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Bridesmaids (2011)
Not a chick flick -- guys will like it, too
Although called a female comedy, this is chock full o' laughs for the guys, too. Co-written by Kristen Wiig and Anne Mumolo (who also has a small role), "Bridesmaids" stars Wiig as the woebegone near-spinster who has a knack for picking losers as her lovers. It was directed by Paul Feig, and co-stars Maya Rudolph as the bride who picks Wiig's character as Maid of Honor. This was Jill Clayburgh's last movie before her death from cancer. Somebody picked great music for the movie, and the Wilson Phillips performed at the end.
The writing and the performances knocked my socks off. "Bridesmaids" was nominated for Academy Awards for best original screenplay and for best supporting actress for Melissa McCarthy for her role as Megan. Although McCarthy shines, I preferred Rudolph's performance, but I don't pick 'em for Oscar Awards. Both Rudolph and Wiig are alums of Saturday Night Life, and the movie abounds with others from SNL. Judd Apatow is credited as producer, although there is a string of names of other producers of various sub-types.
Casting was stellar. I don't know how much Allison Jones had to do with it all, but she deserves an award for picking the right actors for the roles. Casting Jon Hamm as Ted, Annie's jerk boyfriend, is only one of the strokes of genius in this movie.
This is not a momentous film worthy of preservation for the eons, but it's a drop dead funny laugh-out-loud movie. At two hours, it'll fill up an afternoon quite well on some dreary cold day you don't want to go out.
Repo Man (1984)
Punk is a strange genre.
Released in 1984, "Repo Man" is at the confluence of punk rock and generic brands. Starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, "Repo Man" is the hip story of disaffected youth. In the early 80s, men were still wearing wide lapels, paisley ties, and coiffed hair, and our hero in "Repo Man" has a buzz cut and a pierced ear sporting a cross. And when he drinks beer, it comes in a white can that says "BEER," and the can has a huge UPC on the side.
In addition to Mr. Estevez, we have the inimitable Harry Dean Stanton and Sy Richardson as Otto's mentors in the car repo business. Otto's fellow repo men are named Bud, Miller, Lite, and Oly. If you can see "Repo Man" on the big screen, I recommend it because the signs in the background are part of telling the story of the punk esthetics, with Mr. Stanton's voice over and Mr. Richardson's smooth lyricism. Read all the signs.
Among the strange things about the punk movement is how modern it still is. Compare the costumes here with, say, "Earth Girls Are Easy," a film released four years later. The costumes in EGAE are hopelessly dated, but you'd be hard pressed to put a year on "Repo Man" based on how people dressed.
And unlike EGAE, "Repo Man" still holds up. It's a funny movie still.
Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929)
A remarkable movie decades ahead of its time
This is a remarkable movie. I saw the version with music by The Alloy Orchestra and commentary by Yuri Tsivian, and I recommend that version highly. The Alloy Orchestra has captured the spirit of the movie with great fidelity and virtuosity.
"The Man with a Movie Camera" was directed by Denis Kaufman, who took the name Dziga Vertof, which means spinning top, a nom de film which is entirely appropriate in this movie. The movie was edited by Vertof's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, and for the most part the man with the camera was Vertof's brother Mikhail Kaufman.
"The Man with a Movie Camera" is the "Koyaanisqatsi" of 1929, and certain of the music reminds me of Philip Glasses music in that film. (Other times the music reminds me of Edvard Grieg.) The movie starts with the beginning of a day in several Soviet cities, including Odessa, and progresses to the end of a day. However, the unimaginably swift cuts and editing make it a swirling montage of work, play, sports, and rest. Vertof, Svilova, and Kaufman take us on the whirlwind of Oz, and we realize we're not in Odessa anymore.
I don't know whom to credit, so I'll refer to the trio. They took serious risks in putting the camera in places it wasn't meant to go. They show us Kaufman on the side of a train at full speed, standing on the doors of a convertible speeding down the street, on a motorcycle in a race as he steers the motorcycle and hand cranks the camera, climbing a tall chimney, and much, much more. We see him in a firetruck filming an ambulance, then we see the ambulance from his point of view, and it cuts back and forth showing him filming, showing what he's filming. We see the theater where this film is being shown, watch it being projected on the screen, watch the audience watching the film, watch it with them.
We see many scenes of Svilova in the process of editing the movie, with some scenes ending in a freeze frame then pulling back to see her hand on the film as she cuts and splices it. Several scenes show her selecting scenes to insert into the film, then we see the scenes.
For some reason, I find the right word to be metajuxtaposition: we see "The Man with a Movie Camera" from so many points of view that it's almost like watching Joss Whedon's "The Cabin in the Woods": we don't know where the movie starts or ends, where watching the movie starts or ends, where making the movie starts or ends. We don't know if the audience we see watching the film is us or them. Are they the audience, or are we? We watch the cameraman filming the movie; we see what he's filming; we see the film he shot.
The trio used jump cuts, some as short as one frame, double exposures, freeze frames, extreme close ups, extreme long lens shots, tracking shots, stop-motion animation, split screens, and much more. The movie was an incredible work of considerable brilliance by the trio, all the more impressive for being produced in 1929.
It's a short movie of about an hour, and I recommend watching it with the music, then turning on the commentary and listening to Tsivian describe the film for the ultimate metajuxtaposition. Dr. Tsivian is a professor at the University of Chicago.
Les émotifs anonymes (2010)
Funny French romantic comedy
Directed by Jean-Pierre Ameris in 2010, this is a French romantic comedy starring Benoît Poelvoorde and Isabelle Carré as the star-crossed lovers.
Actually, they're neurotic. The gist of the movie is that they're both so neurotic, neither can find a relationship of any kind. The movie follows Angélique Delange (played by Carré) in her search for a job that doesn't make her faint, and she meets Jean- René Van Den Hugde ( Poelvoorde) who hires her as a sales rep for his chocolate factory.
The movie is laugh-out-loud funny almost all the way through its girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy plot. Their neuroses are played for laughs, of course, and each has enough foibles to keep you, if not in stitches, then at least in laughter. The movie has no depth, no lesson, but it has the light touch needed to keep things moving. If you want a very funny movie to while away an hour and a half or so, "Romantics Anonymous" is your ticket.
Sommaren med Monika (1953)
So breathtakingly original in 1953 it's become a cliché.
SPOILERS throughout.
One of the problems with reviewing "Summer with Monika" almost 60 years after its release is that it's breathtaking originality has become a part of our film lexicon.
"Summer with Monika" has many scenes which are familiar now to us but which were startlingly new in 1953, breaking rules with the full intention of shattering them. For starters, let's look at Monika looking at the camera. The convention was for the cast never to acknowledge the presence of the camera, leaving the audience to believe it wasn't there, that the audience was directly watching and experiencing the scenes projected on the silver screen. If you've been watching the movie, the context here is very disturbing, and Monika's frank gaze at you, directly at you the viewer, is both disturbing and challenging. Monika the character is breaking the rules by committing adultery, and she's challenging you to take her to task. She's flouting the rules openly, and she's not going to take your objections. And Bergman is breaking the rules by having his character stare out at you in confrontation and in conspiracy with his rule- breaking. Bergman is challenging you directly to acknowledge the wrongful deeds of his character yet still accept her as a human being. "Yes, Monika has done this; so what?"
Adding to the stare is Bergman's use of music. It's sprightly jazz, bright, fast, and happy. However, as Monika's stare continues and unsettles us, the music fades a little and we become aware of a humming sound; something sours in the sound of the jazz. Underneath the freedom of the drums and clarinet, something lurks that suggests that all is not so happy after all.
This had never been done before. When Fosse did it in "Cabaret" twenty years later no one was shocked; the stare into the camera with souring music has become a part of our vocabulary. Woody Allen mentions Bergman often, and he mentions seeing "Summer with Monika" in his late teens and how it affected him in an interview on YouTube. It's sad to say, but Bergman's freshness in 1953 had become our cliché only twenty years later.
"Summer with Monika" stars Harriet Andersson in the title role and Lars Ekborg as Harry, Monika's lover for a summer. Monika is a curvaceous 18-year-old, and Lars is 20, and they meet in a coffee house, two loose ships adrift the night. Monika is smitten by Lars because he doesn't put his hands all over her the way the other guys do; she sees him as sweet. Both have jobs they hate, home lives that are stultifying, and neither has much money. They decide to run away. Harry's father has a boat, so they take it for the summer and visit the islands around their native town of Stockholm. They challenge the status quo, exclaiming that they'll never knuckle under to the grind of everyday life like all the grownups have. During their summer of love, they fight occasionally but always make up, they live for the present, and the trip seems romantic without many struggles or tribulations. They enjoy freedom, sun, and each other. Of course, they run out of money, and they're reduced to scavenging mushrooms and stealing food from farmers.
And Monika becomes pregnant. They talk about how they'll be different from their parents, Harry will get a job, Monika will stay at home and raise little Harry, Jr., and they'll still go out and dance and see movies. Harry actually grows up, and we are impressed with his new-found maturity as little Monika's father (it was a girl). He gets a job, goes to school at night and studies to get ahead at work. We see from a scene between his fellow workers that he's changed completely from the slacker he was at the beginning of the movie, and his workers recommend him for advancement. Monika, however, is dissatisfied. Harry is spending his time and energies at work and at school and not enough money on her. She buys a new suit for herself instead of paying the rent. Harry comes home a day early from an extended work trip and finds Monika in bed with his rival from before that summer with Monika.
One of the things I like about many Swedish films is the "wrap around." In "The Emigrants," directed by Jan Troell, Max von Sydow plays an emigrant to America who goes to seek the wilderness. At the beginning of the film, he finds his wilderness, and we see him falling asleep alone in a forest to the sound of loons. At the end of the film, we hear the sound of axes ringing as his fellow villagers are using them to chop down the trees and build cabins -- the wilderness-seekers have destroyed it forever by their very act of moving there.
In "Summer with Monika," our wrap around starts with Monika before she meets Harry staring into a mirror as a few drunks stagger around in the reflected background, and Monika adjusts her beret to make herself more becoming. At the end, we have the same mirror and the same drunks, but Harry is holding his infant daughter and he's become his father -- nothing has changed despite his summer with Monika other than the grind continues in the new generation. But Harry's stare into the camera isn't the challenge that we had from Monika. Harry's stare is his acknowledgement that he's his dreams are shattered, that he has become a part of the rat- race. Harry lost.
10 timer til Paradis (2012)
A view of the lonely journey to independence
Directed by Mads Matthiesen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Martin Zandvliet, this is a disturbing movie about a very likable guy, the teddy bear of the title.
Dennis is a professional body builder, a huge hulking man who is a gentle giant of 38. He still lives with his mother in her home, and at first I thought she suffered from dementia because of the ultra politeness of Dennis's dealings with her, never arguing, doing whatever she said, sharing the bathroom with her in the mornings. However, it became clear that his mother was a controlling, very subtle monster who kept her son at a pre-school level in their relationship. Dennis is played very well by Kim Kold in what appears to be his first, maybe only movie appearance. Kold is indeed a professional body builder. His mother is played by Elsebeth Steentoft, a professional actress who is incredibly expressive without moving a muscle. Most of the cast have no other movie experience, and Matthiesen did a wonderful job getting a professional quality performance from everyone.
The plot of the movie is whether Dennis can separate himself from his mother, and I found my self rooting for him along the way. His disagreements with his mother never have raised voices, are based on her subtle manipulation of his feelings toward her, and require her to keep him as her little boy. She refers occasionally to men being disappointments and to Dennis's father, whom Dennis never knew, and her greatest reproof of Dennis is to tell him that he's like his father. The struggle for control over Dennis's freedom is never out in the open.
Dennis's struggle is as subtle as his mother's control, so the drama of his journey is without rage or tears. Just the lonely journey to independence that he should have taken as a boy, made more difficult by decades of manipulation by his mother. Kold does an excellent job showing the internal conflict without emoting. It's a very good movie.
I have the movie on a DVD from filmmovement.com, and the DVD contains two short features by Matthiesen. I don't know whether this is one sick dude or he just likes to explore sick relationships. One of the features is "Dennis," a short version of "Teddy Bear" which shows more of the relationship between Dennis and his mother. The other feature is "Cathrine," which explores the relationship between an overweight 16-year-old girl and a 33-year-old man. As in "Dennis" and "Teddy Bear," Cathrine's parents are controlling, but you can't root for a girl to break free with a man that old -- out of the frying pan and into the fire, I fear.
The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
Like Ed Wood and John Waters before they got good.
It's in black and white, the opening scenes are not well-acted, and the sound is not good. After awhile I was thinking this would segue into a color film that would explain that this was an early film by Ed Wood or John Waters -- you know, before they got good. But no.
"The Honeymoon Killers" opened in 1969. I saw the movie on DVD, with an interview of the screen writer and director, Leonard Kastle. He said it was a direct response to "Bonnie and Clyde," which he despised. "Bonnie and Clyde" had Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the leads, of course, and glamorized Barrow and Parker and their violence. Kastle said he wanted to make a more realistic movie and picked a couple called "the lonely hearts killers."
Kastle said in the interview that he had just written an opera and that it was being performed in LA, when an acquaintance of his suggested that they do a movie. There was $150,000 available, so Kastle wrote a script, they hired new-comer Martin Scorsese to direct, and they started casting. They hired Tony Lo Bianco as Ray Fernandez and Shirley Stoler as Martha Beck. Lo Bianco is a recognizable face from the many movies he did in the 70s, and Stoler of course is famous for her role in "The Seven Beauties." The rest of the cast was drawn from local talent in upstate New York, when the movie was filmed.
Kastle said Scorsese was fired for taking too long; with a budget of $150,000, they had to shoot very quickly. The assistant director took over, but he was fired, too, so Kastle directed with the able assistance of cinematographer Oliver Wood. In the interview, Kastle said many of the scenes were filmed only once -- much of the movie was done in one take. I believe it. (The cinematography is excellent, by the way.) Lo Bianco was good given the material, and Stoler got better as the movie went on. In her opening scenes she was decidedly amateur; however, she got some real emotion going by the end.
The cast is amateurs, and the script is, too. I can't remember why this was in my list of movies to watch. Although the events depicted occurred in the late 1940s, no attempt is made to set the movie in that time; all the costumes and cars are current for 1969. An end card on the movie tells us that the couple was executed in 1951.
It gets rave reviews on IMDb and is called elsewhere a cult classic. It's beyond me why. It's interesting to watch a movie Scorses got fired from; according to the interview with Kastle, Scorsese directed the scenes at the lake. Given Kastle's sensibilities as shown in the interview, I can understand why Kastle let him go. I think it was the right decision. But it's interesting to contemplate "The Honeymoon Killers" as it would have been if Scorsese had been able to finish.
In his interview, Leonard Kastle says although he's open for another movie, no one in Hollywood has come calling. I understand.
The Fall (2006)
Fascinating film that doesn't quite work for me
A little girl and a handsome young man are in the hospital, she for a broken arm, he for a broken back. Alexandria (played by Catinca Untaru) and Roy (Lee Pace) pass the time by telling stories. Roy starts them out, but Alexandria visualizes them, so we have a cross fertilization which can be surprising and funny, but which is always breathtaking. Alexandria is about 11, and her visualization of the tales includes those around her, so (as in "The Singing Detective"), we have the hospital staff pulling dual roles as Alexander the Great, a princess, heroes, and villains.
The costuming is some of the best I've seen, and the cinematography (by Colin Watkinson) is wonderful. IMDb says Tarsem Singh disclaims all trickery -- what you see on the screen is what he actually filmed, with no special effects. The scenery and action is so breathtaking, I actually doubt this. It's that good.
I really liked the movie. On one level, it's a hospital story about the blossoming friendship between two people, one of whom is a little girl. Ms. Untaru is captivating as the girl, with no evidence of acting at all. Little Alexandria is utterly guileless as Roy cunningly uses her to collect morphine tablets for him.
On another level, it's a fantasy initiated in the mind of Roy who is killing time that lays heavy on his shoulders but kicked into fantastic overdrive by the bored little girl stuck in the hospital with a broken arm. Because of the intertwining of the characters in the hospital with her fertile imagination of the tale, we have some hints of magical realism as she encounters the characters in both the fantasy and the reality worlds she inhabits.
On another level, it's a swashbuckling hero movie where a team of five swear to defeat the evil doer who has done each of them a wrong. It's here, though, that the movie let me down. Each of the five is a character, and unlike "The Princess Bride," for example, there's no real warmth among them, no feelings between them, no camaraderie. Just five guys with the same goal. It's unfortunate, because we spend a great deal of time watching them strive for their goal, but I never had any feelings for them during their various ordeals. Because of that lack of emotion among the five heroes, it misses the sweeping epic saga-ness it should have had as we watched the epic grandeur of the settings and costumes (designed by Eiko Ishioka) and listened to the epic music (Beethoven's Symphony No.7 in A major op.92, 2d movement, allegretto, for example).
I recommend the movie in spite of that one shortcoming. It's based on a Bulgarian movie by the name of "Yo Ho Ho," which I've never seen or even heard of.
The Last Command (1928)
A romantic tale turns tragedy
The story is a romantic tale inspired by an actual Russian general who fled his country after the rebellion of the Communists in 1917. The story starts in 1928 showing William Powell as Lev Andreyev, Hollywood mogul casting a film about the revolution. He picks an actor based on the actor's head shot; the actor is former Grand Duke Sergius Alexander (played by Emil Jannings), formerly the most powerful man in Russia, head of the Russian forces fighting against the insurrectionists. The story then goes to flashback, where we see the Grand Duke inspecting his troops, watched secretly by Andreyev and Natalie Dabrova (played by Evelyn Brent) as they plot his overthrow and assassination.
Mr. Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar for this role. "The Last Command" was directed by the incomparable Josef von Sternberg, who also directed "The Blue Angel" (again with Mr. Jannings), "Morocco," "Shanghai Express," "Blonde Venus," "Crime and Punishment," and more, many with Marlena Dietrich as his leading lady. Mr. Jannings was considered among the best actors of his time, and he shows why in this movie. Evelyn Brent plays a revolutionist conspirator with Mr. Powell in 1917, but the Grand Duke captures them, sends Andreyev to jail and Dabrova to the Duke's bedroom. It turns out that both the Grand Duke and Madam Dabrova want the same thing -- what's best for Russia, and he turns her to his point of view and seduces her. Or he seduces her and turns her to his point of view. In any event, he's a powerful man with a powerful personality, and she soon sees things his way.
This is a tragedy, and the Grand Duke's power turns against him when the revolutionists win, capture him, and send him off to be hanged. Dabrova secures his release, but, as the Grand Duke later puts it, he suffers a shock and ends up in Hollywood as a bit player. The tables get turned when Andreyev turns up as the director of a movie about the revolution, and Andreyev casts the general as the general in the movie. Because it is a tragedy, things go badly for our hero the Grand Duke, but von Sternberg gives us a bitterly happy ending out of it all. The three leading actors all give star turns, but for me the direction by von Sternberg is the star of this film. His long, lingering portraits, particularly of Ms. Brent, showed the emotion and depth of the characters. There are some plot points that don't quite make sense, but overall the movie still holds my interest after all these years.
I noticed that Herman J. Mankiewicz did the titles. There is a rumor that in the vote for best actor for the first Academy Award, the actual winner was Rin Tin Tin. The Academy (correctly, I think) decided that awarding the Oscar to a dog would make the award seem less than serious, and the first award for Best Actor went to runner-up Emil Jannings for his work in "The Last Command" and "The Way of All Flesh." Herman J. Mankiewicz was a well-known writer, well- known for often biting the hands that fed him in Hollywood. Another rumor is that as punishment for one of his many sins he was ordered to write a script for one of the many Rin Tin Tin movies, so he turned in a script where the dog carried a baby into a burning house. The Mankiewicz family has a glorious history in Hollywood, and I recommend reading up on them.
I note that Jack Raymond as the cigar-chomping assistant director to Andreyev is a dead ringer for Josef von Sternberg.
In the movie being made by Andreyev, we see extras being assigned costumes and doing make up to play Russian army troops. The extras were in fact extras assigned costumes and doing make up to play extras playing Russian army troops.
Ms. Brent's costumes as the 1917 revolutionist were contemporary with 1928, a situation which she repeated in "The Mating Call," a movie she made the same year which was also set in 1917. I highly recommend "The Mating Call." Herman J. Mankiewicz has an uncredited role in and did the titles for "The Mating Call." Mr. Mankiewicz repeated this role in Citizen Kane.
Bin-jip (2004)
Almost a silent movie
This is the first film I've seen by director Kim Ki-duk, and I'll put it in the "Magic Realism" genre. The movie stars Lee Seung-yeon as our hero, Jae Hee as our heroine. As far as I can remember, the characters they play never say a word to each other until the final scene.
Lee's character (Sun-hwa) is apparently homeless; he posts take-out menus on doors then circulates back to see which doors still have the menus on them the next day. He picks the locks of supposedly vacant homes or apartments and spends a night or two -- he listens to the answering machine to see if people have said they'll be away. While he's there, he fixes whatever is broken and does the people's laundry. He finds one apparently vacant home in a very well-to-do neighborhood and breaks in. He wanders through the home, finds that the scales need to be repaired, does so, and plays some golf in the backyard before noticing that the home is indeed occupied.
It turns out the owner is away on business, but his wife (named Tae-suk) remains; she shows the bruises and busted lip of their last discussion. She's a prisoner in her own home, and our young hero is a free-spirit with no home. It's a match made in heaven.
The title of the movie comes from the 3 iron that Sun-hwa finds in the home occupied by Tae- suk and her beater. The husband comes home early, takes her to task for not answering his phone calls, and discovers Sun-hwa lurking in the back yard. Sun-hwa takes the 3 iron and drives several golf balls into the husband, knocking him down; Sun-hwa and Tae-suk make their escape on his motorcycle.
Our couple continues his pattern of handing out fliers, finding a vacant apartment, and staying overnight. Nothing much happens during these scenes with nothing being said, and yet we follow their meandering path with interest and feeling. Eventually someone discovers them and calls the police. The police investigate but find no evidence of any crimes, no thefts, only repairs and clean laundry. Tae-suk is returned to her husband, and Sun-hwa is sent to jail for breaking and entering where he serves a short sentence.
Now is where the magic realism comes in to play. Sun-hwa hides from his jailer, causing the jailer to beat him and threaten to kill him. Sun-hwa becomes better and better at hiding, becoming capable of standing behind the jailer out of his view no matter how the jailer twists and turns. Eventually, he becomes invisible to the jailer. The jailer constantly threatens Sun- hwa with death and beats him each time. When it comes time to release Sun-hwa, he is escorted down a tunnel to a light at the end of the tunnel.
Apparently Sun-hwa revisits each of the places he stayed with Tae-suk; I say apparently because there is evidence of his ghostly presence, but neither we nor the occupants ever see him, although the occupants are aware of a presence. He goes to Tae-suk's home, and while her husband can't see him hiding behind him, Tae-suk does see Sun-hwa and tells him she loves him. Her husband is shocked and pleased because he assumes she's addressing him. Tae-suk fixes her husband breakfast, placing bowls around him so that as he turns to one serving, Sun-hwa steals a bite from another, both husband and loved one being filled from the same offerings.
The husband leaves, and we see the lovers embrace, standing on a scale that reads zero.
We saw Sun-hwa fix the scale earlier. If we paid attention, we know his weight shown before he fixed it, his weight after he fixed it, and her weight after he fixed it. We saw Tae-suk take the scale apart after she was returned to her husband, so she may have restored it to its former error, and we know their combined weight would take the broken scale back to zero if they both stood on it. So we can imagine that the unrepaired the scale and their combined weights plus the error is the 180 kilos which takes us back to zero. Or we can imagine that the yin and yang of their love is weightless. Or we can imagine that he was beaten to death in prison and that he is, indeed, a ghost whose spirit lifts her body so that it, too, is weightless. It's an interesting film with a spiritualism that is not heavy-handed.
Because of the ending, we get to fill the movie with meanings and emotions of our own. Of the places they stayed, only one couple was happy, and they both return to it separately to spend some time again. It's an easy movie to put meaning into as we see the empty apartments and lives of others in Seoul. It's a fascinating and interesting love story.
The version of the movie that I saw is rated R in American. This is a travesty. There is no nudity, and there is no sex. Apparently two scenes caused the MPAA to lose its mind: in one scene we see him under a sheet looking at a book of photographs with a nude model; his hand is jerking back and forth under the sheet, so we assume he's masturbating. In another scene after Tae- suk was returned to her husband, we see them get into bed, both in pajamas. Her husband puts his hand under the sheet and demands to know if "he touched you there." Our assumption is that he's asking if she's had sex with Sun-hwa. Why this deserved an R is a mystery to me.
Ronin (1998)
This is an action film redeemed from being merely "okay" by the performances of Robert De Niro and Jean Reno and by the car chases.
This is an action film redeemed from being merely "okay" by the performances of Robert De Niro and Jean Reno and by the car chases. They made it actually good.
This 1998 movie was directed by the able John Frankenheimer and stars De Niro, Reno, Katerina Witt, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgard, Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce, and an international smorgasbord of others.
It's a story that's been done many times. A bunch of guys who don't know each other show up for a job nobody knows about to steal something that isn't identified. It stumbles a little out of the gate, as De Niro's character is suspicious of everybody and everything, and he's always right. Once we get established, however, things crank up, and we have a good action movie with a great buddy film thrown in. There were several plot holes that gave me pause, but the chase soon started, and plot holes were blown away by action. Frankenheimer does car chases as well as anyone, maybe better, and every time our heroes were in touch with the prize, it was jerked away from them and put on a very fast car driven by a very professional driver. Over and over again. I lost track of how many innocent bystanders were shot, run over, and otherwise killed -- many more innocents than bad guys -- but no one in the movie cared. On to the next chase.
Reno and De Niro were very good, pulling the movie into the range of being good instead of mindless. The plot is forgettable, but those two guys gave heart to the movie. There's some kind of samurai stuff that the screenwriters attempted to graft onto the story, but it was a waste of time and had no bearing on the action. They want us to have something to puzzle out, but forget it. Watch for the two stars and the action.
Easy Living (1937)
A great screwball comedy written by Preston Sturges
A great screwball comedy written by Preston Sturges, who went on to direct many screwball comedies. "Easy Living" was directed by Mitchell Leisen, who directed a huge number of movies in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and a significant number of TV shows in the 50s and 60s.
"Easy Living" stars Jean Arthur as our lead; she's one of my favorite comedy actors, and she really shines in this movie. She's cast opposite both Edward Arnold and Ray Milland as her love interests in the typical screwball fashion of mistaken identities, mistaken situations, and mistake after mistake of epic proportions leading to a stock market meltdown and true love. Although Sturges didn't direct, we see the beginnings of his stable of actors with roles by Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig, and William Demarest.
The gist of the story is that Mary Smith (Arthur), a working girl with nary a dime to spare (it was 1937, after all), is walking to the bus stop when she's hit in the head by a very expensive fur coat thrown from his penthouse by the very wealthy investment banker J.B. Ball (Arnold) in a snit over the expenditures of his wife. A kindly man when not having a snit, J.B. takes her to a store to get another hat (hers broke when it by the fur) and gives her the fur. She's fired from her job because a man gave her a fur, she's taken into a deluxe hotel owned by J.B. because the manager assumes she's his mistress, and she befriends J.B.'s son John (Milland -- at last a last name that's not a first name!), not knowing he's J.B.'s son. Because both are "Mr. Ball," she commits unwitting mayhem on the stock market by passing on young John's utterly unexpert comments on the market to a reporter who also thinks she's J.B.'s mistress relaying J.B.'s sage advice.
It's a very funny comedy. Sturges and Leisen both hit their respective nails on the head with great writing and direction. The supporting cast is superb in adding to and creating mix-ups galore. A glaring difference between A movies and B is the quality of the supporting cast, and that difference shows very much in "Easy Living."
Crash (1996)
This is a movie about some very sick people.
This is a movie about some very sick people. Their sexual turn-on is car wrecks, and they cause them when they can't find them by chance. This movie, directed by David Cronenberg, is based on a novel by J. G. Ballard.
This is a disturbing film. The sex scenes approach soft core porn, as the characters paw and grope each other, and there is rampant fetishism as well. However, I was unable to care about the characters. Casting James Spader as the lead guarantees a performance of flat affect. This sometimes works (as in "sex, lies, and videotape," when he plays a weird voyeur), but when he is the main character and I can't begin to like him or feel sympathy for him, it wrecks the movie for me.
The problem with the film from my point of view is that I'm never given any reason to identify with these people and to care about their drive for this particular form of fetishism. I suspect the sex aspect of the film was too difficult for the director and/or the actors (including Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, and Deborah Kara Unger) for them to develop their roles fully. Instead of some fascinating insight into a world I'd never heard of, I saw moments of soft core sex interspersed with dialog from affectless characters about whom I learned nothing.
War, Inc. (2008)
Hits all my buttons for satire, might be called a dark comedy
This 2008 movie hits all my buttons for a satire. Some might call it a black comedy. Directed by Joshua Seftel, it was written by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, and John Cusack. It stars John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Hillary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, and Dan Akroyd.
The gist of the movie is that hit man Hauser (played by John Cusack) has been assigned to assassinate the president of some middle eastern country with a made up name. The satire begins when Hauser lands there. The country is being run by an American corporation called Tamerlane. All the occupying soldiers are Tamerlane mercenaries, the equipment is owned by Tamerlane (which sells ads on the sides of its tanks, by the way), and the country basically is occupied by the corporation. Everyone gets a Tamerlane corporate gift bag, including a book entitled "How I Conquered the World and Dealt with Issues with my Father."
I won't go into how well the movie nails corporate scumbaggery, occupation by corporate alter egos, and the like. It nails it. Joan Cusack is brilliant. The commercialization of the war in this godforsaken country is funny, and "War, Inc." spoofs all those dumb action movies where the action hero's wife is killed and his daughter is kidnapped: it happened to Hauser twenty years ago, and he has no clue who did it or why or where his daughter is. And he does nothing about it. Nothing.
For some reason, "War, Inc." didn't get a great release and was quickly shunted to DVD. (No conspiracies here, though, about corporations censoring the movie.) It got seriously bad reviews. (Of course, there were no corporations putting the kibosh on it, making newspapers require bad reviews from their critics.) I'm not sure what the reason was. I think it's a great movie; see it with a decent sound system for all the booms.
On another note, I see this movie as the final film in a Cusack trilogy. My suggestion is that it starts with "Say Anything," where Cusack is paired with Iona Skye. Dobler is a high school grad with nothing going for him. Released in 1989, in "Say Anything" our hero's goal in life is maybe to open a gym and be a kick boxer. Skye plays Dobler's love interest, Diane Court, who's the school's valedictorian on her way to college and a life of brainy success. It has that iconic scene where Dobler stands outside her window holding the boombox over his head as it plays "In Your Eyes."
My alternate universe point of view is that Lloyd Dobler went from being a kick boxer to being Martin Q. Blank in "Grosse Pointe Blank." Blank, of course, is a professional assassin who goes to his high school reunion to see his old high school flame (played by Minnie Driver). In "Grosse Pointe Blank" Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top secretary, and Dan Akroyd plays another assassin. Alan Arkin plays Blank's psychiatrist, and those scenes are fabulous. Blank has been assigned a hit during the time of his reunion, and we get to see a lot of conflict as Blank meets his old friends who've led boringly normal lives while he's been killing people.
In "War, Inc." Cusack plays a character named Hauser, Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top assistant, and Dan Akroyd plays a vice president. Instead of an analyst, Hauser has "GuideStar," a disembodied voice to talk him through his several problems based apparently on GM's navigation service. (Bill Cusack, brother of John and Joan, plays the "overcaffeinated" soldier delivering the dry-cleaning in "War, Inc.," by the way, and a waiter in "Grosse Pointe Blank.")
Flypaper (2011)
Really funny with a couple of small problems
This is a very funny movie directed by Rob Minkoff and written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Tim Blake Nelson and Jeffrey Tambor were the only actors I was familiar with, but the starring roles were played by Patrick Dempsey (as Tripp, our hero) and Ashley Judd (as Kaitlin, our heroine).
The big picture is that a trio of professional bank robbers have paid off the bank's security expert to bypass the alarms but not, for some reason, the security for the vault. They enter just before closing time through a door on the roof. At the same time, two redneck yokels enter through the front door to pilfer the bank's ATM machines, which, again for some reason, are located within the bank's lobby. All hell breaks loose when the two gangs meet.
Eventually Tripp, just a customer, brokers a peace deal between the pros and the yokels: each gang gets what they came for, leaving the other gang alone. The customers and employees are herded into the bank's lunchroom to wait while the gangs go about their business. The professional trio has a laptop, cutting torches, and arthroscopic tools to delve into the innards of the vault, while the rednecks have only C-4. The script kept me laughing without ever descending to slapstick, although our yokels dance the line. The dialogue is almost always sharp, funny when it needs to be, even funnier when you least expect a comedic outburst.
There were two problems that bothered me. Tripp is an absolute genius who refers several times to needing his medicine, which for some reason he never gets. Tripp has a photographic memory, remembering every detail about everything that goes on around him, using tremendous powers of inductive reasoning to figure out what's going on when all around him are in a panic. He was too good to be real, and we were given no background information on him at all. All the characters were taken as we find them in the bank with no background, which normally I have no problem with. But Tripp was too good. I needed some information on him to understand why he went to the lengths he did to parse through all the action and make it make sense.
The other problem is that the ending wrapped things up too neatly. I understand the scriptwriters needed to get us out of there and to the happy ending in 90 minutes, but they rushed the solution by me in just a few quick shots, and having spent an hour getting there, I wanted a little more time to have it sink in before Tripp and Kaitlin had their end-of-movie kiss.
The plot is a predictable boy meets girl during bank robbery, boy gets girl in the end when he solves the whodunit, but the writers gave us a great roller coaster ride to get there.
The Mating Call (1928)
A silent film with modern themes.
Producer Howard Hughes, director James Cruze and actors Thomas Meighan, Evelyn Brent, and Renee Adoree made a singularly modern movie in 1928. The titles were written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the original screenplay for "Citizen Kane," which got him an Oscar for best original screenplay. (The Mankiewicz family had something in its genes, by the way. They had writers and directors all over the family tree.)
Our introduction to the characters begins in Europe at the end of World War I. Leslie Hatten (played by Meighan) is getting ready to return home to his wife, Rose (Brent). What he doesn't know is that his marriage to her was annulled by her parents (she was a minor when they married without parental permission) and that she has remarried to Lon (played by Alan Roscoe). When Hatten discovers this, he sets about getting over the surprise by running the farm and finding another woman. Hatten gets another wife by finding an immigrant family and marrying their daughter, Catharine (Adoree).
Rose and Lon are not happily married, and Rose attempts to seduce Hatten upon his return; Rose is a very sophisticated teen, if we are to believe the script that she's a minor, but Hatten withstands her considerable charms. We learn that Lon is cheating on Rose with Jessie (Helen Foster). When Lon learns that Rose still is interested in Hatten, Lon calls out the local decency posse and makes threats to Hatten. Since Lon is an adulterer, the hypocrisy is obvious.
"The Mating Call" is a very interesting silent movie on a number of levels. It was made before the movie codes were enforced. Hence, the temptation of Hatten by Rose, his former wife, is very realistic and erotic. We also get a chance to see Catharine bathing nude in a pond. Jessie finds that Lon is unfaithful to her in their affair and kills herself. The issues are very adult and are dealt with frankly and with great care by Cruze.
There are some problems with the movie. Modern viewers are not accustomed to the conventions of silent movies, but the acting here is very natural without the mugging common in many silents (Mack Sennett comedies and Rudolph Valentino come to mind). Although Rose is said to have been under age for her marriage (putting her in her mid to late teens), Evelyn Brent was about 30 when the movie was made, and Meighan was 50 - both were clearly too old for the roles, but the sophistication of Rose matches the actress's actual age, so I overlook the age issue.
Additionally, although set in the late Teens, the costumes are current to the year of the film - Rose is dressed as a flapper with a short skirt and bare arms, instead of in period costumes with floor-length skirts, high collars, and long sleeves. Again, though, using current attire lets Rose be as modern in her approach to men as she is in the movie.
More difficult to overlook is "the Order," the local decency posse resembling the KKK in its menswear. They enforce a code of conduct which prohibits men from not supporting their mothers and from beating their wives, in two of the examples we see.
All in all, I can either dismiss the anachronisms or incorporate them into my understanding of the film. The presentation of the many problems the characters face seems to me entirely modern, even here in the early 21st Century. Although silent, "The Mating Call" transcends its time, one of several silent films still well worth watching.
Et soudain, tout le monde me manque (2011)
A fine French comedy
This French movie was directed by Jennifer Devoldère, and co-written by Jennifer Devoldère, Romain Lévy, and Cécile Sellam. They hit the nail right on the head.
Mélanie Laurent stars as Justine and Michel Blanc stars as Justine's father, Eli Dhrey. Eli has two daughters; Justine is single but has a long line of exes, and Dom (played by Florence Loiret Caille) is married. I've lost track of what happened to their mother, but Eli has remarried to the younger Suzanne (played by Claude Perron). It's Eli's 60th birthday, and Suzanne and he announce that she's pregnant. The daughters are shocked, particularly Justine.
The movie is about Justine and her relationship (or lack thereof) with her father. For some reason, he befriends all her ex-boyfriends, taking two into business with him without her knowledge, playing golf regularly with a third, and keeping in contact with several others. Yet he has shown no interest in her and little interest in Dom. Eli tells Justine's latest ex that he has no interest in children, so we have some concern about his coming child.
We see Justine meeting a new soon-to-be-ex, and Eli tries to befriend him but fails. Justine is an x-ray technician, and the new boyfriend, Sami (Guillaume Gouix), comes to see her for a possible injury to his shoulder. She x-rays his entire body and tapes the films to her window at home. Her father sees the films and goes to her for his own x-ray, and she discovers a problem with his heart. Hence the American title to the movie, and a non-too subtle reference to Eli's having shown no heart to Justine for her entire life. (She remembers bitterly his critical comments on a drawing she did at age three.)
One of the good things about the movie is that Blanc's Eli is basically a nice guy who is (a) misunderstood and (b) really doesn't care much for kids but in a casual way. Eli has a sense of humor that his family doesn't get, so some of his apparently heartless comments are just his attempt at humor. But he remains affable throughout all the misunderstandings, reaching out to Justine's exes that he works with for help and understanding. So for his daughters (and maybe his wife), he's a heartless monster at home, but he's a nice guy and true friend to Justine's exes. Those of us outside his family like Eli despite his shortcomings.
This is a French comedy, and it's carried off very well. It has enough drama and humanity to make it meaningful instead of fluff, but the humor carries the day.
Joe Gould's Secret (2000)
Failed promise
This is a movie of failed promise. It stars Stanley Tucci (who also directed) and Ian Holm as the two main characters, with appearances by Susan Sarandon, Patricia Clarkson, and Steve Martin in small (too small) parts.
SPOILER: I reveal Joe Gould's secret -- I don't think it matters, though.
In my humble opinion Stanley Tucci is one of the two best actors working in this millennium (Robert Downey, Jr. is the other), and Ian Holm is excellent as well -- in fact, all the actors I've mentioned in this movie deserve credit for their excellence. However, Mr. Holm never quite finds his character as Joe Gould, and the other appearing actors have very small parts. Tucci, of course, is fabulous as Joe Mitchell. Although the potential of the movie was great, it yielded much less than the material offered.
The gist of the story is based on reality: Joseph Mitchell was a writer for the New Yorker Magazine whose beat was the off-beat in Manhattan. In the early Fifties he stumbled across Joe Gould, a homeless but brilliant bum who was suffering from some mental problems. Mitchell wrote a New Yorker article about Gould, bringing him to prominence for awhile.
Mr. Holm had a lot going for him in the roll, but he never quite convinced me when he was acting the crazy side of Gould -- who apparently could be lucid but never for long. Mitchell would write an article about what could be the seamy side of New York, and then he moved on to the next off-beat character. Joe Gould objected to being "an article" and then being moved back into obscurity. After Mitchell's article, Gould became one of the talks of the town, people mailed in letters and money to the New Yorker, the letters and loot were passed on to Gould, but then the novelty wore off and Gould sank back into obscurity. Gould did not like that. I assume Mitchell brought a lot of riffraff into the light for 15 minutes of fame, and that all the riffraff then sank back into the dark. Gould, in the movie at least, objected. Unfortunately, the script let him voice his objections and moved on.
In the movie when Gould and Mitchell first met, Gould mentions that his father wanted him to be a physician -- like the father and the grandfather -- but Gould became a reporter instead (before spiraling down to a life on the street). Being a reporter with a Harvard degree, Gould was a disappointment to his father. Mitchell mentions that his father wanted him to carry on the family business in North Carolina, but he was a writer for the New Yorker instead; Gould observes that they both, then, were disappointments to their fathers.
There was a lesson in there that the script entirely misses. Joe Gould tells everyone that he's working on an oral history of the United States and that the works so far is so massive it's unpublishable. Despite many efforts by Mitchell to see a copy, Gould never produces any of the oral history, just some rambling writings of Gould's own observations. It becomes clear that the oral history doesn't exist and never did. At the end of the movie as the credits scroll we learn that the article about Joe Gould is the last thing Mitchell ever did. That he went in to "work" every day for decades and never produced another article for the New Yorker. The same massive writer's block that Joe Gould suffered also inflicted Joe Mitchell. That pairing is never explored; we never understand any hint of what about Gould so affected Mitchell. The movie never shows us a connection that affected Mitchell, and we have no clue what the cause of Mitchell's writer's block was. I understand that in real life no one knew the cause of Mitchell's block, but this is a movie, for pete's sake. Let's have some connection that lets us ponder what it's like being the biographer of a homeless man who then can't shake the change wrought by the experience.
So I had two potential learning experiences: a man being used, then dumped; brought into fame for a few weeks, then dropped back down into obscurity; a disappointment to his father. And second, the effect on the person bringing fame then departing, with the effect on the relationship of the two and the effect on the fame-bringer, a disappointment to his father. These are homeric in their potentialities, and script never went there. William Faulkner would have wrung the entire Civil War out of these premises. (The screenplay is by Howard A. Rodman, based on two books by Mitchell about Gould.)
On the good side, Tucci as director does a wonderful job of recreating the Fifties. I remember wearing the shirts and jackets that we see the little boys wearing. I remember the Vivian Vance perms they show. The courtesy and manners are still there, even in Manhattan.
All that's missing is the connection between Gould and Mitchell that leads Mitchell down the same path as Gould. I'm sorry to say what character development there is in the movie, takes place after it ends when Mitchell finds himself lost in his own mind.
Burn After Reading (2008)
The Coens nail another one
The Coen Brothers nail another comedy with a wonderful cast playing wonderful, screwball characters. This movie is a riot. The cast includes George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, and Brad Pitt.
Malkovich is superb as Osbourne Cox, a fired CIA agent who writes his memoirs in defiance of the agency that dumped him. A copy of his memoirs ends up in the hands of the employees of a local gym - Linda Litzke (McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), who are incredibly dumb and driven. They try to blackmail Cox, and the story spirals into complete chaos.
George Clooney should stop acting for anyone other than the Coen brothers. I don't know what they have that brings out the lunatic in Clooney, but every time he's in a Coen movie, he does the best job he's ever done. He's a good actor the other times, but for the Coens, he's one of the best of today's actors. Malkovich is excellent all the time, and he's used by the Coens superbly - well, I said superb about him a paragraph ago, but it's still the right word. His physical comedy here is hilarious. He's a great actor, and he gets to let it all out as Cox.
Among the nice things about this movie is that there are no babes (well, maybe Pitt, but we'll think more about that later), no slow-motion martial arts fights, no big gun fights with full automatic weapons, just funny scene after funny scene, with a few shockers thrown in to keep us off-balance. Pay attention - you'll be well-rewarded. I don't think there was a wasted scene in the whole shebang.
Hell's Angels (1930)
Slow to start, but excellent aerial combat scenes
This action movie was directed by Howard Hughes, and it stars Ben Lyon, James Hall, and Jean Harlow. Monte Rutledge (Lyon) and Roy Rutledge (Hall) are brothers attending Oxford. If I have them straight, Roy is straitlaced and Monte is a womanizer and coward. Helen (Harlow) is Roy's girlfriend, and he thinks she's swell. However, she's a woman of easy virtue who sets herself up to be pursued by every man that's attractive to her, including Monte who doesn't say no.
NOTE: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
There's a long, not very interesting beginning to this two-hour epic in which we're set up with the back story. We are shown that Monte is a cowardly womanizer and that Roy stands up for his brother to save the family name. We learn that Helen lets Roy think she's a moral, upstanding girl, but she seduces every man she wants, and Roy is so moral he can't see what's really going on. Okay, enough of that. We learn that Jean Harlow can't do an English accent at all and that Messrs. Lyon and Hall aren't too good at it.
Finally, World War I breaks out, and Roy and Monte join the Royal Flying Corps, Helen is a volunteer for the canteens, and they all end up in or around Paris. Monte starts claiming he's sick and can't fly all his missions, so others are being sent instead, getting shot down in his place. The squadron resents him, and he volunteers for a dangerous mission to prove he's not yellow. Roy volunteers to fly it with him. Finally, the action starts.
Lyon is quite good as the yellow coward, and I actually felt sympathy for him in several scenes. Hughes was not as his best as director here, and the script and dialogue were not the greatest. "It's getting dark," Monte says, as he lays dying (or lies dying -- who knows these days which is which -- maybe he dies lying). "Roy! Where are you?" even though Roy is holding him in his arms. Several of the scenes were unintentionally hilarious, a mix of the Three Stooges and Monte Python's Flying Circus, which is ironic since the brothers are being chased by someone else's Flying Circus of World War I.
The best scenes are the bombing of the ammo depot and the dog fight. I can't imagine how they choreographed and arranged the dog fight scenes, with one mid-air collision between planes -- real planes, really colliding. There were camera planes filming the action and cameras mounted on the planes showing the pilots, sky, and earth in all the chaos of rolls, spins, and dives.
I felt bad for Monte in the bomber. The German fighters are faster, and he can see them catching up. There's nothing to be done -- they can't dodge them in the bomber, they can't fly faster; all Monte can do is plead for Roy (who's piloting the aircraft) to do something. He's a coward who can see his death approaching, and he can't run away this time, he can't leave it to Roy to get him out of it.
But eventually the real drama ends, and we're back in the staged dialogue and campy acting. I'm not sure I recommend this movie for casual watching. It's interesting to see the blonde bombshell at the age of 18 or 19 -- she was quite a good actress, much more natural than Lyon and Hall. This movie was her big break after a few years of bit parts, often uncredited. Her costumes here are revealing, and the version of "Hell's Angels" I saw on DVD had some scenes in color, showing off her costumes and her to great effect. (She died of an infection at the age of 26, so her career was quite short.)
And it's interesting to watch a movie directed by Howard Hughes. But it turns out Mr. Hughes wasn't all that good with actors. Like Cecil B. DeMille, he needed action and spectacle. But the action and spectacle are great. There are scenes with a Zeppelin bombing London that are breathtaking, and when Hughes has actors in action, he was quite good with them. Unfortunately, too much of this movie was outside Howard Hughes's area of greatest competence.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Meh.
I guess my hopes were too high. I saw the previews and locked in on who the actors are: Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban. How could the movie fail?
And yet it does. Scripted by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola and directed by Anderson, the movie is about a couple of 12-year-olds who run away together. Kara Hayward plays Suzzy and Jared Gilman plays Sam, and the actors are good. Sam's look of quandary was appropriate, and Suzzy was a vicious little delinquent -- which I liked. However, their story was muddled by all the back stories of the adults. There were a large number of kids in the Khaki Scouts who never really had a chance to let loose. And there was absolutely no ensemble acting among the grownups. Swinton and Keitel in particular were totally wasted in their brief roles. There was a great deal of promise, but it was never achieved.
Wes Anderson is an A-list director with lots of quirky movies: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, to name just three. Unfortunately, the story doesn't carry the actors. It's too scattershot, and too many of the characters were empty costumes. There were lots of laughs, a nod or two at other movies, but it left me empty at the end.
Beowulf (2007)
CGI characters and sets well-used for the story
Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this is a "performance capture" film. It stars performances by Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, and Crispin Glover. Oh, and Angelina Jolie.
Performance capture, also known as motion capture, basically means the actors wear skin tight clothes with markers on them and act in front of a green screen. Later, computers render the performance digitally, with costumes, sets, and even the characters created by algorithms. For some people, this is a killer, and they can't accept the movie as a movie. I have some agreement with this. Wright Penn's character, Wealthow, was a blank for me. Whatever expression the actress gave the character, it never showed on the CGI face. Brendan Gleeson's Wiglaf, on the other hand, was totally credible throughout.
But you must know that the sets, the costumes, the scenery, and the characters are all generated on computer and do not look photorealistic at all. My perspective was that I was watching a comic book playing out on the screen, with excellent illustrations and an actual story. In one scene, we see a dragon swimming underwater, breathing fire and making the water boil around its mouth - I thought this was excellent. The fantasy aspects of "Beowulf" worked wonderfully. But when the characters talked, the motions and facial expressions weren't real, and often I had no feeling that the characters were walking on whatever surface they were supposed to be on. Overall, I was not so distracted from it to have it spoil the story for me. And "Beowulf" certainly tells a story.
Scriptwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary took liberties with the original story, an ancient English heroic poem of uncertain date and origin. I've read a translation of the poem, and the movie does not follow it too closely, but the screenplay is epic in itself and worked well for me. Scholars may be disappointed, but movie goers will not be. This is an action drama, with enough emphasis on character, loss, flaw, and disappointment to keep the adults in attention.
Because the movie is computer generated, the art aspects of the movie can really come to the fore. I did not feel ever that the performance capture aspects were used as tricks; Zemeckis kept the story in the forefront, with the animation as the servant of the story at all times. Both the old king (Hrothgar, played by Hopkins) and Beowulf (Winstone) had their flaws; no comic book (nor Old English, neither) heroes they. The artwork surrounding the characters was outstanding, in my very humble opinion, and added to the feel of the story.
I am a great fan of illustration, and I saw the movie as excellent illustration with very credible plot and characters. It has great action, although some may find the gore a bit much in the battle scenes. Because the performances are in computer, I think the scenes are more realistic than live action battles, and this realism may be disturbing to those that are disturbed by such things - you know who you are.
Glover performs as Grendel, and he gives a very interesting performance, taking Grendel far afield from the epic poem by making Grendel a touch more human than monster.
A couple of notes: Beowulf and his kin are not being called "geeks" in the movie; they are "Geats," natives of a no longer extant kingdom somewhere in Scandinavia. The most feared animals in Europe during the Dark Ages were bears. As was common among unschooled folk, it was considered bad luck even to say the word bear, so other terms were made up. In England, the common word was "brown," the color of the unnameable, which at the time was pronounced "bruin." In Scandinavia, bears were referred to as bee-wolves, a word combination having no meaning on its own now called a kenning. The Scandinavian spelling of bee-wolf was - you guessed it - Beowulf. So our hero is a bear, the most fearsome creature on the continent. The characters refer occasionally to their worship of Odin. Gaiman has written a novel called "American Gods," which has Odin as a central character. Other forms of Odin's name include Woden, Wotan, and surprisingly Mercury. Our day called Wednesday is a form of Woden's Day, the germanic form of the Latin Dies Mercurii, also known as mercredi in French and miercoles in Spanish, which use the latinate form. (Why we pronounce Wednesday "wenzdi" is another question.) Additionally, Gaiman wrote "The Sandman" series of comic books, which brings me back to the visualization of this movie as a comic book in action with most excellent illustration.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979)
The best piece of ensemble acting I've seen
This is the best piece of ensemble acting I've seen. This was a mini-series in 1979, directed by John Irvin and starring Alec Guiness. The cast works together as the characters did, and they make the mini-series rise above the genre.
It's based on the novel by John le Carre, and we find George Smiley (played by Sir Alec) called back from retirement to ferret out a mole in the British Secret Service. It would be the usual spy-vs-spy stuff but for the camaraderie shown by the cast (a camaraderie I was disappointed to find missing in the sequel "Smiley's People").
The material is top-notch, the screenplay is excellent, and the story moves along crisply and with intrigue, lots of subtle things going on that add depth to the characters, but it's a real winner because of the performance of the cast.
A Single Man (2009)
Colin Firth is good. Very, very good.
The movie was directed by Tom Ford and co-written by Ford and David Scearce, based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood. Ford takes loving care with long scenes of faces as the characters reveal their interiors. The cinematography is by Eduard Grau, and it's great. The original music is beautiful; it's by Abel Korzeniowski.
The story is about a college professor, George Falconer (played by Firth), who in October 1962 has decided to kill himself, as he's never come to terms with the accidental death of the love of his life, Jim (played by Matthew Goode). Having set his intention in the morning when he wakes, we live the day with him as he sees things and remembers things. Firth is wonderful at showing Falconer's feelings, and Ford lingers on Firth's face to great advantage.
The movie's designers brought the Sixties back with excellent sets, costumes, makeup, and hair. Princess phones with rotary dials and AM radios abound. The Cuban Missile Crisis has everyone but Falconer on edge -- the people around him fear for their futures, but Falconer has no future this fine autumn day.
This is a movie of mood, and although the dialogue is important, what we see around Falconer and what we see in Falconer's face as he sees around him are the most important parts of the movie. He spends much of the day in reverie, with some irritation at the intrusions of people into his privacy. Yet Falconer is ever civil to those around him, even if he wishes them ill.
"A Single Man" is a very good movie. Despite the subject matter, there is much warmth and humor in what George intends to be his last day.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
A great story with great feeling
Directed by David Fincher, this movie is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1922. I've read the short story, but ignoring it when I review the movie is easy as there is basically no connection between the two. I review the film on its own merits, which are many.
The cast is great: Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, and more. The script takes the concept of the short story and goes in completely different directions, taking a path that borders on overly sentimental. Benjamin is born at the end of World War I as an infant who is apparently about seventy years of age, nearly blind from cataracts. As he grows, becomes a toddler, then a pre-schooler, crippled with arthritis, frail, and elderly. He can only watch his peers at play through his glasses. As time passes, his health improves and he becomes more able. It becomes clear that he was born an old man but that he is getting younger as time goes by.
Benjamin's mother dies giving birth and his father, horrified by the appearance of his son and by the death of his wife, at first considers throwing the infant in a canal (the movie is situated in New Orleans) but he ends up leaving the baby as a foundling at an old folks home where little Benjamin fits right in. He's taken in by Queenie, a black maid at the home, and her boyfriend or husband, who is the cook. Benjamin is raised as their own, with no mention ever being made of race. I really liked this although it's impossible to conceive of the reality of a race-blind New Orleans in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. Benjamin calls Queenie "Momma," and he's treated by all as her son.
It's a heartwarming story from the time we meet Queenie, with age as the defining metaphor. In the old folks home, frail elderly come in, dead go out, and young Benjamin watches it all through the cataracted eyes of a pre-schooler, then a pre-teen, then a teen as the hormones kick in and hair starts to grow on his body. As befits the little old man that he appears, Benjamin is wise beyond his years, and we get a wizened view of life.
I didn't really get any depth from the movie. It was a great story with great feeling, but no great lessons. And that's fine. It ran about two hours and forty-five minutes, and it held my attention throughout. It's well-written, with good characters, good dialogue, and good visuals.
I highly recommend the short story, whether you've seen the movie or not. Neither will spoil the other as there are no plot similarities at all. The story is much more bitter-sweet than the film. I recommend all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories. He was excellent. Many, maybe all, of his short stories deal with youth and the failure of its promise. The story of "Benjamin Button" deals with it in reverse. The movie misses that entirely, as a Hollywood film must. The ending of the short story is one of the best I recall.