyway, it's a complete embarrassment, without a single moment that doesn't ring glaringly false. This is the kind of movie that finds it necessary to do a Chinese zoom on an exit sign on a wall before its protagonist bolts for the door. Also the kind of movie that's fond of summarizing the preceding five minutes by having a character start sentences with "Let me get this straight: ..." Could have been interesting despite the stupid script had Richter established the hospital, where 95% of the action takes place and which becomes akin to a prison for the main character, as a distinctively spooky cinematic place, but it's just drab and ugly. As for the ending: I -- and probably you -- have seen this precise twist at least three times before. Maybe more.

The Dead Zone; Australia

2008-11-30T18:00:00.003-05:00

The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) - B+

Unlike Naked Lunch, below, there is nothing "Cronenbergian" at all about the subject matter here, but you can still feel the man's influence in the film's patience and intelligence (as well as the sudden appearance of matter-of-fact gruesomeness). Cronenberg's smart enough, for example, to let the movie develop without much of a plot, with a character arc instead of a story arc at its center; the resulting episodic feel makes it feel bigger, eerier (the application of Johnny's gifts ranges from the small and personal to the apocalyptic), and makes Johnny's journey from bitterness to resignation to embrace feel like precisely that: a journey. This is also one of the rare Stephen King movies to fully adopt the author's famous Maine setting, the haunting snowy backdrops perfectly complementing the slow-burn mood set by Cronenberg (though this isn't a "cold" movie -- there's a lot of green in the palette). And it's one of the few times Christopher Walken has gotten to be a straightforward protagonist. You may or may not be surprised to discover that he's a rather compelling leading man.

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) - C-

But for a moderately rousing 30-minute stretch halfway through, this would be enough to drive a man to drink, or possibly suicide. Three movies: a sweeping love story, a pseudohistorical drama about the Australian aboriginal "stolen generations" (see Rabbit-Proof Fence), and a standard-issue western with plucky cattle ranchers taking on a devious monopolist (the only part that remotely works). Really dire for the first 45 minutes or so, with Luhrmann's frantic, smirking, glaringly artificial style thoughtlessly plunked down in the middle of an Australian desert (the filmmaker, used to his elaborate soundstages, has no clue what to do with the vast barren expanses of his chosen setting); becomes more tolerable when it settles into a hard-to-resist underdog movie rhythm; goes to hell in the ugly, war-torn third act. Patronizing, saccharine, impossibly boring.

Naked Lunch; Bolt

2008-11-27T16:52:00.005-05:00

Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991) - B-

This sort of pure metaphor isn't really my thing, but I do admire the fact that Cronenberg at least made an attempt to give it a somewhat coherent literal dimension. Essential for fans of the filmmaker since audio-visually it's probably the most Cronenbergian Cronenberg film ever, with characters constantly caressing fleshy typewriters and sucking addictive gooey liquids out of tubes protruding from the heads of buglike alien creatures. So there's that. Also: Peter Weller circa 1991 = James Woods + Daniel Craig.

Bolt (Byron Howard & Chris Williams, 2008) - C

You know, movies have been sending talking dogs and cats on cross-country adventures since time immemorial. Was it really necessary to contrive such a labored set-up to do so here? There's this TV show about a superhero dog, you see, but the dog actor thinks it's all real, and the producers of the show go to ridiculous lengths to maintain this impression, but then the producers decide that it's too predictable for the dog to save the day every time, so they end an episode with the dog's owner and sidekick captured by the show's villain, only the dog thinks it's all real, you see, and then the dog gets trapped in a box and shipped across the country, and now has to find his way back to his owner, who he thinks is in grave danger, but he thinks he has superpowers, you see... Complicated but largely charmless, and not very funny; the delusional hero thing is hard to pull off, and the movie doesn't make it work. I must say though that this is the best, most immersive use of 3-D that I've ever seen.

Quantum of Solace; Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

2008-11-19T17:12:00.002-05:00

Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008) - C

See here. Short version: If Bond films are going to be generic actioners, rather than trips to the familiar, idiosyncratic James Bond universe, they had better be good generic actioners. This one mostly sucks.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath, 2008) C

A smartalecky chatterbox of a movie that's essentially a rapid-fire kidflick cliche remix. Some appealing weirdness -- the first appearance of studly hippo Moto-Moto is priceless -- but not enough of its predecessor's visual wit and originality; making the central plot a parody of The Lion King may have seemed like a funny idea, but the result is that at every turn the film recalls one of the greatest animated features of all time. It looks fucking amazing on IMAX though.

Synecdoche, New York

2008-11-16T14:50:00.004-05:00

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008) - C

Ho hum, another recursive autocritique from Charlie Kaufman, who is becoming like the rappers who rap almost entirely about their rapping. Kaufman is the successful but dissatisfied artist, endlessly searching for truth but being tripped up by artistic pretense and the limitations of his medium; ideas keep flowing but not adding up to anything; the rest of his life melds with his art. Starts out as a depressing absurdist comedy and turns into a disturbing, disorienting fever dream -- much like the way Kaufman sees his own life, I'm sure, or else just the Plight of the Artist. It would take a second viewing for me to really unpack this, but that seems unlikely; just because the movie comments on its self-indulgence doesn't make it any less self-indulgent. Kaufman seems to have withdrawn, his cleverness now focused toward pet themes rather than storytelling, and the opaqueness becomes increasingly irritating as we realize that he's not going to give us anything to latch onto here. Some amiably goofy gags (the house that's constantly on fire; Caden's present to his daughter), but probably not worth your time; depends on how much you're willing to humor Kaufman.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

2008-11-13T03:14:00.002-05:00

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Mark Herman, 2008) - B

Even before the awful ending, I already thought this was one of the most horrifying movies about the Holocaust I've ever seen -- which is perverse, since it is largely about a German boy who seems never to be in any real danger. But his instinctive compassion and lack of comprehension is deeply moving, and watching the evil around him chip away at it is like being repeatedly punched in the gut. The movie is entirely unambitious and sometimes overwrought, but there's force in its simplicity: it made me physically ill. To some degree its formal banality might actually work to its advantage, since the contrast between its bland production values and its unflinching depiction of atrocity is jarring. On the other hand, the cruel, contrived irony of the last ten minutes is too much -- I was appropriately shocked that the movie Went There, but I didn't buy that it would happen like that, and it felt like the film was going out of its way to teach some of its characters a lesson. Still pretty powerful, and you haven't seen depressing until you've seen The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Ladder 49

2008-11-12T03:24:00.004-05:00

Ladder 49 (Jay Russell, 2004) - C-

Wow -- I guess this can only be seen as an immediate post-9/11 artifact, when the (understandable and right) national reverence of firefighters would prompt this sort of dully worshipful, rudimentary love letter to the profession. Might have been (more) interesting had it tried to answer why people are driven to this extraordinarily dangerous job despite its toll on life and family, but it seems content with repeating that "saving people is worth it," which seems a tad reductive as insight into human motivation (and not even obviously true when "it" is a widow and several fatherless children). Formally, the film insists on the most boring version of Hollywood gloss, apt to undercut perfectly decent scenes by blaring a country song on the soundtrack, and prone to arty non sequiturs like segueing from a baptism to a water dripping on a trapped firefighter's forehead. There's a lot of firefighting action, but it's too expensive: the fancy crane shots and the lovingly observed explosions kill all immediacy, making the experience akin to watching theme park special effects. Some minor pleasures in the performances -- Phoenix is awfully good at these genial dullard roles, and it's fun to see Travolta as just a regular guy for once -- but I don't think it's possible to watch this in 2008 and not ask "why".

City of Ember

2008-10-19T14:16:00.004-05:00

City of Ember (Gil Kenan, 2008) - B

Infuriating how people don't know a good thing when they see one. This is basically Lions for Lambs without the lecturing -- a movie about the immorality of "minding your own business" in the midst of a global crisis, an eloquent stance against complacency and blind faith. Thematically ambitious and working on several levels: the protagonists run into resistance that isn't political or even pragmatic but rather "it's not my job"; at the same time, the City at large is convinced that it is destined to thrive because it is "the only beacon of light in the darkness" -- shining city on a hill, anyone? Gil Kenan, who I am convinced is or will soon become a Burton-like visionary, folds all of this into a lovely fantasy adventure, fluid and immersive -- and also bold and abrupt when it needs to be, e.g. the opening shot and sequence. Loses it a teensy bit in the climax, which is a protracted and starts to look a bit chintzy (also, I'm still not sure what to make of Tim Robbins' bottle opener), but so the hell what. Hugely underrated.

catch-up

2008-10-12T18:56:00.008-05:00

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (Robert Wiede, 2008) - B-

Worth seeing for a bunch of disconnected reasons: a) Simon Pegg's hilarious physicality; b) the occasional bit of deadpan weirdness that had me rolling ("there are seven rooms"); c) dead-on supporting turns by Danny Huston, Max Minghella, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges... even Kirsten Dunst, allowed to let loose a bit in an R-rated context, is more than just her usual adorable self. But Pegg's transformation from obnoxious boor to lovable scamp is less than convincing, and the whole romantic plot is a bit uneasy. Very funny though.

Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) - B-

Okay, so the whole virus-that-makes-people-bite-one-another thing is clearly played, and this doesn't have the political subtext or technical virtuosity of, say, 28 Weeks Later to make up for it. The first-person stunt is also rapidly approaching "played" status, and creates myriad logistical problems. All that said, Quarantine provides enough decent visceral thrills for me to recommend it to horror junkies. Goes to hell in the last act, which is more hysterical than scary and resorts to infuriating exposition-by-newspaper-clipping, but even that doesn't kill the thing.

Eden Log (Franck Vestiel, 2008) - C

I like the story (i.e. what we get in the occasional bursts of exposition) and it's too bad that the movie constructed around it is so murky and boring. I've read the video game interpretation -- nearly-silent character wanders through levels dodging bad guys on his way to a big finale -- but it doesn't make the film any better, I'm afraid. Final shot verges on self-parody.

Blindness

2008-10-04T16:17:00.002-05:00

Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008) - C-

This has to be the most jury-rigged Lord of the Flies scenario ever devised. The government locks a bunch of newly blind people in a prison, with little food, no assistance, no sanitation, no communication with the outside world, and they descend into chaos and disorder? No kidding. And how, exactly, do things go downhill? Well, half of the quarantined suddenly become evil. Really? That's the great insight into human nature? By the time it turned out that the illness had just come to teach everyone a lesson -- LIVE AS A FAMILY, DAMN YOU! DON'T STEAL CARS! -- I was long past taking anything seriously. The interesting question that the movie doesn't remotely explore is why the fictional government react the way it does: just human selfishness? Or something else?

Miracle at St. Anna

2008-09-28T02:26:00.003-05:00

Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008) - C-

No one runs hot and cold quite like Spike Lee. He can still make a good movie (Inside Man), or even a great one (25th Hour), but the time when he was able to tackle race head-on with a measure of nuance, restraint and moral complexity seems to have passed. This is sledgehammer stuff, preachy and obvious (black soldiers in World War II were mistreated and unappreciated, the end); he did seem to realize that he couldn't fill nearly three hours with outrage about this topic, so there's a whole bunch of general war movie stuff too, which is largely unremarkable. A few recognizable Spike Lee moments (most notably the montage involving the sultry German broadcaster trying to tempt black soldiers to lay down their weapons), and a few tense stretches, but mostly it's really freakin' tedious. Features Michael Ealy in one of the year's most irritating performances; on the other hand, having seen this and the surprisingly strong The Express, I'm very impressed with Omar Benson Miller.

The French Connection

2008-09-28T02:21:00.002-05:00

The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) - A-

The quibble that knocked the grade down a notch for me: what self-respecting foreign drug dealer thinks that a good way to get the cops off your back is to get on the roof of a building with a rifle and try to snipe one of them down? Obviously a great procedural though, and when was the last time you saw cop characters who genuinely love their work -- live for it -- beating up junkies, tailing perps, chasing elevated trains, the works. Worth watching just for the little dance Doyle and Russo do after their wire comes through. The ending knocks everyone down a peg, of course, including us, but part of the reason it works so well is that the nitty-gritty of the police work is so exhilarating to begin with.

Righteous Kill

2008-09-24T10:52:00.003-05:00

Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008) - D-

UNGGGGH! BLECH! This is the last Jon Avnet film I'll be watching. Such a narrative debacle that I can barely describe it; engages in whopping misdirection that makes everything before the "surprise" ending boring and suspense-free, and everything after it (and by extension before it) nonsensical. Someone please explain to me why the villain sits the hero down and has him make that recording, given what he does moments after? And what exactly was he trying to accomplish by beating up Carla Gugino? Ugly and poorly edited to boot, and Pacino becomes almost a caricature of himself. Astonishing that he and De Niro can't find better work than this, though I watched this right after seeing De Niro in Barry Levinson's relatively pleasurable What Just Happened, so who knows.

Hamlet 2

2008-09-18T11:24:00.002-05:00

Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming, 2008) - B

Kept me on my toes for 90 minutes with an off-kilter style I could never quite pin down. Obviously intended as a parody of the Inspirational Teacher Movie, about a wacky theater instructor who bands together a bunch of (mostly gangsta) misfits and saves drama by putting on a show. But as parody, it steers a constantly intriguing middle-ground: Coogan's Dana Marschz (the "z" is NOT silent) is manifestly insane, but only some people seem to know that (it's never quite clear if his wife, played by a hilariously out of it Catherine Keener, is one of them); the movie launches a direct attack on some of the genre cliches (e.g. the parents who pull their kid out of drama class because he lives in a rough world where drama is useless) but takes others seriously. Not a model of tonal consistency, to be sure, but a) it's very funny, and b) it's actually kind of challenging if you're engaging with the film. Elizabeth Shue: best self-effacing cameo since John Malkovich.

The House Bunny

2008-09-16T00:17:00.004-05:00

The House Bunny (Fred Wolf, 2008) - D+

In theory I could have rolled with the amiably cartoonish tone (a villain named Mrs. Hagstrom; a brothel soup joke; "I've got to meet that fucking bird!"), but the thing is so sloppy that rolling proved hard. Why is it that movies about misfits who try to be popular but learn it's okay to be misfits always make the misfits horrid caricatures instead of the types of people it's actually okay to be? (See also Sydney White.) Here I guess the message is a bit different since the characters learn moderation -- being neither the abominations they were at the beginning of the film nor the bimbos the title Playmate tried to make them (you can be beautiful AND brainy, see?) -- but that doesn't make the movie any less aggressively dumb; what purpose is served by making the "loser sorority" consist of a trailer park stereotype, a girl with a full-body brace, etc.? And come on, guys: if you're going to treat the hundred bullshit conflicts you introduce (Scheming Playboy Bunny! Unmailed envelopes! Realization that the Zetas have become what they hated!) so perfunctorily, why even bother? There are enough laughs to make it bearable (Anna Faris is very funny, and I really liked one joke in the climax), but I got the sense that the film's supposedly endearing gee-whiz stupidity wasn't an affectation. And how absurd to even pretend that the adorable Emma Stone is an unattractive outcast.

Transsiberian; Boy A

2008-08-21T22:32:00.007-05:00

Transsiberian (Brad Anderson, 2008) - B+

Fortunate enough to see three fantastic movies in a row over the course of two days -- this, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (see last entry), and Boy A (below). The remarkable thing here is Anderson's flair for evocative bleakness, also on display in The Machinist. Everything constantly straddles the line between beauty and menace: Eduardo Noriega's good-natured drifter, Emily Mortimer's reformed bad girl (Mortimer is wonderful, by the way), but most of all the snowy, foreign desolation of the Siberian setting -- the heart of the film. Some of the plotting is a bit unlikely, and Anderson should have gone easy on the explanatory flashbacks to events we've already seen, but the plot is really just a function of the scenery, which is a moody, malevolent character all its own. A few amusing points: casting Woody Harrelson as a genial yokel, Ben Kingsley teaching Harrelson Russian pronunciation. But mostly scary and haunting; left me in a sad, unsettled funk. Anderson clearly cares more about mood and (sometimes inarticulable) emotion than about story, but he's so good I'm actually cool with that.

Boy A (John Crowley, 2008) - A-

Immensely powerful, and almost a masterpiece; the reason it's not is the overly schematic nature of the crucial subplot involving Mullan's son, with Crowley hellbent on forcing a thematic parallel to the A-story. (I kept wondering why the son was in the movie, and rolled my eyes when it became clear.) The rest is gold; a thoughtful, understated rumination on punishment, forgiveness, and the criminal justice system's (and the media's) insistence on letting juvenile convictions haunt people for the rest of their lives. Maybe the most impressive thing about it is that it doesn't pull any punches about the protagonist's crime -- he did what he did, and note that the movie provides the sexual abuse "excuse" to his psychopathic friend, but not to him. Garfield's performance is as awesome as everyone says, in a hugely difficult role. The last few minutes are a masterfully manipulative knock-out, bringing me to tears. One of the best films of the year; go see it immediately.

A bunch of stuff

2008-08-20T19:44:00.002-05:00

Mirrors (Alexandre Aja, 2008) - D+

Really, really bad -- really bad -- and I'm stunned, since I had come to think of Aja as the most artful of the "Splat Pack," a genre wizard with an eye for genuinely haunting imagery; a horror director who actually pays attention to stuff like shot composition and the color palette. Still looks good, I guess -- the Laurie Holden jawbreaker sequence is one-of-a-kind, and the (obvious) use of reflections can be striking, though the resulting set pieces are often more confusing than Aja, I think, intended. The problem is the screenplay, which is hideously clunky and lazy: every line of dialogue is expository or explanatory, and most plumb the depths of horror flick cliches ("You think I'm crazy, don't you?" "I don't know what to think!"); several crucial story points are conveyed via conveniently placed newspaper clippings (the protagonist actually receives a package full of them at one point); worst of all, the movie never figures out what it's supposed to be about. It's got two things going on simultaneously, as best I could figure out: some sort of vague demonic possession plot, and a just-as-vague alternate universe story; the movie clearly thinks it brings the two of them together, but, uh, it doesn't. Twist ending is laughable, presenting the least creative ever vision of a parallel universe.

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008) - B

This is excellent, though not really for the reasons everyone says. I was struck by its portrayal of the sort of passion that can spur extraordinary collaboration -- the most stirring moments in the film aren't Petit's (admittedly incredible) tightrope walking but the footage of him and his cronies frantically, gleefully working out the head-spinning details of their WTC coup. Amazing what driven, adventurous people can accomplish. Also a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of the divide between morality and the law, and the notion of doing something illegal but not "wicked or mean"; listen for the police officer's awed response to Petit's escapades after he worked to put a stop to them, and the "punishment" meted out by the DA. Not really all that inspiring as a Portrait of an Artist: Petit comes off as infectiously enthusiastic but also self-absorbed and kind of crazy, and too much time is given over to gushing, vapid talking heads, like the girlfriend. But the logistics are loads of fun, Nyman's score is beautiful, and the insights are surprising.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008) - B+

Woody Allen's more serious efforts this decade have all been about ambition in one form or another, and the contrast between the previous two, both thrillers about working-class strivers who get into trouble chasing dreams of wealth and comfort, and this one, about overprivileged Americans searching for other kinds of fulfillment, is fascinating. Allen is not, as some would have it, against commitment; rather, he's made a(nother) film about satisfaction, and the often self-destructive human tendency to grab for things beyond one's reach -- precisely the theme of Cassandra's Dream, and roughly of Match Point as well. And there's so much else that's interesting too, like the best performances of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz's careers, a remarkable discovery in Rebecca Hall (as the obligatory Woody stand-in), unexpectedly careful and lovely cinematography, and the droll voiceover that pointedly undercuts the film's woozy romanticism. On par with Match Point as the best Allen of the 00s.

Elegy (Isabel Coixet, 2008) - C+

Hoo boy. A touching if simple story defeated by unrestrained excess and shameless jerry-rigging. An aging playboy slowly discovers what he's been missing and learns love and companionship -- fine. But seriously, did he have to also be a world-renowned expert on hedonism (I am not making this up), just to drive the point home? Stuff like that. Still compelling for a while, exploring the paradox of how a man so devoted to commitment- and care-free living can simultaneously be so paranoid and jealous; for a while Ben Kingsley looks like he is less likely to kiss Penelope Cruz than devour her (which might be the point), but a character soon starts to emerge, and his gradual awakening is sweet. Then the ridiculously contrived, overwrought ending comes along and sinks the film -- the sort of cheap, out-of-the-blue, totally unearned stunt that can only come from the mind of a supremely arrogant screenwriter. I don't recall Coixet's My Life Without Me being this oppressive. Patricia Clarkson is still awesome.

2008-08-16T11:25:00.001-05:00

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) - B

I'm no Fellini aficionado, but this is an awful lot like 8 1/2, isn't it, with the same rambling quasi-narrative that goes off the meta-deep end in the last half hour? It's less compelling, I think -- possibly because I saw it second, but also because the Fellini/Mastroianni lover protagonist just isn't as interesting as the other movie's filmmaker/solipsist. Mastroianni weirdly goes the lovable puppy dog route, standing around looking all pouty and forlorn as he takes stock of his broken dreams, his pointless career, his empty womanizing, and the artifice that surrounds him. Some of the vignettes are pretty brilliant (I love the circus that develops around the rural Virgin Mary sighting), others just seem like showing off (the weird dungeon sequence is absurdly overstuffed); too many end on the same glibly ironic note, with Marcello calling or otherwise reconnecting with another of his women. The three hours feel more like two, and I'll keep watching Fellini, but 8 1/2 made me hope for something a bit stronger.

Platoon

2008-08-09T01:26:00.001-05:00

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) - B-

Hysterical in a very Oliver Stone sort of way, every shot filled with blood, angst and anger; the characters lament the corruption of the System ("and we're stuck in the middle sucking on it") when they're not surrendering to their bloodthirst, screaming "it's fucking beautiful!" while unloading on the NVA. Charlie Sheen seems a bit goofy here, though that may have been the point; Kevin Dillon is terrifying; Tom Berenger way over the top. Actually one of the better Stones (I'm not a big fan), though useful mostly for its admirable grasp of military logistics, and for making you ask (once again) what the fuck we were thinking fighting a war in the jungle. Features one of the laziest uses of voiceover in movie history.

Some Catch-Up

2008-08-04T18:29:00.000-05:00

Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008) - B

Catholicism is the villain, a monster capable of consuming entire families. Took me a while to realize this was where the movie was going -- I haven't read the Evelyn Waugh novel -- but then it all sort of came together. Before that I couldn't figure out if this was supposed to be a doomed love story (in which case it was an awfully languid, dispassionate one) or a Faulkneresque saga of an aristocratic clan's gradual downfall (in which case the dully good-natured protagonist was a meaningless distraction); in reality it's sort of a combination of the two, with religion as the unexpected focus, which turns out to make a lot more sense. Ben Whishaw remarkable; Matthew Goode a blank slate.

The Wackness (Jonathan Levine, 2008) - C+

Couldn't quite get behind this morose bit of 90s nostalgia, despite being intrigued by the notion of 90s nostalgia -- could this be the first avowed example of same? Too aggressive with the cultural signifiers, straining to shoehorn them in where they don't really fit, and the quirkiness seems forced; it's hard, from a screenwriter's perspective, to make a character like Ben Kingsley's "weird old guy" work, and Levine's not up to the challenge -- "weird old guy" is all he ever is. Josh Peck and Olivia Thirlby are winners, and the movie rose at least half a grade in its last five minutes. But were summers in New York City in the early 90s really this depressing?

Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) - B-

ABBA songs + Meryl Streep = entertainment. That's about all I have to say about this one. Stupid, laughable even, but the music is great, the director seems to have had a pulse, and the cheese factor and Pierce Brosnan's inability to sing a note are part of the charm. However, it's stupid to sing "Chiquitita" to someone not named Chiquitita.

Swing Vote (Joshua Michael Stern, 2008) - C-

First of all, dreadful as a character piece -- the swing voter is an insufferable, irredeemable dimwit, and there's nothing remotely charming (or human) about him. For a while, I thought it would be serviceable as political commentary, a statement on the way modern politics makes it impossible for anyone involved with it in any capacity to hold on to a shred of dignity and principle. But then it ends with a weird bit of ass-kissing, Costner suddenly telling both candidates how much he admires them and wishes he were more like them -- what? That's your ending? Talk about pulling your punches. Also not very funny, though Lane, Tucci, Grammer and Hopper are entertaining to watch, as usual.

Iron Man

2008-05-05T00:28:00.002-05:00

Iron Ban (Jon Favreau, 2008) - B+

Very good -- really. If I'm not creaming myself like some other folks, it's because the action never quite reaches Raimi levels of transcendence, and because the movie indulges in a few too many winks to the comic book fanboys that just play like enormous red herrings to the rest of us. (I gather that the Clark Gregg character is somehow significant to the Iron Man mythos, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about or why he kept showing up.) At its best, though, it's actually quite moving: if Spider-Man and its sequels have been about heroism and responsibility, Iron Man is about conscience, and holding on to it even if the System would have you throw it in a ditch. Downey's ceaseless sarcasm masks a touching fragility, and the screenplay gives the protagonist time to bloom -- his conversion from cynical arms dealer to justice-seeker is about as convincing as superhero character development gets. And I'm immensely grateful for the ending, which is note-perfect and brilliantly ties together the movie's theme while setting up a sequel. Well-played.

The Band's Visit

2008-03-05T00:59:00.002-05:00

The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin, 2008) - C

So deliberately understated that it's almost an affectation. Lots of pained silences and awkwardness played for laughs, pushing hard on how out-of-place these Egyptians feel in Israel's version of Podunk, Ohio, though of course the Israelis have all the same problems as the Arabs and maybe they can all help each other because we're all human, etc. Draws the obvious parallels (uptight colonel's son committed suicide because dad was too hard on him; cue scene where the colonel shares a tender, understanding moment with the wild, insubordinate young recruit whom he had previously threatened with firing) and never fails to make metaphors explicit (the speech about how the clarinet player's unfinished concerto = life is really rather shameless), but there's no real insight; everything's surface-level and aggressively wistful. Miscalculates weirdly in spots -- Khaled is supposed to be charming, but he's actually creepy; the scene where he coaches a hapless Israeli kid on how to flirt is more performance art than narrative cinema -- and can't even create a sense of place: it places so much emphasis on what a downscale suburban hellhole Bet Hatikvah is, but gives us no feel for it whatsoever. Couple of strong performances, and the clean, spare compositions look nice (especially in the first half-hour), but this is a pretty bland, stereotypically "arthouse" piece of business.

Storyville

2008-03-02T13:54:00.002-05:00

Storyville (Mark Frost, 1992) - C+

Came to this due to Twin Peaks-related loyalty to Mark Frost, and for a while dug it as a Twin Peaks fan: Frost learned a lot from David Lynch, giving his version of New Orleans an airtight and totally singular sense of place, and sustaining a tone of subtle, something-is-wrong-but-it's-not-clear-what creepiness (the ambient noise and constant whooshing of ceiling fans on the soundtrack helps). When a mysterious Asian woman lures an old-money political candidate into a darkened Aikido studio for some steamy hot tub sex, I was gleefully on board. When the plot got going and the movie turned into a sub-Grisham courtroom melodrama, complete with a climactic shoot-out, I jumped off. Fun for setting and mood, but any number of movies have done this sort of dark-family-secrets-down-south thing better.

chills

2008-02-19T22:44:00.003-05:00

Apropos of nothing except a current obsession, here is a pretty new video for one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. Enjoy!

An mp3 of the song is here.

Step Up 2

2008-02-18T19:26:00.004-05:00

Step Up 2: The Streets (Jon M. Chu, 2008) - C+

Graceful people piss me off, and there are dozens of them here, exhibiting a level of physical coordination that human beings simply should not possess. The filmmaking is not nearly so prodigious; in fact, when it comes to dialogue and plotting, it's dumb as a rock. But this in-name-only sequel is well-paced, energetic, and shockingly easy to watch (it's also slightly racist, but whatever). It's smart enough to lean heavily on the dance sequences to the point of essentially becoming a revue, which turns out to be fine because the dancing is legitimately spectacular -- distinctive, entertaining, and really fucking impressive. The semblance of a story stringing the dance sequences together is predictably turgid, but less so than the first film's; I liked how no one wasted screen time agonizing over the inevitable romance, and the movie wisely never lets the characters keep talking for too long. Performances range from sweet (Brianna Evigan) to bland (Robert Hoffman) to apoplectic (Adam G. Sevani), but everyone can dance, and everyone does, a lot. I almost wrote this one off as skippable; I'm glad I didn't.

Why?

2008-02-14T00:17:00.003-05:00

Why are the people in this movie speaking English with vaguely Eastern-European accents? Why? If they're not going to speak Russian, can't they just speak English? Are we all retarded?

The Eye

2008-02-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

The Eye (David Moreau & Xavier Palud, 2008) - C-

Moreau & Palud are clearly most comfortable with the mode of horror on display in the first half of the film, basically amounting to mysterious blurry figures appearing in the corneal transplant patient's nascent field of vision; this is much the same territory they explored in Them, their delightfully abstract debut. They also have a knack for creepy throwaway moments that suggests a strong preference for low-key, low-budget horror (spoiler warning): Alba suddenly asking "who's that" when shown a picture of herself (a good hour into the film); a stranger sensing Alba's connection to the spirit world and pleading, "that's my Tommy, isn't it?" just before the elevator doors close on her and the ghost of her son standing behind her. But more conventional set pieces are a no go, since Palud and Moreau are either disinterested in the big scares or just inept. Among other things, they use blatant visual cheats, e.g.: we see the protagonist in the foreground and something menacing/unnatural in the background; as the camera pans and the background object passes behind Alba, it disappears! A typical device, but for the fact that Alba is looking away from the camera and at the object the entire time, so that the way the film would have it, the object disappears before her very eyes. Normally when this tactic is used, the character would walk past a post, for example, and the object would vanish behind it, disappearing for her and for us simultaneously. The Eye ignores her perspective, and the result is just bizarre; this happens a couple of times. The movie also gets dumber as it gets less subtle, with a climax that furiously pitches boring exposition and a denoument that simply makes no sense. Bottom line: talented but disengaged filmmakers barely make a dent in a useless screenplay. Alba's presence has predictable effects.

The Air I Breathe

2008-02-01T14:40:00.000-05:00

The Air I Breathe (Jieho Lee, 2008) - F

New rule: Just because you shoehorn the line "there's no such thing as a coincidence" into your screenplay does not mean your movie will remain watchable if you then proceed to ignore all dictates of logic and decorum.

Teeth

2008-01-22T23:41:00.000-05:00

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2008) - C

Tries to do two things with the vagina dentata concept: construct an allegory about a young woman learning to harness the power of her sexuality, and imply that the abstinence movement, such as it is, is grounded in a subconscious fear of sex. But the subtext is so obvious it's barely subtext, and the movie is overbearingly sarcastic and smug; Lichtenstein prefers to get laughs at the expense of his protagonist instead of taking her twisted psychology seriously, but his screenplay isn't that funny and Dawn is never convincing. Every guy she encounters is detestable in predictable ways (uber-Christian crush turns out to be a rapist; nerdy second choice a date rapist; gynecologist a pervert; don't even ask about the random guy who gives her a ride), and they all get their comeuppance in exactly the way you'd think, without question or much suspense. Not much of a horror movie -- Lichtenstein turns up the gore in the second half, but in an annoyingly self-satisfied way, trying hard to elicit horrified laugh-groans from the audience by (e.g.) lingering on a dog as it considers a severed penis (one of many in the film), picks it up, then spits half of it back out. (Eew. Why?) Everyone who's seen Teeth seems to be as enamored of its premise as Lichtenstein is, but I'm not buying. This is a huge, largely artless disappointment.

Love and Death

2008-01-09T00:17:00.000-05:00

Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975) - A

Not sure I've ever seen a movie that takes so much joy in absurdity, really exemplified by the closing shot of Allen and the Grim Reaper jigging across the screen. Self-serious 19th Century Russian lit is vulnerable to the introduction of anything remotely modern, and Allen's sarcastic, hyperactive schlub is the perfect poison, dismantling the genre by introducing 20th Century neuroses (thereby also rebuffing, it seems to me, the view that Dostoyevsky et al. cannot be criticized except from the (necessarily imaginary) perspective of their contemporaries). Everything hits, from the straight-up Airplane!-style silliness ("No, YOU are Don Francisco's sister") to the often non sequitur wordplay ("Are you scared of dying?" "Scared is the wrong word. I'm frightened of it." "Interesting distinction.") to the bits that play more like Woody stand-up. Not a dull minute; endlessly energetic and pretty much perfect.

Silver Linings to the Strike

2008-01-08T13:33:00.001-05:00

The obvious one, of course, is the cancellation of the Golden Globes, a.k.a. the gay second game of the Stanley Cup Finals. But one that would have flown under my radar had I not scanned Entertainment Weekly's terrible website this morning is that the only reality show I've ever enjoyed is coming back, baby.

As to the first point -- the "suck it, HFPA" point -- check out this fascinating Variety article on the collapse of the efforts to salvage the "ceremony." If nothing else, it makes it clear why the Globes are such a scam -- the last thing they were trying to save was the parties.

The Butterfly Effect

2008-01-05T15:36:00.000-05:00

The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) - B+ [director's cut]

Fun to watch this again; everyone wrote it off as "goofy" three years ago, but I think people were actually responding to its brazenness, the extent to which it was willing to follow its premise to some genuinely (and perhaps incongruously) dark and unexpected places. Some of the small details are actually pretty silly (Evan's disturbing second-grade drawing looks like the work of a young Picasso; Kaylie's smooching her boyfriend just after a despondent and armless (!) Evan confesses his undying love seems a bit insensitive; Ashton Kuthcer is as intractable a presence as ever; etc., etc.) and there are serious metaphysical problems with the way the film plays out its time travel conceit (Why, aside from storytelling convenience, do all of the memories of the "newly created" Evan get "loaded" into the version of Evan that we've been following? Wouldn't his life have just continued uninterrupted all those years? The movie seems to assume that he has some sort of primary soul and that everything else is filler, which is a hell of an assumption.), but the movie's made with undeniable skill and a lot of guts; the "blackouts," in particular, are a terrific suspense device that's actually given some substance later on, and the way the script fills in the holes is neat, if not always perfectly logical. The new ending would have played into the hands of those who called the film goofy, but it packs a punch if you're willing to play along. I liked it then and I like it now.

I drink your milkshake

2008-01-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

In an uncharacteristically half-assed rhetorical flourish, Mike D'Angelo claims that There Will Be Blood involves a "titanic battle between the worldly and the spiritual." This struck me as weirdly wrong-headed, since the spiritual never enters PT Anderson's masterpiece. It's clear to me that Anderson views Daniel and Eli as competing enterprises -- both surrender what principles they had (or claim to have had) for material gain, and then, in the film's view of capitalism, one has to destroy (or "eat") the other (hence the prophecy of the title). It's not clear whether Eli is sincere or a charlatan, and I don't think Anderson really cares, but there's certainly nothing "spiritual" about Eli as far as the movie is concerned. He's competition.

There are nuances and layers aplenty to the film, but I think the bird's eye view of it is actually a bit simpler than a lot of people are claiming. I could be wrong.

Year-End

2007-12-31T02:05:00.000-05:00

My year-end feature, which includes my best and worst lists is now up here. For some reason there's currently a database error on the page, and I'm trying to fix it (the person who designed the site and is normally kind enough to help me with tech is on vacation; if you have any ideas please let me know), but the page should still display (give it a moment).

Let me know what you think.

As a bonus, here is my ballot for the nomination stage of the Online Film Critics Society awards:

BEST PICTURE
1. "There Will Be Blood"
2. "The Mist"
3. "3:10 to Yuma"
4. "Into the Wild"
5. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”
2. Andrew Dominik, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
3. Quentin Tarantino, "Grindhouse/Death Proof"
4. Cristian Mungiu, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
5. James Mangold, "3:10 to Yuma"

BEST ACTOR
1. Sam Riley, "Control"
2. Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"
3. Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Savages"
5. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, "The Lookout"

BEST ACTRESS
1. Laura Linney, "The Savages"
2. Jodie Foster, "The Brave One"
3. Anamaria Marinca, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
4. Keri Russell, "Waitress"
5. Ellen Page, "Juno"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Charlie Wilson's War"
2. Casey Affleck, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
3. Tom Wilkinson, "Michael Clayton"
4. Albert Finney, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"
5. Paul Dano, "There Will Be Blood"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Amy Ryan, "Gone Baby Gone"
2. Marcia Gay Harden, "The Mist"
3. Catherine Keener, "Into the Wild"
4. Imelda Staunton, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
5. Romola Garai, "Atonement"

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
1. "The Savages"
2. "Michael Clayton"
3. "Breach"
4. "The Lookout"
5. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
1. “There Will Be Blood”
2. "3:10 to Yuma"
3. "Charlie Wilson's War"
4. "Control"
5. "The Mist"

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
1. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
2. "Grindhouse (Death Proof)"
3. “There Will Be Blood”
4. "The Brave One"
5. "No Country for Old Men"

BEST EDITING
1. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
2. "No Country for Old Men"
3. “There Will Be Blood”
4. "Grindhouse (Death Proof)"
5. "Control"

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
1. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
2. “There Will Be Blood”
3. "Beowulf"
4. "Atonement"
5. "The Mist"

BEST DOCUMENTARY
1. "The Devil Came on Horseback"
2. "Lake of Fire"
3. "My Kid Could Paint That"
4. "God Grew Tired of Us"
5. "Billy the Kid"

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM (Non-English language)
1. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
2. "Vitus"
3. "The Host"
4. "Black Book"
5. "Them"

BEST ANIMATED FILM
1. "Ratatouille"
2. "The Simpsons Movie"
3. "Shrek the Third"
4. "Beowulf"
5. "Meet the Robinsons"

BREAKTHROUGH FILMMAKER
1. George Ratliff, "Joshua"
2. Tony Gilroy, "Michael Clayton"
3. Ben Affleck, "Gone Baby Gone"
4. Sarah Polley, "Away From Her"
5. Scott Frank, "The Lookout"

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMER
1. Sam Riley, "Control"
2. Michael Cera, "Superbad"
3. Zoe Bell, "Grindhouse/Death Proof"
4. Brian Dierker, "Into the Wild"
5. Nikki Blonsky, "Hairspray"

Birdman of Alcatraz

2007-12-29T17:02:00.000-05:00

Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer, 1962) - C

A dose of earnest goofiness from the usually hyper-self-aware Frankenheimer, both straight-up silly (an actor portrays the author of the book about Stroud and speaks directly to the camera; square-jawed Burt Lancaster as an unmitigated badass) and almost charmingly quaint (warden to prison guard after Stroud beats a fellow inmate to a pulp: "I don't give up on a man that easy!"). A relic in the sense that it wants to have a debate about prison rehabilitation -- should the goal be cultivating obedience or dignity and independent thought? -- that's simply not relevant anymore, given that we've given up on rehabilitation entirely. That part is still sort of compelling, but the movie is awfully long at two-and-a-half hours; Stroud's rectitude wears, his conflict with the petty warden is a cliché, and his relationship with his mother scales heights of absurdity. The Oscar noms for Lancaster and Telly Savalas are interesting, since their performances seem so exaggerated today.

The Walker

2007-12-29T13:12:00.000-05:00

The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007) - B

A film about what it's like to have status and nothing else -- no importance, no real money, no real connections -- and Schrader's cinema-of-repression schtick is a peculiarly good fit for the material. I loved the steely opulence, the art direction just this side of realistic, the warm hues of the dinner parties and rich wives' homes contrasting the overdramatic blue of the interrogation room and all of it highlighting the hollowness of the protag's existence. The image of him taking off his wig at the end of each day is fairly heartbreaking. Harrelson minces a bit too much and the murder mystery is almost completely useless, but the core of the film is solid.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem; Lake of Fire

2007-12-26T12:30:00.001-05:00

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (The Brothers Strause, 2007) - C-

All the set-up is endearing because you can see the movie trying so hard to establish characters and set the interplanetary conflict against a small-town milieu, but the writing's just not there. What winds up happening is that the stock characters force out any actual sci-fi elements, and we learn nothing new about the war between the species that threatens to annihilate the planet (or at least Gunnison, CO). There's actually a more fundamental problem, which is that the notion of alien invaders that are reptilian and slimy just isn't that interesting from a sci-fi perspective anymore; the Alien franchise was always horror, but this movie has nothing to offer in that respect. Climax and ending are sharply distrustful of government (I wonder if the line "The government wouldn't lie to people!" would have gotten as much of a hearty laugh 10 years ago), which is always a nice sentiment, but the last scene doesn't make any sense, and the movie is boring by virtue of being basically content-free. Why are the Aliens fighting the Predators? I think the first AvP explained it, but motivations play no role here; they just beat on each other senselessly. We do get a glimpse of the Predators' home world, if that's your bag.

Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, 2007) - B+

I'm very sympathetic to what Kaye is trying to do here, because abortion is -- or should be, at any rate -- such a difficult issue for any thinking person living in the 21st century. At two and a half hours, this searing documentary aims to be all but the last word on the subject, which to my mind consists of two distinct goals: 1) exploring the moral, political and philosophical dimensions of abortion, and 2) getting to know the people involved, from the passionate advocates on both sides of the issue, to abortion doctors and the women they treat. When the film engages the first, which it does for several long stretches, it's interesting but dry, verging on droning, maybe because the prim academic talking heads are so out of place next to the firebrands and personalities that grace the screen when Kaye hits up the trenches of the abortion wars. In depicting the activists, Kaye incisively gets at the disingenuousness of many pro-choicers and the batshit insanity of the pro-lifers ("There are four types of people you encounter at the abortion clinics. The first are the satan-worshippers, who will actually roast babies over a barbecue pit..."); he doesn't resolve the moral and ethical dilemmas (though he crystallizes several of them nicely), but he does confirm which side of the debate I'd rather be associated with. Long, and almost crazy with ambition, but a must-see if you don't treat abortion as merely part of a checklist at election time.

The Kite Runner; Sharkwater

2007-12-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

The Kite Runner (Marc Forster, 2007) - B+

Sometimes you peg a movie as useless Oscar bait and then it comes back and kicks you in the nuts. Could have been really turgid stuff -- child rape, lifelong guilt, intergenerational conflict -- but Forster handles it with uncommon finesse. The movie is deliberate, almost calming, letting "big scenes" happen without needlessly underscoring them; it allows the characters humanity and nuance, letting good people make mistakes and giving them the freedom to redeem themselves. I panicked when, an hour into the film, Amir's father, theretofore painted as a moral giant, seemed about to become one of those movie dads who crushes his son's dreams -- "And what will you do for money?" dad asks when son says he wants to be a writer, not a doctor. "Work with me at the gas station?" But the movie quickly makes clear that this is just a (perfectly understandable) fit of drunken stubbornness, and that Amir's father wants the best for him, absolutely. And Hassan, who could have become a parody of a turn-the-other-cheek Christ figure, is a fully realized human being because Forster and Benioff are smart enough to take their time during the lengthy flashback set-up. Basically, The Kite Runner had me hook, line and sinker; watching my screener DVD at home I actually yelled "Fuck!" at a crucial late-film revelation. A bizarrely contrived climax keeps it out of the "A" range, but this might be the most conventionally entertaining of the season's big pedigreed films.

Sharkwater (Rob Stewart, 2007) - C-

Interesting for as long as it focuses on Paul Watson, the Greenpeace militant who uses his boat to police the oceans against illegal fishers and poachers, ramming and sinking their boats if he has to, and painting the insignias of vanquished enemy ships on his hull. We get to see a little bit of him in action when Stewart briefly joins his crew, and the details of what he does, culminating in an honest-to-goodness speedboat chase, are riveting. As an environmentalist documentary, though, Sharkwater kind of sucks, prone to fuzzy math ("The shark population is estimated to have declined by 90%" -- since when?), weird demagoguery ("No species on this planet has ever survived by ignoring the basic laws of ecology") and dangling participles ("While watching this film, 15,000 sharks have been killed"). Stewart is inarticulate and doesn't have much screen presence, and when he fancies himself a Michael Moore (e.g. getting himself kicked out of a restaurant that serves shark fins) he tends to lose all sense of proportion. Some of his directorial choices are questionable too: what we're supposed to get out of the idiot shark fin company hack who pops up every ten minutes to spout inanities, for example, is unclear. Some great underwater photography (not surprising, since that's Stewart's day job) but everything else is amateur hour.

The Devil Came on Horseback; The Stranger

2007-12-24T22:16:00.000-05:00

The Devil Came on Horseback (Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern, 2007) - A-

Astonishing, because it accomplishes something so elusive: a depiction of third-world atrocities from the point of view of a white humanitarian that does not in the process become about the humanitarian or try to make him into some sort of messiah (see, e.g., Born into Brothels). It helps that Brian Steidle, who witnessed the take-off of the genocide in Darfur as a "cease-fire monitor" and returned to try to outrage America, is so humble and sincere: it's not about him, and his ego does not come within a five-mile radius of the movie. His narration sticks to the facts, and the facts speak for themselves. The doc is meant to be a call to action, which would normally make me skeptical of its merits as a film, but it's also an unforgettable portrait of evil, and of indifference that becomes evil. It made the scope of the Sudanese genocide sink in better than anything else thus far.

The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946) - B+

Welles supposedly considers this his "worst" film, but the first half, at least, is a pretty awesome evil-invades-placid-suburbia noir. (Dig that shift from shadowy skulking through the alleys of some European harbor to sunlit, idyllic Connecticut.) Fascinating, too, because the 1946 film is such an immediate reaction to World War II, and I liked seeing how the conflict was cast: very little about Jews, a quick mention of gas chambers and concentration camps, and mostly dealing in abstract notions of evil -- which might be just as well for a noir thriller. Welles and Edward G. Robinson are in top form; the last act is kind of hysterical and the way the villain is dispatched is a bit much, but this is great entertainment.

Starting Out in the Evening

2007-12-23T22:20:00.000-05:00

Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner, 2007) - C

The first hour's annoyingly coy, predicated on our being in suspense about whether Lauren Ambrose and Frank Langella will have sex. The second is morose, almost pouty, and basically superfluous. The main problem is a weird circularity: we only get to know Ambrose's ambitious grad student in relation to Langella's aging writer (the film provides literally no details about her life that do not involve the writer or his books), and our only insight into the writer and his life comes from the grad student's bullshit literary analysis. There's also a second plot -- the writer's daughter trying to decide whether to subordinate her desire to have children to her desire to be with a man who doesn't want any -- that's supposed to crystallize Langella's personal and artistic crisis (he used to be a reckless idealist who wrote about liberation but was overcome by cynicism after his wife took his implicit advice and left him for another man) but just feels like piling on top of the already overt subtext. Pathological stodginess doesn't help -- this is a movie where a couple bickers over whether to see The Young Girls of Rochefort or The Battle of Algiers. I hope one of these characters gets a Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD for Christmas, or something.

John Carpenter's The Thing

2007-12-23T15:11:00.001-05:00

John Carpenter's The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) - B+

Like most of Carpenter's best, a triumph of truly unpleasant practical effects, and in fact an excellent case study in what works and what doesn't about the top-notch computer effects you see in today's sci-fi and horror. The make-up, goo and puppetry on display here is both more and less real than the CGI stuff: more real because it's an actual physical presence, and less real because it's so limited in its movement. But it serves for what Carpenter is trying to do, which is freak you out in short bursts; he doesn't try to make you jump, but there are moments here of the sort of visceral and immediate horror that's hard to come by in the movies, moments where you feel yourself in the shoes of the character watching this horrible, disgusting alien abomination unveil itself, and holy shit can you imagine seeing that in real life? Quintessential Carpenter in other ways too, not all of them positive: the drab and ugly look, the somewhat interchangeable characters, the abundance of soft testosterone (his characters are macho in kind of a gentle way, though maybe that's just the 80's mentality generally); even Ennio Morricone is aping the synthy, pulsating scores Carpenter wrote for his other films. Very effective but not transcendent; I actually think the opening shot of the flying saucer spoils some of the fun, since as an alien invasion movie it's pretty unimaginative (they traveled light years to bury themselves in the ice for millenia and then spray people with goo?), while as horror it's awesome.

Awake; Enchanted

2007-12-03T00:22:00.000-05:00

Awake (Joby Harold, 2007) - C+

Ludicrous, and would have fared far worse had it not also been fascinating -- this is one of those movies I respond to because of how utterly whacked they are, on the theory that weird is almost always better than boring. Message here, believe it or not, is that the ultra-rich need to stick together, lest the not-as-fortunate hungrily converge on their livelihoods, if not their lives; and if you think it's not plausible for that to actually be the subtext of a Hollywood film, then, uh, you need to see this. Add to that the intense Oedipal overtones of the central relationship -- Christensen and Olin, not Christensen and Alba -- and what you've got is strange, strange, strange; had it also been competent, it might have been brilliant. But the first-time director sadly botches the high concept -- Christensen's panicked voiceover is at an obvious remove from the surgery (you can imagine him in the sound booth, trying to sound terrified), and having an invisible version of the protagonist haranguing people who cannot see or hear him is just not a potent dramatic device, as I thought we had learned from The Invisible. Are the interludes in the last act supposed to take place in some sort of afterlife? Who the hell knows. Christensen and Alba are both terrible actors, though the latter has a nice moment late in the film that I can't really describe without giving away the ending. Oh well. Probably doesn't work in any way that a reasonable moviegoer would appreciate, but I can't be too hard on anything this bizarre.

Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007) - C+

Cops out like whoa -- sets up a terrific prototypical fairy tale universe, with a maiden whose singing voice calls to action a platoon of helpful woodland creatures and who yearns only for "true love's kiss," an egotistical Prince, an evil witch wielding poison apples, an eager-to-please chipmunk sidekick, etc., but then can't bring itself to skewer it properly, preferring instead to insist in all sincerity that our world should be more like a storybook. Should have been funnier; I'm not sure there's much use for a movie where Patrick Dempsey finds true love with a fairy tale princess, but there could have been room for it in the context of an actual comedy, something like a live-action Shrek. Amy Adams is awesome, there are a few amusing moments, and the big musical number is surprisingly dynamic and rousing, but the tacked-on final fifteen minutes involving a truly pointless CGI dragon sealed the thumbs-down.

Oldies

2007-11-26T11:03:00.001-05:00

Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) - B+

Not much to contribute, but I just want to note: wasn't disco infinitely better than what passes for music in clubs these days?

Latter Days (C. Jay Cox, 2003) - D-

Rented this solely for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is brilliantly hateful in the few scenes that he has. Sadly he outclasses everyone and everything else here by a factor of roughly 500, and when he departs the film roughly 50 minutes in, everything goes to hell. Misconceived from the start, as it clearly should have been about the missionary instead of the playboy, but it doesn't even really matter, since the film is incredibly stupid and thinks we are, too. Most of it is just painfully sappy and laughable, but there are no words for the cruelly manipulative monstrosity of an ending, except maybe "outrageous." I don't watch many gay niche movies -- are they all this terrible?

Hitman; The Mist

2007-11-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

Hitman (Xavier Gens, 2007) - C-

It's dumb as a rock and nearly incomprehensible, but the dealbreaker is how inconsequential it all feels; the backstory has no weight whatsoever (sorry, Xavier, but color-drained flashbacks of a little tattooing don't equate to pathos), and Agent 47's "mission" -- to figure out why a Russian politician he's assassinated has come back healthy and happy -- has all the emotional pull of, well, a level in a video game. Paramaters of the film's universe are unclear -- we're not even sure if Agent 47's "brotherhood" of assassins is secret or not (I'm guessing not, judging by the enormous bar codes tattooed on the back of the members' shaved heads), for-profit or not (they have "ties to every government" but what the hell does that mean?), or mandatory or not (I'm guessing they don't ask those little outcasts and orphans whether or not they'd like in) -- which makes the main character even more problematic: it's already hard to build a movie around a protagonist intended to be a cipher, but even harder when he doesn't have a convincing context to play in. Timothy Olyphant has nothing to work with, and the action is ho-hum and uninspiring. A loud, confused bore.

The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007) - A

"There's something in the mist!" Holy fuck! A dream come true -- horror made as more than a lark, with real scares and suspense, attention to character and detail, something on its mind, and a wide-eyed sense of wonder. This is the Stephen King adaptation that 1408 wasn't, filled with terror at something otherworldly and utterly beyond human comprehension, which, for all that King can get sappy and ponderous sometimes, is a brand of horror he understands and does extremely well. First and foremost, a masterful piece of survival horror, with the sort of lucidly thought-out logistics I haven't seen since the original Dawn of the Dead. Then, awe-inspiring sci-fi, with a premise no less frightening for its simplicity -- mostly because the film convincingly conveys that there is infinitely more that we don't know simply by virtue of our perspective. Finally, an unforgettable, pitch-black parable about human nature, with an ending that's both incredibly upsetting and strangely optimistic, suggesting that, though it may sometimes not seem like it, we're better than the worst among us. Blisteringly anti-sectarian, too, which is particularly gratifying this fall given the sterilization of The Golden Compass.

P2; Finishing the Game

2007-11-21T17:58:00.000-05:00

P2 (Franck Khalfoun, 2007) - C+

Aggressively insecure villains in horror movies are hard, because they tend not to be terribly menacing, and there's usually not much satisfaction in seeing them dispatched. Wes Bentley busts out a pretty generic, dimestore crazy here, and Rachel Nichols makes for a pretty boring woman in trouble; the concept, on the other hand, is nifty and simple -- those underground parking garages can be pretty creepy in the off hours, can't they? Bottom line, then, is that there's some suspense but not much catharsis -- the heroine is nowhere near aggressive enough until the very end, and the villain is never really that scary, since he's really just a shrimpy guy with some keycards, handcuffs, and a mean dog. Profoundly unremarkable and instantly forgettable, though Khalfoun's peers should take note of the good, judicious use of gore here; it really is so much more effective when it can surprise you.

Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee (Justin Lin, 2007) - B

Even when it's trite, it's bizarrely so -- e.g. we get the lily-white guy who insists that he is half-Chinese and writes turgid poems about the oppression of the yellow man in America, but then we see his mother and it turns out he really is half-Chinese; the casting director has a prototypical Christopher Guest vibe -- unshakeable confidence + complete incompetence -- but then the movie gives her an inexplicable crush on a comically average-looking Asian dude. Generally very sharp and self-aware (the boom mike joke toward the end had me rolling), but weird enough to be interesting even when the gags veer toward the cheap and easy. People seem to really dislike this, and I can't figure out why; I suspect anti-Asian bigotry.

30 Days of Night; The Darjeeling Limited

2007-10-21T17:37:00.000-05:00

30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007) - B-

Slade knows from scary, and gets off to a dynamite start -- it helps that Barrow, AK is a killer setting, becoming sort of supernatural in its own right as we see 2/3 of its population catch the last plane out before the sun can drop below the horizon, not to be seen again for a month. The frigid melancholy of the first twenty minutes, as Hartnett's Sheriff Oleson makes the rounds in preparation for the annual shut-down, got under my skin a hundred times more than the armies of vicious blood-sucking creatures Slade busts out shortly thereafter. But at first that too seems promising -- Slade has a knack for recognizing unsettling imagery, an understanding of why a momentary glimpse of something in a corner of the frame can be much scarier than a full view, and a sense of what it is about vampires that makes them so enduringly frightening. A third of the way through, I was genuinely excited. Then the movie becomes a pretty generic piece of survival horror, without any characters that really connect, and I started to get bored. On the whole 30 Days of Night is still kind of awesome -- I love the fact that Danny Huston plays the lead villain, Josh Hartnett is effortlessly believable as the Barrow sheriff, the movie is imposingly gory, and the first act portended the best movie of the year -- but it can't sustain momentum, and at 113 minutes, that stings.

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007) - C

Bite me.

The Seeker; The Last Season

2007-10-16T11:21:00.000-05:00

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (David L. Cunningham, 2007) - C-

You can attribute my absurd optimism about this one to Post-Harry Potter Stress Disorder, but I really should have known once studio marketing drones changed the title from the simple and elegant The Dark is Rising to the nonsensical and ugly (but less depressing!) The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. None the wiser, I remained vaguely intrigued until roughly 40 minutes into the film, when I thought it might be playing around with the question of why most modern fantasy involves a retreat into something resembling the Middle Ages, with swordfights and horseback riding accompanying the sorcery. And it does sort of address it -- the first scene is the last day of school, accompanied by the entire student body flipping open their cell phones in unison; we then transition to the 14 year-old protagonist's house, where an XBox and a flat-screen tv blare across the room while the huge nuclear family tries to have dinner; meanwhile our hero, who will soon discover his supernatural powers and destiny to save the universe, is forced to move up to the rustic attic by the arrival of his big brother from college; soon enough the menacing Rider makes his appearance and we're off to the Medieval races -- but that doesn't really excuse the arbitrary mish-mash of fantasy clichés that, it turns out, comprises the storyline. My heart sank as the serviceable half hour of what-the-hell-is-going-on set-up turned into useless blather about battling forces of light and dark (a scientific concept, apparently, though the film only feints toward explaining it), Old Ones, Chosen Ones, six signs (one of which may or may not be locked away in someone's being), etc. Silliness isn't the problem (surely you know me better than that); the problem is how lazy, thin and insubstantial all of it is, with the fantasy elements seeming totally random and the characters uniformly worthless. Even Frances Conroy and Ian McShane can't give this stuff any weight. Can't speak to the Susan Cooper novel, which is apparently pretty good, but kids will forget the movie within minutes.

The Last Season (David Mickey Evans, 2007) - D+

I almost never walk out, but I would have bolted had I not read (in the Chicago Reader, no less) that The Last Season pulls itself together in the last act. That's sort of true, at least insofar as the Big Game focuses on the baseball rather than school consolidation or the purity of Sean Astin's soul. But this is still the most overbearing sports movie I've ever seen, demolishing all rationality and common sense in pursuit of its anti-consolidation message, preferring to manufacture absurd villains and a symbolic underdog story that's just not there rather than acknowledge that maybe the merits of its cause are kind of ambiguous. Astonishingly, insufferably corny, dragging in a pointless love subplot to supplement all the sickening hero worship and (for the first 90 minutes at least) ignoring the baseball altogether. Most movies about "underdog" teams at least address the mechanics of the team rising from zero to hero; The Last Season doesn't give a damn. Footnote: since when is Michael Angarano getting the reverse-prestigious last-in-the-credits spot? Is Sky High that popular?

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

2007-10-14T12:18:00.001-05:00

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur, 2007) - C

The mistake is straining to turn Elizabeth (or "Lizzie," as I like to call her) into a full-fledged, sentimentalized hero -- and sometimes, as when she stands on a cliff in a flowing dress, overlooking the burning Spanish Armada, nearly a superhero. I just wasn't feelin' it; Kapur seems awed by his protagonist more than anything else this time around, which would be okay except that it apparently prevents him from treating her thoughtfully. He makes some token nods to the ambiguity that made Elizabeth so compelling in the first film, with a few scenes were she laments giving up her life for England, or gets really angry, or what have you, but the movie is mostly interested in lionizing her without doing the legwork. Kind of oppressive in its opulence, with lots of expensive costumes and birds-eye-view shots from 50-foot vaulted ceilings, and ultimately makes a hollow noise when you thump it. The portrayal of King Philip II is hilarious, as he walks around dark corridors clutching rosaries and calling Elizabeth a "blood-soaked virgin." Lovely guy.

In the Valley of Elah

2007-10-07T13:00:00.001-05:00

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007) - B

Oh boy could this have been worse. After watching Haggis bamboozle everyone from my neighbors to Roger Ebert with the screenwriting grad student's wet dream that was Crash, I panicked upon learning that, apparently having defeated racism, he was now taking on Iraq. And in some ways, he is indeed up to his old tricks -- most reasonable people will agree, I hope, that the stunt with the flag is basically unforgivable. That aside, though, this is a surprisingly strong effort, reminding us that the wounds of Iraq, like the wounds of Vietnam, are going to remain long after the next presidential election is a distant memory. The interesting thing is how immediate it is -- the basic thesis is "the Army fucks people up," but what makes the film powerful is everything we know about Iraq that goes more-or-less unsaid here. It's hard to imagine Elah working in 10 years, but it sure as hell works now. Tommy Lee Jones is remarkable, though is the idea here that the last generation's career officers simply became emotionally constipated OCD-ers while today's wind up charred and decapitated? Jesus.

Eastern Promises; Mr. Woodcock

2007-09-27T16:48:00.000-05:00

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007) - B+

Tricky -- Cronenberg's trademark doom-and-gloom portentousness keeps you waiting patiently for a Big Twist, a left turn like the one A History of Violence took in its third act. It never comes, and once Eastern Promises is over it kind of feels like it's slipped away from you. The key is to come to terms with its distinctly non-fantastic scope -- it's a mafia tale, opening a window into one particular (and probably fictional) seedy underbelly of London; a story of ritual and power, of good people navigating a hideous criminal underworld. But man, it's a Cronenberg movie through and through, with a disarmingly frank focus on sordid details, a direct, effects-heavy approach to gruesome violence that periodically disrupts the otherwise dignified mien, and one sequence that will be studied by fight scene acolytes until the very demise of film as an art form. Not as significant as History or the rest of the man's best work, but certainly suspenseful and disturbing -- the least we can expect from Cronenberg, I guess.

Mr. Woodcock (Craig Gillespie, 2007) - B-

Two ways this could have gone -- making Woodcock a real bastard and the film's villain, or making him basically misunderstood and the film about the protagonist's realization of same. I actually liked the choice the screenplay makes, though (*SPOILER*) it would have been far stronger had it grappled with the child abuse it plays for laughs -- everything everyone thought about Woodcock is wrong, it turns out, but, uh, he was still pretty nasty to those kids. I also wish the movie had stuck to its guns w/r/t the anti-self-help sentiment, instead of dismantling one stupid trope only to introduce another at the 11th hour. But it's pretty funny (the video crafted by Farley's friends to incriminate Woodcock is priceless), usually going just far enough to be satisfying; Billy Bob Thornton's the man, and Seann William Scott kind of is too, though his talents are underused here. Susan Sarandon's presence is a mystery.

Halloween; Death Sentence

2007-09-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) - C+

Zombie is improving, as I thought he might, and he could actually have a decent horror movie in him one day: he's at the very least a talented stylist with a relentlessly bleak, grungy worldview, something that serves him well in making bleak, grungy, depressing films. The back story he provides for Michael Myers here is compelling precisely for that reason; it's not actually that interesting, a pretty generic abusive childhood rattling an already-disturbed psyche, but it's so grandly unpleasant (mom's a stripper; stepdad is a filthy asshole; house is something out of The Devil's Rejects; school bullies could themselves be horror film villains) that I admit to a certain fascination. If Zombie can harness his flair for this sort of operatic nastiness, I thought, he might come up with something. When he moves on to the more generic slasher horror of this prequel/remake's second half, though, his instincts begin to fail him. In navigating the staple elements of the genre, he's depressingly literal-minded -- making Myers seven feet tall is a stupid, unimaginative move, putting the final nail in the coffin of the original film's conception of the character as a representation of pure evil. In staging the violence, he forgets that all great horror directors, even ones who traffic in gore, know when to look away. Halloween ultimately doesn't deliver the scares and suspense, which is probably a fatal flaw for any entry into this franchise. But Rob Zombie, in his third and "best" feature to date, continues to show some glimmers of promise.

Death Sentence (James Wan, 2007) - B

Now here's a movie, red-blooded, smart, alive in every frame. I am really starting to like this Wan guy; for as long as the underrated Saw franchise keeps up he'll be remembered as the one who got it off the ground, but it's his post-Saw work -- first the creepy, gleefully nasty horror flick Dead Silence and now this -- that makes me think he is going to develop into the sort of genre wizard we always need around. On one level, this is an ode to self-reliance -- the justice system is ineffectual, promising to put the gang-initiation murderer of the protag's son away for a few years, if that, and once the gang declares war, law enforcement is almost willfully unhelpful, basically telling poor Kevin Bacon to suck it up -- but at the same time, the distressing outcome of Bacon's antics and the mournful last fade-out suggest a morbid cautionary tale. Wan, in any event, just chomps down on this stuff, busting out elaborate long takes (the parking lot sequence is awesome) and giving every admittedly implausible twist unexpected dramatic weight. The movie's contrived and, on paper, a little silly, and Wan pulls off a tough balancing act taking on this material without winking, making the exaggerated, grotesque story seem to matter. Garrett Hedlund, cast against type in a role that Ben Foster would have eaten alive, plays a truly fearsome villain -- it's a big performance, one that teeters on the edge of absurdity but doesn't quite tip over, much like the film itself.

Them; Shoot 'Em Up

2007-09-09T10:35:00.000-05:00

Them (David Moreau & Xavier Palud, 2007) - B

Really liked the classical horror film that comprises the lion's share of this merciless 77-minute jolt -- Them is a splendid title, but a more accurate one might have been Something, since for much of the film that's as much information as we have about the assailants who pursue the lovely French couple in their rural Romanian home. It's a minor masterpiece of atmosphere, timing, and shot selection; Palud and Moreau seemed to know just what would creep the hell out of me and when -- a fleeting glimpse of a hooded figure as a door slams shut, a play of light and shadow on a wall, the sudden appearance of a well-lit tunnel. The identity of the unseen villains doesn't really matter in the sense that the film's pleasures are largely formal anyhow, but of course it does "matter" -- though lots of people extoll "ambiguity," I don't think too many of them would really be content with total abstraction. So there is a reveal, and on its own it's actually quite good: an unexpected, chilling image followed by expository title cards that actually work. I'm just not sure I like this particular ending on this particular horror film, because the resulting effect is abrupt, heavily ironic demystification. To the extent that Them's what-the-hell trappings get our imaginations working, the ending is a letdown, raising the question of why the film played it so close to the vest to begin with. The only possible response is "for fun," which I guess is fair enough. N.B. Rating was a tough call -- it's just this side of the B/B+ borderline.

Shoot 'Em Up (Michael Davis, 2007) - B

"Violence is one of the most fun things to watch," says Paul Giamatti's crazy-ass villain -- and Oh My God, I thought! That's what I've been saying for years! By Jebus there's plenty of it here, non-stop, stylish, and exaggerated to a degree that transcends ludicrous and approaches unfathomable. A newborn's umbilical cord is shot off; Giamatti madly charges the camera with a knife; when the protagonists are interrupted mid-coitus, they dispatch the gun-wielding baddies and complete the act, topping off with the line: "Talk about shooting your load." It's hilarious, transgressive, offensive, and awesome. I also adored the subtext: tough guys don't need guns (the hero doesn't have one of his own), but they don't need gun control laws either, fuck you very much. A trifle, ultimately, but trifles like this don't come along often.

End-of-Summer Poll

2007-08-21T13:14:00.000-05:00

Meme going around...

Summer wrap up poll time. Give me your choice for...

1) Best movie - Sunshine
2) Worst movie - Captivity
3) Biggest creative winner - Stardust for the summer's highest difficulty:success ratio. Superbad for Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, the most inspired pairing since Lemmon and Matthau.
4) Biggest creative loser - Talk to Me for neutering Kasi Lemmons' talents.
5) Most overrated - Transformers. Yes, I know it wasn't that well-liked. The fact that it was tolerated is enough.
6) Most underrated - Spider-Man 3. Raimi took a beating for trying something new and interesting. Ang Lee endured the same with Hulk. Stay tuned for Renny Harlin remake. I'll also mention George Ratliff's Joshua here.
7) Biggest surprise - The awesomeness of Live Free or Die Hard.
8) Favorite scene - Opening assault in 28 Weeks Later.
9) Breakout star - Gotta be Seth Rogen. Fingers crossed for Michael Cera too.
10) Most unfortunate success - Transformers. Why do people keep feeding the Bay?

The Invasion

2007-08-21T12:09:00.000-05:00

The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007) - B-

Bizarro, somewhat gutsy subtext -- we should resign ourselves to genocide, war and famine because it's an inescapable part of the human condition -- makes this kind of a downer, if you ask me, though it works for a while. At its best when depicting the invasion itself; the body snatchers' gradual, inevitable takeover is pretty creepy, most effectively so in the frightened faces and voices of people realizing that something is going horribly wrong -- Veronica "My Husband is Not My Husband" Cartwright is perhaps the best thing in the film. Inexplicably gets hung up on the medi-babble about the mechanics of the alien virus, or what not -- who gives a shit? I wonder if this too was a Wachowski addition, or just that damn car chase? -- and the ending really is a shame, but if nothing else it does take advantage of its premise, still killer after all these years. Hirschbiegel's original cut must have been better.

Becoming Jane

2007-08-18T14:02:00.001-05:00

Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007) - C

Too long, and too wishy-washy -- if you're going to invent an elaborate backstory for Jane Austen, then at least take some sort of stand, goddammit -- for all its feints toward finding poignancy in Austen's youth, the movie winds up neatly packaging everything and tying a bow around the result. In any event, giving her a passionate, if ultimately unfulfilled, youthful romance destroys the fundamental sadness of her story, which is that she embarked on a career writing about matters of the heart in which she herself had little involvement (the man portrayed here as her love interest apparently received two fleeting mentions in Austen's letters to her sister). The only meaningful path left to the film -- the notion that Austen loved, lost, and retreated to the worlds she created in her novels -- is equivocated into oblivion by the screenplay's compulsion to tie up every end, loose or not, and drag the characters kicking and screaming to strained, illogical happy endings. Some superficial pleasures remain, among them the intractable presence of Maggie Smith as a haughty noblewoman, but Ann Hathaway is tragically a lightweight among the accomplished cast, and the movie is too pointlessly glum and poker-faced to be chick-lit-style fun. Austen wouldn't have approved.

I Now Pronounce You

2007-08-12T22:59:00.000-05:00

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Dennis Dugan, 2007) - C

Still shitty, but not the offensive stereotype-giggle-fest I feared -- or rather it is, but kind of in a good way. Wha? Well, it occurred to me that it might better to turn this stuff into fodder for a raunchy, unabashedly mainstream Adam Sandler comedy than to ceaselessly treat it with PC kid gloves. And Chuck & Larry is doing it ("it" being rampant comic displays of homophobia and soap-dropping gags) out of love, if you get me -- at various points I questioned the filmmakers' IQ and choice of profession, but never their good intentions. So in this context, the PG-13 puerility ("penis department" instead of "pension department") and weird gay panic non sequiturs (Adam Sandler's faux-shocked response to the notion that people out there will fake homosexual relationships to get government benefits: "It makes me so sad... and gay... to hear about people like that") seem appropriate and almost charming. What's not remotely charming is the film's two-hour length, the ridiculous "I am Spartacus" climax, the cloying, dishonest denoument, the neverending Rob Schneider appearances, and general confusion about what constitutes comedy (i.e. Allen Covert leaping about dressed as a gay butterfly = not comedy; please make a note of it). One of these days someone will have the guts to cut one of these movies to a tight, funny 85 minutes and we might have something.

Simpsons Movie; Captivity

2007-08-02T22:21:00.000-05:00

The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007) - B+

Funny how after all these years, and the recent incessant complaints about The Simpsons having "jumped the shark," the long-awaited film opens with a huge splash, and droves of critics and filmgoers return to fawning over Matt Groening's now-timeless satire masterpiece. Truth is, the show has never lost its edge, and the Movie s less a "return to form" than a particularly polished iteration of its brilliance. The material does lose something in its translation to the big screen, as gags that would have been showstoppers in tv viewing sort of float by serenely in the larger context. But the show's notorious arsenal of humor - social satire, pop culture jabs, general weirdness (the riotous opening sequence awesomely embodying all three) -- s in fine shape, the laughs coming furiously and some of the jokes immediately attaining classic Simpsons status. The show has been the best thing on tv for 18 years, or at least since the demise of Twin Peaks; it makes a certain sense that its cinematic incarnation is better than most of what's in theaters this summer.

Captivity (Roland Joffe, 2007) - F

I hate to say it, but this lends credibility to certain pundits' otherwise retarded tirades against what they call the torture porn genre. Not that the movie is all that graphic, or all that horrifying -- in fact it fakes us out so many times that we quickly learn to disbelieve what we see, no matter how gruesome. It's just that it's so schlocky, dumb and nonsensical that prevailing sight-unseen impression of films in this sub-genre* (because of course these people are too outraged to actually watch them) consisting of "just people being tortured" might as well be true. The twisted, baroque storytelling of the Saws and the sly satire of the Hostels is nowhere to be found here. Not sure what the deal is with the suggestion that Cuthbert's character is the "girl with no heart," but if the notion is one of conquest -- the big reveal has the villains wind up talking about their predictions about how long it would take for her to submit to "hero sex" -- then I have only two things to say: 1) eew; and 2) the accusations of moral depravity might actually be on point for once.

*I feel like I'm surrendering just by calling it a "sub-genre," since really they're just horror films like any other, but it's hard to ignore trends.

Evening

2007-07-04T10:39:00.000-05:00

Evening (Lajos Koltai, 2007) - B

Would be so much stronger if it weren't so fucking aggressive, determined to squeeze tears from your eyes if it kills it, you, and the rest of the audience. Seriously: more small-scale character stuff and less Vanessa Redgrave chasing butterflies; I often complain about movies that consist of non-stop heart-to-hearts, but here the heart-to-hearts work, and there's a scene mid-film between Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy that's just about unmatched this year in terms of force. But while I'm generally a fan of unrestrained dramatics, much of the film veers toward the maudlin: any character who confesses his undying love only to be rebuffed has to die in short order, of course, but Evening actually fakes us out once before dropping the hammer on the poor guy. The last half hour loses all sense of decorum, basically cudgeling us with scene after scene of emotional fever pitch -- some people die, others deliver speeches, still others triumphantly announce pregnancies. Even there, though, a few moments make it through: two sisters gripping hands, an old friend at the deathbed, the touching, understated final shot. Or maybe I just succumbed to the film's merciless beating. Evening's constant battle stance leaves it an occasionally effective series of emotional beats rather than a story.

Fido

2007-06-30T10:53:00.001-05:00

Fido (Andrew Currie, 2007) - A-

Words can't express how grateful I am for this top-notch, hilarious satire right about now. A killer premise (humans won the zombie war and enslaved the zombies, who are now upscale commodities used mostly for house chores), an affinity for delightful non-sequiturs ("My nose was bleeding." "How did it get on your zombie?" "I wiped it there."), and a diabolical skewering of consumerism and corporate hegemony (only a licensed, expensive ZombieCon funeral can keep your corpse from coming back to life) combine to make what might be the best film of the summer. It could have rested on the laurels of its gimmick, but it goes all out instead, and doesn't skimp on the gore either. Like most great things, it's Canadian, and has Dylan Baker in it. I don't think it's doing too well, so run, don't walk, etc.

Fantastic 4

2007-06-18T07:14:00.000-05:00

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Tim Story, 2007) - C

I cut the first one a lot of slack, but there are just too many things working against the sequel for it to come out ahead: Jessica Alba's persistent and frankly kind of impressive efforts to ruin everything she touches; the unimaginative depiction of the planet-eating villain Galactus (he's a cloud); the half-assed, techno-babbly story construction; and that's just to name a few. They do all of nothing with the near-omnipotent Silver Surfer character, a Laurence Fishburne-voiced special effect who shows up to menace the Human Torch before disappearing for a while and resurfacing to be summarily disarmed and tied to a table. And while the jokey, light-hearted tone lent the first film a goofy likability, a repeat only serves to highlight the shoddiness of this lumbering mess, which is shockingly unwieldy at only an hour and a half. Really, none of what fans had hoped would come to fruition here -- good villains, better action, less wanton stupidity -- in fact sees the light of day. Watching it made crystal-clear why the Spider-Man franchise, for all the problems of the third film, remains awesome: Sam Raimi effortlessly handles the sort of unabashed earnestness that Tim Story makes corny and cringe-worthy here. Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans are still strong links, but this franchise needs to be put out of its misery.

Steel City

2007-06-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

Steel City (Brian Jun, 2007) - B+

In a season with distressingly few movies to love, I almost latched on to this one -- a straightforward, quietly touching dispatch from the sort of blue-collar universe we so rarely see in the movies (and no, Blue Collar Comedy Tour doesn't count). Fittingly, it takes a realist moral posture: the storyline involves a father (John Heard) who voluntarily goes to jail for his son's (Tom Guiry) deadly accident, but the movie doesn't lecture about abstract notions of responsibility; the focus instead is on the father's guilt about his relationship with the son, and the possibility that the latter could actually grow to be happy. Brian Jun's eminently small screenplay is filled with the sort of genuine, unpretentious emotion I've been missing at the movies lately. Sadly the story gets sidetracked in the third act, spending unnecessary time on the dad's issues, and for a while Steel City grows ponderous and a little boring. And while Heard is fine, Tom Guiry's steady performance could easily have carried the film.

Bug

2007-06-02T10:14:00.000-05:00

Bug (William Friedkin, 2007) - B

Plays better in my mind's eye than on the screen, where it's a bit too heightened and hysterical to have the intended effect: it's strange, but one almost has to disengage from the film to appreciate what it's doing, else some of the characters' insane rants might induce inadvertent laughter. This is particularly true since Ashley Judd, despite being praised in some circles for the role, is just terrible, busting out a lot of method-actress writhing and twitching, though given the film's tone that might just be appropriate. Beneath the histrionics is a sad, vaguely allegorical story about a lonely woman who makes an unexpected connection with a paranoid schizophrenic, and the two of them spiral together to their doom. Though the film is almost actively offputting as it plays, its stage roots showing not in its one-set, two-character structure but in its exaggerated flourishes and dialogue that doesn't quite gel, in retrospect it's powerful, almost searing. There's a scene in which Judd's character kicks her well-meaning friend out of the house to tend to her manifestly insane new friend, and while I didn't think much of it at the time, I haven't been able to forget it -- and the same goes for Bug's last ten minutes. Marketing this as some sort of monster movie probably led to droves of dissatisfied moviegoers last weekend.

Once

2007-05-30T20:55:00.000-05:00

Once (John Carney, 2007) - B+

I'm not quite on board with all of the raves, since I think the movie tries so hard to be unassuming and low-key that it becomes sort of overbearing and also kind of moment-to-moment predictable (e.g. the bored studio engineer cursing to his friend about having to spend the weekend with a bunch of wankers before hearing the music and nodding meaningfully). But nor can I deny its charms: the music is actually good, for one thing (Glen Hansard is the frontman for the better-than-Coldplay Irish pop band The Frames); for another, the movie staunchly resists becoming the sort of sappy love story I kept expecting. It's more in the vein of Before Sunrise, and by the end, the film's advertising tagline -- "How often do you find the right person?" (the answer ostensibly being "Once") -- seems more cruel than wistful. Last shot is a real heartbreaker.

Day Night Day Night; Brand Upon the Brain!

2007-05-26T18:48:00.001-05:00

Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev, 2007) - B

The minor hubbub about Loktev allegedly asking us to "sympathize with a suicide bomber" is largely a red herring, since the picture she paints is, at least to my mind, consonant with the sort of religious fanaticism that can drive someone to detonate a nail bomb in Times Square. Portraying the terrorist as an attractive 19 year-old girl who is wracked by fear and doubt and carries a picture of her baby brother in her purse strikes me as noncontroversial, and preferring to think of these people as barely sentient ogres seems unproductive. Indeed, what makes the film crackle for over an hour is its verisimilitude -- as with United 93, the suspense is in the mundane details of something so awful and huge (though what with Day Night Day Night being fictitious, the ultimate effect is quite a bit different). The movie is so unflinching for a while that it's disappointing when Loktev wimps out with a last-act contrivance that allows for some convenient thematic point-making but breaks the terrifying spell -- the ending is kind of akin to the compromise in the 1998 disaster flick Deep Impact, which tried to have its cake and eat it, too, by averting the apocalypse but breaking off a little piece of the comet hurtling toward Earth and having it make a big splash in the Atlantic Ocean.

Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2007) - C-

This joker is supposed to be the Canadian answer to David Lynch? Please. What made "Twin Peaks" such an awe-inspiring masterpiece is its utter devotion to its story even as it descends into the nightmarish and bizarre; what makes Mulholland Drive one of the finest films of the decade is the way it coalesces both narratively and emotionally even as Lynch mercilessly fucks with your head. Maddin's stuff -- self-consciously baroque plots in late-era silent film pastiches -- doesn't do it for me because it's so damn insincere: I kept expecting a rim shot after every damn chapter break and title card. Sad part is, I really want to see a movie about a teenage mystery-serial detective who comes to an island to discover the true nature of a mysterious orphanage where, it turns out, a mad scientist is piercing holes in children's necks to extract their life essense. It's just not Brand Upon the Brain!, which unloads such a barrage of visual and aural tricks and quirks that it becomes oppressive and no fun at all. What's the point of inventing a story so mysterious and strange if you're not going to take it seriously?

Versus; Shrek the Third

2007-05-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

Versus (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2000) - C-

Tone's all wrong -- I like these movies to take themselves a little bit seriously, you know? -- but for a while I thought there might be something here anyway, due to Kitamura's eye for unadorned martial arts brawls and a really fucking cool performance from then-newcomer Tak Sakaguchi. Then the film descends into full-on absurdity, and Kitamura's entertaining kineticism mysteriously disappears; he's both too invested in the incomprehensible plot, burning a lot of celluloid on expository flashbacks and the like, and not invested enough, since everything's a hip joke and nothing seems to matter. I can see why this is a cult hit, I guess -- zombies! yakuza! "the forest of resurrection!" -- but there's no content, and sorry geeks, but the style just ain't that impressive (though Sakaguchi has the whiff of stardom about him). The last hour is pure tedium.

Shrek the Third (Chris Miller, 2007) - B+

Makes sense that the reviews are lukewarm -- we were weaned on Shrek being the realm of grandiose satire, coming in big, uproarious set pieces complete with an ironic pop score and an unending stream of pop culture references. Perhaps realizing that the franchise could convincingly keep this up for so long, the people behind the second sequel changed tacks: the comedy is almost low-key, if you can believe it; the jokes smaller, more verbal; gags more dependent on editing than elaborate choreography ("Someone better be dying," yells Shrek when a knock interrupts a touching heart-to-heart with Fiona; cut to the cast standing around the Frog King's deathbed as the latter croaks "I'm dying"). It's actually the funniest of the films and the most consistent, though it's also less emotionally engaging, and the message -- "the only thing standing in the way of your being who you want to be is you" -- ultimately seems pulled out of thin air. It also makes sense that the trailer wasn't funny: the great jokes keep coming, but each individual one is too little and context-dependent for a gag reel. Not for kids at all, though slightly older ones should dig it, The Third is the rare sequel that lives up to its predecessors by toning down the franchise.

Away From Her

2007-05-14T21:42:00.000-05:00

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2007) - A-

Wrenching -- tantamount to watching a man's heart break in slow motion for two hours -- but wonderfully rewarding; the biggest problem, actually, is the way Polley somewhat dulls the film's impact by working so aggressively to make it into a tone poem, fracturing the chronology and writing self-consciously "literary" dialogue. But the movie works as a tone poem, too, and maneuvers that sound like they'd be insufferably clunky -- e.g. cross-country skiing as a metaphor for life; repeated shots of characters walking away from the camera in slow motion, bathed in the copious "natural sunlight" of the nursing home/"care facility" Julie Christie's Fiona enters upon an Alzheimer's diagnosis -- function as grace notes even when they can't quite cut it substantively. And that seems kind of appropriate: "the most we can aspire to in this situation is a little bit of grace," says Julie Christie's Fiona, and that's precisely what Polley accomplishes with Away From Her, a melancholy, elegant film about a difficult subject. A more direct approach may have packed a stronger punch, but Polley's screenplay isn't chopped liver either: Fiona's transformation after entering the home -- an utter, unforgiving, incomprehensible withdrawal that we see through her husband's eyes -- is brutal, believable, and incredibly moving.

The TV Set; Year of the Dog

2007-05-07T18:36:00.000-05:00

The TV Set (Jake Kasdan, 2007) - B

Ricky Gervais recently covered this territory to somewhat funnier effect in Extras, but Kasdan's movie is worth a look too. It's a bit mean-spirited in the way it caricatures selectively: Sigourney Weaver's single-minded tv executive is a complete horrorshow, if a funny one ("He's not coming; he had an emergency and had to go to the hospital." "He's not coming?"), while Ioan Gruffud is humanized despite being painted as a similarly ratings-minded tv business superstar; the male and female leads of the show respectively exhibit the same dynamic. It's as if Kasdan took his cast of characters and pitted them against each other, with half being put-upon artists trying to eke out a career in a brutal industry and having to navigate their way around a gaggle of tin-eared buffoons (the other half). Still, great to see Weaver and David Duchovny doing comedy (both are terrific), and though the movie is mostly a blunt instrument, it has some first-rate zingers. Query: If I'm actually curious to watch "Slut Wars," am I part of the problem?

Year of the Dog (Mike White, 2007) - C

I feel kind of bad about this one, actually, as I understand what it's trying to do and am very sympathetic to it; I just wish White had taken a less irritating tack. The film does finally make sense of the protagonist's animal rights kick in the final scene, and even makes the whole thing kind of affecting, but alas this follows forty-five minutes of Molly Shannon acting like precisely the sort of detestable "activist" that has made PETA such a PR disaster. We simply don't have a strong enough connection to the protagonist to get us through, and I spent much of the movie wanting it to end, as Shannon goes about stealing money from her employer to donate to animal rights causes, threatening to take her niece to a factory farm, being outraged by furs, etc., etc. It doesn't help that the movie feints, playing at first like it might be a a Sideways-style dramedy about someone middle-aged and unlucky in love forming an unexpected bond with someone like-minded and lovely, before cutting off this line and sending Shannon off the PETA deep end. White ultimately makes sense of this about-face, too -- different kinds of love, and all that -- but again, that doesn't make the film any less actively unpleasant in the meantime. Almost worth watching for some of the performances -- Laura Dern, in particular, is note-perfect as Shannon's aggressively suburban sister-in-law -- and the finale undeniably works, but the movie is one big emotional miscalculation.

Pathfinder; ATHF

2007-05-02T09:49:00.000-05:00

Pathfinder (Marcus Nispel, 2007) - F

Hey, remember when I put the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake on my top ten list? That was awesome.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (Dave Willis & Matt Maiellaro, 2007) - B-

The only movie I have ever seen where a line like "Daddy, you've grown up to be a beautiful woman!" can sort of just vanish into the ether rather than stopping the show. I had never seen an entire episode of the series, but warnings prepared me for the weirdness, and I must admit I kind of dug it: it's utterly, unapologetically inexplicable, which is kind of refreshing, although its best moments aren't really the aggressively weird ones. I loved the title cards, which declare that we're in Egypt, a long time ago, before announcing that we're in 2004 and in New York, and of course the heavy metal take on movie theaters' idiotic pre-feature jingle reels is some sort of brilliant. Nearly ninety minutes of this is more than I bargained for, but I definitely appreciate that this movie exists, if you get me.

Vacancy; Perfect Stranger

2007-04-30T23:07:00.000-05:00

Vacancy (Nimrod Antal, 2007) - B+

Rating is almost even higher, actually; frightening and niftily self-reflexive, this is my favorite horror film since The Descent. It's not an entry in what I have resigned to calling the "torture porn" genre,* but it coopts certain elements of the fad and turns the camera on them, so to speak: funny how the snuff videos we glimpse through the panicked eyes of Wilson and Beckinsale, recorded on video using a few stationary cameras and haphazardly edited together, make us shrink away in horror and disgust, while much the same dynamic filled out with Hollywood pyrotechnics evokes merely conventional, conditioned "suspense." It's a neat trick, and all the more potent since the movie works like gangbusters, imagining a genuinely scary scenario and making it even scarier over 80 taut, frantic, logistics-obsessed minutes. The character dynamic at the center -- the protagonists are a wounded couple careening toward an ugly divorce, and on their way from an unpleasant family visit -- provides some emotional context without wasting a minute of screentime, and man does it ever help to have two real actors, rather than bland and anonymous teenyboppers, guiding this sort of movie. One possibility is that Vacancy is too breathlessly entertaining to be a serious examination of our own reactions to it, but I think the fact that it doesn't condemn its own audience is to its credit, and besides, just because the film is interested in what makes horror conventions tick doesn't mean it's not allowed to indulge in some of them as well.

*I'm actually in the process of penning an elaborate defense of "torture porn"; stay tuned.

Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007) - C-

For a while, the precise equivalent of an "airport novel" -- pulpy, dumb, and sort of indifferently engaging, it chugs along for a while generating neither disgust nor interest. Then it takes a turn toward lunacy, with a third act that turns it into some sort of treatise on the impossibility of anonymity in these, the Internet Years. (The last shot, of course, is neither here nor there: couldn't people peek out of windows before the world wide web?) Foley tries for a sort of steely, measured elegance -- lots of slow pans and tracking shots; bright, cold colors; glass galore -- but the thing winds up looking like a tv movie (the hysterical flashbacks to the protagonist's abusive childhood don't help any). The plot twists are so arbitrary as to cause physical pain, but aside from that, it's hardly a bore, just a time waster, pure and simple. Bruce Willis fans might tune in on DVD for his enjoyably slimy performance as a shameless, filthy rich womanizer.

Disturbia

2007-04-21T13:07:00.000-05:00

Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007) - B

At about the two-thirds mark, I was incredulous at the lukewarm reviews -- surely, I thought, this must be one of the great unappreciated genre films: smart, observant, witty, prizing attention to detail and character over cheap shocks and plot machinations. Then I watched the stupid, violent assault of an ending, and I understood. But though the movie deserves better than its third act, which feels like it snuck in from a different screenplay, the lengthy, patient set-up is worth the price of admission all on its own. Rather than merely using its sub-Rear Window scenario -- a teenager under house arrest begins to suspect that his neighbor is a serial killer -- to launch a conventional teenybopper horror throwaway, the movie actually cares, providing the teenager with a personality, actual relationships, and honest dialogue. Even the banter is lively and realistic; what's even more remarkable is that the movie makes time for banter, for moments that exist for their own sake, for seemingly inconsequential character tidbits that prove rewarding despite not being integral to the story. (Watch the scene when Kale's frustrated mom unplugs his cable, and tell me his reaction isn't a pitch-perfect depiction of teenage indignation, the sort of thing a basically good kid would say in a fit of pique and passive rebellion against a parent; listen, too, to Kale's moving late-film characterization of what his mom is doing over at the psycho's house.) The conclusion is an outrage, incoherent as well as inappropriate, but everything else pretty much rocks, including Shia LaBeouf's effortlessly naturalistic performance; I suggest ignoring the haters and hitting a matinee.

Time

2007-04-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

Time (Kim Ki-Duk, 2007) - C+

But... but... She's totally nuts! Everyone's creaming over Kim's metaphorical exploration of romantic relationships and human identity, but he lost me from the first scene, where his protagonist throws a neurotic hissy fit in a coffee shop after a waitress is insufficiently polite, and her boyfriend dares to speak with a woman who nicked his car. Some suspension of disbelief is required given the film's premise -- frightened that she has become tiresome to her boyfriend, a woman decides to undergo a face transplant -- but the characters here (the woman in particular, but really the man too) are so batshit crazy in such an unpleasant way that, though I like a good metaphor as much as the next guy, I checked out. The movie's actually formally fascinating -- Kim's rhythms are utterly gonzo, and he perverts the three-act structure in some seriously fucked up ways -- but I wound up noticing these things dispassionately, as I became farther and farther removed from the actual, y'know, story Kim's presumably telling. I had a similar problem with 3-Iron to be honest -- it was audacious and beautiful to watch, but so single-mindedly focused on its concept that the things actually happening on screen became less and less relevant. People really love this one, though, so don't mind me...

Blades of Glory

2007-04-03T22:20:00.000-05:00

Blades of Glory (Josh Gordon & Will Speck, 2007) - C-

I hate this fucking movie, but I cannot lie: the North Korean rendition of the Iron Lotus, the "ice-devouring sex tornado," and Arnett and Poehler's urban- and JFK-themed skating routines made me laugh. I kind of resented it, since this continuation of Ferrell's widlly popular Anchorman and Talladega Nights formula/saga is shoddy, moronic, and barely even a movie; it is now clear that Ferrell is making a career out of gags that get laughs precisely because they're so stupid. You get to a point, I think, where the audience starts to laugh at the movie, and Blades of Glory crosses that threshold several times. Talladega Nights, at least, had moments of wit that transcended these films' general m.o. (see, e.g., the dinner table grace scene); this one has a few random laughs, but is mostly just phoning it in. Even Ferrell's usually admirable anything-for-a-laugh energy has turned grating and stale, and the less said about Jon Heder, the better.

Dead Silence

2007-04-03T22:16:00.001-05:00

Dead Silence (James Wan, 2007) - B

I think that people kind of missed the boat on this one -- it's an old-school, lovingly crafted little horror film that, though it sometimes seems pretty toothless, in fact contains the same gleefully nasty spirit that writer Leigh Whanell and director James Wan display in the Saw franchise. I still can't quite make heads-or-tails of the ending -- none of the several possibilities that present themselves seems adequate to explain one particular narrative leap -- but I like the way it takes the entire film to a higher plane of evil; at the very least, it's demonstrably not just your run-of-the-mill possessed-ventriloquist-dummy movie. The screenplay and direction are admirably controlled, maintaining genuine horror atmosphere with a streak of knowing goofiness ("In my hometown, a ventriloquist dummy is a sign of ill omen.") that lurks just under the surface. Ryan Kwanten is kind of a black hole, and I do wish the story made more sense, but it's gorgeously shot and never less than fun. It's certainly not the cheapo throwaway that many of the critics seem to have seen.

Shooter

2007-03-31T10:31:00.000-05:00

Shooter (Antoine Fuqua, 2007) - B-

Holy crap! Mostly, I wish this worked better as a straight-ahead genre film, but I'm willing to forgive a movie a lot for being so angry, and political, and -- yes -- brave. No, I don't actually believe, as this film blatantly suggests, that Donald Rumsfeld ought to be shot in the head, but the fact that a big-budget shoot-'em-up has the balls to come out and say it is significant. This is an incendiary blend of '80s-style one-man-against-the-world action (think Commando) and modern political paranoia, existing in a world where every facet, nook and cranny of the state is corrupt to the core and merits absolute distrust. There's a scene late in the film where our falsely-accused protagonist enters a DOJ boardroom to plead his case, and five years ago that would have been that -- he would have presented his evidence, justice would have prevailed, and Danny Glover's sneering villain would have gotten his richly deserved comeuppance. But here the DOJ honchos can only throw up their hands, leaving Mark Wahlberg to, predictably enough, take matters into his own. The film is, sadly, kind of incompetent -- the second act sags; there are some bizarro edits and time-jumps I'm still trying to figure out; Fuqua never really seems comfortable with the action set-pieces -- but that may have worked in its favor, since were it actually good, it may have bought Fuqua and Co. more controversy than they bargained for. The last lines of Shooter are simply stunning, and the last shot suggests that the only viable option is for sensible people to leave civilization and retreat to the mountains, preferably after we hire Mark Wahlberg -- excuse me, "Bob Lee Swagger" -- to take most of the inside-the-Beltway population the fuck out.

The Host

2007-03-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

The Host (Joon-Ho Bong, 2007) - B+

The first real appearance of the Creature -- not the brief glimpse of it hanging under the bridge, but immediately after that -- has to be the best genre film moment since... when? I don't know. Maybe ever. The way Bong lets us glimpse it -- following an ominous shot of the horrified protagonist, we see it galloping almost merrily toward him along the bank of a river, bowling over the hapless humans who don't catch on and run for their lives fast enough -- makes for a moment that's so big and so subtle at the same time that it took my breath away. Bong gets a lot of mileage of how matter-of-factly he shoots the creature -- no hide-the-ball set-up, no portentous reveals; the camera seems placed almost casually, affording unassuming, sometimes straight-up, sometimes partially-obstructed views. It's a monster movie liberated of the genre's stylistic trappings, and it's wonderful to see. As much as I hate to denigrate ambition, I do think that the film gets carried away with the political allegory that comes to dominate the second and third acts, if only because it winds up stretched a bit too thin; still, this is surely the year's best genre film to date.

I Think I Love My Wife

2007-03-23T17:19:00.000-05:00

I Think I Love My Wife (Chris Rock, 2007) - C+

Nope, still don't like Chris Rock -- that ever-present smirk makes me want to deck him, and I wish he would stop yelling every line; he's like the live equivalent of someone who TYPES IN ALL CAPS. As a writer and director he shows more promise: his humor is unsophisticated, relying a lot on tonal contrast, repetition, and tried-and-true gags, but he can be genuinely clever, and for all his goofiness, he takes his stories seriously. My Wife is interesting for a while, mostly because of Rock's sneaky recognition of the way people perceive any interaction between a married man and an attractive woman; it's too bad that he moves away from this notion in the third act, preferring to veer toward more traditional themes of temptation and redemption. Ultimately, there's a little too much in the way of Viagra jokes and Chris Rock smugness for this to really work (the gimmicky ending, while it sounds good on paper, bombs simply because Rock is so freakin' annoying), but there are also enough laughs and surprising nuance to keep the proceedings respectable. In particular, Kerry Washington is great in a role she could have played as mindless seductress.

Zodiac, Black Snake Moan

2007-03-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) - B+

Different interpretations abound; I think it's about the way we try to process evil, subject it to rules and regulations, then prefer to forget about it, push it aside, with the inevitable result that our hands close on air. People have complained about the last scene providing an unsolicited solution to the whodunit, but all I could think was, why couldn't they bust out that photo line-up years earlier? Answer, I take it: because of petty jurisdictional bullshit, cops fighting over territory and struggling to consolidate information, hampered at every step by egos, red tape, and the Fourth Amendment. The implication is that we set up this framework to avoid dealing with evil face-to-face, something Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith finally does in the film's most powerful scene; everyone else who gets uncomfortably close bails out for the sake of their lives and families. Fincher loads the 2:40 film with detail -- it's the most intricate police procedural in years -- but our knowledge that the Zodiac was never caught makes everything seem sadly quixotic. Meanwhile, what lurks behind curiously ungrammatical letters and cryptic ciphers -- the killer we never meet (or do we?) -- is genuinely scary.

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2007) - B+

I'm tempted to accuse Brewer of being too willing to ditch his daring conceit for more conventional redemption story elements, but the whole thing winds up working so well that it's hard to complain: the final scene, in particular, is a rare movie moment, striking such a powerful chord of hope and sadness, regret and determination... it's just perfect. Amazingly, the story functions on its own terms, lest you think that a black man chaining a white woman to a radiator in Tennessee is only good for metaphor or commentary; the film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its characters' sparse backstories, even while Samuel L. Jackson is literally dragging Christina Ricci back into his house, hand over hand. Noodles around too much in the second act, but rallies big time in the third; Jackson and Ricci are extraordinary.

Raising Arizona

2007-03-03T00:08:00.000-05:00

Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987) - A-

The Coens do wonders with the English language ("We got a name for people like you. That name's called 'recidivism.'") and with comedy -- they revel in contradictions, making their characters quintessential white trash bumpkins who exhibit unexpected but consistent bursts of erudition and eloquence, alternating obstinate applications of logic to the absurd (questioning the coherence of "Freeze! Get down on the ground!"; H.I. trying to reassure Ed by telling her that she resigned as a police officer before setting off to steal the baby, and thus need not worry about breaking her oath to uphold the Constitution) with non sequiturs ("They say he's a decent man, so maybe his advisors are confused."). They are masters of tone -- it is so easy for this sort of idiosyncracy to become irritating -- and even wrap up all the silliness with an epilogue that's genuinely lovely, giving substance to what had seemed like perfectly selfish characters living in a perfectly amoral universe. It's not amoral, we realize, just unfair: the Arizonas have "more than they can handle," after all, while everyone else in the film has nothing. But that's beyond the call of duty: if you haven't seen this, rent it for the Coens' effortless command of everything they do.

Breach

2007-02-24T14:08:00.000-05:00

Breach (Billy Ray, 2007) - A

Details, details, details -- Ray gives away the plot with the very first shot (real news footage of AG Ashcroft announcing Hanssen's arrest for selling secrets to the Russians), and what's left is the interactions, the psychological pas de deux, the cat-and-mouse games. Stunning how thrilling all of this is despite taking place in an office and consisting largely of people walking around in suits; it's because it's so carefully observed, full of wonderfully unnecessary little bits, like the way Chris Cooper's Hanssen walks down the hallway, constantly ramming the bewildered Ryan Philippe into walls without noticing, or the downright predatory way Hanssen tells the latter to "pray more." Loved the obsessing over minutia (did he put the PDA back in the right briefcase pocket?), and the notion of a global conflict playing out on an administrative scale -- surely it actually happens this way. September 11th subtext is potent, too: the film posits Hanssen's ego as the source of all the trouble, and the notion of men's egoes fucking up international affairs seems vaguely familiar for some reason.

Ghost Rider; Norbit

2007-02-17T18:49:00.000-05:00

Ghost Rider (Mark Steven Johnson, 2007) - C

Johnson runs into the same problems he did in Daredevil -- all the nifty comic book conceits don't coalesce into a compelling (or coherent) mythology, so there's no sense of stakes, importance, or scale. Starts out strongly, with the sort of grand, broad-brush storytelling I was hoping for: the devil appears in the form of a black-clad Peter Fonda and immediately demands Johnny Blaze's soul (no, seriously: "Name your price," says Johnny when the devil offers to cure his father's cancer; "your soul," replies the devil); the film moves furiously for a while, and doesn't blink until Nicolas Cage shows up as Adult Johnny. Then the tone goes to hell (ha... ha...) -- Cage hams it up; the screenplay starts winking furiously and attempting broad comedy -- and the storyline sprawls in a half dozen different directions, trying to cram in as much of the comic as possible: Blaze seems to be both the devil's bounty hunter and an all-purpose avenger (he goes around smiting the wicked, kind of like Daredevil); Fonda's Mephistopheles is inexplicably dumped in favor of a generic and boring sub-villain played by Wes Bentley; Johnson lingers on Blaze's tiresome psychological crises and the obligatory journalist love interest. None of it matters, the film drains of momentum, and by the end what could have been a kick-ass geek-out becomes as ridiculous as everyone feared. A movie about a bike-riding superhero with a burning skull for a head walks a thin line, and Ghost Rider isn't calibrated right. Rent The Punisher instead.

Norbit (Brian Robbins, 2007) - D

It's not the fat suit or the mean jokes; it's not even Eddie Murphy as a small Asian man, or the unspeakably obnoxious attempts at a catchphrase ("How YOU doin'" as an expression of contempt). It's the stupidity of it that's offensive: the moron characters, the hacked-together, barely-there story, the one-note emasculated caricature that is Norbit himself. Murphy remains a talented performer, and Norbit is sometimes kind of funny (the absurdity of the monstrous Rasputia made me laugh despite myself), but it adopts a demeanor that is so aggressively formulaic and cloying that the idiocy seems almost purposeful. It made me want to shower.

Breaking and Entering

2007-02-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) - B+

Seems, at first glance, to have been built top-down, entirely out of themes, messages, and metaphors -- there's a lot about distances: physical, emotional, socioeconomic; the film tackles gentrification, urban renewal, class divides, autism -- but the characters come alive almost despite the screenplay, and ultimately wind up driving the plot. The ending, specifically, which has been decried elsewhere as pedantic and ridiculous, struck me as precisely right, both thematically -- a selfless act closing all distances -- and narratively. Meanwhile, Minghella demonstrates why he was recruited into the big time: this is a strikingly beautiful film, and Minghella's use of the entire frame is so effective and pervasive that I pity the poor saps who watch it in pan-and-scan. Ambitious as hell, sometimes overreaching -- the Russian prostitute, though gamely played by Vera Farmiga, was probably a mistake -- but also moving and downright impressive. Ignore the bad reviews.

Because I Said So

2007-02-07T17:17:00.000-05:00

Because I Said So (Michael Lehmann, 2007 ) - D+

My least favorite kind of romantic comedy: the kind where everyone is completely insane. Diane Keaton's character, who obsesses over her daughter's love life to the point of placing personal ads for her and screening potential suitors, and then showing up at her house before her dates, simply needs to be institutionalized; the daughter, played by the (still gorgeous and radiant) Mandy Moore, seems to have zero qualms about dating two people at once while trying to decide which she wants to ditch. The most interesting thing is the way antiquated notions of relationships sort of track each other: the man Mandy Moore's mother finds for her happens to be a vaguely chauvinist asshole, insisting on ordering for her from restaurant menus, and essentially telling her not to think so much. But that little thematic nugget is buried under 100 minutes of unfunny hysteria; there's also the small matter that both Tom Everett Scott and Gabriel Macht are like twice as old as Mandy Moore (her mom's okay with this?), and the question of what Piper Perabo is doing in a role with about a dozen lines, most of them about sex.

Blood and Chocolate

2007-01-30T19:00:00.000-05:00

Blood and Chocolate (Katja Von Garnier, 2007) - C

Von Garnier's werewolves don't transform with screams of pain and grotesque morphs; nor do they become gangly, ugly human-canine hybrids; nor are they hampered by such niceties as the lunar cycle. They leap into the air gracefully in the heat of the hunt, and transform into real, gorgeous wolves in a flash of light that may have been used to reduce the effects budget, but ends up being perfectly appropriate to illustrate something that need not really be all that technically impressive. They're hardly monsters at all, really, and the point is that irrational fear "of what we're not" is what turns them into objects of horror. Could have been tragic, except Von Garnier insists on turning the movie into a rejected WB-pilot, with weirdly dull-eyed Agnes Bruckner running off with plucky, unsuspecting Hugh Dancy, their love proscribed as bad for the werewolf community. The film is so invested in this that it forgets about the damn werewolves, who wind up pretty much incoherent: it's suggested that they have some level of superhuman strength and prowess, but all we see is Bruckner skipping off walls Little-Red-Riding-Hood-style, and later Dancy starts dispatching the creatures with a butter knife (albeit a silver one). Also goes on several climaxes too long, mistaking itself for a competent action film. The kind of movie that seems interesting for a while, before you realize it's totally clueless.

Catch and Release

2007-01-27T17:49:00.000-05:00

Catch and Release (Susannah Grant, 2007) - C

The kind of movie where all plot progression depends on characters' stunning and improbable lack of tact, or alternatively on characters overhearing insulting things about themselves (the film even comments on this: "It's a small house, everyone hears everything"). Glaringly artificial, in other words, full of awkward screenplay-isms (e.g. people starting conversations with a nonsense line, only to reveal [after the other person says "What?"] that they were making an oblique reference to something that happened earlier -- does anyone actually do that?) and contrived, arbitrary twists; it's all unbelievably manipulative and fundamentally boring despite some nice performances by Kevin Smith (!), Fiona Shaw, and sporadically Timothy Olyphant. Jennifer Garner does a lot of pouting and shocked indignation, making her character more self-important than sympathetic, and Juliette Lewis has what might be the most thankless and impossible task of all time: trying to be shrill, deranged and likable at the same time. But it's Grant's screenplay that's the basic problem -- sickly sweet and clumsy, it never manages to convince us that the dead character at its center actually existed. And the fishing metaphor is retarded.

Venus

2007-01-21T02:20:00.000-05:00

Venus (Roger Michell, 2006) - B+

I was ready to be the voice of backlash on this, but I must admit it's a lovely send-off (?) for O'Toole, who proves equally adept at heavy drama and slapstick at the formidable age of 74. I could say it's about Dying With Dignity, but that makes it sound more boring and clichéd than it is, and The Sea Inside this ain't: it's more about rising above the depressing situation where death is the default position and anything more than that is gravy. What struck me was the inconsiderate nonchalance of the doctors and the nurses, who seem to think that O'Toole's elderly thespian should leap in the air with glee at any suggestion that he's not about to keel over: one attempts to engage in idle chit-chat while administering a prostate exam; two gossip among themselves while sticking him with needles; a fourth curtly pronounces that though impotence and incontinence are sure to follow the operation, Maurice will emerge alive. It's a nightmare of indifference, which is what all the film's characters seem to be struggling with -- but love is the answer, as it usually is, and the early description of Venus as love and temptation that brings with it despair and foolishness turns out to be way off as to the latter. The movie starts out off-kilter, with an oddly jerky rhythm, but then settles into a tone of wry amusement, cheerfully lingering on the unpleasant details of growing old (toenail clipping, colostomy bags) and then, in a touching display of optimism, turning them into jokes. Sweet, sad, and funny too: "Not yodeling! Yodeling? Modeling!"

Miss Potter

2007-01-14T16:12:00.000-05:00

Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006) - B

"To love and be loved in return," etc., but the movie nicely integrates that into the much more interesting question of whether the relationship of an artist with her art can substitute for meaningful human interaction and other more traditional means of personal fulfillment. Answer: probably not, though the bottom line seems to be that true happiness, at least for Beatrix Potter, requires ruffling some feathers, be it of her churlish socialite mother and kind failed artist father, some greedy land developers, or even just an innocent guy strolling in the park as her carriage speeds by, with her insisting that they go faster, faster! The even, almost deadpan tone (it's just as earnest pushing Emily Watson's feminist posturing as it is predictably undercutting the same later) and exaggeratedly genteel dialogue give the movie a stifled air that (unlike its protagonist) it never quite manages to break through, but it's genuinely amiable and nice -- the perfect Sunday-afternoon senior-citizen-cinema, really -- and more thoughtful about the title character than all the clichéd Don't-Bring-Tradespeople-Into-the-House-They-Bring-Dust stuff lets on. If someone can explain to me why Renée Zellweger insists on constantly scrunching her face together in that grotesque way, though, I'd be grateful.