Little Worlds

"At once terrible and of a great beauty": The Grey

2012-01-28T16:07:00.013-05:00

What I like most about Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, a raw, gory, gripping Arctic survival tale, is that it is a raw, gory, gripping Arctic survival tale. In my book, that alone makes it a film worth watching, but this Arctic tale offers more.

The Grey follows the typical survival story pattern: plane crashes in a snowy wasteland; non-survivors die; survivors huddle; some panic and want to give up; some seem determined to survive; one take-charge guy rallies the men (the sole stewardess has died) to survive against the cold, and the hungry and very aggressive wolves whose space has been violated.

What elevates The Grey above your typical Arctic survival tale is its central character: a man named John Ottway, played excellently by Liam Neeson, a guard/sniper hired to protect the wild-and-wooly Arctic oil refinery workers who love to drink and brawl. What makes Neeson’s character interesting is that he is a deeply troubled individual, suicidal, the son of a drunken but poetic Irish father (seen in flashback images that reminded me of The Tree of Life). Ottway is also very much in love with a woman (seen in flashback images, saying, “Don’t be afraid”), but there is some unnamed division between them (Is it death?) that has separated him from her and sent him to this faraway outpost.

Another factor that elevates The Grey, another reason that I like it, is that it’s not just an action movie. There is a lot of action involving the unrelentingly vicious wolves, but the film also takes time to be a thoughtful exploration of the meaning of life and death in the wilderness, reminiscent of James Dickey’s To the White Sea and just about everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

This philosophical texture begins with the death of a wolf shot by Ottway in order to protect workers. The workers don’t even seem to notice. But Ottway notices, and it affects him deeply. As the wolf lies breathing its last, Ottway kneels and places his hand on the beast’s rising and falling body. He feels the wolf’s death. It makes him think about what he’s going to do with his own life. This very powerful scene made me think immediately of a passage in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing in which the main character looks sadly upon a dead wolf and contemplates all thing shining – or not so shining – as in Malick’s The Thin Red Line, another story that The Grey evoked for me. In The Crossing, Billy Parham laments the wolf’s death that makes him ponder all things that live and die in the universe:

The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.

He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.

But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.

The death of the wolf in The Grey is mirrored by a later moment, the best moment in the film: when one of the mortally wounded non-survivors of the crash lies dying in the wreckage and John helps him die. His voice calm, soothing in its conviction, he helps the dying man embrace his death. While the others look on in astonishment, Ottway tells the dying man he will feel warm, as James Dickey writes in To the White Sea. For a second there was a terrific heat, like somebody had opened a furnace door, the most terrible heat, something that could burn up the world, and I knew I was gone.

The film ends with another striking image: Ottway kneeling in the snow watching the approach of the alpha male wolf (supposedly “the grey” though he doesn’t look very grey). I found this shot to be so reminiscent of that classic of Arctic non-survival tales: Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” In London’s story, the Man, at the end of his tether, kneels in the snow and knows that death is approaching. If he didn’t know it before, he now knows the power of nature and man’s comparative insignificance in the cosmic scope of things. Similarly, the men who spend the most time hanging in there, played by Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, and Dermot Mulroney (looking, in his cap, very much like Steven Spielberg), find time to voice similar observations and quandaries about the mysteries of life and what they value most.

The Grey is not a perfect film. It would have been much more gripping had the wolves been shown more sparingly. Devices such as pairs of gleaming eyes in the darkness, puffs of vapor rising from the mouths of the howling wolves, and the horrifying noises emanating from the black forest, along with the excellent acting of all characters involved, do a lot more to create suspense and terror than the hairy but unscary animatronic wolves that come in close to join the campers by their fire. In addition, some viewers might consider the film’s ambiguous ending to be irritating though I urge you to hang in there through the credits to see an additional scene which is ambiguous in a different way. But The Grey is a raw, gory, gripping Arctic survival tale, and I definitely get behind that, as well as all the existential musings about that which cannot be held never be held, and all things shining, or dark and inscrutable, in this human adventure of ours.

The Ninth Nomination

2012-01-25T13:53:00.016-05:00

When I opened the Oscar Nominations live online at 8:38 EST on Tuesday morning, I was between classes, and I ran the rest of it as my A.P. English Literature students took their seats. At first, the colorful little rectangles stacked up symmetrically, four on one side of announcers Jennifer Lawrence and Tom Sherak, and four on the other.

(If you missed it, you can watch it now.)

Eight movies stacked up, and I had seen them all! Suddenly, up popped the ninth nomination: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. What a surprise! I didn’t even know it had been released in 2011; I thought its release had been delayed. It had only opened on Cape Cod on Friday. Well, this put a wrinkle in my viewing sweep! Being the obsessive-compulsive individual I am, I was determined to smooth things out.

So I taught my classes, including my challenging group of ADHD 8th graders who turn distractedness into an art form. After school, I directed a Drama Club rehearsal until 4:30, and then I went home, made dinner, bade farewell to wife and daughter, and made the 7:00 showing, ready to escape into a movie after a stressful day.

When I got home, I compared notes with my wife who had read the novel. She told me the book had left her cold, and she had found it frustratingly gimmicky. And that’s exactly how I had felt about the movie.

I enjoyed elements of Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about the odyssey of Oskar Schell, an anti-social, highly intellectual child, possibly with Asperger syndrome, who searches the boroughs of New York City for the lock that will fit a key left by Oskar’s father who has been killed in the 9/11 disaster.

The acting is fairly good. Tom Hanks is at his pudgy overacting best, but his goofy approach suits the character of Thomas Schell, Oskar’s eccentric father, aspiring scientist turned jeweler (to support the family), who assigns Oskar whimsical tasks geared to occupy his hyperactive brain and force him to interact with other people. As Oskar’s deeply grieving but always loving mother, Sandra Bullock looks suitably stricken, as though she’s suffering from chronic migraines. Max von Sydow is intriguing as Oskar’s grandmother’s mysterious “Renter,” who refuses to speak, writing everything he wants to say in a notebook or holding up his right or left palm tattooed with “Yes” or “No.”

Max von Sydow’s performance here is all about his facial expressions, and this has landed him a Best Supporting Actor nod even though Hunter McCracken, the boy who plays young Jack in The Tree of Life, expresses a world of meaning with his eyes and body posture. Rightfully so, Thomas Horn was not nominated for an Oscar even though he delivers very long speeches very quickly without taking a breath. Horn is at times touching, but eventually his presence wears thin in the same way the Renter’s cutesy notes and other gimmicks in the film pique one's interest and then eventually become irritating. Meanwhile, Alexandre Desplat’s musical score is quite touching; I sat through the credits to listen to it.

Here, the gimmicks fly as fast as Oskar Schell’s narrated thoughts and his rapidly delivered run-ons. We have his father’s whimsical quest to find New York’s 6th borough and the shrine to his dead father Oskar makes in an overhead cupboard that also contains the answering machine with the recording of his father’s last six messages called from the south tower of the World Trade Center, which he replaces with a new answering machine he dashes out to buy on the night of 9/11, so that his mother never hears the messages, though I would have noticed right away that it was a new answering machine because the older one is smudged and discolored; and it’s in the cupboard that Oskar finds the small vase that contains a key and the envelope containing the key with the word “Black” written on it, and in order to assuage his sorrow, Oskar tells himself that the key unlocks a message left to him by his father in the possession of someone named Black, which leads to his quest to locate and interview the hundreds of Blacks living in New York City, so he packs his backpack with an Israeli gas mask and his notebook and his tambourine, which he shakes to distract him from his fears as he crosses streets and bridges and takes the subway, an interesting gimmick, though that means a whole hell of a lot of shaking of jingles as he makes his way through the busy city, sometimes with the help of the note-writing Renter, his journey ultimately leading him to a closer relationship with his mother, and a surprise that takes us into a montage reprising the entire journey.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is certainly not the weakest of the nine films nominated for Best Picture. The way I see it, it falls like this –

1. The Tree of Life
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
9. The Help

As for the other six films, I regard them in two clumps of three, but I’m indifferent as to where they stand in those two clumps, thus –

1. The Tree of Life
2. Moneyball/ War Horse/ The Artist
3. The Artist/ Moneyball/ War Horse
4. War Horse/ The Artist/ Moneyball
5. The Descendants/ Midnight in Paris/ Hugo
6. Midnight in Paris/ Hugo/ The Descendants
7. Hugo/ The Descendants/ Midnight in Paris
8. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
9. The Help

Excuse the gimmick.

In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a well-intended tale about the effects of the 9/11 tragedy, story quirks and a whimsical tone throttle the impact of a very powerful event. It is a film that is powerful in the few brief moments when Oskar listens to his father’s messages and when he dreams of his father falling from the burning building, but it is a film as bad as the moment in which John Goodman, as a doorman, stares at a television as CNN broadcasts live coverage of 9/11 and gasps, “Oh, God” in a tone that is downright comical.

Interchangeably throughout the film, Oskar says that his father died “in 9/11” and that he died “on 9/11” and that he died “at 9/11.” Since Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a film about words and wonder and secrets and clues, I wonder if this was intended as a deliberate gimmick. Giving the writers credit, they express the scope of 9/11. It is an event, like a battle; it is a date; it is a location.

Intentionally clever or not, this different wording suggests that writers and filmmakers still don’t know how to effectively address an event that overwhelmed a nation. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a whimsically clever film, but it is not a powerful film. It doesn’t have the visceral punch of United 93. It doesn’t cut to the bone. It must show the ubiquitous plywood wall covered with missing persons posters with overwrought reverence. With the intended-as-touching vignettes of the many Mr. and Mrs. Blacks hugging or crying over Oskar, it must assure us that everything is all right now, even though everything is not all right now. People who lost loved ones are not over the loss; and the same goes for people who were suffering worse tragedies and losses even before the planes struck.

Movie History: Red Tails (2012) and Jackie Chan's 1911 (2011)

2012-01-21T19:23:00.011-05:00

Will cocky, ever-so-cheerful-in-battle African American fighter pilots prove to the racist white officers in the Pentagon that they will be brave under fire as they escort B-17 bombers on their mission? Oh, yes they will. (Historically, I don’t know where the white officers were coming from, saying in a report in the early 1900s that African Americans were essentially cowards. Hadn’t black soldiers already fought bravely and died in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War?)

With this central conflict, the World War II historical action movie Red Tails (whose title refers to the red tails painted on the planes the African Americans flew) is very much a made-for-television affair. But the film’s tangential plotlines and its visual scope turn it into an epic historical film that is too lengthy for its own good.

Along with ample scenes showing that yes, indeed, the African American aces under the command of Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howard) and Major Stance (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) are not afraid to shoot down Jerries led by the stereotypically venomous and scar-faced Kraut “Pretty Boy” (Lars van Riesen), the film spends time on the highly improbable love story between Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo) and a gorgeous Italian woman (Daniela Ruah). It even turns prison camp movie when “Junior” (Tristan Wilds) ends up in a German P.O.W. camp where he impresses white American inmates by helping their escape effort in the role of “scrounger.” Later, he distracts a guard from shooting an escapee who sticks his head out of the tunnel in a scene that borrows unimaginatively from The Great Escape

Throughout, Red Tails makes up for its hackneyed central plot by providing lots to look at. The pilots live and work in a vast Italian airfield that is vividly rendered in sprawling long shots, and there are no limits to the action enhanced by CGI as the daredevil “Lightning” shoots up a train, then a battleship, then an entire German airfield. In the film’s climactic battle, a dizzying visual overload of flying images, the brave pilots defend B-17 bombers in an attack by German jet planes that whiz past in a blur. This is the first depiction of propeller-driven fighter planes pitted against World War II jets that I’ve seen! In a slip-up, however, “Lightning” shoots down a German jet and says, “That puts an end to Pretty Boy,” but how the hell did he identify the German pilot in his much faster jet?

For the most part, the acting carries the film and the actors playing the various pilots and ground crew are invested in their small parts. Howard is at his ardent best, and I have to say that Gooding, Jr. suppresses the over-acting, and over-smiling, to portray a realistically serious and seasoned squadron leader. Finally, the sincere performance of David Oyelowo (excellent in the British mini-series 5 Days provides the film’s central strength.

Ultimately, the film holds together and takes you along despite some talkie scenes that slow it down. At the end, things get heavy-handed with excessive flag-waving and a musical score, overbearing throughout, that waxes irritatingly histrionic with its rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. All in all, Red Tails is a worthwhile viewing experience that features David Oyelowo, gripping action, and German jet planes. Unfortunately, no horses. (See “It’s gotta have horses.”)

Unlike Red Tails, Jackie Chan’s patriotic 1911, a film about the Xinhai Revolution, released in 2011 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the uprising that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China, features a horse as a central image in a scene in which Huang Xing (Jackie Chan), commander of nationalist forces, is impressed by the red nationalist flag brought to the front by a messenger on horseback. Appropriating flag and horse, Xing rides out across no man’s land to inspire his beleaguered troops during an artillery barrage. Suddenly, the stirring scene is cut short and we see Xing running through the trenches telling his men to take cover. This is the nature of 1911, very much like Red Tails a made-for-television effort. 1911 is full of brief vignettes, some of them striking, some of them pointless, some of them merely adding more information to a film that ambitiously tries to cover too much of a complex event that involved multiple uprisings and battles and countless important persons.

As Huang Xing, Chan restrains the overacting and does a serious job as the fervent revolutionist turned leader of ragtag forces that suffer heavy casualties. He does, however, manage to insert the requisite Jackie Chan martial arts display when Xing thwarts an assassination attempt. The attractive Bingbing Lee plays Xu Zonghan, a woman dedicated to the cause who works as a nurse and bucks up the dispirited Huang Xing. Meanwhile, from San Francisco to London and Paris, Sun Yat-Sen (Winston Chao), the ideological leader of the movements, drums up financial support for the republican cause while trying to stop financial support of the Manchus.

Jackie Chan knows how to stage rousing, heroic action. The first battle, the best one, involves a failed attempt by civilian revolutionists to gain power, and it is appropriately fast-paced and chaotic. It ends badly for the revolutionists, as we see in a striking crane shot of executed revolutionists strewn on a muddy beach. In the film’s central set piece, Xing leads his men in a charge across no man’s land.

Chan’s film is well intended though often stilted and mostly unable to surpass a made-for-television look and tone. When Sun Yat-Sen heads for England, he sails aboard a ship so poorly rendered by CGI it would be better left on the cutting room floor. A few powerful scenes are the exceptions, one of them being the image of the bodies on the beach, another involving a female revolutionist, her neck in a wooden yoke, marched down a crowded street to her execution.

Another problem with the film is that it tries to cram in too much information. Chan packs in a lot of history by presenting a battle or incident followed by big chunks of text telling us the detailed results. On top of that, the DVD is a challenge to watch. If you choose Mandarin with English subtitles, you have to be a speed-reader to catch the dense, quickly changing subtitles, while you try to keep one eye on the frenetic action. If you choose the English dubbing so that you can follow the action undistracted by subtitles, you get silly voices that make the actors sound like Japanese anime characters. In addition, the chunks of historical text, full of all-inclusive litanies of Chinese names, are too small to read without zooming in on the frame.

The film is informative and sometimes fascinating to watch, but ultimately the pace gets bogged down in confusing politics as Yat-sen gives up the presidency to Yuan Shikai, for some reason that isn’t clear, and in order to pep things up, the film ends flatly with a surge of patriotic music accompanying shots of a bas relief commemorating the revolution. I’m a big fan of Doctor Zhivago. I love movies featuring passionate revolutionists involved in an epic struggle, but in Jackie Chan’s 1911 the facts outweigh the passion and the visual scope.

"It's gotta have horses."

2012-01-05T19:54:00.009-05:00

The following reflection is not about War Horse.

This is a thought that came to me when I went to a site listing upcoming 2012 movies and, to my disappointment, the prospects looked bleak. I’m a big fan of science fiction, so I’m looking forward to Prometheus, but I’m also a big fan of Westerns (which are relegated to HBO these days), historical epics, and period pieces. I like a film that transports you to another time and place. So, looking at the list of upcoming films, and thinking of the movies I had seen in 2011 and the scarcity of great period films, I remembered a discussion about movies that had led to the question, “What must a film have in order to be a great film?” and I had responded, “It’s gotta have horses.”

When answering the above question, I wasn't expressing a love of horses, and I wasn't just thinking about Westerns and historical epics. When I thought of films that I consider great, they all seemed to have horses (or at least one horse) in them.

Asked to apply my criterion to specific films, I had mentioned three of my favorite films, which I also consider great films: Lawrence of Arabia, The Searchers, and Ben-Hur (1959). (Some might argue that the last film is not a great film, but to each his own.)

Then, the suggestion was made that my criterion was too restrictive. It seemed to point mostly to Westerns and period pieces. “Not so,” I said. If you think The Godfather is a great film, don’t worry. It meets the criterion. If you think Vertigo is a great film, think about the wooden horse in the mission museum. Citizen Kane? Don’t forget the horse-drawn wagon that splashes mud on Kane just before he meets Susan Alexander. The Graduate? Monkeys! Damn, no horse.

Applying this criterion to more recent movies, I’m happy to see that it includes The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, There Will Be Blood, and The New World. The Tree of Life, my pick for the best film of 2011, has horses on the cowboy bedspread in the boys’ room, but that might be stretching the rule. With all those images, there must be another horse in the film! But Melancholia, #2 on my list of the best films of 2011, definitely has horses that are key to its story and imagery. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, my pick for the best summer release - horses!

So here’s the deal. Think of great films that you love – perhaps the first five that come to mind. Do they meet the horse criterion? Or, if you don’t want to do it that way, provide your own response to the question, “What must a film have in order to be a great film?” and keep your answer limited to one specific requirement.

My Year at the Movies - 2011

2011-12-31T23:00:00.009-05:00

Happy New Year!

The 2011 Year at the Movies is over, and I look forward to the new year in film. I am grateful to all my faithful followers throughout my three years of blogging, and I wish you the best in 2012. In 2011, I went to the movies 91 times to see 83 different movies in theaters, and I had lots of fun seeing just about all of them.

Enjoy this look at the 2011 Movie Year. You may come upon your favorite films of the year; you may encounter films you have totally forgotten or films you had no idea were released this year. If you wish, you are welcome to skip through the year's low-quality beginning and scroll down to the more recent films released.

Each image is followed by a brief reaction to that film OR an excerpt from the post I wrote about the film shortly after its release. Links to full posts follow excerpts. Titles include a date or dates when I viewed the movie.

Once you make it down past movie #83, you will find an image gallery of best performances, followed by my nominees for Best Picture, and my pick for Best Picture of 2011. At the end you will find a list of my Top Twenty Favorite Films of 2011.

Enjoy!

1. The Rite (1/28)

Mikael (1408) Håfström’s The Rite is not an overly scary movie about exorcism, but it is a sincere, modest little movie about faith and God.

The Rite never scared me but it kept my interest. Having attended a Catholic grade school back in the 60s when the nuns still told stories about martyred virgin saints raped by Roman legions and priests visited by demonic strangers with cloven feet, I find most movies about demonic obsession fascinating, and this one, with its substantial atmosphere, fascinates to a worthy degree.

Full post here.

2. Sanctum (2/4)

Sanctum is especially marred by elements that detract from the thrilling adventure and the wow-inducing visuals. There’s too much clunking around of equipment and clacking away at computers, as well as moving around of characters too numerous to keep track of, before the storm hits and the nether regions flood. On top of that, the subterranean action is weighed down by silly friction between hard-driven Frank (Richard Roxburgh), the leader of the expedition, and idealistic son, Josh (Rhys Wakefield), who feels scarred by Dad’s domineering character. In addition, the action is crippled by silly arguments about who’s staying behind or about the decency of using a dead woman’s dry suit. Jesus! In a life-or-death situation, you use the frickin’ dry suit! Then, of course, the resident gung-ho adventurer, Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), turns into a sniveling coward who swims off with the last oxygen tanks and later attacks Frank. Here, Gruffudd’s ravings constitute the worst acting in a film rife with wooden delivery of poorly written lines.

Full post here.

3. The Eagle (2/14)

The Eagle, an earnest adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, offers a solidly engrossing first half as Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), the son of the commander of the “Lost Ninth Legion,” assumes command of an isolated fort in Roman-occupied Britain in the 2nd Century AD. As the stolid by savvy Marcus, Channing Tatum exhibits commendable screen presence as he shapes up his fearful, grumbling Latin grunts like an American officer bolstering reluctant soldiers in a forlorn Vietnam firebase. Marcus senses danger and expertly prepares his men for a nighttime assault. Unfortunately, excessive fast-shutter speed camerawork makes most of the action a blur. Meanwhile, the film’s memorable long shots frame this Roman outpost of progress under brooding skies and establish its very convincing presence.

Full post here.

4. I Am Number Four (2/18)

It is easy to see that I Am Number Four is based on a best-selling young adult science fiction novel, the first in a proposed series. Its main characters are teenagers. Its setting is the typical small-town public high school replete with outcasts, nerds, and bullies. Its main character, John Smith (very handsome Alex Pettyfer), has paranormal powers, attracts the pretty outsider girl, and saves her from bullies, just like Edward in Twilight. Turns out that John Smith is a Lorien on the lam, one of nine such Loriens endowed with Legacies (special powers), pursued by nasty aliens called Mogadorians, who look like a cross between a piranha and Gary Busey and are determined to kill all the Loriens who stand in the way of their intergalactic conquests – I think. Like most teenage aliens on the run, John wants a normal life, so against the paranoid wishes of his guardian, Henri (Timothy Olyphant), he picks the easiest way to a normal life: he enrolls in a high school in Paradise, Ohio.

Full post here.

5. Unknown (2/23)

Yep, there’s nothing new in Unknown, but I have to admit I enjoyed watching it until the ending throws Neeson’s character into a 360 that’s hard to justify. The setting engages, the inevitable car chase has its thrills, and the acting is more than serviceable. Neeson has cast a mold that he repeats with solid presence in numerous films (Unknown resembles Taken (2008) in many ways). Ganz stands out for his textured portrayal of the old Stasi inspector, and Kruger is fun to watch as she bravely helps Martin when all she really wants to do is make enough money so she can get out of "zhis place." As Martin’s wife (or is she?), January Jones is attractive, bland, and affectless, though her soft delivery might remind you of Janet Leigh, which is at least in keeping with the film’s Hitchcockian aspirations.

Full post here.

6. The Adjustment Bureau (3/4)

The Adjustment Bureau was originally slated to be released in September of last year, but many viewers were still on an Inception high, and even though the two films are entirely different, the other-worldly sci-fi nature of the former might have drawn viewers expecting more of the latter, only to discover that The Adjustment Bureau is not an action movie with a lot of shooting about different realms of non-reality. The Adjustment Bureau is a quiet little sci-fi film about true love and free will, and there’s absolutely no shooting in it.

Full post here.

7. Beastly (3/7)

There's no magic in this modern version of the Beauty and the Beast trope.

8. Rango (3/10)

Rango is at its best when Johnny Depp's spindly lizard bungles his way, Chaplin style, through a number of desert hazards. When he roams into town, and the story gets way too Chinatown for its own good, I had less fun. Yeah, I get all the nifty allusions, but kids are watching too!

9. Battle: Los Angeles (3/11)

Well, hell, I was looking forward to a gripping alien-invasion thrill ride, but what you get in Battle Los Angeles is nothing more than standard operating procedure for an action movie that spends more time glorifying the U.S. military in combat than it does establishing any sort of substantial fear or establishing the aliens as a fearsome, formidable foe. In fact, I frequently felt I was watching an extended version of that Citizen Soldiers propaganda music video we were forced to watch countless times before the previews played. Although I kind of dig a good old John Wayne guts and glory shoot-em-up, I had expected this one to serve up a little more science fiction with its battle action. Instead, this is the same old thing, with all the elements you’d expect from a standard war movie.

Full post here.

10. Red Riding Hood (3/11)

I’m not going to spend much time here on the overall silliness of this Twilight-like (girl desired by two handsome guys; girl’s father played by Billy Burke, who plays Bella’s father; werewolves) disappointment that retells the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale without any sort of engaging imagination. I’m not going to address the wooden acting, the very unscary CGI werewolf, how Virginia Madsen looks totally out of place, how most of the characters seem out of place, looking like characters in a Disney Channel teen drama done up in storybook costumes standing around looking shocked to find themselves in a werewolf movie. I’m not going to go on about how Julie Christie as Grandmother is wasted on making sudden appearances and odd exclamations that work, unintentionally or not, as a running joke throughout the movie. I’m only going to address two elements, one a significant plus, another a significant weakness: the eyes of Amanda Seyfried and the ineffective art direction. The former are always enticing; the latter is worse than the decor for a Fantasyland food court.

Full post here.

11. Mars Needs Moms (3/20)

This animated feature of grotesque caricatures and hyperbolic ridiculousness is one of the worst films of the year.

12. Limitless (3/23)

I especially enjoyed the film’s science-fiction elements and the use of creative effects to depict Eddie’s transformation. When Eddie pops his first pill, he is aware of his brain connecting with everything he knows and has observed. He notices part of a book title in landlord’s daughter’s book back, and the complete title floats through the air to his brain. When he decides to get a handle on his wastrel existence and clean up his grungy apartment, multiple Eddie’s zoom around the place, doing dishes and putting things away. I wish I could do that! Then, in the film’s best image, when Eddie sits down at his laptop and pounds out his novel in fast motion, the letters rain down from the ceiling.

Full post here.

13. Sucker Punch (3/25)

Is it all nonsense? Scott Glenn is way silly as the girls’ guru “Wise Man.” “And another thing,” directors need to know when to cut the action. But Emily Browning’s face is hauntingly gorgeous, Abbie Cornish has solid presence, the steam-spewing clockwork krauts are something different, and I have to say that Snyder frames some memorable images – though for some viewers, what’s most memorable won’t be the CGI landscapes.

Full post here.

14. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (3/27)

It's nice that they make totally appropriate little comedies based on kids' books for the tween viewers.

15. Jane Eyre (4/1)

Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is a beautiful film. Fukunaga’s camera frames expansive shots of the somber moor in contrast with the bright blossoms of Rochester’s gardens. Interior shots of windows and curtains full of light are memorable as well. The film’s colors seem to shift with its mood: from the grays and muted colors of the austere moorland and the foggy woods to the bright greens of Thornfield’s grounds to a brown filter over shots of Jane awakening to her love for Rochester.

Along with the film’s pretty look we get an excellent cast. Michael Fassbender plays a moody, manly, passionate Edward Rochester. Jamie Bell is nicely cast as the fervent missionary, St. John Rivers, and Judi Dench reins in her tendency to overact as she invests Mrs. Fairfax with warmth and humor. But the driving force of Jane Eyre is the remarkable portrayal of Jane by Mia Wasikowska, whose absorbing performance and beautiful presence magnify the film’s visual beauty.

Full post here.

16. Source Code (4/3)

I enjoyed this modest entertainment. Jake Gyllenhaal engages skillfully as he plots how to free himself from a trap within a trap. Or is it a trap within a trap within a trap? I also love science fiction even if nowadays that means scratching your head over perplexing questions. If you die in a dream, do you wake up? Whose dream is this anyway? What the hell is limbo? And, in the case of Source Code, if you send a text message from another dimension, will your cell be able to pick it up?

Full post here.

17. Hanna (4/8)

Part Frankenstein’s monster grappling with identity, part Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage learning to exist in the civilized world, yet another part Mindy Kick-Ass Macready, a little girl learning to kick butt, Hanna, as played by Saoirse, is a fascinating fairytale outcast trying to find her place in a very alien world. In the wilderness of Finland where she is brought up as a resourceful killer, Hanna is a fair-haired nymph of the snowy forest. But in her first acts of murder, a shocking moment intensified by Agent Marissa’s aghast reaction, she is a blood-splattered assassin. During her peregrinations in the outside world, she wonders about her place in it all: her parentage; the importance of family; how love works; and how the way she has been created may alienate her from normalcy forever.

Full post here.

18. Insidious (4/10 and 4/15)

Director James Wan does a lot of things right. Refreshingly, he keeps the camera steady – no shaky handheld effect; no camcorder point of view; no dependency on CGI-produced gruesomeness. A drawback might be the "I" in the title and the film's cliffhanger ending. I prefer one-off horror movies, but a sequel could succeed if it employs Wan's talent for dark lighting and dark figures placed in the right place at just the right time. As the bedeviled couple, Wilson and Byrne offer invested performances that always draw our sympathies for their plight, and we readily identify with their terror of demons in dark places.

Full post here.

19. Soul Surfer (4/22)

I saw Soul Surfer with my daughter, Jane; it was her second viewing. She loves AnnaSophia Robb (The Bridge to Terebithia) and movies involving teenage girls, and she’s crazy about movies in which a sports team or an individual athlete overcomes a setback to win the big one. For competitive surfer Bethany Hamilton (Robb), that setback is a considerable one: her left arm is bitten off by a shark. (Jane knew just when to cover her eyes.) But Bethany Hamilton has incredible determination, extremely supportive parents (played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt), equally supportive siblings and friends, a lot of ability, and faith in God. Yes, sir, now I understood the title. I never thought that “soul” was meant in religious terms, and I had kept referring to it as Cool Surfer. How lapsed-Catholic of me!

20. The Conspirator (4/22)

Despite its made-for-television formula and its Civil War era stiffness, this movie grows more engrossing as Aiken pumps up his ardent campaign to defy the court’s determination to hang four conspirators as swiftly as possible by proving that John Surratt, Mary’s son, not Mary, knew about the treasonous chatter going on in the boardinghouse. After running into numerous legal dead ends, Aiken's efforts culminate with a nicely done moment in which Aiken argues constitutionality with Lincoln’s friend, a Supreme Court Justice (John Cullum), for a writ of habeas corpus.

With the bad guys played by the grim-faced Yankees who want vengeful closure for the tragic cap on four years of bitter tragedy at the hands of the hated Southerners, there is much old-fashioned courtroom drama to be had. But it’s hard to be transported into this event in history when the writing bombards you with phrases regarding the present state of fear, the need for vengeance, mistreatment of prisoners, prejudice against a hated enemy that has caused a national disaster, and legal gray areas that clearly seem to have a political agenda rooted in the present.

21. Water for Elephants (4/24)

In Water for Elephants, colorful camerawork and a James Newton Howard musical score that borrows heavily from To Kill a Mockingbird and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button conjure a romantic, nostalgic picture of a Depression-era circus as seen through the eyes of a young man named Jacob (Robert Pattinson), an orphaned Polish immigrant who is hired to train a circus elephant and becomes enmeshed in the precarious relationship between the attractive circus star Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and her sadistic ringmaster husband, August, suitably played by Christoph Walz who taps into his Hans Landa reservoir for much of his performance as the villain.

Though Walz’s is a compelling performance, despite much overacting, you could close your eyes and swear you were sitting in a showing of Basterds. Open your eyes on one of the numerous close-ups of August’s profile, and you’d swear director Francis Lawrence was imitating shots from Tarantino’s film.

But there are some very entertaining moments in this film, and it does a nice job of contrasting the superficial glamor of the circus against its sordid and shabby underside. Water for Elephants is contrived, melodramatic, predictable, and nicely pat, factors that must have made the novel a bestseller. But the movie is often beautifully filmed, genuinely funny and warm-hearted at times, and full of action. Like the kind of movie produced in great numbers in the 1930s, it is deliberately stocked with enough enjoyable ingredients to make it a worthwhile experience.

22. African Cats (4/24)

Morgan Freeman's rich voice demands your attention, but the life-and-death drama of nature is also extremely compelling, and here the conflicts are fierce and the images are stunning.

23. Prom (5/2)

Most of the seniors in my A.P. English class saw this one, and as teen romances go, it was not ridiculous. Tapping into the rich prep falls in love with long-haired guy from the other side of the tracks scenario, this silly thing was quite touching.

24. Thor (5/8)

Thor was a bore. Unfortunately, he returns in The Avengers.

25. Priest (5/13)

A steampunk The Searchers with vampires. Forgettable.

26. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (5/20)

I consider Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island a masterpiece of literature, but there ends my interest in pirates. I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but the first two sequels added CGI bloat to the original’s charm. The latest Jack Sparrow adventure, On Stranger Tides, is careful not to overdo the CGI. Instead, it’s bloated with clashing, clattering sword fights that go on and on and on to the point that you forget what the hell they’re fighting about.

Still, I found elements to enjoy. I took my daughter, a Jack Sparrow fan, and I enjoyed her laughter in response to this more lighthearted escapade that starts with Jack impersonating a judge, swinging from a chandelier, leading the Redcoats a merry chase through the streets of London, jumping from coach top to coach top, hijacking a coal wagon that spills burning coals to ward off the cavalry. And although Depp overdoes Jack’s affectations and antics, he still can raise a chuckle with a well-timed one-liner.

As for the story, it’s all about finding the Fountain of Youth on some unidentified island, and by the time said Fountain is found, you forget what everybody’s after, but the journey takes us through some colorful scenery, and in order to make the Fountain’s waters work, you need a mermaid’s tear, and that’s as good an excuse as any to throw in the film’s best sequence in which Jack, Angelica (Penelope Cruz), and dastardly Blackbeard (Ian McShane) attempt to capture a mermaid.

I found the mermaids quite fetching and lots of fun. They start out as Victoria’s Secret models posing in fish tails, but they transform into fierce man-killers, providing a startling contrast as they swarm in a shark-like frenzy around a longboat full of potential prey.

27. The Tree of Life (5/28 and 5/29 at the Sunshine Cinema in NYC; 6/20, 6/25)

The first thing that Terrence Malick’s new film did for me was take me back to my childhood in California during the late 50s and early 60s, when a year was an eternity, summer seemed to last forever, and much of my life was spent outside with my two brothers, dressed in t-shirts and blue jeans, playing baseball or “guns,” riding our bicycles to nowhere in particular, or wandering in the hills, finding an old shack, and smashing panes of glass.

In The Tree of Life Malick’s screenplay and direction, as well as Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning cinematography, masterfully capture the day-after-day cycle in the life of a family. For the story’s memorable setting, the art direction by David Crank takes a residential block and a main street in a small Texas town and sends them back in time to the 1950s. For a film which does not have the luxury of a thousand-page novel, it is always a challenge to capture the passage of time, but in its focus on the O’Brien family, Malick vividly depicts the countless days from marriage to the birth of three boys to the endless days of being ten years old in a collage of vignettes that left me feeling like I had absorbed a thick novel in two hours and eighteen minutes

Full post here.

28. X-Men: First Class (6/3)

Great performances by Fassbender and McAvoy add texture to what is ultimately another forgettable superhero movie.

29. Super 8 (6/10)

What do you get when you combine the production input of Steven Spielberg with the writing and directing of J.J. Abrams? You get overblown silliness and excessive lens flares.

I had hoped for more. I knew I was going into a film whose story seemed to draw from Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial as well as films like Independence Day and Alien, but I told myself that I wouldn’t mind the film’s derivative nature if it offered some taut, scary, thrilling, even touching, summer entertainment. What I saw was a big disappointment.

Full post here.

30. Midnight in Paris (6/12)

Owen Wilson is endearing as Woody Allen's stand-in looking for direction in life as he wanders through Paris in the 1920s. There is wonderful atmosphere here, and the appearances of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein and Dali, and many more, is an English major's fantasy. It is a pleasant film.

31. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer (6/13)

This quirky movie about a quirky little girl getting oddball enjoyment out of doing oddball things is not an unpleasant experience; better than Mars Meets Moms.

32. Beginners (6/24)

A quiet and very understated film, Beginners is not an entirely happy one. Oliver loses his father. It looks like he might lose Anna as well. But the film is always worth watching for its humor, for the performance of a very talented Jack Russell, as well as for the three main human performances. Christopher Plummer’s subtle performance as Hal, an old man spreading his wings to live out his true sexual identity as his life is ending, is a believable, dignified performance that is definitely worth watching.

Full post here.

33. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (7/1)

Lots of Kaboom! provided by a massive battle for Chicago between good bots and bad bots with puny humans racing around in between. Lots of Vavoom! provided by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in tight jeans.

Full post here.

34. Monte Carlo (7/4)

Delightful performances, beautiful shots of Paris and Monte Carlo, some comical turns by bit French actors as hotel clerks and policemen that reminded me of Peter Sellers movies, and a nice tie-in to To Catch a Thief make this an enjoyable movie. If I hadn’t taken my daughter, I wouldn’t have seen this movie, but I have to say I really enjoyed watching Gomez, Meester, and Cassidy have loads of fun portraying girls having loads of fun on a dream vacation.

35. Cars 2 (7/7)

Too much racing and chasing around. All motion and no emotion. And where’s the singable song like “Life is a Highway”?

36. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two (7/16 and 7/21)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two is the raw, thrilling grand finale to the Harry Potter saga, begun by the novels of J. K. Rowling in 1997, visualized by the eight-movie series that began in 2001.

This time the plot is simple and not over-burdened by the machinations and convoluted (often very contrived) hocus-pocus that weigh down the previous films. Harry and friends Hermione and Ron have their work cut out for them. Find a few horcruxes, destroy the pieces of Voldemort’s soul that are hidden in those horcruxes, and do away with “you know who.” Very quickly the forces of evil swoop down upon the forces of good, holed up in beloved Hogwarts, a wizards’ Alamo, and the final battle dominates the film.

Full post here.

37. Captain America: The First Avenger (7/27)

The wonderful art direction and the rousing World War II action are ultimately not enough to save this contribution to the glut of superhero releases from same-old-same-old syndrome.

38. Cowboys & Aliens (7/29)

With all the aliens trundling around, with all the laser blasts and inexplicable mothership machinery, Cowboys & Aliens adheres more to its Western persona than anything else. We get whole bunches of horses galloping across Western terrain and a hell of a lot of shooting at this or that, even the ubiquitous Western target shooting, as typical Western themes are played out. An orphaned boy develops manly John Wayne courage. Doc learns to shoot straight at the right time. Crusty old Woodruff reveals his rough past and shows that he’s got a good heart after all, and the taciturn stranger with the dark past returns to save the innocent townspeople. The sci-fi elements provide interesting visual contrasts and some chuckle-inducing ironies, but the bug-eyed, green-blooded aliens might as well have been the members of a lost Indian tribe or a gang of very ugly outlaws, and the movie could have been what it feels like it wants to be more than anything else: a good old Western.

Full post here.

39. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (8/5, 8/10, and 8/16)

When the final battle comes, a wonderfully suspenseful and entertaining set piece staged on Golden Gate Bridge in an approaching fog, it’s all fun summer entertainment. I found it thrilling, and I enjoyed its surprises. Throughout, I was certainly on the side of the apes; screw you, fellow humans.

Full post here.

40. The Help (8/17)

There are moments of poignant truth in The Help, most of them involving Viola Davis, but these snippets of verisimilitude are swamped by the film’s tendency to deflate the drama with comedy, most of it centered around the type of gag more appropriate to a film like The Hangover, and the plot device of the book that leads to more fantasy than reality. Meanwhile, the whole thing takes place in interiors and exteriors that are so perfectly early 60s: the formica kitchen tables; the archaic television sets; and the diners with booths and counter and egg salad sandwiches with chips. Every prop tells us that this story takes place in the 1960s, but none of it looks lived in. If Disneyland had a 1960s World, this is what it would look like, all bright and clean and plastic. As for the film's tone and content, it's all Disneyland too.

Full post here.

41. One Day (8/21)

Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway are engaging in their roles as college friends who stay in touch every July 15th, during the ups and downs of their lives over a period of many years, and there are some touching moments, but the story is naggingly repetitious, obvious, and predictable.

42. The Debt (8/31)

During the 1960s, three young Mossad special agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) endeavor to kidnap a Nazi war criminal and smuggled him out of East Berlin, but the mission is beset by many problems. Later, in 1997, it is up to an aged Rachel (Helen Mirren) to reveal the truth about the mission or to carry it out to completion. The film is suspenseful and well-acted, but it fares better when it focuses on the 1960s mission than when it deals with the elderly former agents facing their moral dilemma.

43. Apollo 18 (9/5)

As a big-budget, color film enhanced with elaborate CGI, Apollo 18 could have been a major sci-fi epic, but what the filmmakers achieve here with three actors, a couple of tight interior sets, and murky shots of the lunar wasteland is quite impressive. This is an enjoyable little movie.

44. Contagion (9/10)

Even though Soderbergh provides enough tightly edited vignettes that are genuinely scary and some grim shots of social decay, the bland acting detracts from the whole. Though sometimes over the top, Jude Law establishes the most interesting character: Alan Krumwiede, the paranoid blogger, and sometimes his performance is wonderfully riveting. Meanwhile, the film’s global scope provides visual fascination, but it also abbreviates some very commendable suspense.

What I liked best about this mostly satisfying movie is that its best shots require nothing from its prestigious cast of characters. Soderbergh thrills us when he plots the spread of the disease by focusing the camera on a glass or a handshake or an escalator railing. In fact, the film’s best sequence, its final one, involves a bat and a pig.

Full post here.

45. Straw Dogs (9/17)

In the 1971 original, Dustin Hoffman is more convincing as the math nerd and so that his transformation is more surprising, while Sam Peckinpah's violence is more gut-wrenching, and you can't beat Peckinpah's slow-mo. Still, this remake establishes an eerie, sticky atmosphere in the swampy hinterlands of Louisiana, and some deft editing pumps up the tension.

46. Drive (9/18)

So much of this movie is cool and visually exciting. I love the opening getaway sequence. I love the oasis in the L.A. River. Gosling's cool is reminiscent of Steve McQueen, and his relationship with Irene and her son is touching. Then the film gets hacked up by the dreadful performances of Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman and scenes that echo the mafia-movie hyperbole of Scarface.

47. Moneyball (9/23)

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” This is what discouraged GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) of the Oakland A’s says when his unlikely assistant manager, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate who uses statistics and calculations to find capable undervalued players at the lowest cost, shows him an endearing video in which an overweight player hits a high ball, gets to first base, falls in an attempt to round first, and ends up scrabbling for the base on hands and knees, only to learn that he has hit a homer. Brad Pitt's Beane seems to send the question in three directions: toward his tubby, socially taciturn assistant manager who seems too immersed in numbers to have a passion for the game (even though he watches the games and Beane doesn’t); toward Beane himself, who may have lost a lot of that passion after being drafted as a promising star, only to reveal that he didn’t have the right stuff; and toward the audience, which might include a viewer like me who doesn’t share that passion at all and doesn’t follow baseball to the extent that I had no idea who Billy Beane was or what the Oakland A’s achieved in their 2002 season.

Full post here.

48. Killer Elite (9/23)

A professional assassin, who's hung up his guns and has sworn off killing, is forced into performing three last assassinations, which leads to lots of run-of-the-mill action during which Jason Statham's repentant killer kills reluctantly. This is an insulting load of crap full of sheer fantasy and humdrum action we've seen countless times.

49. The Lion King 3D (9/24)

For a number of weeks this fall, this was the best movie playing on the big screen. Classic! Makes you yearn for the days of hand-drawn animation to return.

50. Dream House (9/30)

Being able to feast your eyes on Rachel Weisz, ever beautiful at any angle, is not enough to give this simplistic, half-hearted ghost story a big enough boost. Dream House is never gripping, never creepy; the preview was spookier.

51. The Ides of March (10/7)

Excellent performances, especially by Evan Rachel Wood as a campaign volunteer embroiled in a relationship that could cause the typical election scandal. Excellent direction, some tense moments. An enjoyable, well-made movie but nothing earth-shattering.

52. The Thing (10/14)

As a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing (2011) does a nice job of building some of the same tension as paranoid scientists in a small Antarctic outpost suspect each other of being infested by an alien life form found frozen in the ice, and all the running around and bursting with alien tentacles and incinerating said tentacles and monstrosities with flamethrowers (Why does an Antarctic research outpost have flamethrowers?) is done in a set that is a faithful replica of the one for the 1982 film. Meanwhile, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as paleontologist Kate Llyod, does a very good job of showing fear in tight situations and emerging as the clever survivor, much like Ellen Ripley, blazing away with her flamethrower and wisely refusing to trust anyone. And even though the movie connects the dots niftily with the Carpenter film it precedes in storyline, the end product provides only moderate chills and suspense, and it left me wondering why it essentially remakes the 1982 film when the storyline and premises of Howard Hawks’s 1951 film, The Thing from Another World, would have been much more interesting to revisit.

53. Reel Steel (10/14)

This is nothing much more than a comic book soap opera replete with glitzy robot boxing scenes calling to mind the histrionics of WWF matches and the requisite comic bookish adversaries: Tak Mashido (Karl Yune), Zeus’s anal Japanese designer, and Farra Lemcova (Olga Fonda), the busty Russian ice queen. But there is a warmth that lights up this standard story of the underdog going to the big match, achieved mostly by Goyo’s performance played opposite Atlas, that clanking collection of metallic parts who is doggedly determined to fight for the boy who loves him, and I like how director Levy takes time with lighting and cinematography to capture some idyllic images: Midwestern cornfields; roadside motels; and the open road taking father and son on their quest.

Full post here.

54. Melancholia (11/15)

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with a devastating image. Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, stands facing the camera. Under heavy lids, her eyes open halfway. Her limp hair hangs in unwashed strands. Behind her, dead birds fall from the sky. Like Thomas Wolfe’s “God’s lonely man,” Justine peers into the abyss. In this case it is an abyss of depression. What follows this perfect metaphor for depression is a montage of images, some symbolic, some presaging what is yet to unfold, some rendered in such extreme slow-motion that movement is barely perceptible. To the music of Richard Wagner’s brooding prelude for Tristan and Isolde, we see ashes falling over Peter Bruegel’s painting “Hunters in the Snow.” Justine, in her white wedding gown, struggles to run, held back by strands of black yarn. A horse collapses under a black, apocalyptic sky. A woman carrying a young boy moves imperceptibly across a golf course. Planets collide.

Full post here.

55. Footloose (10/19)

A very schmaltzy fantasy but lots of fun! The first part of the "Let's Hear it for the Boy" number is one of the cutest scenes of 2011.

56. The Three Musketeers (10/21)

Oh, very silly. But CGI renders Paris in the 1600s in great detail, and there's the amazingly bizarre image of Mila Jovovich standing at the top of Versailles in bodice and stockings and making a Mission: Impossible-like leap to a window below.

57. In Time (10/28)

It's an intriguing premise. No one ages past twenty-five. Then you have to pay for your time. But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near. There is dramatic potential here. There are a couple of dramatic moments that involve a character's life literally running out as she frantically runs to get more time. But the film doesn't go very far with the premise, and it fails to build the kind of dystopian atmosphere we expect from movies like this, as seen in Children of Men and Minority Report. But this aimless story of aimless pursuit takes place in a very empty, toneless world of vacant lots and alleys.

58. The Mill & the Cross (10/29)

Very interesting examination of a very fascinating work of art. As in most Bruegel paintings, everybody goes about their business while Jesus is crucified or Icarus plunges into the sea. Those Old Masters. They understood how suffering takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. (W. H. Auden)

59. Anonymous (11/4)

Panoramic CGI shots of Elizabethan London like the one above constitute the best moments in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, an often pointless film that toys with the old argument that Will did not pen his famous plays, that it was an educated nobleman with a bent for political messages who indeed wrote the famous plays. But the film doesn't make you believe that Edward de Vere wrote the plays, and the court intrigue is confusing and not very compelling. Now, if a storm surge had swelled up the Thames to inundate the great city, that would have been a worth subject for Emmerich's talent for widescreen visual bedazzlement.

Full post here.

60. The Rum Diary (11/5)

Johnny Depp is at his Hunter S. Thompson best as Paul Kemp, an inebriate journalist, down and out in San Juan, Puerto Rico, trying to take a journalistic stab at the money-mongering "Bastards." Often a victim of circumstances and a bewildered observer, Kemp hobnobs with conniving real estate investors; gets entangled with a rich man's token fiance; attends cock fights; takes LSD; nearly gets killed by angry islanders; and hardly ever stays sober. The film builds rich atmosphere of Puerto Rico in 1960, an atmosphere so tangible you feel like you're drunk on rum with Kemp and his seedy pals.

61. Meek's Cutoff (11/9)

Director Reichardt captures the reality of how time passed on the Oregon Trail. During the opening sequence, silent except for the sound of water and birds, the camera stays on wagons crossing a river and travelers toting belongings to the other side. This goes on until one of the men (Paul Dano) carves the word “Lost” on a log, and the wagon train moves on. Later along the trail, women hang laundry or knead bread or collect firewood, usually without a word. In one scene, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) must fire a distress signal, and the camera stays on her as long as it takes for her to get the rifle, prime the powder pan, fire the load, stand up the rifle, put a bullet in her mouth, measure in another load of powder, take the bullet out of her mouth and stick it in the muzzle, ram it down, prime the pan again, and fire off the second shot. The real-time realism of this moment is one of the best things I’ve seen on screen all year.

Full post here.

62. Take Shelter (11/9)

Is Curtis seeing signs of an impending apocalyptic storm or is he succumbing to the schizophrenia that put his mother in an institution? The direction of Jeff Nichols and the fine performance of Michael Shannon, as the taciturn, haunted Curtis, leave the answer a mystery as Curtis's paranoia builds, he tears up the back yard to enlarge his storm shelter, and his nightmares of storms and zombies and plagues of birds right out of Hitchcock's The Birds become more horrific.

Throughout all this, Jessica Chastain as Samantha, Curtis's wife, is understanding and compassionate but firmly assertive when Curtis's weird behavior gets Curtis fired and threatens the family's security. While Curtis refuses to believe that his premonitions are not real, Samantha plans how the family can survive financially. Once again Chastain plays the ideal wife and mother, as she did in The Tree of Life, and once again her performance is perfect.

Shannon nicely plays the line between his acknowledgement of the possibility that he is manifesting schizophrenia and his firm conviction that a big storm is coming. Though the stunning ending is up for interpretation, the story delivers satisfying drama and a genuinely creepy atmosphere that strengthens a number of very gripping scenes.

63. J. Edgar (11/11)

Leonardo DiCaprio is passionately invested in the role of J. Edgar Hoover, but Eastwood's movie fairs better in the more distant color-muted past than in the pasty-faced 60s and 70s when old J. Edgar is dictating his dubious memoirs and when he and his colleague Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) look like ready-made parodies for Epic Movie III, especially in the silly race track scene in which pasty-faced Tolson collapses from a stroke.

64. Martha Marcy May Marlene (11/16)

In Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, young Elizabeth Olsen is outstanding as a young woman haunted by her two-year experience with a cult commune in Upstate New York. Martha escapes from the commune, but she can’t escape the brainwashing and the sexual abuse of the cult’s creepy leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). Taken in by her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who is staying at a cozy lakeside rental with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), Martha quickly demonstrates that she has undergone a disturbing ordeal.

The camera lingers patiently on shots of the commune and on Martha’s troubled eyes, often enclosing her face in a constricted framework. Match cuts transition smoothly between two starkly contrasted worlds: the cult’s shabby farm and Lucy and Ted’s upper-class lakeside rental.

Although the film is clear about how Patrick’s cult ensnares its female members and subjugates them sexually, the story reaches no climax or resolution. The film is driven by Olsen’s touching performance as well as the looming, sinister presence of Patrick and the commune.

65. The Immortals (11/18)

Nothing detracts from the awesomeness of Tarsem’s expansive landscapes that stretch far beyond the limits of a framed image. In the middle of a vast wasteland, a wall and a steampunk gate guard the Titans at Mount Tartarus, and this is the setting for a battle between a vastly outnumbered group of heroes and a prodigious horde that gets channeled into a subway-like passageway.

The violent combat is well staged, and for the most part it is not overbearing and belabored. Unlike 300, which is more about what you see than what you feel, The Immortals gives you characters and conflicts to care about once the action starts. Still, the set design and art direction stand out as the film’s best strengths and make The Immortals a movie to see.

Full post here.

66. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 (11/19 and 11/20)

Well, you know, Jacob can howl at the moon all he wants; it was a foregone conclusion. The whole point was for Bella to show her full love and commitment for Edward by marrying the immortal guy and becoming a vampire. This doesn't happen, however, until she endures the ordeal of birthing his supernatural baby, Renesme. Of all names!

This Twilight installment is quite shocking from a medical point of view. Lots of blood; a massive bruised and distended belly while Bella shrinks up like an extreme anorexic; and a bizarre internal metamorphosis when Bella's life's blood, arteries, and heart are taken over by whatever goes on inside a vampire's anatomy.

67. The Muppets (11/23)

It takes much too long for the gang to get back together, but once the Muppet Show within the show gets started, it's chaotic, heartwarming fun.

68. Hugo (11/25)

Hugo is about the power of books and movies to transport readers and viewers to other worlds. It is about a boy’s search for a family. It is about the history of silent films, and the magic of cinema. It is an enjoyable film whose wonderful elements never amounted to a wonderful experience for me.

Especially during the sequences that document the emergence of silent films, from the Lumière brothers’ first cinematic showing and the creations of filmmaker Georges Méliès, I felt on the outside, looking in on a curious, interesting documentary that never made me feel the magic portrayed. As an amateur filmmaker, I found it fun to watch the trickery of filmmaking, how a story can be told with a camera focused on a single set inside a glass studio, and how the special effect of a magical disappearance is done by freezing the action, taking out the character, continuing the action, and then later cutting the film to fit together. Of course, I knew all this already, but the film failed to generate the thrill in response to the magic that I readily identify as thrilling. I felt as though the dramatic story had been pushed aside to allow time for didactic documentation of silent filmmaking, the life of Méliès, and the importance of film preservation. It is always clear that this is a film by a passionate filmmaker. (You can see the delight on Marty’s face in his cameo as a photographer capturing Georges and his glass studio.) But the sense of excitement and dazzle falls a little flat.

Full post here.

69. My Week with Marilyn (12/2)

Michelle Williams is superb as Marilyn Monroe though sometimes she plays the languorous, seductive spiel too much. Remarkably, Kenneth Branagh's imitation of Laurence Olivier's voice and delivery is spot on! Wonderful too is Julia Ormand as an aging Vivien Leigh. The movie plays free with the facts and turns Colin Clark's (Eddie Redmayne) week with Marilyn into sheer wish-fulfillment fantasy, but the week is an entertaining one and it nicely captures the moviemaking industry at Pinewood Studios.

70. The Descendants (12/9)

In Alexander Payne's The Descendants, according to the film's opening voiceover covering a montage of Honolulu traffic and homeless people, the paradise of Hawaii is the real world too where people die of cancer and lose loved ones. But as Matt King (George Clooney), assisted by his teenage daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), moves through his quest to accept his wife's death and come to a decision about a tract of virgin land held in trust for over a century, he quests and suffers and wonders "What did I do wrong?" within a very cushy lifestyle set in a persistently gorgeous environment. The film features some touching moments of sharp vérité performed by Clooney and Woodley, but other moments are poorly written and flatly performed. All in all, this is a poignant look at a father wondering where he went wrong and trying to pull his family together after a crisis, and its silly bits don't mar the overall effect.

71. New Year's Eve (12/11)

Ashton Kutcher and Jessica Biel return in another tribute to the Great American Holiday, and they are joined by Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro, Halle Barry, Abigail Breslin in her first on-screen kiss, and an MTV/Disney Channel cast of oodles, to portray parallel stories of characters rushing somewhere for some reason in New York City on New Year's Eve, and if you are accompanying your daughter who loves Zac Efron, who is actually quite cool in this movie, then the experience is quite pleasant.

72. Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (12/16)

Not much deductive reasoning here. There's a lot of shooting and fisticuffs, and the film has gone into the deep end of steampunk with a colorless palate, all shades of gray. Rachel McAdams disappears quickly. Noomi Rapace does nothing but lead Holmes and Watson to a gypsy came and run the gauntlet of late-1900s Krupp firepower. The not-so-new action look is super-slow motion that nearly approaches a freeze frame and then bursts into normal motion. What do you call that? Seems that Holmes can predict the moves that will take place in an imminent fight, so he knows how the fight will come out, which often means we see Holmes review the fight in his head, and then we get to see it again. Oh, boy! Downey, Jr. and Jude Law engage in much verbal sparring. It's all very clever but not a big part of the slim story. We all know that Holmes and Moriarty went over the Reichenbach Falls together. Conan Doyle planned to end the Sherlock Holmes stories there, but fans protested and Doyle brought Holmes back. But the ending of this movie makes it clear that Holmes survives the fall in the falls, which means Holmes will most likely return. Too bad.

73. Young Adult (12/16)

Jason Reitman's Young Adult is a surprisingly touching examination of how we feel about the past. What are the moments that touched us? What are the moments that injured us? (Patton Oswalt gives a heartfelt supporting performance as Mavis's locker neighbor in high school, an overweight outcast beaten up and crippled by jocks.) How do we get past those moments and eke out a satisfactory existence for ourselves in the here and now? These questions are ones worth pondering. What's surprising about the film is that Mavis's quest seems so desperate and what she would like to get would destroy a family, yet I found myself identifying with her late-thirties crisis.

Full post here.

74. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (12/21)

David Fincher delivers solid, suspenseful entertainment with his slick, moody remake of the Swedish film version of the Swedish worldwide bestselling novel. Daniel Craig is well cast as Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist investigating the disappearance and possible murder of a member of the powerful Sanger family dynasty. Assisting him is Lisbeth Salander, the bitter, psychologically scarred, body-pierced computer hacking researcher, played memorably by Rooney Mara who sinks her acting teeth into one of the most interesting female roles in a long time; she is fascinating to watch.

Fincher does a fine job of keeping up the pace, even as Blomkvist and Lisbeth spend the first half of the film involved in different storylines. They could have come together a little earlier, in my opinion, and Lisbeth's hope for a relationship with Blomqvist doesn't ring true to her disturbed, very bitter character.

One of the best things about this movie is the opening credits: an amazing phantasmagoria of bodies covered with oil, or tattoo ink, exuding winged insects and other bizarre things.

75. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (12/21)

This installment of the Mission Impossible franchise skips from Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai to play out a typical tale of nuclear missile codes and imminent nuclear holocaust that must be averted at the last minute. Playing the members of a rogue MI team, Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, and Paula Patton, with Simon Pegg thrown in to provide some pleasant comic relief, establish some engaging rapport, keep the pace moving, and deliver snappy action. Unfortunately, the film's most gripping sequences in which Ethan Hunt scales Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower and pursues a bad guy into a sandstorm come in the middle of the film, and the film ends with a chase-of-the-bad-guy-with-the-suitcase-that-could-blow-up-the-world scene that is derivative and tedious. Still, Ghost Protocol is an enjoyable action movie, the kind of secret agent movie that is the polar opposite of this year's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (see below).

76. The Adventures of Tintin (12/21)

This delightful motion-capture animated adventure plays like lost footage from some of the Indiana Jones movies. The action is fun but sometimes stiltedly gimmicky and too rigidly choreographed. The character of Tintin is pleasant enough; we like his plucky courage. Captain Haddock gets a little wearisome. But the dog, Snowy, steals the show, adds a lot of energy, and provides the best humor. Love it when his white paws dangle in front of the bad guys' windshield. Love it when he goes for the sandwich instead of the keys. I loved watching Snowy move through the intricate action sequences.

77. The Artist (12/23)

Michel Hazanavicius's silent film The Artist is clearly a tribute to the artistry of films and filmmaking and film acting. Yeah, yeah, I get the wonderful allusions to Citizen Kane, City Lights, and Vertigo. The use of Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo is responsible for the dramatic effect of one of the final scenes. The film also seems to borrow from Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane, with echoes of Taxi Driver, when a defeated George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) leaves the cinema where his flop is playing and looks up at the glowing marquee of his rival's hit movie. In the film's best moment, Valentin stands behind the screen as his hit movie comes to an end, and he waits for the applause, and it comes, but we never hear it because we are watching a silent movie. With Dujardin's fine performance and Uggie the dog and the film's wonderful montages of showing the process of filmmaking, this is a very enjoyable, well-made film.

78. War Horse (12/26 and 12/30)

Echoing the tradition of films like My Friend Flicka and The Black Stallion, Steven Spielberg’s hugely sentimental War Horse is the story of an extraordinary horse, Joey, and the persevering boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who loves him so much he enlists in the hell of World War I to find him. At times the film is so innocently sentimental you’d swear you were watching a feel-good, cookie-cutter, studio release from the 1930s. In a touching speech that would have suited Ronald Colman or Errol Flynn, the kind-hearted Captain Nichols (Tom Hiddleston) sees how much the boy loves the horse, and the horse loves the boy, that he says, well, too damn bad the horse has to go to war, but I will only lease him; I will take good care of him; and I will return him to you after the war. How perfect!

Full post here.

79. A Dangerous Method (12/27)

Michael Fassbender is, indeed, the male performer of the year, appearing in multiple films, and always delivering an engaging performance. In this one, Fassbender plays Carl Jung, a pioneer of psychoanalysis and a passionate risk-taker who had relationship with Sabina Spielrein, one of his patients. With an entertaining performance by Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, the film provides an interesting look at the two famous psychiatrists and their theories. Keira Knightley as the troubled Sabina ranges from melodramatic to genuine as she portrays a woman battling with disturbing sexual urges and trying to come to grips with them in order to study psychology and follow in Jung’s footsteps. The film is a well-made glimpse at an episode in history, and a colorful depiction of Vienna and Switzerland in the early twentieth century, but the end result is a film full of compelling ideas that is not nearly compelling enough.

80. Shame (12/27)

In Steve McQueen’s Shame, Michael Fassbender demonstrates that he is the year’s best male performer. Playing a loner addicted to sexual gratification, acquired by often sordid means, Fassbender as Brandon reveals the turmoil and shame at the heart of this man’s addiction. Carey Mulligan as Brandon’s rootless sister is also excellent. As an itinerant nightclub singer, she sings a very slow, very melancholy rendition of “New York, New York” that suggests that she, and her brother, are not “a part of it.” They are isolated in an indifferent city teeming with countless fellow humans crammed in noisy subway trains. Like Brandon, she is looking for some connection to soothe her, and the connection she values the most is with her brother. But Brandon’s secret life keeps him separated from his sister and from a normal relationship with Marianne (Nicole Beharie), a co-worker. Brandon would like to establish normal human relations, but the film’s wonderfully ambiguous ending suggests this may not be possible. The film does little to explain the cause of Brandon’s turmoil, but it always presents very real moments that make Shame a compelling and memorable film.

81. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (12/27)

While it memorably depicts the world of espionage in England and Europe during the Cold War, Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy presents the kind of Cold War spy film that is as distant to us as the Cold War world of spy “moles,” defection from the East, and the threat of World War III. Here, there are no glamorous spies, no high-tech contraptions, no fast cars, no lengthy shootouts and chases. Reminiscent of The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this film depicts aging members of Britain’s World War II intelligence agency doing tedious jobs in a place where nothing much seems to happen.

While the performances of Gary Oldman, Tom Brady, Colin Firth, and Mark Strong are excellent, the film’s best strength is in its masterful sets and location shots and the very memorable atmosphere they evoke. The “Circus,” the headquarters of MI6, is located in a cold, shabby warehouse with an iron gate tended by an aged, decrepit guard who could do no more than have a heart attack if enemy agents tried to do a commando raid on the place. The offices are shabby, utilitarian, and the files are crammed onto rows and rows of shelves. The fact that the Ministry can't afford to provide money for a safehouse explains why conditions are so dismal. This grim, cold setting could easily double for a production of 1984. Unlike modern spy films, there is little violence; but very striking is the image of an agent’s intestines floating next to his body in a bathtub. Similarly, there is no sexy romance with the stunning beauty played by a super-model. Here, the handsome field agent’s love interest ends up shot in the head, her brains dribbling down a wall. Though the film's slowly paced plot sometimes sags, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is always fascinating for its atmosphere and development of secret agents who are real people.

82. The Darkest Hour (12/28)

This sci-fi movie is not a biggie. When I saw it with my son, we were the only ones in the theater. That worried us. But it was not dreadful. Everyone involved, including Emile Hirsch above, gives a stilted performance; my high school Drama Club students could have done better. But I love the alien invasion genre and this one adds some refreshing elements. First of all, the aliens are shown attacking Moscow, neither Los Angeles nor New York City. Second, and most interestingly, the aliens appear in amorphous swirls of light that send out comet-like tentacles that feed on electric impulses and disintegrate human beings similar to the way they get zapped in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Basically, these things are beings of electricity, and the beleaguered humans must find inventive ways to stun them with microwaves or guard against them by grounding them. A novelty here is that a knowledge of science is required for comprehending this film.

83. We Bought a Zoo (1/1/12)

And we end with Cameron Crowe’s feel-good movie of the year: We Bought a Zoo in which Matt Damon plays Benjamin Dee, a journalist who has recently lost his wife and must care for his son, Dylan (Colin Ford), and his daughter, Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), come to turns with the loss of his wife, and try to reintroduce some happiness into his kids’ lives. This leads Benjamin to buying a property outside L.A. that is a small zoo, and with this zoo he hopes to change their lives. Will Benjamin be able to finance the zoo and get it past inspection so that it can open in July? Will he be able to communicate with his bitterly grieving son? Will he and the zookeepers, led by Kelly (Scarlett Johannson), be able to catch the escaped grizzly bear before it gives their zoo a bad name? Will Dylan be able to tell beautiful young Lily (Elle Fanning) that he loves her? Will the zoo open? Will the people come? Will Scarlett kiss Matt? The answer to all this questions is a most obvious yes, but this very pleasant movie wins you over, despite an overlong middle chapter or two, with idyllic images of countryside; Cameron Crowe’s favorite mellow rock music; and with the performances of Johannson and especially Damon, who carries any movie in which he stars. Throw in a very touching scene in which Dad demonstrates how he met Mom, and you have a very enjoyable movie that is well worth seeing.

A GALLERY OF FINE PERFORMANCES:

MY NOMINEES FOR BEST PICTURE:

Meek's Cutoff

Melancholia

Shame

The Tree of Life

War Horse

AND THE WINNER IS

The Tree of Life

TOP TWENTY FAVORITE FILMS OF 2011

1. The Tree of Life
2. Melancholia
3. Meek's Cutoff
4. War Horse
5. Shame
6. The Artist
7. Insidious
8. Moneyball
9. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
10. Jane Eyre
11. Young Adult
12. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
13. Contagion
14. Take Shelter
15. Beginners
16. Limitless
17. The Adjustment Bureau
18. The Descendants
19. Hugo
20. Midnight in Paris

Made it this far? Thanks for reading, now and throughout the year, and enjoy the new movie-going year.

Spielberg's War Horse

2011-12-26T18:43:00.015-05:00

Echoing the tradition of films like My Friend Flicka and The Black Stallion, Steven Spielberg’s hugely sentimental War Horse is the story of an extraordinary horse, Joey, and the persevering boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who loves him so much he enlists in the hell of World War I to find him. At times the film is so innocently sentimental you’d swear you were watching a feel-good, cookie-cutter, studio release from the 1930s. In a touching speech that would have suited Ronald Colman or Errol Flynn, the kind-hearted Captain Nichols (Tom Hiddleston) sees how much the boy loves the horse, and the horse loves the boy, that he says, well, too damn bad the horse has to go to war, but I will only lease him; I will take good care of him; and I will return him to you after the war. How perfect!

(Spoilers.)

After the good captain’s speech, and the film’s slow start, the pace picks up as Joey endures a series of adventures as he changes hands and is befriended by various characters “over there” on the Western Front. From good captain he goes to good German lads, who bid a farewell to arms and meet a tragic end, and from them he goes to a perfectly sweet, frail French girl named Emilie. Later, Joey is forced to lug a massive cannon up a ridge; after that he ends up in no man’s land, where his experiences are the most horrific and the film is at its best.

While most of War Horse plays like the type of movie that could only come from a more innocent time, or from Steven Spielberg, much drama is provided by a number of finely shot scenes that show Spielberg’s talent for dramatic effect. In sparing a more family-oriented audience the graphic impact of bullets hitting human flesh as in Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg cleverly uses poetic framing to provide effect without being explicit. Riderless mounts charge through the German machine guns that are obviously massacring the charging British cavalry. The sail of a windmill blocks out the tragic fate of the two German lads.

In other instances, Spielberg’s direction is simply brilliant without being stagey: when the German artillery opens fire, we glimpse the stunning panorama of the trenches. When the British cavalry attacks, the charge emerges from a field of tall grass, the air full of floating pollen, and we watch as it turns into a thing of flowing beauty starkly antithetical to the ghastly aftermath of battle, which is equally devastating for horses and men. As well as it can without being objectionable for family audiences, the film shows the horrors of war for English and German lads. It stages one of the most tense preludes to "going over the top" at the Somme - and many have been staged! At the same time, we see the horrid effects of modern war on horses. (Over eight million horses died in World War I.)

In the film’s best scene, Spielberg tones down the sentimentality, often accompanied by a John Williams score that we've heard before, and lets two unknown actors, one playing a British soldier, the other playing a German soldier, play out a subtly dramatic encounter in which the two enemy soldiers work together to release Joey from a net of barbed wire. No swelling music, no otherworldly lighting, is needed. Spielberg allows us to respond to what is happening and what is being said without laying it on schmaltz.

Unfortunately, the film’s final long sequence, in which horse and boy are reunited, works out too predictably and is too nicely contrived. But by the time Spielberg pushes the visual sentimentality to an extreme degree, framing the lone rider against a Technicolor sunset sky, Spielberg has won us over enough with his best skills, and his excessive sentimentality has been counterbalanced by gripping drama and very genuine moments, most of them involving very minor characters – the German boys; the German artilleryman; the two soldiers who meet in no-man’s land. As for the name actors, Emily Watson stands out for the sincerity of her performance as Rose, Albert’s mother. Taken as a whole, War Horse is a very well-made, satisfying film, perhaps one of the best family films made in a long time.

Mavis Gary: Young Adult

2011-12-19T17:05:00.012-05:00

In Juno and Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody explored some of the life-changing and scary things that can and can't happen to teenagers in high school. This time around Cody explores what it’s like to be thirty-seven, or thereabouts, looking back upon those high school years, an experience that touched some people and caused other people a lot of pain.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a moderately successful writer of a young adult novel series, but she is divorced, lonely, alcoholic, doubting her talents. When she learns that Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), her high school beau, is married and has just had a baby, she embarks on a quest: to go back to her small hometown in Minnesota and wrest her former boyfriend from wife, baby, and home. But now Buddy, the former high school alpha male, is a puffy-faced father who unabashedly pours breast milk into screw-top bags as he talks over the good old days with former flame Mavis Gary. Buddy seems just fine in the small town of Mercury, Minnesota, where the dining options range from Chili's to KFC, and where his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reese), plays the drums for a discordant band of thirty-something moms. Mavis, from the big city, would like to think that Buddy can do better than this and they can "beat this thing together."

Jason Reitman's Young Adult is a surprisingly touching examination of how we feel about the past. What are the moments that touched us? What are the moments that injured us? (Patton Oswalt gives a heartfelt supporting performance as Mavis's locker neighbor in high school, an overweight outcast beaten up and crippled by jocks.) How do we get past those moments and eke out a satisfactory existence for ourselves in the here and now? These questions are ones worth pondering. What's surprising about the film is that Mavis's quest seems so desperate and what she would like to get would destroy a family, yet I found myself identifying with her late-thirties crisis.

Strangely, Matt, the nerdy, crippled reject, emerges as Mavis's best ally. Suffering the complications of his beating, Matt lives with his sister, makes hybrid models out of pieces of superhero action figures, and ages homemade whiskey in his garage. Whereas Mavis never acknowledged Matt's existence in high school, now she seeks his help, his advice, his comforting embrace, and their developing relationship is the film's nice surprise. As a young adult who still needs to figure life out, Mavis sees that Matt copes with what he has. Talking to Matt's sister, Sandra (Collette Wolf), who seems to think that life would be better in the big city, Mavis sees that it might be better to be satisfied with what one has. Diablo Cody's Juno is a clever little comedy-drama; Jennifer's Body is a wild teenage fantasy-horror pic; but Young Adult is Cody's settled, more thoughtful look at the experiences that shape us and how we deal with where we end up.

Although Mavis’s quest seems immature, selfish, and cold, I identified with her bitter edge. As a writer, Mavis seems to know how to persevere in the face of unlikely success, and that edgy strength seems to fuel her futile endeavor. When our current condition doesn’t seem so rosy, we wonder about the choices we made in the past; we wonder if we can get what we lost. Theron plays Mavis’s acidic glare, her icy lies, with convincing precision. I can’t judge Mavis for that cold, self-centered glare. We’ve all had those moments of bitter regret. Mavis takes her bitter obsession to a pathetic extreme, but hers is a voice crying out in the wilderness that we all call home.

The Wonders of Hugo

2011-11-26T10:18:00.007-05:00

The greatest wonder of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is the production design of Dante Ferretti. In the film’s leisurely prologue, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), the orphaned boy who lives in the station and winds the many clocks, moves through the set for the Gare de Montparnasse that is much more than a little world film set. It is all of Paris under one roof. Here, Hugo weaves through busy shopkeepers and people rushing off to trains, pursued by Station Master (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his black Doberman, and he passes the café proprietress with her long-haired dachshund and the shy old man whose fancy for the woman is thwarted by her snapping dog, and we easily get a sense of the size of this world within a world, with its alleys and passageways into attics and clock towers. We hardly ever leave the station, except in flashback or to go to Isabelle's house, but we don’t need to. Here, all the world’s a train station.

Of the wonderful performances in a fine cast, my favorite is Sacha Baron Cohen as Station Master. He is slender and ramrod-stiff, impeccable in his bright blue uniform, but any authority is lost when he runs haltingly with his leg in a rusty brace, gets caught up on a train door, and dragged down the platform, a wonderful routine fit for the silent film era to which Scorsese's film pays tribute. An orphan in his youth, Station Master captures runaway orphans hiding in the station so that they can be sent to the orphanage where they will learn life the hard way as he did. Cohen is controlled, thoughtful, sensitive in every glance and articulation, and his smiles attempted to please the pretty flower salesgirl (Emily Mortimer) he loves are a laugh. But the film is led by the performances of Asa Butterfield as Hugo and Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle, the girl who joins Hugo in his quest to fix a mechanical man and understand the message the automaton delivers. As the young girl who has only found adventure in books, Moretz is especially talented and graceful in her role. Cutting out a tendency to overact, Ben Kingsley delivers a fine performance as filmmaker Georges Méliès, and it is magical how CGI transforms Kingsley into the young Georges, the stage magician who becomes a cinematic magician.

Wonderful is the masterful eye of Martin Scorsese. He captures the dazzle of Paris as seen through the number panels of the massive train station clock, the huge moon reminding us of Méliès’s moon-shot masterpiece. He keeps the camera on the faces of Hugo and Isabelle so that we might feel their sense of wonder. I also admire how he never rushes a scene. Here the pace is thoughtful, careful, often taking the time to emulate the wordless demonstration of a silent-film-like scene. Then he turns around and dazzles the eye with a clock tower stairway chase that elongates the tower in Vertigo to a hyperbolic degree or with a room full of swirling drawings.

Hugo is about the power of books and movies to transport readers and viewers to other worlds. It is about a boy’s search for a family. It is about the history of silent films, and the magic of cinema. It is an enjoyable film whose wonderful elements never amounted to a wonderful experience for me.

Especially during the sequences that document the emergence of silent films, from the Lumière brothers’ first cinematic showing and the creations of filmmaker Georges Méliès, I felt on the outside, looking in on a curious, interesting documentary that never made me feel the magic portrayed. As an amateur filmmaker, I found it fun to watch the trickery of filmmaking, how a story can be told with a camera focused on a single set inside a glass studio, and how the special effect of a magical disappearance is done by freezing the action, taking out the character, continuing the action, and then later cutting the film to fit together. Of course, I knew all this already, but the film failed to generate the thrill in response to the magic that I readily identify as thrilling. I felt as though the dramatic story had been pushed aside to allow time for didactic documentation of silent filmmaking, the life of Méliès, and the importance of film preservation. It is always clear that this is a film by a passionate filmmaker. (You can see the delight on Marty’s face in his cameo as a photographer capturing Georges and his glass studio.) But the sense of excitement and dazzle falls a little flat.

The Méliès flashbacks and the Méliès tribute sequence are interesting, curious, and informative, but the drama and magic of Scorsese’s story about a young boy and girl discovering the past is lost in the documentation. I never felt the same thrill as that generated by the opening prologue. As a sequence that is obviously a nightmare, the famous 1895 train wreck generates neither suspense nor impact. A repeat viewing, I'm sure, will reveal other tributes to filmmaking seeded throughout Scorsese's film, and it will be fun to discover them. The film is meticulously made, but like Hugo in the crowded train station, the story gets orphaned within the meticulous filmmaking.

Immortal Imagery: The Immortals

2011-11-19T14:31:00.014-05:00

The Immortals is well worth seeing for its thrilling story, gripping action, and more than serviceable acting, but it is a must-see for the amazing imagery of Tarsem Singh (The Cell (2000) and The Fall 2008).

The story is a simple Greek mythological tale of heroes and formidable foes. The most formidable foe is King Hyperion, played by Mickey Rourke, looking much like he did in The Wrestler, beefy, craggy, and wearing his hair in long greasy strands, with the added threat of a deep, croaky voice. Theseus, the hero, is played by Henry Cavill, handsome and muscular. Bitter at the gods because the gods just don’t seem to care, Hyperion wants the magical Epicus bow (a cross between the elven bow of Legolas’s and an RPG launcher) in order to release the Titans (wiry zombie-like dudes imprisoned with iron bars chained to their mouths) and battle the gods, golden armored denizens of Mount Olympus wearing hats that look like they were designed by haute couture fashion designers who make models look like they come from another planet.

In a film featuring much manly slow-mo swordplay and buckets of blood, a nice calming effect is supplied by Freida Pinto as Phaedra, the virgin (not for long) oracle. Athena, played by Isabel Lucas, dressed in a little bit of golden armor, is nothing short of wow!

But The Immortals is all about the art direction. (Well, considering Athena and the gripping combat, not quite.) The sets for cliffside villages, palace chambers, and temples are modern minimalist design.

Even Mount Olympus is a simple circular platform with a few marble benches. The style of the imagery looks like something painted jointly by Maxfield Parrish and Thomas Cole.

But nothing detracts from the awesomeness of Tarsem’s expansive landscapes that stretch far beyond the limits of a framed image. In the middle of a vast wasteland, a wall and a steampunk gate guard the Titans at Mount Tartarus, and this is the setting for a battle between a vastly outnumbered group of heroes and a prodigious horde that gets channeled into a subway-like passageway.

Then it’s fast and slow-mo clashing and slashing before the gods come down and kick Titan butt in a scene that might well have made Sam Peckinpah sit up in his grave and gawk in envy. When Ares (Daniel Sharman) defies Zeus (Luke Evans) and helps the mortals, he pulverizes very slow-moving bad guys with a hammer while he moves at a faster godlike speed. It is a remarkable, very cool scene.

The violent combat is well staged, and for the most part it is not overbearing and belabored. Unlike 300, which is more about what you see than what you feel, The Immortals gives you characters and conflicts to care about once the action starts. Still, the set design and art direction stand out as the film’s best strengths and make The Immortals a movie to see.

Indies Out There

2011-11-15T17:00:00.002-05:00

While Hollywood slings out fare like The Three Musketeers - 3D, major films like Eastwood's J. Edgar vie for the Oscars. In J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover invests himself in his role, especially in the earlier past that explores the formation of his F.B.I., but when the film focuses on the 60s and 70s and features cardboard portrayals of Robert F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, DiCaprio and Armie Hammer, as Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar's "boyfriend," totter around in puffy, pasty-white old-age makeup that constricts their speaking and turns some of their scenes into ready-made parody. Meanwhile, smaller movies have delivered notable performances and provocative stories.

In Melancholia director Lars van Trier juxtaposes stunning imagery with Kirsten Dunst's visceral portrayal of Justine, a woman suffering from deep depression while a newly discovered planet, named Melancholia, advances meaningfully on a collision course toward Earth. I have already reviewed this film here, so I won’t add more than to say that so far this year Melancholia ranks second place to The Tree of Life on my list of the best films of 2011.

In Take Shelter, is Curtis seeing signs of an impending apocalyptic storm or is he succumbing to the schizophrenia that put his mother in an institution? The direction of Jeff Nichols and the fine performance of Michael Shannon, as the taciturn, haunted Curtis, leave the answer a mystery as Curtis's paranoia builds, he tears up the back yard to enlarge his storm shelter, and his nightmares of storms and zombies and plagues of birds right out of Hitchcock's The Birds become more horrific.

Throughout all this, Jessica Chastain as Samantha, Curtis's wife, is understanding and compassionate but firmly assertive when Curtis's weird behavior gets Curtis fired and threatens the family's security. While Curtis refuses to believe that his premonitions are not real, Samantha plans how the family can survive financially. Once again Chastain plays the ideal wife and mother, as she did in The Tree of Life, and once again her performance is perfect.

Shannon nicely plays the line between his acknowledgement of the possibility that he is manifesting schizophrenia and his firm conviction that a big storm is coming. Though the stunning ending is up for interpretation, the story delivers satisfying drama and a genuinely creepy atmosphere that strengthens a number of very gripping scenes.

Starved for the panoramic exteriors of the classic Western? I am. But this hunger for expansive Western landscapes was satisfied by director Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn, with Bolivian locations providing an awesomely rugged backdrop for the story of an aging Butch Cassidy (Sam Shepard), who survived the shootout with Bolivian soldiers and has been living quietly in the hinterland with a Bolivian lover.

When Butch gets a hankering to see home one last time before he dies, he sets out on a journey that gets sidetracked when he runs into Eduardo, a Spaniard on the lam for robbing from a rich mine owner. Pursued by an angry posse, as well as by an ex-Pinkerton (Stephen Rea), who recognizes Butch from his good old outlaw days, Butch feels his plans crumbling, and all that is left for him to do is survive. And survive he does in scenes of rousing Western action.

Shepard is well suited to the role of the crusty, cagey Butch Cassidy, but the real stars of this outdoor action film are the cinematography and the jungle, salt desert, and mountains of Bolivia.

In Sleeping Beauty Emily Browning plays Lucy, a nihilistic college student in need of money who hires out as a medical test patient, resorts to prostitution, and ends up working for a high-end kink ring that services older men, allowing them privacy and whatever they wish to do, short of penetration, with the inert body of a "sleeping beauty."

Is this film voyeuristic crap, or does it explore fascinating questions? Curiously, it's directed by a woman, Julia Leigh. Emily's Lucy is certainly an enigma, willing to sell herself to perversion while at the same time seeming to get satisfaction from providing others with what they need. The white-haired gent in the image above delivers one of the most curious monologues in any film this year. What's the old man's point? What does he want, and how does cuddling with a slumbering nude girl fill in for his life's losses? What does the human soul need that is satisfied by fondling, or abusing, a sleeping nude, and why is Lucy willing to fill that need? The film raises these questions and offers Emily Browning's thoughtful performance, but its blunt ending supplies no definite answer.

In Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, young Elizabeth Olsen is outstanding as a young woman haunted by her two-year experience with a cult commune in Upstate New York. Martha escapes from the commune, but she can’t escape the brainwashing and the sexual abuse of the cult’s creepy leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). Taken in by her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who is staying at a cozy lakeside rental with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), Martha quickly demonstrates that she has undergone a disturbing ordeal.

The camera lingers patiently on shots of the commune and on Martha’s troubled eyes, often enclosing her face in a constricted framework. Match cuts transition smoothly between two starkly contrasted worlds: the cult’s shabby farm and Lucy and Ted’s upper-class lakeside rental.

Although the film is clear about how Patrick’s cult ensnares its female members and subjugates them sexually, the story reaches no climax or resolution. The film is driven by Olsen’s touching performance as well as the looming, sinister presence of Patrick and the commune.

O for a Muse of Fire, Flood, and Alien Invasion: Roland Emmerich's Anonymous

2011-11-06T11:00:00.001-05:00

Well known for destroying Los Angeles in Independence Day (1996), New York in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and practically the whole planet in 2012 (2009), Roland Emmerich attempts to destroy the widely held belief that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to his authorship, taking on the theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays.

Emmerich has a talent for the grandiose, but the most memorable aspects of Emmerich’s great disaster films are visual, and the overly talkie Anonymous becomes claustrophobic as it sets up the circumstances for de Vere’s production of his provocative plays under the name of William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), a vain, illiterate, shameless fop who is more than willing to take a free ride on another man’s talent. Much more time is spent indoors as de Vere (Rhys Ifans) becomes embroiled in confusing court intrigue surrounding the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, played over the top by Vanessa Redgrave as a silly old woman still primping herself for her swains. Additional time is spent chronicling Elizabeth’s scandalous choices of bedfellows.

Panoramic CGI shots of Elizabethan London, like the one above, breathe life into the film, but these moments are few and far between. Instead, the plot follows conniving earls and the hunchbacked villainy of Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), supposedly the basis for Shakespeare’s hunchbacked characterization of Richard III. The film’s best scenes, however, take place in the theatre and depict what it must have been like to view the first performances of Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Emmerich overplays the rapture of the Elizabethan audience witnessing Shakespeare’s plays with shots of tear-filled eyes and female groundlings swooning over Romeo. Apparently, at the time, Shakespeare was just another very good playwright during a renaissance of great theater, and many of his speeches are merely utilitarian. But these scenes, staged with compelling authenticity, are full of rich atmosphere and energy, elements lacking from the rest of the film.

Rhys Ifans is all well and fine as the stern, grimly frustrated writer, de Vere. Ifans effectively expresses the sublime satisfaction felt by a writer when an audience responds positively to his work, and there's a nice moment when de Vere complains about the voices in his head that compel him to write. But you never see him do much writing. The film focuses on politics more than de Vere's writing of the plays he keeps in folders in his study. The film’s best performance comes from Sebastian Armesto as Ben Jonson, who is hired by de Vere to produce the plays but to keep the true author’s identity a secret and who struggles with the burden of this secret as he sees literary masterpieces attributed to an illiterate buffoon.

But the film’s central premise, that de Vere wrote the plays, lacks dramatic impact. Anonymous does nothing to depict the passion and inspiration that created the plays. In the end, there is no awe attached to theory the film presents. This movie would have benefitted from the approach employed by National Treasure movies in which clue after surprising clue eventually leads to a shocking revelation that is sort of awesome even though it has no basis in truth. Instead, Anonymous gets bogged down in court chicanery. Indeed, National Treasure's tone of fanciful mystery would be quite suitable for a movie that presents a theory rejected by most scholars and for a director with a talent for visual bedazzlement on a grand scale. More suitably, Emmerich should have ended his historical fantasy with a massive storm surge inundating London Bridge.

God's Manic Depressive: Melancholia

2011-10-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

(SPOILERS - DEFINITELY)

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with a devastating image. Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, stands facing the camera. Under heavy lids, her eyes open slowly, halfway. Her limp hair hangs in unwashed strands. Behind her, dead birds fall from the sky. Like Thomas Wolfe’s “God’s lonely man,” Justine peers into the abyss. In this case it is an abyss of depression. What follows this perfect metaphor for depression is a montage of images, some symbolic, some presaging what is yet to unfold, some rendered in such extreme slow-motion that movement is barely perceptible. To the music of Richard Wagner’s brooding prelude for Tristan and Isolde, we see ashes falling over Peter Bruegel’s painting “Hunters in the Snow.” Justine, in her white wedding gown, struggles to run, held back by heavy strands of black yarn. A horse collapses under a black, apocalyptic sky. A woman carrying a young boy moves imperceptibly across a golf course. Planets collide.

This examination of deep-seated depression in the shadow of impending, very metaphorical, cosmic catastrophe, is divided into two parts. “Part One: Justine” covers the disaster of Justine’s wedding reception as she succumbs by increments to the depression that has ruled her life. Her father (John Hurt) acts childishly and gives a toast that antagonizes his ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling). Justine’s mother responds with a bitter declaration about the absurdity of marriage. Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) makes an innocent proclamation of deep affection but becomes more and more alienated from his bride as Justine leaves the wedding party to lounge in a bath, drive a golf cart around the golf course, tell her boss how much she despises him, and do anything to avoid becoming intimate with her husband. Throughout all this, Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), tries futilely to stop Justine from falling apart, and Justine’s brother-in-law, John (Kiefer Sutherland), tries to act the dignified host while regarding Justine’s family and her behavior with haughty disgust.

“Part Two: Claire” focuses on impending planetary disaster as the planet Melancholia heads toward Earth, supposedly, as scientists have predicted, to pass Earth by. Here, Justine is so depressed that she can’t even climb into a bath with her sister’s help. Even though Claire says to her sister, “Sometimes I hate you so much;” she also says to her husband, “She’s my sister,” and it is touching how tenderly Claire cares for Justine. Knowing that horseback riding is a release for Justine, she takes her sister riding, and we are treated to the stunning image of Claire and Justine riding black horses along a winding road under patches of fog. But since Claire cannot quell her sense of trepidation for her own life and the life of her son, Leo (Cameron Spurr), it is ultimately Justine who ends up taking care of her sister.

The best strengths of this memorable film derive from the deeply invested performances of each cast member, and the compelling nature of the film’s imagery.

Kirsten Dunst’s performance is a gripping one. Her face is sharp, her eyes cold with pain. Dunst dramatically shows Justine’s decline from a childlike innocence as she arrives in a stretch limo that, absurdly, can’t make the turn in a narrow winding road to a deep despondency registered as pain in a visage that grows harder and harder during the wedding celebrations. Later, however, as disaster looms, her eyes seem to see purpose. She has already peered into the abyss. Now she can comfort her nephew with the fantasy of building a magic “cave” of sticks. Now she tends to her unhinged sister.

Gainsbourg plays a loving mother and a devoted sister. She tenderly tries to help her sister to get into a bathtub. She pushes Justine to ride her horse, which provides some relief. She provides security by means of ritual, planning a wedding celebration with symbolic activities such as writing best wishes on the panels of hot air balloons released into the darkness. But ritual, and the shallow security of her wealth and privilege, cannot save her from the approaching apocalypse. When her son’s makeshift device consisting of a stick and a coil of wire reveals that the rogue planet has returned on a collision course with Earth, she becomes unhinged. Now it becomes Justine’s role to take control and provide compassionate care for her distraught sister.

The film belongs to Dunst and Gainsbourg, but the other cast members say much about their characters in brief appearances. With expressions and few words, Skarsgard very touchingly portrays Michael as a simple innocent who wants to grow apples. Slowly he becomes aware that Justine’s depression makes their marriage impossible, and the expression of his bewilderment is heart-wrenching. In one of his best performances, Kiefer Sutherland plays John as imperious and seemingly confident. He finds it hard to tolerate Justine’s bizarre behavior, complains about how much the reception cost him even though he’s rich enough to have his own eighteen-hole golf course, but he defers to his wife, Claire, who seems to sacrifice all for Justine. Rampling, as Justine’s iconoclastic mother, sketches a woman whose personal bitterness comes out as indifference toward her suffering daughter, and she makes clear some of the causes for Justine’s anguish.

In addition to the acting, von Trier’s talent for framing memorable imagery carries the film. Starting with a very striking prologue that lays out images that encapsulate the plot, the film continues to offer images that catch your attention, culminating with a dramatic, touching image symbolic of heart-breaking compassion.

In way of comparison, von Trier’s Antichrist and Melancholia share similarities that suggest they are variations on a recurrent theme. Besides sharing such imagery as a bridge that strikes fear in the Woman in the former and Justine in the latter, as well as the hailstorm and other bizarre natural phenomena, both films examine characters who are suffering from extreme psychological turmoil.

In Antichrist, the Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) suffers from extreme guilt and grief due to the accidental death of her son. In Melancholia, Justine suffers from immobilizing depression so intense she can’t get in a taxi or a bathtub while her sister suffers from a dread that completely unhinges her to the extent that it is Justine who summons the compassion to help Claire’s son deal with the impending disaster. But the films differ in what happens as a result of extreme inner anguish.

In the psychological horror film Antichrist, the Woman’s grief and guilt make her respond with ghastly acts of violence toward her husband and herself. Meanwhile, in the psychological disaster movie Melancholia, Justine’s turmoil seems inconsolable until the approaching apocalypse gives rise to emotional triumph, however brief it might be. Neither film is happy, but in Melancholia there is the feeling of some sort of positive deliverance.

In both films, von Trier certainly goes to metaphorical extremes, but the subjects he explores are extremely intense ones. As difficult as it is to watch, the graphic violence and masochism of Antichrist seems entirely appropriate in relation to the intensity of anguish suffered by a mother who has lost her child due to an accident for which she blames herself. Her guilt is so great that she decides she is the Antichrist. If one considers the debilitating effects of severe, suicidal depression, von Trier’s metaphor of the planet and the impending disaster in Melancholia provides a brilliant illustration of that kind of anguish. I would rather not watch Antichrist again, but I’ve already watched Melancholia three times and I hope to see it again, for the excellence of its performances, primarily Kirsten Dunst’s, and the eloquence of the memorable images it frames.

The Movie Is Playing

2011-10-19T20:53:00.016-04:00

It was a rainy day on Cape Cod today and my daughter and I had planned to see Footloose after I got off work, so we went and got taken away from the rain, and I got taken away from the stress and the fact that I devote hours to planning my classes and I don’t make enough to pay all the bills, by this silly, schmaltzy, fun fantasy world where everyone is so good-looking and can dance so well, and it was worth seeing just for the first part of the “Let’s Here it for the Boy” routine, the cutest moment in any film I’ve seen this year. Man, we loved it! Sometimes, it doesn’t matter what I see. Last Friday, I had wanted to see Take Shelter or The Mill and the Cross, but the arties and the indies don’t get to the Cape until a month or so after their release, if at all, and so I saw The Thing and Real Steel, the latter providing the same sort of silly escapist fantasy as Footloose, and I had a very enjoyable evening.

My favorite movie this year has been The Tree of Life, which I went to see in May on opening weekend in New York City. (It didn’t make the Cape until July.) I’ve been looking forward to seeing Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, but I knew it might not even make the Cape, and I learned that it was on Comcast, so I decided not to risk missing its theatrical release and watched it three times.

(In way of contrast, I watched von Trier’s Antichrist on Netflix. Interesting connections. Some amazing imagery. Same use of extreme slow motion and some recurrent symbolism: the bridge that’s hard to cross. As for some of the more graphic images, I liked the whetstone bolted to Willem Dafoe’s calf, but his bloody you-know-what was hard to take.)

I love all kinds of movies. I’m an equal opportunity viewer, and I’ll see a movie anywhere, anytime. One of my most memorable viewings of all time was seeing Zulu Dawn with my wife in one of the last, crumbling single-screen cinemas on Market Street in San Francisco where homeless people and pushers and pimps paid the two bucks to get off the streets or hide.

A lot of people my age will only see the month-old indies and foreign movies at the Cape Cinema with its butt-wrecking wooden chairs or at the Nickelodeon, which I call the Old Moldy, but I’ll go to the Regal Cinemas at the Cape Cod Mall, even on a Friday night when the lobby is packed with teenagers, especially if it’s opening night for a PG-13 horror movie, and I have to run the gauntlet of shrieking students who recognize me, and I sit in a theater lit up by the glow of cell phone screens. And I’ll go the dinner-movie route with my wife and the other couples on Saturday night, but if I want to avoid the teeming teens on Friday night, I’ll catch a new release on a Sunday night, even if I have to get up early the next morning. Sunday night is the low-impact, laid-back audience of 20-somethings or community college students. And later in the school year, when I’m getting burned out by teaching, I’ll rebel against the exploitation of my efforts and my talents, and I’ll skip out during lunch time if I’m lucky enough to have the last two periods free, and I’ll catch a weekday matinee. That’s when the teenage mothers bring their babies because they can sit way in the back and there might only be five or ten people in the whole huge theater, babies included. We’ll sit there and the place will go dark and the babies are usually pretty quiet because their clever young mothers have trained them well, or given them a dose of cold medicine, and we’ll watch some B sci-fi flick with Radha Mitchell or some secondary critically reviled feature with Robert Pattinson, and when the big screen fills with light and color and motion, we don’t worry about bills or dirty diapers or teaching a classroom full of kids with ADHD or finishing high school because the movie is playing.

Robots & Aliens: Real Steel and The Thing (2011)

2011-10-15T15:02:00.017-04:00

As a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing (2011) does a nice job of building some of the same tension as paranoid scientists in a small Antarctic outpost suspect each other of being infested by an alien life form found frozen in the ice, and all the running around and bursting with alien tentacles and incinerating said tentacles and monstrosities with flamethrowers (Why does an Antarctic research outpost have flamethrowers?) is done in a set that is a faithful replica of the one for the 1982 film. Meanwhile, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as paleontologist Kate Llyod, does a very good job of showing fear in tight situations and emerging as the clever survivor, blazing away with her flamethrower like Ellen Ripley and wisely refusing to trust anyone. And even though the movie connects the dots niftily with the Carpenter film whose storyline it precedes, the end product provides only moderate chills and suspense, and it left me wondering why it essentially remakes the 1982 film when the storyline and premises of Howard Hawks’s 1951 film, The Thing from Another World, would have been much more interesting to revisit.

Family-friendly director Shawn Levy’s film Real Steel tugs at every emotional chord in a film whose performances are so over the top that you suspect there’s an overacting competition going on among the cast, but you eventually find yourself won over by the film’s touching core achieved by the relationship between bitter, wayward ex-boxer Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), who drives all over the country, fixes up boxing robots, and fights them at fairs and carnivals, and Max (Dakota Goyo), his son he hasn’t seen since birth.

While most of the overacting is successfully done by Jackman as Charlie, the impetuous freelancer always trying to make a buck, and Kevin Durand as Ricky, the sleazy, upper-lipless promoter who hounds Charlie for money, Evangaline Lilly, as Bailey, the daughter of Charlie’s former trainer, offers some subtlety and sincerity as the attractive, mechanically minded love interest who believes in her man.

Though we don't see Charlie and Bailey do anything more than kiss, there is the touching moment when Charlie returns from a long trip, lies on the bed next to Bailey, and places his arm over her sleeping body. Very family-friendly, yes, but then Bailey is quite leggy and busty around the little eleven-year-old boy, and you can see why he takes to her immediately.

Though Dakota Goyo, as Charlie’s son, Max, might remind you of little Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker, over-bubbling with campy golly-gee enthusiasm, Goyo makes Max a very believable, touching little hot dog as he does his pre-match dance numbers with Atom, his fighting robot, and exudes boyish bravado as he challenges the owners of Zeus, the World Robot Boxing champion, to a match. In addition, his earnest passion for training Atlas for the big fight leads to the inevitable father-son bonding scenes and elicits some emotional speeches from Jackman.

Real Steel is nothing much more than a comic book soap opera replete with glitzy robot boxing scenes calling to mind the histrionics of WWF matches and the requisite comic bookish adversaries: Tak Mashido (Karl Yune), Zeus’s anal Japanese designer, and Farra Lemcova (Olga Fonda), the tight-bodied Russian ice queen, but it doesn't leave you with an empty feeling. There is a warmth that lights up this standard story of the underdog going to the big match, achieved mostly by Goyo’s performance played opposite Atlas, that clanking collection of metallic parts who is doggedly determined to fight for the boy who loves him, and I like how director Levy takes time with lighting and cinematography to capture some idyllic images: Midwestern cornfields; roadside motels; and the open road taking father and son on their quest.

Oregon Trail Vérité: Meek's Cutoff (2011)

2011-10-01T14:07:00.002-04:00

Want to know what it was like traveling the Oregon Trail in 1845? Watch Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, which follows the ordeal of a small train of three wagons and three families crossing the rugged high desert of Oregon, the travelers’ lives depending on trusting Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) and his dubious cutoff or a mysterious Indian (Ron Rondeaux), who seems to be leading them toward water.

Of all the movies I’ve seen about the Oregon Trail, this is the only one that is historically accurate about the details: the small, narrow wagons pulled by oxen; the travelers walking along at the pace of the oxen; the tedium and back-breaking labor of fording a river or lowering wagons down a steep incline; collecting scarce firewood from amidst the sage; the long, hot days; the nights darker than we know a night can be.

Director Reichardt captures the reality of how time passed on the Oregon Trail. During the opening sequence, silent except for the sound of water and birds, the camera stays on wagons crossing a river and travelers toting belongings to the other side. This goes on until one of the men (Paul Dano) carves the word “Lost” on a log, and the wagon train moves on. Later along the trail, women hang laundry or knead bread or collect firewood, usually without a word. In one scene, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) must fire a distress signal, and the camera stays on her as long as it takes for her to get the rifle, prime the powder pan, fire the load, stand up the rifle, put a bullet in her mouth, measure in another load of powder, take the bullet out of her mouth and stick it in the muzzle, ram it down, prime the pan again, and fire off the second shot. The real-time realism of this moment is one of the best things I’ve seen on screen all year.

Except for Bruce Greenwood’s portrayal of crusty, hairy-faced old mountain, Stephen Meek, which leans toward stereotype, the performances are muted and naturalistic. With little conflict among the travelers, played by Williams, Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, and Tommy Nelson, the main conflict here is between humans and a wilderness that stretches mile after merciless mile. With its slim story and spare dialogue, much of it barely audible as the men stand off from the women to discuss their plight, the film’s true stars are the cinematography and the landscape.

The camera, lingering on lengthy long shots of the three wagons making their slow progress, always accompanied by the squeak of an axle, clearly captures the arduous nature of plodding along, step after step, across plains or salt flats. Shots present a variety of earthy colors. At the same time the land is wondrously beautiful, it is hopelessly empty. After the river crossing sequence, the wagon train moves to the left of the frame as the same wagons and travelers cross the ridge behind them in one of the most magnificent dissolves I’ve ever seen.

Beyond the visual realism, Meek’s Cutoff depicts the trepidation and despair felt by three ordinary families who realize they have jumped off into extraordinary circumstances. Set in 1845, the film easily calls to mind the ordeal and tragedy that would take place in 1846 when the Donner Party’s hopeful journey turned into a desperate rout as the members of the wagon train started starving even before they reached the Sierra Nevada and the snow started to fall. At one point in the film, Thomas Gately (Paul Dano) bemoans the fact that he did not “heed the writing,” and the film evokes the gut-wrenching gravity of faulty decisions already made or a decision yet to be made that could well turn out to be fatal. The travelers’ doubts and fears are muttered in the darkness of night, for perhaps they know they should have heeded the type of advice Donner Party member Virginia Reed would write in 1847, “Never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as you can.”

"How can you not be romantic about baseball?" - Moneyball

2011-09-25T13:22:00.000-04:00

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” This is what discouraged GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) of the Oakland A’s says when his unlikely assistant manager, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate who uses statistics and calculations to find capable undervalued players at the lowest cost, shows him an endearing video in which an overweight player hits a high ball, gets to first base, falls in an attempt to round first, and ends up scrabbling for the base on hands and knees, only to learn that he has hit a homer. Brad Pitt's Beane seems to send the question in three directions: toward his tubby, socially taciturn assistant manager who seems too immersed in numbers to have a passion for the game (even though he watches the games and Beane doesn’t); toward Beane himself, who may have lost a lot of that passion after being drafted as a promising star, only to reveal that he didn’t have the right stuff; and toward the audience, which might include a viewer like me who doesn’t share that passion at all and doesn’t follow baseball to the extent that I had no idea who Billy Beane was or what the Oakland A’s achieved in their 2002 season.

Indeed, it would be very hard not to be romantic about baseball, watching Bennett Miller’s meticulously made Moneyball, which includes memorable writing, solid performances, and striking cinematography that breaks out of the claustrophobia of the Oakland A’s cramped, austere offices and locker room to frame long shots of Beane in isolation or the infield lights of the ballpark fading to mist. From opening shots to the final poignant extreme close-up, Moneyball never hits a false note for me. Scene after carefully staged scene makes you feel emotion for a game played with a bat and a ball by players who don’t need to have the agility of basketball players or the strength of football players but who must have that elusive knack and built-in confidence that ensure they can make the ball go somewhere, anywhere, and get on base.

My ignorance of the true story, of course, shields me from any possible altering of the facts done for dramatic purposes; and my lack of knowledge of the real-life Billy Beane allows me to look at Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane as an engaging fictional character, a driven crusader in Great American Novel style, a defiant and driven Huck Finn navigating an unknown river full of stubborn obstacles in order to prove that outcast players who, at least, can get on base, can win games. In one scene, Beane and Brand strategically trade players considered the best, so that the manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) will be forced to play an undervalued player with a promising record of hits.

Bennett’s direction and the excellent performances instill that sense of butterflies-in-the-stomach excitement in me, someone who does not follow baseball at all, to the extent that I had no idea the Oakland A’s achieved a twenty-game winning streak and made baseball history. Thus, the film’s climactic moment was a total surprise to me and I got an extra dose of suspense. But growing up in San Mateo, California, with a father and an older brother, staunch Giants fans, whose passion for the game equaled my zealous passion for movies, I was well aware of the Oakland A’s, that shabby team whose shaggy-haired players in their dumb-looking uniforms quickly came out of nowhere to give my father a chuckle and win his admiration with their bungling audacity. I believe my father, who followed the emergence of the team in Oakland in the 70s, called them clowns but said he was rather fond of them.

But growing up with a father and a brother who loved to talk baseball, who extolled the nobility of the game, I was open to this well-framed, lovingly made film about that passion for a game. A great deal of the film’s touching core is established by the acting. Although Pitt could benefit by varying what he does with his jaw and his lower lip, his all-American looks fit the atmosphere. In some profiles he looks like Robert Redford whose classic features suited his role in The Natural, another film that captures the tension evoked by a lone batter at the plate and the glory of a high flying ball arcing over the outfield. Juxtaposed with the handsome, athletic Beane is Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand, roly-poly and slow on the uptake, but always confident about what the numbers seem to indicate. Hill’s croaky, deadpan delivery is perfectly timed and often hilarious.

Pitt and Hill are supported by a number of understated performances, but the frosting on the cake comes from the delightful performance of Kerris Dorsey as Beane’s daughter, Casey, a young teen just entering puberty with an emerging worldly wisdom, an affectionate awareness of her father’s dreams, and a need for his presence in her world. Her performance is unself-conscious non-acting that is refreshingly naturalistic and very touching. Casey is Beane’s good angel, sensitively telling him to take more pleasure in what he does, suggesting that it’s not all about winning. Dorsey's perfect performance subtly suggests Casey’s own regrets and losses, similar to Beane’s regrets about his past, so it is appropriate that the film ends with her voice, singing a song for her father, reminding him to find satisfaction in what he has achieved and open himself up to the passion.

Not Catchy Enough: Soderbergh's Contagion

2011-09-11T13:18:00.010-04:00

(To avoid spoilers, jump to second paragraph.)

A contagious virus, spread by human breath or touch, infects individuals in Macau, and they take the disease all over the world. Their contact with other humans spreads the disease exponentially. Researchers race to identify the malignancy. Once it is identified, doctors endeavor to develop a vaccine. Victims die in droves. People panic and riot for food. A paranoid conspiracy theorist uses his blog to raise suspicions about incompetent government handling of the crisis. The blogger also says that he has discovered a homeopathic cure. A disease investigator is kidnapped; the ransom price is a supply of vaccinations. Fear escalates. More riots. Rage. Chaos.

It’s all possible, and at its best, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion vividly charts the escalation of panic and chaos, with tensely staged vignettes set in Macau, Hong Kong, Chicago, London, D.C., and San Francisco. In addition, a star-heavy cast, that includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould, and an as-himself cameo by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, helps establish our sympathies when wooden acting and the film’s distancing matter-of-fact tone fail to win them.

After a poorly written couple of speeches in which Matt Damon’s mild-mannered father, Mitch Emhoff, uses the word “sweetie” at least six times as he watches his wife (Paltrow) go into convulsions on the kitchen floor and as he warns his step-son to stand back, Damon grounds the film and provides its emotional core with his performance as a loving father determined to help his daughter survive the epidemic. As Erin Mears, a doctor in charge of the overwhelming task of containing the disease, Kate Winslet is totally invested, as Kate Winslet always is. Meanwhile, Marion Cotillard’s appearance as the kidnapped doctor is an afterthought; Fishburne’s performance is painfully bland; and Elliot Gould is downright dreadful.

Even though Soderbergh provides enough tightly edited vignettes that are genuinely scary and some grim shots of social decay, the bland acting detracts from the whole. Though sometimes over the top, Jude Law establishes the most interesting character: Alan Krumwiede, the paranoid blogger, and sometimes his performance is wonderfully riveting. Meanwhile, the film’s global scope provides visual fascination, but it also abbreviates some very commendable suspense.

What I liked best about this mostly satisfying movie is that its best shots require nothing from its prestigious cast of characters. Soderbergh thrills us when he plots the spread of the disease by focusing the camera on a glass or a handshake or an escalator railing. In fact, the film’s best sequence, its final one, involves a bat and a pig.

Not Swiss Cheese: Apollo 18

2011-09-05T17:30:00.008-04:00

Borrowing the style of the “actual footage” genre, Apollo 18 adopts science fiction trappings and takes us to the moon where it builds more suspense and delivers more satisfying chills than all the thumps in the night of the Paranormal Activity movies.

Purporting to be the found footage of the top secret, forgotten Apollo 18 Mission, the movie sets out to reveal why NASA has stayed away from the moon since the 70s. Needless to say, crew members Ben (Warren Christie), Nate (Lloyd Owen), and John (Ryan Robbins) encounter more than just lifeless moonscapes, but I shall reveal no details here. As Ben, Warren Christie is especially intense and convincing as his blandly technical astronaut's tone turns to panic.

Since the story takes place in 1974, the crew members employ fixed 16 mm cameras (no camcorders here), and we get some stark black and white shots of the astronauts isolated in a barren terrain, an atmosphere which sets an eerie tone. Meanwhile, the claustrophobic lunar landing module, along with the delicate limits of the protection it offers, intensifies the urgency of the danger. If a demon haunts your house, you can leave the room or go stay with a friend, but on the moon there are no neighbors.

As a big-budget, color film enhanced with elaborate CGI, Apollo 18 could have been a major sci-fi epic, but what the filmmakers achieve here with three actors, a couple of tight interior sets, and murky shots of the lunar wasteland is quite impressive. This is an enjoyable little movie.

Oh, Help! The Help

2011-08-17T17:24:00.015-04:00

Tate Taylor’s The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel, is well worth seeing for the acting. Most outstanding is Viola Davis as Aibeleen Clark, an African American woman who bravely agrees to reveal her stories about being a maid in a white household in the Jim Crow South. Asked how she felt taking care of a white child while her own child was at home with someone else, Aibeleen’s pain is seen in her inability to respond. Throughout the film, Davis shows worlds of pain and indignity in her eyes and facial expressions.

Also outstanding is Jessica Chastain as Celia Foote, an endearing “white trash” blonde bombshell who married into wealth and who tries to get accepted by the intolerant queen bees of the bridge club. She cares little about racist etiquette, and her humorous, upstart nature is a pleasure to watch as Chastain effortlessly fills her character with believability and life. Octavia Spencer is much fun to watch as Minny Jackson, the sassy African-American maid whose rebellious nature gets her fired, and Bryce Dallas Howard, as Hilly Holbrook, the film’s resident out-and-out racist bitch, convincingly plays an out-and-out racist bitch. You can see it in her eyes and in the way she stomps around on a tirade, but the histrionics are hardly necessary to convince us of what Howard has already convincingly shown us more subtly.

At the center of the story is Emma Stone as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, the iconoclastic daughter of a Southern land-baron family, graduate of Ole Miss, who aspires to be a journalist and has the idea of chronicling the hardships and demeaning conditions suffered by African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in the first half of the 1960s. Stone is always endearing and engaging; her presence demands your attention. She employs those talents here, but her character is more vehicle than fully developed person. She is there to be so compassionate and so devoted to her project. Heaven forbid that it should be revealed that she wants to help the Civil Rights cause, but she also wants to make money and a name for herself.

In The Help characters do not attain any sort of complex dimensions. It is revealed that Skeeter’s mother, nicely portrayed by Allison Janney, fired Constantine, the maid who reared her daughter from infancy and instilled courage and decency in her, just so that she wouldn’t be kicked out of the Daughters of America, but the remorse she displays is merely going through the motions, and her action doesn’t generate much rancor between mother and daughter. As Constantine, Tyson is touching in her brief scenes but nothing ever explains how a woman, hired to work for a pittance, can offer such motherly tenderness to the daughter of her employer.

As a look into the lives of African American maids working for white households in the Deep South during the height of racial tension, this could have been a fine film. But the film straps itself to the novel’s fanciful device: a white woman, an aspiring journalist, sets out to interview African American maids, record their stories, and publish these stories in a book called The Help, thereby exposing to the world the indignities they have suffered. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that, obviously, that’s exactly what happens. The book comes out, with its silly blue and white bird (why a bird?) on the worst book cover I have ever seen, and everybody reads it, and the maids who contributed their stories are applauded at church, and Hilly Holbrook stomps around in a rage because Minny’s very embarrassing act of vengeance for Hilly’s intolerance is exposed to the world.

On top of that, Skeeter gets hired by Harper and Row. (Mary Steenburgen is mere caricature as Elain Stein, the tough-as-nails editor who is so exacting with Skeeter’s project, and yet she allows the book to be published with that ridiculously bland cover.) In addition, Aibeleen is fired but she is filled with hope for the future. Meanwhile, where are the fire-bombings of the homes of the women who contributed to this incriminating book? What’s the KKK doing during all of this? Sleeping? Or too busy beating Freedom Riders and burning their buses? And Skeeter might have been able to leave the South and be safe in New York, but I imagine her family’s house would have been burned to the ground.

There are moments of poignant truth in The Help, most of them involving Viola Davis, but these snippets of verisimilitude are swamped by the film’s tendency to deflate the drama with comedy, most of it centered around the type of gag more appropriate to a film like The Hangover, and the plot device of the book that leads to more fantasy than reality. Meanwhile, the whole thing takes place in interiors and exteriors that are so perfectly early 60s: the formica kitchen tables; the archaic television sets; and the diners with booths and counter and egg salad sandwiches with chips. Every prop tells us that this story takes place in the 1960s, but none of it looks lived in. If Disneyland had a 1960s World, this is what it would look like, all bright and clean and plastic. As for the film's tone and content, it's all Disneyland too.

Rise and Fall: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-06T14:30:00.018-04:00

Planet of the Apes (1968) is well known for many reasons: its honorary-Oscar-winning makeup; its catchy one-liners (“Take your paws off me, you damned dirty ape); Charlton Heston, the man who played Moses, as a cynical misanthrope; Heston in the nude playing a cynical misanthrope; model Linda Harrison playing the mute but very curvy Nova. But it’s most well known for its very dramatic, shocking surprise ending, which may not have been much of a surprise to viewers coming to the movie on VHS or DVD. Back in 1968, sixteen years old, I was totally surprised. When the famous reveal came, I almost felt a palpable kick taking me from what I had totally accepted as an alien planet and jolting me back to Earth.

What seemed to contribute most to the success of that reveal was, in my opinion, the effective degree to which the film immerses you in an otherworldly world from the moment Taylor (Heston) and his crew fall out of space and crash-land to the point at which Taylor and Nova wander off in the film’s final shots. Memorably, the film employs locations in Arizona for its stark “Forbidden Zone,” and the squat, earthen dwellings of the apes resemble the suburban homes of Bedrock, but they definitely look alien placed in a little valley in Malibu Creek State Park.

In addition, a number of little details contribute to the otherworldliness: the leather smocks worn by the apes, color-coded according to caste; the slanted, grease-smeared, Impressionistic bars of the cages; the dark chapel where a funeral is underway; and the natural history museum in which stuffed humans are used in the exhibits. Finally, there’s something very unsettling about the very prejudiced, militaristic, bureaucratic society in which Taylor finds himself, a “mad house” in which, at first, he can’t utter a word in his defense and when he is able to speak, he still finds it impossible to reason with his intractable captors. This world totally took me out of myself and far away, so that when the famous reveal slammed me back to Earth, I was stunned. (Also, the sequence in which the apes make their first appearance, hunting humans in a cornfield, is a very gripping, superbly edited sequence.)

The 1968 film was also very influential. It spawned four mostly forgettable theatrical sequels, one of them being Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) (perhaps the best of the sequels), the inspiration for Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), in which a chimp named Caesar leads a simian uprising against humankind. In addition, it inspired an animated television series, as well as Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of the story in 2001’s Planet of the Apes.

Forty-three years after the film that started the whole “mad house,” we return to the Planet of the Apes, which is, and always was, our good old planet Earth, in Rupert Wyatt’s “re-imagined” origin story: Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

As an origin story for the apes saga, Rise of the Planet of the Apes clearly sets up the groundwork for how the whole “mad house” planet gets started. Chimpanzees develop super intelligence by means of an experimental drug, developed by Dr. Will Rodman (James Franco), designed to repair the brain and cure Alzheimer’s, but the drug has an unfortunate side effect for humans that will take care of the human species and ensure simian dominance. Also, very nifty, simian subjects of the medicine pass on their attributes to their offspring genetically.

As a movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has its ups and downs. First of all, it goes it strains hard to allude to the classic original in multiple ways. There are so many allusions you find yourself playing “Spot the Allusion” instead of watching the movie. One or two allusions would have been nice. I would have been happy with the shot of the youthful Caesar (Andy Serkis in motion capture) trying to fit the crown on a model of the Statue of Liberty. A nice touch, that one allusion encompasses the entire 1968 film. Rest there! Instead, the film goes as far as to use the famous one-liner, quoted above. But the line can’t help but raise a chuckle, detracting from a potentially dramatic moment. And the name-dropping, tying in with the 1968 film, gets out of hand: Bright Eyes, George, Maurice, Cornelia, Landon, Dodge. Are there more? (The space ship on its Mars mission is called the Icarus, a name given to Captain Taylor’s ship after the original movie.)

Especially in the beginning, the film suffers from poor writing. One of the first scenes includes stilted dialogue we’ve heard countless times. “The drug has been successful so far. It’s time to try it on human subjects.” “It’s too soon! We’ll let the board decide.” And, of course, in a scene that’s nearly identical to the one in Splice, which this film resembles in many ways, it becomes obvious to the board that the drug is problematic when a crazed chimp flies through the window and lands on the conference table.

Meanwhile, the film stacks the deck ridiculously when it comes to building a motive for Caesar’s revolt. It would be enough that his mother and other chimps had been stolen from their jungle homes and brought over to America to be used as guinea pigs for a dangerous drug. When Rodman quits the program and provides a safe haven for the orphaned Caesar, the research project is taken over by mercenary Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) who wants to push ahead, no matter what, when he learns that Rodman has been treating his Alzheimer’s-inflicted father, George, on the sly and that the drug increases intelligence. Seeing multiple dollar signs in front of his eyes, Jacobs does a complete 360 in attitude toward the project. (SPOILER: Jacobs deserves his comeuppance when it comes, but Oyelowo certainly doesn't deserve the poorly conceived role he has been assigned; the writers should have taken his place in his plunge off the bridge.) Later, when grown-up Caesar gets out of hand at home, he ends up in an “institution” for primates which is managed by a sleazy warden named John Landon, and his slimy son, Dodge, played by Tom Felton as a sadistic psycho. On top of that, there are no nice neighbors. One neighbor wants to club Caesar with a baseball bat when he reveals himself to his kids; another neighbor wants to beat up George, and then runs in terror from the chimp. Hell, I’d love to have a chimpanzee living next door, rather than the neighbor I call Grass Crab who yelled at my son for riding his bicycle over a small corner of his finely cultivated, manicured lawn.

Despite its drawbacks, Rise rises to the occasion and delivers lots of entertainment. It must be some built-in, primal connection to evolution that makes us humans so fascinated by primate behavior, and it’s lots of fun watching a chimp act like a human. The Planet of the Apes movies, in all their cheesiness, had that going for them, as well as the striking contrast of apes standing upright, talking, exhibiting human foibles, while subjugating those high and mighty humans who thought they were so great. Rise has all that going for it plus more during the delightful sequences chronicling Caesar’s upbringing. It’s also a joy when Rodman and girlfriend, Caroline, (Freida Pinto), the film’s pretty face and an expert on ape behavior, take Caesar to Muir Woods (the entrance to the part depicted is an entirely fanciful rendition of the real, highly frequented tourist attraction) where the young chimp clambers up the tallest redwood tree.

Later, the incarceration sequences are done as a sort of primate Shawshank Redemption, complete with sadistic guards and requisite prison yard bully, who actually flicks off the preening fingers of one of his hovering bitches, and a hilarious scene in which Caesar and his orangutan partner (think Morgan Freeman) sit looking over the prison yard, quietly discussing escape in surreptitious sign language. But these silly bits lead to mounting suspense as Caesar readies his fellow prisoners for the great escape.

When the final battle comes, a wonderfully suspenseful and entertaining set piece staged on Golden Gate Bridge in an approaching fog, it’s all fun summer entertainment. I found it thrilling, and I enjoyed its surprises, which I won’t spoil here. Throughout, I was certainly on the side of the apes; screw you, fellow humans.

Caesar, at all ages, is an obvious motion-capture rendering, sometimes too cartoonish in the face, often too swift and fluid in shots of running or swinging or climbing. But the development of Caesar’s emotions, as captured in his face, is the film’s strongest achievement, as we watch Caesar develop from a wide-eyed, curious, mischievous youth, to a crafty prison breaker, to a clever strategist and a merciless leader. Meanwhile, the CGI is spot on and eerily realistic in some of the full shots of Caesar, leading the rise of the apes, and a very chilling shot of the sinister Koba, lurking in Caesar's shadow and looking diabolical.

I am a big fan of the 1968 film, and I have to say I enjoyed Rise immensely for its revisiting of an unsettling, very otherworldly cinematic world, though it is definitely at its best once the rise begins.

Cowboys & Aliens

2011-07-30T10:24:00.004-04:00

After outlaw Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of nowhere with an alien weapon strapped to his wrist, and after he overcomes three stereotypical Western bullies, he straps on a six-shooter, dons a hat, and rides off across classic Western movie terrain. It was enough to make my viewing-eyes itch and my heart swell for my favorite genre, the rarely produced Western.

Knowing that Cowboys & Aliens is not a straight Western, I was rather pleased as the film took pleasure in fleshing out the action-oater side of this rather curious hybrid, taking extra time with purely Western elements and themes as it develops the characters who live in the typically dry and dusty town of Absolution.

When tyrannical cattle baron, Woodruff Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), rides into town to spring his wayward son, Percy (Paul Dano), from jail before he can be shipped off to the U.S. Marshall, it’s like a scene out of Rio Bravo. For the most part, Ford’s performance is cringe-worthy, but his craggy face and macho swagger fit the genre nicely. Keith Carradine is perfect as the aging but competent sheriff; Sam Rockwell, playing the mild-mannered bartender/doc, overdoes the silly meekness but develops an enjoyable presence; and it’s fun to see Raoul Trujillo (The New World) as an Apache chief. Meanwhile, Olivia Wilde plays a mysterious woman hanging around town, very interested in how and where Jake got that cool blaster on his wrist. But when her true identity is revealed, I was rather puzzled by some inconsistencies in regards to what she knows and what she can and cannot do.

The sci-fi side of this genre hybrid employs the standard Earth-invading, human-snatching aliens (shades of War of the Worlds 2005), but the enjoyment comes from the clever fusing of genres and the inclusion of some nifty ironies. In the film’s best moment, we get the typical showdown in the street, but this time it’s between a lone gunman and an alien spacecraft, and when Jake sees that six-guns are doing little damage, he twirls his revolver into his holster gunslinger-style and blasts away with his alien weapon. In addition, there is considerable tension built by the first appearance of the alien spacecraft to people for whom a flying contraption is beyond their imagination. Cowboys shooting at flying aliens from the backs of galloping horses provides a thrilling image, and I love the irony of the motive for this alien invasion: just like many Western bad guys they are after gold! It’s also fitting how the part of the alien mothership sticking out of the ground looks like your ordinary badlands crag.

But with all the aliens trundling around, with all the laser blasts and inexplicable mothership machinery, Cowboys & Aliens adheres more to its Western persona than anything else. We get whole bunches of horses galloping across Western terrain and a hell of a lot of shooting at this or that, even the ubiquitous Western target shooting, as typical Western themes are played out. An orphaned boy develops manly John Wayne courage. Doc learns to shoot straight at the right time. Crusty old Woodruff reveals his rough past and shows that he’s got a good heart after all, and the taciturn stranger with the dark past returns to save the innocent townspeople. The sci-fi elements provide interesting visual contrasts and some chuckle-inducing ironies, but the bug-eyed, green-blooded aliens might as well have been the members of a lost Indian tribe or a gang of very ugly outlaws, and the movie could have been what it feels like it wants to be more than anything else: a good old Western.

Remember Hogwarts! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two

2011-07-21T20:00:00.001-04:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two is the raw, thrilling grand finale to the Harry Potter saga, begun by the novels of J. K. Rowling in 1997, visualized by the eight-movie series that began in 2001. Throughout, I have not been an avid fan of the saga. Unlike many readers, I was not dazzled by the first novel. I read the first four novels aloud to my young son and daughter, but I often skipped through pages of dialogue that seemed less like pith and more like padding. To me, the stories read too much like video games: meet the challenge, solve the problem, move to the next level. When the movies came out, I accompanied both of my kids to the early ones, my daughter to all of them, sometimes feeling bored, sometimes nodding off to sleep, enjoying some more than others. But I must admit that the lengthy, sometimes ponderous, often bloated movies of the series successfully establish all the details and emotional connections between characters that are brought together masterfully and very touchingly in the final film. I don’t think the books and the films had to include so much padding, but all the ground covered in the previous films prepares the way for the gripping denouement achieved here.

This time the plot is simple and not over-burdened by the machinations and convoluted (often very contrived) hocus-pocus that weigh down the previous films. Harry and friends Hermione and Ron have their work cut out for them. Find a few horcruxes, destroy the pieces of Voldemort’s soul that are hidden in those horcruxes, and do away with “you know who.” Very quickly the forces of evil swoop down upon the forces of good, holed up in beloved Hogwarts, a wizards’ Alamo, and the final battle dominates the film.

We get shades of The Lord of the Rings with the evil hordes, including battle giants, massed outside the “castle,” shades of World War II movies with the talk of a “suicide mission” and the whole Hogwarts resistance movement. In addition, Voldemort’s army bombards a magic shield protecting Hogwarts; the good guys blow up a bridge; and the Hogwarts wounded huddle in the rubble of a shelter like the Brits during the Blitz. But when the battle is drawn, the action is gripping and characteristically Potteresque as Harry and friends evade a raging fire in the Room of Requirement, a storeroom of needful things that looks like the famous shot of Citizen Kane’s collection of possessions; and Harry attempts to slay the serpent, another horcrux. In addition, the fighting pauses for some crucial character development and dramatic moments, notably when Harry visualizes Snape’s backstory, and when he walks with Dumbledore in a dazzling white train station in his mind. I love it when Harry wonders where the train will take him, and Dumbledore responds meaningfully, "On!" (Yes, and Daniel Radcliffe will have to "go on" from here, his last performance as the famous Harry Potter.)

All the action and drama are enhanced by distinctive cinematography. Visually, this is an outstanding episode filled with striking images: a fearsome dragon soaring over London; Voldemort’s horde; a long shot of beleaguered Hogwarts; the minimalist white train station in Harry’s mind where he walks with the deceased Dumbledore. In addition, the poignant departures captured in the final scene on Platform 9 and ¾, nineteen years later, make for one of the most touching scenes in the eight movies.

With a lot going on, perhaps too much going on, in the final sequences, it seems that every dear character (except for Ginny Weasley) gets to do something funny or dramatic: come to the rescue, die, deliver a parting one-liner, or call some witch a bitch, and at times it’s just caricatures doing what they characteristically do, but Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter, in his eighth film evocation, is a gritty, bold character that is firmly established as a classic film character. Face dirty, corduroy jacket blackened with soot, Harry is much more than an action hero as he carries the burden of so many memories, neatly brought into this final film in snippet flashbacks, to the final showdown with Voldemort. This Harry is far from the little chubby-cheeked boy who stood in the snow with his owl in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This Harry is all man.

Days before seeing Part Two I fortunately re-watched Deathly Hallows, Part One and did extensive Wikipedia research on previous episodes; otherwise, I would have been lost, and the dramatic reveals and comeuppances would have fallen flat dramatically. But it is a considerable compliment to the filmmakers of this final installment, the leanest and meanest of the them all, that I felt my heart swelling and my eyes tearing up for a cast of characters I had viewed mostly with indifference during the long history of this cinematic epic.

Monte Carlo is a Delight!

2011-07-04T20:21:00.008-04:00

Grace (Selena Gomez), Emma (Katie Cassidy), and Meg (Leighton Meester) are three girls from a small Texas town who go on a much-anticipated trip to Paris only to end up on the whirlwind tour from hell. They have a lot more fun when they make their way to Monte Carlo after Grace is mistaken for Cordelia Winthrop Scott (also Selena Gomez), a wealthy Brit heiress brat. In a comedy of errors, they stay in the best hotel in Monte Carlo, wear Scott’s designer clothes, and attend her charity ball with handsome French playboys, while the real rich bitch plays hooky from the event. This gives Grace the chance to expose the real her to a handsome French lad, throws reclusive Meg in with a handsome Aussie guy (Luke Bracey) out to discover the world, and allows diner-waitress Emma an opportunity to taste the high life, only to realize that her heart lies with her hometown beau, Owen (Cory Monteith).

There's lots to enjoy watching the three girls from Texas as their small-town eyes pop open in the midst of Monte Carlo extravagance, and as Grace’s masquerade leads her into some tight pickles. I laughed out loud at their delightful reactions to an experience that is a radical clash of cultures and economic backgrounds. The situations are lots of fun, but your enjoyment of those moments is guaranteed by the delightful performances of the three main performers.

Selena Gomez, with none of the brash delivery of Miley Cyrus, shows herself to be a very watchable actress. She’s cute, but believably so, and she never goes over the top. Cassidy is solid as the more daring, hedonistic Emma, but Meester as Meg steals the show, displaying a very sensitive, invested delivery of her lines. There’s an endearing playfulness about her that reminded me of Kate Winslet in Titanic. As the girl suffering the recent death of her mother and learning to enjoy life again, Meg’s character has more room for change, and Meester portrays that development very touchingly.

Delightful performances; beautiful shots of Paris and Monte Carlo; some comical turns by bit French actors as hotel clerks and policemen that reminded me of characters in Peter Sellers movies, and a nostalgic tie-in to To Catch a Thief make this an enjoyable movie. If I hadn’t taken my daughter, I wouldn’t have seen this movie, but I have to say I had loads of fun watching Gomez, Meester, and Cassidy have loads of fun portraying girls on a dream vacation.

Beginners (2010)

2011-07-02T20:01:00.005-04:00

In Mike Mills’s Beginners Hal (Christopher Plummer) begins his life as an openly gay man after coming out to his son, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), at the ripe old age of 75. He also begins his decline toward death after finding out that he has terminal cancer. When his father dies, Oliver inherits his father’s highly intelligent dog, a Jack Russell terrier with separation anxiety and a sardonic humor rendered in subtitles, and tries to begin a relationship with a young French woman, Anna (Melanie Laurent), after a number of failed relationships.

In flashbacks and by means of slideshows that characterize the decades of Oliver and Hal’s lives, Beginners often charts Oliver’s deep loss and Hal’s brave steps to actualize his sexual identity with a whimsical tone, but this is a serious movie about coming to grips with the past and dealing with the realities of the present. With sensitivity and humor, once again delivering a solid performance, McGregor plays Oliver as a lost soul who wonders how his mother endured decades of marriage knowing that her husband was gay. Confused but impressed by Hal’s explanation of how he tried to play the straight husband in order to make the marriage last, Oliver attempts to make his new relationship work.

As Anna, Oliver’s girlfriend, Melanie Laurent shows a talent for very expressive acting. As demonstrated in Inglourious Basterds, Laurent uses the cast of her eyes and the movements in her lips to communicate a lot. Fittingly, she gets to play her first scene, when she meets Oliver at a costume party, virtually silently. Explaining that she has laryngitis, dressed appropriately as Charlie Chaplin, Anna communicates by means of notes on a pad of paper, but Laurent’s lively eyes and the uncanny animation in her lips communicate even more, making her performance a very engaging one.

A quiet and very understated film, Beginners is not an entirely happy one. Oliver loses his father. It looks like he might lose Anna as well. But the film is always worth watching for its humor, for the performance of a very talented Jack Russell, as well as for the three main human performances. Christopher Plummer’s subtle performance as Hal, an old man spreading his wings to live out his true sexual identity as his life is ending, is a believable, dignified performance that is definitely worth watching.

Vavoom! Kaboom! Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-01T18:21:00.015-04:00

What’s with this Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf)? In the first two Transformers adventures his girlfriend is the curvaceous hottie Mikaela, played by Megan Fox. In the third installment, Mikaela has left him, and his new girlfriend is Carly, played by super model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. What makes Sam Witwicky a hot-chick magnet? His nerdy last name doesn’t keep them way. Being shorter than his girlfriends doesn’t keep them away. What gives? Perhaps, as his own mother so crudely suggests, it’s the size of his you-know-what.

Whatever the reason, Sam’s animal magnetism reels in this movie’s big vavoom factor! Mama! The human side of the story opens with Carly, dressed for work in a very short, very tight dress, waking up unemployed Sam by straddling him in bed. Then she puts on her spiked heels and clicks off to work. Throughout, Carly appears in each new sequence dressed in a different tight outfit that always includes spiked heels. She even has a chance to change into a skimpy top, tight jeans, and heels when she is captured by the bad humans, led by Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), who is aiding the Decepticon takeover of the world. Huntington-Whiteley's long legs and tight butt are shown in juxtaposition with those flashy pimped rides that transform into our hero bots. Dylan even says that the new Ferrari he purchased for Carly is the right car for her because both car and chick share the same sensual curves. Well, that's making it clear why Huntington-Whiteley is cast as Witwicky's girlfriend!

Of course, the film's kaboom factor comes from the many battles between the good Autobots and the bad Decepticons. This time around, the Decepticons are led by the traitorous Sentinel Prime (croaky voice by Leonard Nimoy), whose goal is to use a bunch of power pillars to form a teleportation bridge that will bring his planet, Cybertron, down to earth so that they can use the human race as a slave force to rebuild it.

As in the previous installment, this movie ends with a mega-long sequence in which human forces do battle against the bad bots, turning Chicago into rubble in the process. We get jet planes against Decepticon flying craft. We get special forces paratroopers and ground troops against the massive Shockwave, the anaconda of Decepticons, with a voracious maw and many burrowing tentacles. I rather enjoyed Shockwave, a nifty contribution to all things kaboom.

As all things impossible occur throughout the film, there's an element of good-guys-to-the-rescue fun that I enjoyed here, taking me back to many a Saturday afternoon matinee. All those standard ingredients are here. You think the good guys are dead. They're not. Sam and Carly are about to be killed. They're saved. It looks like Optimus Prime is down for good. He's up. It looks like Cybertron is going to double park next to the Trump Tower. It doesn't. That Dark of the Moon takes these predictable devices and creates suspense, or at least some jaw-dropping imagery, is something of an accomplishment.

Finally, we end with gratuitous schmaltz (O. P. swearing the Autobots will never desert humanity even though humanity kicked the Autobots out when the chips were down), blatant patriotism (tattered flag flying above the rubble of fallen buildings), and shallow sentimentality ("I love you's" exchanged by the unlikely couple, Sam and Carly).

But at a length of over two and a half hours, man, oh, man, this is way too much vavooming and kabooming even though I enjoyed some of the action in the Chicago battle. Yet throughout this very long and very noisy movie, the silliest element is the use of Huntington-Whiteley whose job is simply to look sexy. Well, she does her job, and why should I worry? We came to look, and she's just more to look at.

Poorly Developed Super 8

2011-06-11T20:00:00.008-04:00

What do you get when you combine the production input of Steven Spielberg with the writing and directing of J.J. Abrams? You get overblown silliness and excessive lens flares.

I had hoped for more. I knew I was going into a film whose story seemed to draw from Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial as well as films like Independence Day and Alien, but I told myself that I wouldn’t mind the film’s derivative nature if it offered some taut, scary, thrilling, even touching, summer entertainment. What I saw was a big disappointment.

The film’s basic premise was intriguing: 1970s kids making a zombie movie with an 8mm camera witness a train wreck and discover the presence of an alien trying to assemble his space ship and get back home. Two scenes in particular, during which the kids film scenes from their movie, constitute the best moments in this film. In one scene, director Charles (Riley Griffiths), lead actor Martin (Gabriel Basso), bit player Preston (Zach Mills), pyrotechnics expert Cary (Ryan Lee), and make up artist Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) watch as actress Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) rehearses an emotional speech with very touching results. Here, the shy Joe Lamb, who has recently lost his mother in a tragic steel mill accident, starts to fall in love with Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), whose wastrel, hard-drinking father feels responsible for the death of Joe’s mother. In another scene, the most striking visually (image above), the kids shoot a scene from their movie on a hill overlooking the train wreckage. Both scenes evoke the wonder of youthful imagination, the magic of filmmaking, and the bittersweet poignancy of young love. Along with these two scenes, the performances of Courtney and Fanning are the best the film has to offer.

Courtney and Fanning are full of sincerity and believability. They are worth watching, but they can’t save a film that starts with silliness in its major set piece: the train wreck. Rendered in poor CGI, a train racing from some sort of Area 51 hits a truck and sends ALL its cars flying through the air, exploding, plastering a huge area with twisted cars and chunks of wreckage that cover every space except for where the kids happen to be. Similarly, the Alien, looking like a midget-sized Cloverfield monster, moves fast, makes a lot of noise, but never generates a single second of drama or suspense. In addition, the Alien, whose most interesting characteristic is that it can carve tunnels underground like a hyperactive Horta on steroids, has no presence whatsoever. Most often a blur, it is flat and faded in the one scene in which it holds still in a face off with Joe.

Beyond the two scenes I have praised above, the rest of the film plays like a Mad movie parody: all caricature and cartoonish hyperbole: Cary's braces; the girl in curlers; Charles's slovenly family; an inexplicable scene in which tanks blow each other up across the panorama of the whole town of Lillian, Ohio. Ron Eldard, whose performances are often dreadful, is dreadful as Alice's drunken, blubbery, whining, long-haired father. I winced when Alice hugs him. As Joe's father, Kyle Chandler is flat and unconvincing, even in his big dramatic moment when he supposedly embraces his son with full acceptance (another hug that made me wince).

Oh, the lens flares. In the scene in which Alice rehearses her speech before the train arrives, they are bright blue bars stretching across the entire frame, telling us, I guess, that this is a touching, idyllic moment. But we don't need a sign. We know the moment is touching because it works. Similarly, throughout the rest of the film, we don't need all that motion, noise, and silliness. We need good writing, good acting, good direction. We need young Joe Lamb's uncorrupted imagination.

T-shirts, Blue Jeans, Creation, the Universe, and the Answer to All the Questions in the World: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

2011-05-30T21:45:00.001-04:00

The first thing that Terrence Malick’s new film did for me was take me back to my childhood in California during the late 50s and early 60s, when a year was an eternity, summer seemed to last forever, and much of my life was spent outside with my two brothers, dressed in t-shirts and blue jeans, playing baseball or “guns,” riding our bicycles to nowhere in particular, or wandering in the San Mateo hills, finding an old shack, and smashing panes of glass.

In The Tree of Life Malick’s screenplay and direction, as well as Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning cinematography, masterfully capture the day-after-day cycle in the life of a family. For the story’s memorable setting, production designer Jack Fisk and art director David Crank take a residential block and a main street in a small Texas town and send them back in time to the 1950s. For a film which does not have the luxury of a novel's many pages, it is always a challenge to capture the passage of time, but in its focus on the O’Brien family, Malick vividly depicts the countless days from the birth of three boys to the endless days of boyhood in a collage of vignettes that left me feeling like I had absorbed a thousand-page novel in two hours and eighteen minutes.

In addition to all that, Malick inserts a dazzling depiction of the birth of our planet from gaseous clouds floating in space to explosive volcanoes to dinosaurs browsing in a redwood grove. Only until Malick has delineated the vast scope of the universe in which humans fall in love and make families, dwarfed by that universe, can he return to the single family that is the focus of this story.

Father (Brad Pitt) is a 50s head of the family, bringing home the bacon and asserting his authoritarian rule but sometimes boiling over into bursts of anger incited by his own frustrations. In brief shots, Pitt reflects Father’s inner turmoil, his desire to be a good father while he yearns to be a highly accomplished engineer and deals with the frustration of being an unfulfilled musician who did not follow his dream. Mother (Jessica Chastain) is the epitome of tranquility and compassion, a Christ-like figure when she gives water to a criminal who looks like he’s just been apprehended after a long chase. In a single shot Chastain exudes the tenderness that is the counter force influencing the upbringing of the three boys: Jack (Hunter McCracken), the oldest; the artistic, sensitive middle child (Laramie Eppier); and the laconic youngest (Tye Sheridan). McCracken, in a touching, naturalistic performance – the most striking performance I’ve seen all year – displays a wonderful talent for conveying worlds of meaning with a single glance or a shift in his body posture, and his mostly silent performance covers the dawning awareness and the emotions of the many years in a boy’s development.

After Jack’s birth, all the days of Jack’s life are are depicted in lively vignettes that blend together seamlessly to form the layers of a life. The many days of infancy are nicely delineated by a repeated shot of Mother turning out a bedside lamp. After the birth of Jack’s brothers, the film flies into exhilarating cinematic motion as the camera follows the boys climbing a tree, riding their bikes, throwing a ball over the house, rolling down a grassy hill, or simply lounging around in t-shirts and jeans, day after summer day. Through Jack’s eyes, we grow up again. We hold sparklers on the 4th of July; we dress up for Hallowe’en; we become aware of life's tragedies; we play on the school playground; we follow a girl home from school. We do bad things.

Following the Creation sequence, the film echoes Genesis again as Jack struggles with free will, wanting to do good things but being tempted to do bad. He can be a destructive little boy, smashing a garbage can, breaking windows on a dare. He can lust after a neighbor woman hanging her underwear on a laundry line and washing her bare legs with a hose. He runs from a sin committed, face full of guilt. The Genesis allusions continue in the depiction of sibling rivalry between Jack and the middle brother, suggestive of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. Similarly, Jack seeks favor from the Father, as Jacob did with Isaac.

As with Days of Heaven, Malick tells a poignant, powerful story by means of snippet scenes that might have one line of dialogue linked to another snippet by a montage of images that may hold meaning or might just be achingly beautiful. We get pieces of the conflicts that arise as Jack is torn between a mother’s compassionate example and a Father’s tough dictates stemming from an unsatisfied longing. These conflicts, in turn, make Jack the adult he becomes, a man (Sean Penn) who has achieved power and success but seeks fulfillment by letting go of his bitterness and embracing the “glory” that he turned his back on.

Adult Jack must pass through the many doorways seeded throughout the film, an image that is part of a matrix of imagery from Malick’s previous four films: a patch of sky through the treetops; grass blowing in the wind; snakes; lace curtains moving in a breeze; rivers; boys swimming underwater; a room whose ceiling becomes the sky. These are images that Malick clearly loves, images that have meaning to him, and here, in The Tree of Life, Malick bares his tender soul passionately, powerfully, sometimes tritely, sometimes inscrutably, but he boldly attempts to deal with all the questions in the world, and he leaves you with the feeling that he has nearly answered them all. Malick’s soulful exploration of all the questions in the world might take too long wandering on the beach of heaven, but I’ll allow a man his indulgence when he has the talent to capture memorable power and significance in a single image, as in one of my favorites in this film: a boy’s hand holding a wisp of dried grass on a leg clad in blue jeans, as two brothers console each other against one of life’s hard moments.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-21T21:00:00.002-04:00

I consider Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island a masterpiece of literature, but there ends my interest in pirates. I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but the first two sequels added CGI bloat to the original’s charm. The latest Jack Sparrow adventure, On Stranger Tides, is careful not to overdo the CGI. Instead, it’s bloated with clashing, clattering sword fights that go on and on and on to the point that you forget what the hell they’re fighting about.

Still, I found elements to enjoy. I took my daughter, a Jack Sparrow fan, and I enjoyed her laughter in response to this more lighthearted escapade that starts with Jack impersonating a judge, swinging from a chandelier, leading the Redcoats a merry chase through the streets of London, jumping from coach top to coach top, hijacking a coal wagon that spills burning coals to ward off the cavalry. And although Depp overdoes Jack’s affectations and antics, he still can raise a chuckle with a well-timed one-liner.

As for the story, it’s all about finding the Fountain of Youth on some unidentified island, and by the time said Fountain is found, you forget what everybody’s after, but the journey takes us through some colorful scenery, and in order to make the Fountain’s waters work, you need a mermaid’s tear, and that’s as good an excuse as any to throw in the film’s best sequence in which Jack, Angelica (Penelope Cruz), and dastardly Blackbeard (Ian McShane) attempt to capture a mermaid.

I found the mermaids quite fetching and lots of fun. They start out as Victoria’s Secret models posing in fish tails, but they transform into fierce man-killers, providing a startling contrast as they swarm in a shark-like frenzy around a longboat full of potential prey.

(Gemma Ward plays Tamara)

(Astrid Berges-Frisbey as Syrena)

For its minimalism and use of color, that famous Howard Pyle illustration of the poor pirate marooned on a desert island has always been my favorite depiction of a pirate. And I’ve always appreciated how the Pirates of the Caribbean films have, I'd like to believe, alluded to that painting by including striking locations and minimalist shots of Jack on a pristine beach, but it’s well nigh time for Jack, admittedly a classic film character, to find one of those desert sand spits, settle down, and give up pirating for good.

A Sense of Longing

2011-05-15T20:00:00.000-04:00

After watching Matt Zoller Seitz’s lyrical video essay on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978): All Things Shining: Part 2, I was struck by how this exquisite film about human longing is the type of film that satisfies my movie-going soul and responds to a deep longing for cinematic fulfillment. A finely made film like this - one that fills the viewer with lucid sights, sounds, and emotions - gives me a wonderful sense of satisfaction even though, after the glow has worn off, it gives way to that aching sense of longing once again.

The beauty of Days of Heaven, a film I revisit yearly when I show it to my A.P. English class as the topic for an essay, always leaves me with a feeling of wonderful satisfaction that settles that aching yearning for days after I have watched it. Fittingly, the film is about longing. Bill (Richard Gere), Linda (Linda Manz), and Abby (Brooke Adams) long for their “days of heaven,” better days than the ones that see them shoveling coal in a steel mill, doing piece-work, sorting through garbage, or doing back-breaking work in a wheat field.

After they pass through those very symbolic gates, Bill and Abby hatch a con that ensnares the dying Farmer (Sam Shepard) who longs so desperately for a companion. And the damage they do enrages the Foreman (Robert J. Wilke) who longs for a son.

Longing also plays a role in Malick’s The New World. The yearning for a new start and progress in a new land is an iconic theme central to American history. John Smith (Colin Farrell) wants to be part of that huge undertaking, and he is willing to delve farther than others, as seen when he wades into the wilderness wetlands alone.

Meeting Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) instills in him yet another kind of yearning which is wrapped up in his involvement in this significant human venture. Pulled by a longing for fame and that indefinable itch that keeps humans striving, searching, John Smith leaves Pocahontas. How can he? In a performance that is purely naturalistic, Kilcher is exquisite in her deer-hide leggings.

Pocahontas pines and sinks into a despair of longing, but she is saved by John Rolfe’s touching yearning for a wife to share in his contributions to progress and industry. Malick as director and Christian Bale as actor are at their best in these scenes filmed by Emmanuel Lubezki.

Other recent films have satisfied that longing for viewing fulfillment as they combine emotional themes with visual beauty. Some even explore the theme of human longing, a quest for an answer or fulfillment.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, Benjamin’s questions about his life-in-reverse are essentially the same questions we ask about this mystery that is our life. We yearn for an answer and most likely never find one.

During his search, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) comes in contact with an interesting cast of characters: an African pygmy longing for the past (Rampai Mohadi); a hard-drinking sea captain fascinated by hummingbirds (Jared Harris); an enigmatic Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton) who wants another shot at swimming the English Channel, and this journey, as filmed by Claudio Miranda, is presented with striking imagery that depicts the lucid moments in Benjamin's backwards life as well as the beauty of the mysterious world around him.

A perfect image of sad longing comes in the strikingly filmed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, directed by Andrew Dominik, filmed by Roger Deakins. Jesse James (Brad Pitt) looks out over the prairie and sees an approaching prairie fire, suggesting an impending threat to his life. What goes through his mind? Does he regret the past? Does he long for forgiveness and deliverance from damnation? Jesse James’s inner torment plays out in an achingly beautiful world of prairies, snowy ridges, and ice-covered lakes. The camera frames a vision of the past that has depth and reality.

What Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) feels in There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is much stronger than longing. It is a desperate rapacity that strives to dominate, and the film takes the viewer to dark places when Plainview’s disturbing urges succumb to bitter indolence. Despite the film’s heaviness, its stark visual grandeur, as shot by Robert Elswit, presents a world that is memorable and palpable. You can feel the dust and smell the oil. For this viewer, a yearning to enter this world brings one in contact with gut-wrenching elements, yes, but the experience offers the satisfaction of superb filmmaking.

Wondering how I might end this post, I did some blog surfing and came upon Sheila O’Malley’s wonderfully touching story about a group of film enthusiasts bonding at a party over the question, “What movie is your heart?” (Jason Bellamy was part of that conversation, and he posted his own account here.)

Appropriately, that movie of the heart for me is one that incorporates the theme of longing, and its moving story and visual splendor definitely satisfy my gnawing cinematic yearning whenever I watch it: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

When Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother’s ranch in Texas following the Civil War, after a three-year search for something, it is clear that one thing that might have made him reluctant to return is his passionate love for his sister-in-law, Martha. I love how Ford shows this silently. Behind the back of Captain Clayton (Ward Bond), Martha takes up Ethan's Johnny Reb coat, brushes it off, and hands it to Ethan. Ethan kisses her reverently on the forehead. Aware of this impropriety, Clayton laboriously swallows a mouthful of coffee and donut.

Did Ethan spend three years yearning for his love, Martha? And how horrible it is for him to pick up her bloody dress and look in at her violated body less than two days after his return! This longing for her, cut so tragically short, clicks on something very dark inside him, a wrathful longing to kill Scar, the Comanche leader who raped and killed Martha, perhaps to kill Debbie, tainted by her years with the Indians.

Throughout the depiction of this quest, Ford frames landscapes so beautifully and classically Western that the viewing of this film is always a sublime experience. In this red, rocky wilderness, strong passions play out to an emotional climax. A family has been torn apart, but Ethan’s racial hatred threatens to tear it further.

Longings for the stability and peace of civilized family keep tugging at the searchers. Mose (Hank Worden) knows. He hankers for his rocking chair by the fire and “a roof over old Mose’s head.” Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) keeps pulling at Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) to give up the search and start a family. Finally, at the end, the power of family cuts through the rage. When Ethan holds Debbie up in the same way he held her up as a little girl, he sees that she is Martha’s daughter. She is her blood, and he can’t kill her.

But in one of the greatest closing shots ever filmed, Ethan walks away toward that majestic but wild wilderness. He’s a man of the West’s violent past and can’t be part of civilization and family.

The door closes on an exquisite film, and the movie-loving heart yearns for more.

Bad Weather, Netflix Instant Streaming, and The Red Riding Trilogy

2011-05-11T08:58:00.001-04:00

On Cape Cod, it's winter again. Things are just as bleak at the Regal Cinemas, Hyannis. Thor was a complete snore. Prom, which I saw with my daughter, was surprisingly enjoyable; it was sincere, tenderhearted, and refreshingly understated for a teenage movie set in your typical Hollywood high school. Meanwhile, there isn't much out there on the cloudy horizon.

My cinematic salvation has been instant streaming at Netflix. First, you have to download the app; then you have to understand that not every movie is marked “Play,” but it’s a great way to catch up on last year’s movies, or old classics, without having to wait for the DVD to arrive in the mail. My first pick was Blade Runner, which I hadn’t seen in many years, and my Mac desktop did justice to its amazing lighting and the intricate detail of its futuristic cityscapes.

A downside of instant streaming is that sometimes it stops and starts, or blinks off and has to reload. I watched Restrepo. What a powerful documentary! What a sad episode in our history! But the instant streaming was having issues. What occasionally happens is that the movie paralyzes into a series of freeze frames though the audio goes on without stuttering, a sort of artsy effect that seemed to suit Restrepo.

When Netflix had me pegged for films that are “dark, gritty, and suspenseful,” and laid out a string of movie suggestions that were eerily spot on, I discovered a viewing gold mine: the Red Riding Trilogy: 1974, 1980, 1983, a very gripping, viscerally haunting, artistically filmed, wonderfully performed British series of three made-for-TV films about police corruption in West Yorkshire, and about a cover-up of circumstances surrounding the disappearances of three girls, as well as the mismanagement of the investigation of a series of murders based on the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the late 70s and early 80s.

I was riveted. I watched all three movies, and then watched the first and last movies a second time each – not just because of the complex plot involving a large cast of characters and the hard-to-follow Yorkshire accents – but because I was fascinated by this tale of greed and cruelty at the disadvantage of poor, uneducated people living in a garbage-strewn housing development in the shadow of a steaming nuclear power plant.

Red Riding: 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold, follows the efforts of young Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) to investigate the disappearance of a little girl and to connect it with two previous, unsolved disappearances that started in 1969. While Dunford, played with energetic zeal by Garfield, becomes involved with Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), the alcoholic mother of the second girl to disappear, he finds himself up against a police force that rules like a gang of medieval warlords. Chortling at their own greed, they raise a toast to “the North, where we do what we want.” But as they, in turn, kowtow to the wealthy developer John Dawson, played as a beefy, seedy tycoon by Sean Bean, they resort to all manner of cruelties to guard their turf and prevent anyone from uncovering evidence of their corruption and their negligence in regards to the disappearances. When the third girl is found dead, amputated swans’ wings stitched to her back, Dunford comes close to revealing the unspeakable depravity. But there seems to be no hope when he comes up against the merciless goons of the corrupt police force.

In Red Riding: 1980, directed by James Marsh, it’s six years later, the girls have been forgotten, and a series of unsolved prostitutes starts a public outcry against the police. Detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is brought from the outside to take over the investigation. Of course, he uncovers sordid secrets and resistance within the force, especially when his findings suggest that the most recent murder was committed by a copycat killer, or by someone attempting to attribute the woman’s murder to the Yorkshire Slasher. Very quickly, Hunter realizes that something is rotten in West Yorkshire, as suggested to him by BJ (Robert Sheehan), a male prostitute who knows some sordid truths about the locals.

If I call Red Riding: 1983, directed by Anand Tucker, the most powerful of the three films, that’s saying a lot when you consider the visceral effect of the crime, cruelty, and torture going on in the first two films. The most artistic of the three, with its creative cinematography and the gritty poetry of BJ’s voiceovers, 1983 immediately links with 1974 when a fourth girl’s disappearance seems to make it clear that the poor Polish immigrant nailed for the first three disappearances is innocent, as flashbacks clarify mysteries established during the investigations of Dunford, the reporter, and Hunter, the detective.

I love how the heroic investigator in this third film is a lonely, slovenly, overweight legal representative named John Piggott (Mark Addy), who bravely enters the lion’s den to uncover the truth, correct past mistakes, and save the innocent. With the help of Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a police inspector with a guilty conscience, ends left loose (often too loose) in the first two films are tied up as Piggott and Jobson get closer to the ghastly answer.

Released theatrically in the United States in February, 2010, the Red Riding Trilogy may be destined to become a film directed by Ridley Scott. But, as they stand, these three made-for-TV episodes provide the satisfaction of an epic theatrical film. They play together as a very compelling unit. Fine acting, in all three films, portrays a Dickensian cast of characters ranging from base prostitutes to lofty bureaucrats bloated with their ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, the imaginative cinematography ups the tension with eerie dream sequences and flashbacks as well as vivid depictions of sleazy alleys, scrubby moors, and smoky pubs where the thugs of the West Yorkshire police force suck down pints of ale while turning their backs on an organized network of unspeakable depravity.

The Conspirator, Water for Elephants, and The Way Back (2010)

2011-04-24T17:00:00.002-04:00

After a silly, unconvincing scene in which wounded Captain Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) distracts his painfully wounded comrade (Justin Long) by cracking jokes, and an ineffective depiction of the assassination of Lincoln that feels like it’s merely going through the motions to get the movie started, a dullness that is rescued by a dramatic rendition of the panic on Tenth Street as the wounded Lincoln is carried across to the Petersen House, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator settles into a mostly interesting, often touching story as James McAvoy plays Frederick Aiken, the underdog lawyer crusading for justice as he defends conspirator Mary Surratt.

Robin Wright skillfully portrays Mary Surratt as a thin, gray-faced woman tormented by hopelessness. Along with Wright, Even Rachel Wood as Mary’s daughter, Anna, offers the best, most invested acting. Meanwhile, Kevin Kline as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is suitably grim and merciless, reminding us that the Dick Cheneys of the world are not restricted to our time period.

Despite its made-for-television formula and its Civil War era stiffness, the movie grows more engrossing as Aiken pumps up his ardent campaign to defy the court’s determination to hang four conspirators as swiftly as possible by proving that John Surratt, Mary’s son, not Mary, knew about the treasonous chatter going on in the boardinghouse. After running into numerous legal dead ends, Aiken's efforts culminate with a nicely done moment in which Aiken argues constitutionality with Lincoln’s friend, a Supreme Court Justice (John Cullum), for a writ of habeas corpus.

With the bad guys played by the grim-faced Yankees who want vengeful closure for the tragic cap on four years of bitter tragedy at the hands of the hated Southerners, there is much old-fashioned courtroom drama to be had. But it’s hard to be transported into this event in history when the writing bombards you with phrases regarding the present state of fear, the need for vengeance, mistreatment of prisoners, prejudice against a hated enemy that has caused a national disaster, and legal gray areas that clearly seem to have a political agenda rooted in the present.

In Water for Elephants, colorful camerawork and a James Newton Howard musical score that borrows heavily from To Kill a Mockingbird and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button conjure a romantic, nostalgic picture of a Depression-era circus as seen through the eyes of a young man named Jacob (Robert Pattinson), an orphaned Polish immigrant who is hired to train a circus elephant and becomes enmeshed in the precarious relationship between the attractive circus star Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and her sadistic ringmaster husband, August, suitably played by Christoph Walz who taps into his Hans Landa reservoir for much of his performance as the villain.

Though Walz’s is a compelling performance, despite much overacting, you could close your eyes and swear you were sitting in a showing of Basterds. Open your eyes on one of the numerous close-ups of August’s profile, and you’d swear director Francis Lawrence was imitating shots from Tarantino’s film.

But there are some very entertaining moments in this film, and it does a nice job of contrasting the superficial glamor of the circus against its sordid and shabby underside. Water for Elephants is contrived, melodramatic, predictable, and nicely pat, factors that must have made the novel a bestseller. But the movie is often beautifully filmed, genuinely funny and warm-hearted at times, and full of action. Like the kind of movie produced in great numbers in the 1930s, it is deliberately stocked with enough enjoyable ingredients to make it a worthwhile experience.

But why, oh, why does Old Jacob have to tell his story as a flashback, with Hal Holbrook as the sentimental old fellow elegiacally recounting his painful past in the style of Saving Private Ryan? There is nothing of the young Jacob in Holbrook’s doughy round cheeks; nothing of him in his moist eyes. Holbrook reveals not the slightest bit of hardness to suggest that he suffered the losses nor lived the life he recounts. In addition, the sniffly sadness with which he begins his account seems to belie how nicely it all turned out for him in the end.

The Way Back, Peter Weir’s ultimately spectacular and touching outdoor adventure about a band of Stalin-era gulag-escapees who hike from Siberia, across Mongolia and the Himalayas, to India, takes some time to find its stride.

Although the Siberian gulag sequences are appropriately dark and effectively suggestive of squalor, cold, and misery, due to meticulous art direction and real snow, these opening parts are disorienting and claustrophobic, and it’s hard to focus on the central characters as a mixture of Russian, English, and English subtitles, as well as muttered nearly, inaudible dialogue, makes it hard to follow what’s being said. Then, suddenly and not very dramatically, the escapees are running through the dense forest; we never see them leave their barracks and cut through the wire.

Once the escapees start traipsing across the wilderness, however, and the characters are isolated in the Siberian vastness, we have a chance to distinguish faces as the performers touchingly establish their personalities. Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, the young Polish leader of the group who is determined to walk all the way to Poland to tell his wife he forgives her for submitting to torture and informing on him. Ed Harris is Mr. Smith, the American engineer, a sturdy survivor. Meanwhile, Dragos Bucur is the jokester Zorca, Gustaf Skarsgard is the capable cook, Voss, and Alexandru Potocean plays Tomasz, the artist, who documents their ordeal with sketches on scraps of paper and sheets of bark. Colin Farrell provides tension and dark humor as Valka, the dim-witted murderer whose loyalties are unpredictable.

But in a film that is mostly about walking, much of the film’s emotional core is provided by the touching performance of Saoirse Ronan as the gypsy outcast, Irena, who unifies the group by loosening each members reticence and sharing their backstories with the others. At first rejected by the group, later embraced by them as their darling, Ronan’s glowing portrayal of Irena is central to the film’s most touching image enhanced by inspired cinematography and direction.

Although the film’s main conflict depends on magnificent cinematography of amazing stretches of wilderness and the suffering endured to cross that wilderness, the journey and the bare existence of the trekkers are depicted in memorable detail: fighting wolves off a carcass and then fighting each other for raw meat just like the wolves; tracking, catching, and eating a snake; suffering from swarms of insects; surviving on the bare necessities they carry: one knife, a pot, a few cups, coats, and the sticks they pick up as walking staffs; sucking the last bit of moisture from a rag.

Soul Surfer - Jane at the Movies, Part 2

2011-04-19T22:30:00.001-04:00

As my avid movie-going daughter, Jane, approaches her 24th birthday, I wonder whether her cinematic tastes have changed and how her discrimination has developed over the years.

The other day we saw Soul Surfer together. This was Jane’s second viewing. She loves AnnaSophia Robb (The Bridge to Terebithia) and movies involving teenage girls, and she’s crazy about movies in which a sports team or an individual athlete overcomes a setback to win the big one. For competitive surfer Bethany Hamilton (Robb), that setback is a considerable one: her left arm is bitten off by a shark. (Jane knew just when to cover her eyes.) But Bethany Hamilton has incredible determination, extremely supportive parents (played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt), equally supportive siblings and friends, a lot of ability, and faith in God. Yes, sir, now I understood the title. I never thought that “soul” was meant in religious terms, and I had kept referring to it as Cool Surfer. How lapsed-Catholic of me!

I had had no clue that this movie is one of a growing number of movies in a Christian cinema genre for which I have seen previews now and then. In Soul Surfer the importance of God and faith are blatantly depicted with scenes including saying grace at meals; a church ceremony; religious songs; a Christian youth group that goes to Thailand to participate in tsunami; the youth group leader, played by Carrie Underwood, who encourages Bethany to have faith that good will come of her tragedy; and lots of praying during and after the shark attack.

But Jane only chuckled when I leaned over and whispered, “This is a religious movie.” Most likely, her young heart and innocence, in which her Down syndrome play a part, glossed over the propaganda while she focused on what she loves: bright, smiling teen friendships and uplifting athletic competition.

And, too, some of the bad acting did nothing to diminish her enjoyment. She loves Dennis Quaid, ubiquitous actor in both Disney family films (The Parent Trap) as well as sports movies (The Rookie). In fact, Quaid always does a likable, serviceable job. Despite overacting here, he establishes a believable presence as the sun-bronzed, muscular surfer dad, and he overacts a range of emotions. Hunt, on the other hand, spends the whole film with her long, bony face drawn in toneless worry, eyes blank, forehead knitted as though suffering from an eternal headache.

Even on my own I would have enjoyed this touching movie. The Hawaiian location shots are majestic, the surfing footage is awesome, and the shark attack/ rescue sequence is grippingly depicted. But with Jane I could participate fully in the emotional crescendo to which this movie builds. That’s what made Jane want to see the movie a second time: the glorious triumph of a teenage girl who overcomes a disability and comes from behind to achieve something great.

Nevertheless, now that Jane is nearly 24, she has become a discriminating viewer. She won’t see just anything. (I am more at fault in that respect than she is.) She waved her hand dismissively at the preview for Hop. She thinks the upcoming Smurfs is some kind of joke. And she’s not a fan of the current trend in adult-friendly animated features that incorporate allusions and inside jokes so that, supposedly, parents can enjoy a trip to the movies with the kiddies.

Jane turned down my invitation to see Despicable Me. She took me up on Tangled, and she loved it, both of us enjoying its charming, more classic treatment and lighter humor. I had to beg her to see Rango with me. We both enjoyed the more visual, Chaplinesque comedy of the opening scenes, but we didn’t much enjoy the rest of it. I felt its Chinatown parallels weighed it down ponderously; it was not a light and breezy Western parody. Its visual weirdness and all those allusions did nothing for Jane.

Jane is always faithful to the Disney Channel performers she adores. Vanessa Hudgens took us to Beastly, but Jane didn’t care to see it again. I thought it was an ill-conceived, poorly written, contrived failure. Jane enjoyed Hudgens, but I don’t think she found the movie very touching, even though the unlikely plot turns miraculously happy at the end. Mary-Kate Olsen is unsettlingly bizarre as a prep-school witch.

In the past year, Jane’s favorites have been Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I suffered through the former for Jane. (I’ve had enough of that Potter chap!) The latter sequel was an enjoyable surprise, starting in Battle of Britain England and ending up in magical Narnia.

We movie bloggers have our angles for arguing the benefits of film-going while some people consider it a waste of time and money. For Jane, I argue that movies have increased her verbal abilities tremendously. She has a great vocabulary and she’s a good writer, and in order to learn a language, you have to hear it before you speak it. I imagine she doesn’t always follow the dialogue. When she sees the Harry Potter movies multiple times, it’s not just because she loves Harry, Hermione, and Ron. Hell, I have trouble understanding all the hocus pocus they’re blathering about: Deathly Hallows and horcruxes and all that. Whatever the challenge, Jane knows the language of movies. A film’s magical capacity to tell a story with images alone is a language that Jane reads fluently. It’s just all that talking that makes it hard.

I would love to be able to jump inside Jane’s mind and see a movie as she sees it. Well, I guess sometimes I do. At the end of Soul Surfer, Jane turned to me to read my reaction as Bethany catches her last big wave. “She feels it,” Jane whispered, voicing Bethany’s father’s advice on how to predict a great wave. As Bethany rides the tube, and Jane smiled, I felt it too – all the personal triumph and perfect family unity that are part of this touching climactic moment. There was no way I could not feel it.

Tiptoe through The Further with Insidious (I)

2011-04-11T18:00:00.002-04:00

I guess there was always something kind of scary about Tiny Tim singing “Tiptoe through the Tulips” – though it was scary in a funny way. In the genuinely frightening film Insidious, however, director James Saw Wan turns this silly song into a chilling, literally hair-raising cue for two very frightening moments in a film that’s full of them.

With its lurid main title frame and its non-reliance on an overwrought musical score to signal a demon jumping out of a closet, Insidious allows those restless wraiths and demons to show their horrible faces when you least expect them. In addition, Wan starts out slowly. He opens brilliantly with black and white shots of rooms in an old house strewn with packing boxes. A family has just moved in.

Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) unpack and settle in while belongings go missing and things go thump in the night and their two boys have trouble sleeping. Ah, the house is haunted! Not so! After the first subtle creaks and shadowy figures, the family moves away – a neat joke on all the horror movies in which the family grapples with demons but stays in the frickin’ house against all logic – and it’s clear that the haunting has followed them.

When Josh’s creepy mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), calls in the paranormal experts, the film turns for the first time to a couple of laughs. We get a weird parody of Ghostbusters in the form of two nerdy specialists (writer Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) equipped with inexplicable gizmos. But once the elderly-lady psychic (Lin Shaye) starts communicating with Josh and Renai’s haunted, comatose son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), the comic relief is over. Seriously scary stuff happens as Josh embarks on a journey into The Further, a dark region populated by ghosts and demons lining up to take over his son’s empty “vessel.”

Josh’s journey through a lightless murk teeming with scary things to the bizarre realm of The Further is one of the best sequences I’ve viewed this year. Much is made of this dark void and the entities that drift through the obscurity. The puny lantern Josh carries seems strangled by the darkness, and this accentuates the threat. At the core of the murk lies a bizarre limbo of lost souls. Here, creepy images, "Tiptoe through the Tulips," and a weird tribute to Saw make this a hellishly frightening place to be.

Wan does a lot of things right. Refreshingly, he keeps the camera steady – no shaky handheld effect; no camcorder point of view; no dependency on CGI-produced gruesomeness. A drawback might be the "I" in the title and the film's cliffhanger ending. I prefer one-off horror movies, but a sequel could succeed if it employs Wan's talent for dark lighting and dark figures placed in the right place at just the right time. As the bedeviled couple, Wilson and Byrne offer invested performances that always draw our sympathies for their plight, and we readily identify with their terror of demons in dark places.

Wild Child - Hanna

2011-04-10T21:12:00.005-04:00

Pallid and lanky, elongated by puberty, Saorise Ronan is perfect as Hanna, a genetically enhanced killing machine – universal soldier, junior model. Last of an outlawed experiment, Hanna is slated for elimination by cold-blooded CIA operative Marissa (Cate Blanchett). With an obsessive-compulsive thing about her teeth that drives her to scrape until her gums bleed, and a shoe fetish to boot, Marissa was responsible for the death of Hanna’s mother, Johanna, and now she is driven to clean things up completely by doing away with the daughter. Meanwhile, Erik (Eric Bana), Johanna’s lover, has released Hanna as a weapon of vengeance.

A mixture of brooding Cold War sordidness and standard kick-boxing combat against impossible odds, Joe Wright’s Hanna contains a mixture of elements that keep the storyline of flight and pursuit of a genetically enhanced agent in need of extermination interesting: a cold, concrete secret desert installation that turns out, strikingly, to be in the middle of an exotic country; an eccentric hippie-Brit family (Jason Flemyng and Olivia Williams as the parents) on a caravan trek; an atmospheric sequence in a Moroccan resort where Hanna gets freaked out by all the electrical devices; Isaacs (Tom Hollander), a sleazy German strip-joint owner who leads his hulky boyfriends in pursuit; a frighteningly tacky fairytale theme park gone to ruin that includes a gingerbread house full of dangling plastic mushrooms; and vivid locations depicting the scuzzy side of Berlin that include a junk-strewn playground where Erik dukes it out with Isaacs and his boys.

Part Frankenstein’s monster grappling with identity, part Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage learning to exist in the civilized world, yet another part Mindy Kick-Ass Macready, a little girl learning to kick butt, Hanna, as played by Saoirse, is a fascinating fairytale outcast trying to find her place in a very alien world. In the wilderness of Finland where she is brought up as a resourceful killer, Hanna is a fair-haired nymph of the snowy forest. But in her first acts of murder, a shocking moment intensified by Agent Marissa’s aghast reaction, she is a blood-splattered assassin. During her peregrinations in the outside world, she wonders about her place in it all: her parentage; the importance of family; how love works; and how the way she has been created may alienate her from normalcy forever.

The film doesn’t supply much of a resolution, and sometimes the flight/pursuit/vengeance storyline is unsatisfyingly standard, but its unique and often bizarre details, its memorably textured settings, and Saoirse’s compelling performance, make it a film worth seeing.

Source Code

2011-04-04T19:27:00.010-04:00

Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped. He is trapped on a Chicago-bound commuter train in an eight-minute loop, the last minutes before a mad bomber blows up the train, an interval called a source code that exists in another dimension. This is part of a military project employing quantum physics hocus pocus to identify the mad bomber in order to prevent a plan to explode a dirty bomb in the center of the city (though why he needs to blow up a train when he’s going to destroy the whole city anyway is as hard to understand as quantum physics).

Colter is also trapped in a steel pod that at first resembles the interior of the kind of helicopter he has been flying over Afghanistan. Here he learns that he is being used as a cross-dimensional agent in an experiment designed to stop terrorism at the expense of enslaving Colter’s consciousness. This treatment of Colter, thrown back into those eight minutes like a poor student forced to do the same math problem over and over again, involves the best moments in Duncan Jones’s Source Code, a film that borrows from The Thirteenth Floor, Avatar, and Inception, and Gyllenhaal does an excellent job of making those moments dramatic, evoking Colter’s turmoil as he questions his existence, or non-existence, as he grapples with his assignment, and as he determines that he has more control over his existence and his duties than he has been told.

At times the film struggles against the monotony of its repetitious construct. The same shot zooming over a pond toward the railway route takes us back to the train again and again, to Colter’s developing relationship with Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the woman sitting across from him, but there's not much they can do in eight minutes. Back and forth we go to the same details and events, sometimes slightly altered, but Gyllenhaal maintains the urgency. Meanwhile, Vera Farmiga, as Officer Goodwin, has nothing more to do than to look conflicted by the military’s experiment and to appear on the pod’s video screen like Big Brother controlling Colter’s destiny. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Rutledge hobbles around like a loopy scientist nerd, fretting when things go wrong, much more worried about his invention than Colter’s welfare.

I enjoyed this modest entertainment. Jake Gyllenhaal engages skillfully as he plots how to free himself from a trap within a trap. Or is it a trap within a trap within a trap? I also love science fiction even if nowadays that means scratching your head over perplexing questions. If you die in a dream, do you wake up? Whose dream is this anyway? What the hell is limbo? And, in the case of Source Code, if you send a text message from another dimension, will your cell be able to pick it up?

Beautiful Jane Eyre (2011)

2011-04-02T18:30:00.005-04:00

Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is a beautiful film. Fukunaga’s camera frames expansive shots of the somber moor in contrast with the bright blossoms of Rochester’s gardens. Interior shots of windows and curtains full of light are memorable as well. The film’s colors seem to shift with its mood: from the grays and muted colors of the austere moorland and the foggy woods to the bright greens of Thornfield’s grounds to a brown filter over shots of Jane awakening to her love for Rochester.

Along with the film’s pretty look we get an excellent cast. Michael Fassbender plays a moody, manly, passionate Edward Rochester. Jamie Bell is nicely cast as the fervent missionary, St. John Rivers, and Judi Dench reins in her tendency to overact as she invests Mrs. Fairfax with warmth and humor. But the driving force of Jane Eyre is the remarkable portrayal of Jane by Mia Wasikowska, whose absorbing performance and beautiful presence magnify the film’s visual beauty.

Costumed in plain dresses, her hair pulled back severely, Wasikowska brilliantly establishes the strength of character and soul that constitutes the most famous plain Jane in British literature. Wasikowska instills in Jane a firm sense of self and an inner strength tempered by loss and suffering that support her when Rochester’s devious attempt to defy moral custom is followed by the proposition that she live with him out of wedlock. The aborted wedding, Jane’s desperate struggle to unfasten the wedding garments that have ensnared her, her confrontation with Rochester and the truth, and her flight from Thornfield to the stormy moor are dramatic moments in a well-written script.

Though Sally Hawkins contributes histrionics to a deathbed apology that doesn’t quite fit, and the end comes too quickly after Jane leaves Rivers, with the dramatic fire covered after the fact in stage play fashion as a monologue delivered by Dench, the film achieves a lasting impact by setting Wasichowska’s impressive portrayal of an oft-portrayed character in a visual world of artistically framed shots and dramatically juxtaposed images and colors.

Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch

2011-03-26T10:00:00.004-04:00

Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch opens with a powerful music montage that depicts the sordid events that land Baby Doll (Emily Browning) in an institution for the mentally insane, a living hell she does not deserve. Victimized by her brutal stepfather, she is relinquished to the custody of abusive hospital orderlies. For Baby Doll and her friends, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish, doing some heartfelt acting), Rocket (Jena Malone in constant bitter and rebellious mode), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, looking totally uncomfortable outside the Disney Channel), and Amber (Jamie Chung, merely modeling sexy outfits), freedom is only a dream, and perhaps the only freedom they can attain is inside their minds where they strut their stuff into four set-piece battles.

Clad in the thigh-highs, garters, and fetishistic dance-girl costumes that turn them into sex objects for the kind of abusive men that populate this film, Baby Doll and her wild bunch blaze away with automatic weapons at gigantic samurai; steam-powered clockwork World War I German soldiers (I liked the Germans spewing steam instead of blood; and they're not zombies); armored ogres; a dragon; and chrome robots, and all this is set in fantasy-scapes, rendered in steampunk greens and browns, the kind of CGI feast we expect form Zack Snyder, with gratuitous slow-mo close ups of ejecting cartridge casings.

Yeah, yeah, you could say that Snyder is making the statement that the girls are decked out in titillating fashion as would be expected by the abusive, victimizing male ogres that watch over Baby Doll and her friends with their stripper-girl nicknames and the expectation that they “perform” for the ogling sexist wolves, and that when our heroines go to war in those costumes and blaze away with huge guns, it is a demonstration of courage and defiance that defies what their victimizers would expect of them. But at the same time, Snyder gets a lot of titillation out of bitchin’ babes blasting bad bastards on full auto.

I don’t know. You be the judge. But when the battles are over – the samurai combat and the World War I battle are visually fascinating, but they go on too long; the dragon fight is okay, but we’ve been there, done that; and the robot thing goes on and on and on – the ending is sincerely touching, tragic, yet uplifting. Baby Doll redeems herself. Sweet Pea finds (SPOILER!) freedom, and the credits roll with outtake nonsense.

Is it all nonsense? Scott Glenn is way silly as the girls’ guru “Wise Man.” “And another thing,” directors need to know when to cut the action. But Emily Browning’s face is hauntingly gorgeous, Abbie Cornish has solid presence, the steam-spewing clockwork krauts are something different, and I have to say that Snyder frames some memorable images – though for some viewers, what’s most memorable won’t be the CGI landscapes.

One pill makes you . . . Limitless

2011-03-24T20:20:00.000-04:00

In Neil Burger’s fast-paced, entertaining film Limitless, Bradley Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a creatively paralyzed writer with a book deal for an inscrutable science fiction novel, who can’t manage to get one word down on his laptop screen until he’s slipped an experimental drug called NZT-48 that accesses 100% of his brain power, allowing him to charm his landlord’s daughter out of nagging him for the rent, help her write a law essay, seduce her, write a chunk of his novel, all in one day, and then – blastoff – the sky’s the limit.

Great name. Eddie Morra. Sounds like a bookie for the mob, or it made me think of a moray eel, perhaps suggesting Eddie’s slithery, aggressive side. Or perhaps it’s meant to suggest the moral dilemmas Eddie faces as he succumbs to the allure of the drug’s effects. Or perhaps it simply suggests that Eddie wants more out of life. Like Doctor Faustus or Dorian Gray, he dares to open a Pandora’s box in order to get a hell of a lot more out of life, even though this choice comes with a hell of a price.

I especially enjoyed the film’s science-fiction elements and the use of creative effects to depict Eddie’s transformation. When Eddie pops his first pill, he is aware of his brain connecting with everything he knows and has observed. He notices part of a book title in landlord’s daughter’s book back, and the complete title floats through the air to his brain. When he decides to get a handle on his wastrel existence and clean up his grungy apartment, multiple Eddie’s zoom around the place, doing dishes and putting things away. I wish I could do that! Then, in the film’s best image, when Eddie sits down at his laptop and pounds out his novel in fast motion, the letters rain down from the ceiling.

Eddie certainly gets more out of life. He hands in his manuscript and wows his editor; he gets his successful girlfriend, Lindy, (Abbie Cornish) back; he picks up Italian; he makes two million on the stock market, and his agent’s avarice gets him ensnared with Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro providing a solid supporting performance without doing anything silly), who wants to use Eddie's stock market expertise to negotiate a multi-million-dollar merger with another corporation.

But as Faustus and Gray would tell you, hell comes your way inevitably, and for Eddie, hell is a labyrinth of life-threatening factors that lead to a number of hair-breadth escapes for himself and for his girlfriend throughout the latter half of the film. The thrills arrive in good time, just when the movie seems to be bogging down in Wall Street territory, and the suspense comes from wondering whether or not Eddie can elude various sinister figures on his tail, survive the drug’s potentially lethal side effects, and still come out with success and Abbie Cornish. Meanwhile, it’s fun when he, as well as Lindy in a suspenseful fix amidst the granite outcroppings of Central Park, uses the pill to sharpen his wits in order to get out of a tight spot.

Although the plot leaves a few loose ends to wonder about, I found this a gripping piece of entertainment that moves along swiftly, wows with clever camerawork, and includes an engaging lead performance by Bradley Cooper, and the only thing I wondered was how grungy, long-haired, heavy-drinking Eddie Morra got that book deal in the first place.

"My, what big eyes you have!" - Red Riding Hood

2011-03-14T10:00:00.001-04:00

I’m not going to spend much time here on the overall silliness of this Twilight-like (girl desired by two handsome guys; girl’s father played by Billy Burke, who plays Bella’s father; werewolves) disappointment that retells the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale without any sort of engaging imagination. I’m not going to address the wooden acting, the very unscary CGI werewolf, how Virginia Madsen looks totally out of place, how most of the characters seem out of place, looking like characters in a Disney Channel teen drama done up in storybook costumes standing around looking shocked to find themselves in a werewolf movie. I’m not going to go on about how Julie Christie as Grandmother is wasted on making sudden appearances and odd exclamations that work, unintentionally or not, as a running joke throughout the movie. I’m only going to address two elements, one a significant plus, another a significant weakness: the eyes of Amanda Seyfried and the ineffective art direction.

The Eyes of Amanda Seyfried:

They are impossibly large. You could get lost in them forever and ever. With the frequency of the close shots on Seyfried’s eyes, deep and dusky gray-blue, juxtaposed with her luxuriant tresses of golden blonde hair, it’s almost as if director Catherine Hardwicke is trying to build the whole movie around her eyes, as Seyfried’s character Valerie, the girl in peril of the big bad wolf, uses those big beauties to express deep longing or intense fear. But as interesting as Seyfried’s eyes may be, and as stunning as the close shots are, they are not enough to carry this disappointing, poorly written, lamely imagined story.

The Fairytale Town:

Immediately, as the townspeople close their gate against the predations of the werewolf, offering up a little piggy in appeasement, talking about how the werewolf has not bothered them in years, some of the characters stumbling through sentences without contractions, village idiot babbling in the attic, you are immediately reminded of Shyamalan’s The Village. But even though Red Riding Hood matches elements from M. Night Shyamalan’s film, it does not come anywhere near succeeding in establishing the rich reality of Shyamalan’s village nor the very convincing dread of the townspeople cowering in that very convincing little world.

For Red Riding Hood this is a wonderful opportunity for art direction: a small medieval village called Daggerhorn (Yikes!) surrounded by a dark forest, but the opportunity is sadly squandered. This bland, fake sound stage set has no more substance and reality than the sets in Disneyland’s Fantasyland, where everything looks new and colorful but more than that is unnecessary because you came for the rides, not the sets.

In Valerie Riding Hood’s village, the wooden buildings look plastic. The flowers in the fields are fake. Nothing looks lived in. Nothing looks used. Everyone’s clothes are fresh and clean. The snow, of course, is fake, and even though it’s constantly snowing, no one acts cold, no one wears a hat, and no one’s breath fogs up. (Even the men who climb a snowy mountain to the werewolf’s cavern wear no hats, and some of them don’t even wear coats.)

Meanwhile, the scenes enacted in the town do little to establish genuine dread or a sense of wonder that would draw your attention away from setting. When the townspeople think they have slain the big bad wolf, they celebrate with music played on weird, Dr. Seussian instruments and an oddly lewd dance. (The revelries also include three kids in piggy masks and a guy in a wolf suit acting out The Three Little Piggies; "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in.") When Valerie sees her sweetheart, Peter, doing the bump and grind with another girl, she grabs a female friend and performs the same suggestive dance, but I guess Peter isn’t worried that Valerie’s bisexual because he doesn’t seem to care.

Of course, the big bad wolf very quickly disabuses the townsfolk of the delusion that they’ve killed him when he suddenly leaps out and munches on random townies. This is done without an ounce of suspenseful build-up. Blood stains the fake snow in a rather confined town square in a setting that makes no effort to suggest the dark forest beyond or to generate any sense of dread.

In the film’s opening shots, the camera moves eagle-like over snowy ridges and along a plummeting mountain stream to the forest and the village in its midst. The camera tells you that you have arrived at Valerie’s village. Alas, the art direction never makes you feel like you’re really there.

Standard Operating Procedure - Battle Los Angeles

2011-03-12T13:00:00.001-05:00

Well, hell, I was looking forward to a gripping alien-invasion thrill ride, but what you get in Battle Los Angeles is nothing more than standard operating procedure for an action movie that spends more time glorifying the U.S. military in combat than it does establishing any sort of substantial fear or establishing the aliens as a fearsome, formidable foe. In fact, I frequently felt I was watching an extended version of that Citizen Soldiers propaganda music video we were forced to watch countless times before the previews played. Although I kind of dig a good old John Wayne guts and glory shoot-em-up, I had expected this one to serve up a little more science fiction with its battle action. Instead, this is the same old thing, with all the elements you’d expect from a standard war movie.

Aaron Eckhart as Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz:

He’s John Wayne, 2011. He has devoted twenty years to the Marines, and he wants out, but when aliens land off Santa Monica, he kicks in and does his duty and more, risking his life in daring maneuvers, planning to go back alone to destroy an alien command ship. Eckhart has presence, and he often carries the movie as it subsides into ordinary combat action, but we don’t get much more from Eckhart than tough-as-nails bravado. A little bit of the shakes, sure, but when he and his men have gone miles and miles beyond the call of duty, he’s ready to eschew R&R and go back for more: “I’ve already had my breakfast.”

Action Without Suspense:

The action starts so immediately it’s jarring and disorienting. As the platoon led by Second Lieutenant Martinez (Ramon Rodriguez) and Sergeant Nantaz gear up and fly out to Lincoln Avenue in Santa Monica to extract civilians before a massive air strike, the place is already a hellish war zone. Seen from the air, the image is impressive, but I felt disappointed that we never get to see how it got that way. The aliens have already landed but without any sort of build up or suspense. From fuzzy televised newscasts we learn that approaching meteors harbor some sort of alien craft. Again, in fuzzy images on TV screens, the meteors splash down, one hits a ship, alien cyborgs or whatever emerge from the water, and ranks of aliens march out of the ocean onto Santa Monica Beach, an image that could have been impressively done as a gripping set-piece. But, hell, we’re past that. We’re already following our platoon into Santa Monica, where the streets have been reduced to the mean streets of Baghdad, with insurgents shooting down from rooftops. And that’s all it is, any old insurgent threat, a lot of shooting, a lot of running down alleys and into apartments and laundry rooms, but no sort of gripping dread of what’s out there.

U.S. Military Advertising:

This movie is certainly endorsed by the U.S. Marines. It does the same thing that Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) did, which is why the Marines showed it to new recruits training for the Vietnam War. All the essential Marine virtues are extolled – unit pride, sacrifice, duty. Never leave a man behind! “Retreat? Hell!” The swelling musical score plays obtrusive accompaniment for all the heroism and glory.

The Convenient Control Ship:

At first it looks like the aliens just have ground forces. Piece of cake for the U.S. Marines. Then the aliens send down drone aircraft that detach from circular clusters of drones. Nothing new here; they look like the aliencraft from Skyline. And the ship that controls ALL the drones is a pendulous collection of clinking junk right out of District 9. This makes it very easy for our guys. All they have to do is knock out the control ship and they all fall down. Very nice of the aliens to make it so easy.

Michelle Rodriquez:

What’s an action movie without her? Recently in Avatar she played the tough helicopter pilot who goes down shooting rockets at the big command ship. She’s always the tough macha military chick, and I love her. She makes her appearance just when things start to get monotonous, but then she seems tired in her role, not as bitchy as she was in Avatar, not nearly as awesome as she was in Resident Evil.

Shaky Handheld:

Oh, yes, even though no hippie cameraman or nerdy civilian is videotaping the platoon with his camcorder, the camera shakes and blurs the action to the point of nausea. Especially since we’ve been robbed of any suspense associated with the landing of the aliens, it would be important to establish what the aliens look like and what they can and can’t do, and a little more clarity goes a long way in establishing a gripping situation, but here it’s all a blur.

Video Game Targets:

The aliens are no more than video game targets that jump out of nowhere into the shooter’s point of view. They are given no character. We don’t know their attributes. There’s a nifty scene in which Nantz and a cute veterinarian (Bridget Moynahan) dissect a dead alien in order to find its never center so they guys know what to shoot at, but beyond that the aliens have no presence. There’s a brief shot in which Nantz tosses a grenade, and one of the aliens picks it up and wonders what it is, but this is just a glimmer of the aliens as a real presence. All they do is keep coming, but you never feel the icy dread you feel in Aliens when the aliens keep coming.

In conclusion, enough on the alien invasion movies unless filmmakers can do something different! Once I settled into this movie’s focus on frictions that coalesce into unit pride and solidarity, I enjoyed some of the standard action. I enjoyed the cheesy scene in which Nantz slides down the rope from the helicopter to go back alone, and you just know who will follow right behind, but much of this movie is right out of Black Hawk Down without the genuine fear and gripping sense of extreme danger established by that film.

Hang on to your hats! The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-05T10:16:00.015-05:00

The Adjustment Bureau was originally slated to be released in September of last year, but many viewers were still on an Inception high, and even though the two films are entirely different, the other-worldly sci-fi nature of the former might have drawn viewers expecting more of the latter, only to discover that The Adjustment Bureau is not an action movie with a lot of shooting about different realms of non-reality. The Adjustment Bureau is a quiet little sci-fi film about true love and free will, and there’s absolutely no shooting in it.

The story is simple. Matt Damon is David Norris, a young congressman from the mean streets of Brooklyn successfully running for a senate seat on his charm and bad-boy attitude, and Emily Blunt plays Elise Sellas, a rather flip, free-spirited dancer, also with a promising future. When David loses his campaign due to a scandalous photograph from his past, he meets Elise, they look at each, they fall in love. But being together is apparently not the fate intended for them by the Chairman, whose Adjustment Bureau of nerdy goons in suits and outdated trilbies keeps people on the right course in life so that we imperfect humans don't entirely destroy the planet. Who the hell are the Chairman and the Adjustment Bureau? God and his angels? An alien lord and his minions? We never do find out.

Indeed, intentionally or not, the hat dudes are hilarious at times, bungling their straight-backed pursuit of the errant David even though their little hats allow them to use doors that allow them to jump to another location in the city. But the fun is following Damon’s endearing perseverance in choosing to be with Elise and marry her, even though the hat guys keep warning ominously that this choice will damage their futures. And when things get a little too nonsensical, Terence Stamp steps in as Thompson the "Hammer," whose talent is smashing even the most passionate relationship. Just Stamp's ominous presence and voice, as mesmerizing here as way back when in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), are enough to nudge you back onto the edge of your seat.

What would you choose? A bright future that might benefit the world, or the love of your life? Well, we’re kind of romantic at heart, so we are behind Damon all the way. Besides, Damon has a talent for investing himself in his characters in such a warm, charismatic way, that as a candidate for whatever office, we would definitely vote for him, and as a staunch Everyman bravely defying the Fates in order to pursue his free will, we are behind him throughout all his clever evasions of those nagging nerds with the trilbies.

Meanwhile, Emily Blunt, though not a raving beauty (her face is kind of flat; her eyes kind of wan), has a talent for convincingly portraying the woman of David’s dreams. It’s not just the Brit accent; there’s a style about her delivery, there’s a twinkle in her eye, and she makes us want David to want her.

The chief strength of The Adjustment Bureau is the chemistry between Damon and Emily Blunt, their touching portrayal of love-at-first-sight, and the film’s simplistic but poignant commentary about free will. This is not an earth-shattering film. It is a very satisfying one.

And if the dynamic performances of Damon and Blunt are not enough for you, or if the story’s ruminations about free will are not deep enough for you, then relax, sit back, and feast your eyes on the stunning cinematography of John Toll, who has loads of fun moving David and Elise through a rabbit’s-hole wonderland of regimented buildings and lines and angles (allusions to North by Northwest, a classic of love and pursuit by mysterious agents?), as the trilby guys use multiple doorways to try to outfox David and Elise. Watch out! Door #3 might take you to Yankee Stadium or the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Toll creates a whimsical wonderland of angular geometry that suggests, of course, the lines of Fate in the hat guys’ Notebooks of Destiny, or whatever those flat, leather-bound notebooks are - and I want one more than an iPad!

This maze of hallways, stairways, and alleys might also suggest the rat’s maze in which David is caught, and it’s invigorating to watch as shots of streets and hallways and skyscrapers create tension in this simple tale in which David and Elise pursue the fate that they have chosen for themselves in their imperfect and reckless but loyal human hearts.

My Life with John Wayne

2011-03-01T16:30:00.005-05:00

After reading Jason Bellamy’s perceptive evaluations of Chisum and The Cowboys, I knew I had to write about John Wayne. As the screen capture for my blog profile might suggest, John Wayne is my favorite actor, and I have spent a lifetime watching and re-watching his movies. For me, the best antidote to low spirits is watching a favorite John Wayner, a sure way to make me smile, chuckle, or feel a tug at my emotions.

When I decided I had to write about John Wayne, I considered reviewing one of his best movies, but I wanted to talk about more than one film. I considered a video essay of his life’s work. What I have settled on here is an essay with video clips that covers my experiences with John Wayne movies and delineates aspects of his talent and persona that I admire.

I don’t recall my first experience with John Wayne. It was in the 1950s and it must have been a movie on TV, but I can’t remember whether it was one of his many forgettable 1930s Western actioners that included shootouts, chases on horseback, much leaping from horse to horse, and the inevitable fistfights, or whether it was watching a more significant John Wayne movie on TV with my family. I have a feeling it might have been The Searchers (1956) because I remember how the quotation “That’ll be the day” became a favorite household idiom.

Whatever the starting point, it set me on a quest to see all the John Wayne movies I could find by hunting through TV Guide and setting up a weekend viewing regimen that took me to many Westerns: Stagecoach, Allegheny Uprising, The Dark Command, Tall in the Saddle, Flame of the Barbary Coast, Angel and the Badman, Fort Apache, Red River, Three Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Fighting Kentuckian, Rio Grande, Hondo, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, the Civil War adventure The Horse Soldiers, as well as a number of 30s B-Westerns that blur together in memory; war films: Flying Tigers, The Fighting Seabees, Back to Bataan, They Were Expendable, Sands of Iwo Jima, Operation Pacific, Flying Leathernecks; sea stories: The Long Voyage Home, Reap the Wild Wind, Wake of the Red Witch, The Sea Chase; anti-Commie propaganda: Big Jim McClain (a truly boring movie; Wayne plays a special agent ferreting out Commies) and Blood Alley; a number of construction company/entrepreneurial dramas: The Spoilers, Pittsburgh, War of the Wildcats, Tycoon; the stand-alone classic The Quiet Man; a wide array of films from miscellaneous genres: Three Faces West, Lady for a Night, Without Reservations, Island in the Sky, The High and the Mighty, Legend of the Lost, The Barbarian and the Geisha; as well as oddities such as The Conqueror.

The first John Wayne movie I saw in a theater was The Alamo (1960), which I saw in 1961 shortly after its release. I had seen enough John Wayne movies by this time that I was affected viscerally by Davy Crockett’s death in the climactic battle scene, a sock to the belly that I felt for days afterwards. Though not his best movie, The Alamo is one of my favorites on an emotional level, a John Wayne movie that is a sure-fired remedy for the blues. The movie is awkward, overlong, silly at times, often gripping, visually sprawling, violent, touching, and funny. The way I see it, The Alamo is John Wayne. Watching it is like being with John Wayne. I enjoy Wayne’s sense of timing and comedy, his silent presence in many of the scenes focusing on Richard Widmark’s Bowie or Laurence Harvey’s Travis, and I am always gripped by the final assault on the Alamo, a fast-paced battle scene that fills each frame with motion though it never blurs the action into confusion.

From The Alamo to the end of Wayne’s career, I was determined to see his movies when they came out in theaters, which I did for most of his Westerns: The Comancheros, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hatari, McClintock!, Circus World, The Sons of Katie Elder, The War Wagon, El Dorado, True Grit, The Undefeated, Chisum, Rio Lobo, Big Jake, The Cowboys, The Train Robbers, McQ, Brannigan, Rooster Cogburn, and The Shootist. Meanwhile, on television, I caught The Longest Day, North to Alaska, Donavan’s Reef, In Harm’s Way, Cast a Giant Shadow, Hellfighters, The Green Berets and Cahill, U.S. Marshal. (Though not “John Wayne” movies, I also saw How the West Was Won and The Greatest Story Ever Told in theaters.)

I was in high school during the late 60s, but I was still seeing John Wayne’s movies even though he was not popular with people my age. In 1965, I went to the movies with a friend of mine who wanted to see The Beatles’ new movie, Help!, but I wanted to see The Sons of Katie Elder; I got what I wanted and my friend enjoyed it.

When True Grit was released in 1969, it played at the single-screen cinema where I was working as an usher. First I saw the whole thing on my day off. Then, over the course of the months that it played at the theater, I saw it in bits and pieces an estimated fifty times, at least, and I never got bored with it.

I saw Rooster Cogburn, dubbed in French, in a theater in Rabat, Morocco. I saw Big Jake in Kodiak, Alaska, and I remember coming out of the cinema into the midnight sun. I also had the chance to see The Searchers at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as at the A.F.I. Silver Theater, in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Jason Bellamy of The Cooler.

In order to spell out what I like about John Wayne, I present here a look at favorite film moments that reveal elements of Wayne’s talent and persona that I love. (For each video, press play, then pause and let the video buffer before pressing play again.)

“Words they say and mean”

I like Wayne’s sincerity, and I like his obvious love for what he is doing. After the ordeal of producing The Alamo, a project that soaked up his assets and saddled him with the responsibilities of producer, director, and star, Wayne starred in The Comancheros, a straightforward actioner in which Wayne as Captain Jake Cutter of the Texas Rangers strikes up an unlikely buddy relationship with Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman), a dandified Louisiana gambler and ladies’ man wanted for killing a man in a duel. Together they venture into Comanche territory to expose the dealings of a hidden outlaws’ kingdom.

The Western settings rival John Ford's use of Monument Valley, the cinematography is excellent, the action is fun, and it is clear that Wayne is having a great time doing what he loved most – acting. He looks relaxed, healthy and fit, at the height of his career. For its location shots, its action, and its wonderful sense of humor, this film is one I watch frequently. It’s also nice to see the movie include Joan O’Brien, Mrs. Dickinson in The Alamo, and Aissa Wayne, his daughter, who also appeared in The Alamo, in a touching scene in which O’Brien plays a widowed rancher’s wife who is just the right match for the Duke.

The idyllic Western scenes below show a youthful, vibrant Wayne invested cheerfully in his role, and they provide great examples of the dramatic pacing of his delivery that comes off as sincere and thoughtful. Also watch when he picks up Aissa and almost dances toward the woman he obviously loves. Indeed, there is a sweetness to Wayne’s presence and speech in the two scenes shown here that celebrate honesty, family, and the love of a woman, and this innocent sweetness and earnestness have always been aspects of Wayne that I find rather endearing.

Women!

I love how Wayne liked to throw or kick something as an expression of and punctuation to a moment of frustration, disgust, or despair.

In John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (1959) Wayne as Colonel John Marlowe leads a cavalry troop on a daring mission into the deep South during the Civil War to destroy a crucial railway junction. Along the way, he reluctantly picks up a Southern gentlewoman turned spy, Miss Hannah Hunter (Constance Towers). Saddled with a female he can’t shoot and he can’t leave behind, Wayne’s Marlowe suffers all sorts of frustrations dealing with Miss Hannah’s complaints, attempts to alert the Rebs, and her delicate female needs.

Meanwhile, friction occurs between Marlowe and his insolent medical officer, Major Henry Kendall (William Holden). Seems that Marlowe hates doctors, ever since a quack surgeon cost him the life of his young wife. The Horse Soldiers, a fast-paced adventure that also takes time to make grim commentary about war, is one of my favorite films set during the Civil War.

A contentious medical officer, an aggravating female, and the whole Confederate Army cause poor Colonel Marlowe much frustration in the scene below.

Centaur

Wayne wasn’t crazy about horses; he considered them kind of dumb. But he sure could ride a horse in such a way that he seemed one with the horse. He also rode very tall in the saddle. In an outtake from The Searchers we see an extreme long shot of Ethan Edwards riding silhouetted along a ridge. (This shot would have preceded the famous opening-door shot.) Even from so far away, the rider is clearly distinguishable as Wayne playing a bold, determined man.

There are so many famous John Wayne scenes and lines, but some of my favorite Wayne moments are ones that are just part of the texture Wayne brought to many of his movies. In the clip below, it’s all about Wayne’s presence on a horse.

In Fort Apache (1948) Wayne gets top billing, but his character is overshadowed by the tragic, dominant figure of Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, played by Henry Fonda. Indeed, after Thursday is killed in a Custer’s Last Stand-like blunder that is Thursday’s fault, Wayne as Captain Kirby York assumes command of the fort but also assumes Thursday’s persona by following military protocol to the letter and wearing the regulation kepi that Thursday wore while he disdained York’s broad-brimmed cowboy hat.

In the following scene, we see York, on horseback, challenging Colonel Thursday about his rash decision to charge the Apache and throwing down his gauntlet in defiance. Then York rides up to Second Lieutenant O’Rourke and assigns him to a duty that will keep him out of harm’s way. Watch how smoothly Wayne reins about, pulls himself and the horse toward Agar to give the command, and then reins the horse away as though horse and rider are one and the same entity. I love this moment!

True Heart

Without comparing True Grit (1969) with the Coens’ version, I consider Hathaway’s ending to be one of the most touching scenes ever to appear in a Western, and that is largely due to Wayne’s presence and his talented delivery. This ending is not completely upbeat. Yes, we end with Cogburn jovially jumping his horse over a fence, joking about himself as a “fat old man,” as Mattie Ross looks on and smiles lovingly, but the scene is also ominous. Look at the darkening clouds. Look at the snow. Standing in her family’s graveyard, Mattie asks Rooster to “rest” beside her, which is kind of creepy and suggests that she has no intention of getting married.

I love this scene for its touching sadness evoked by the setting and Wayne’s presence, standing there in classic Michelangelo’s David stance, looking lovingly at “sis,” and his delivery of the line, “Now, sis, that place should be for your … your family … husband … kids,” with the dramatic spacing of words and the repetition of “your,” is a memorably poignant moment.

“God’s lonely man”

A large part of Wayne’s command as an actor comes from his physical presence. He looms large. In his famous David stance, as in the clip from True Grit, Wayne’s silent presence speaks worlds. John Ford, an experienced silent film director, knew how to use Wayne’s wordless physical presence in dramatic ways. In Stagecoach in the Apache Wells sequence, Wayne as the Ringo Kid fills doorways, and he has to duck his head to pass through them.

In the two scenes from The Searchers below, Wayne fills a cave opening and a doorway. In the cave scene, he is a physical presence transformed from violence to reconciliation. Wayne doesn’t just help Debbie up; he literally sweeps her off her feet and raises her overhead in the same way he picks her up when she is a girl. In one fluid, strong motion, Debbie is in the air and in Wayne’s arms, protected and embraced as part of family. But Ethan Edwards cannot be part of that family as we see in the famous, final shot. Wayne fills the iris of the doorway. He’s a powerful man, but here he is an outcast, perhaps due in part to that rugged physicality.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Rogers”

When I first saw The Shootist (1976) in the summer of 1977, I was touched by Wayne's performance but not overly impressed with the film as a whole. After many subsequent viewings, I have come to consider this a wonderfully sensitive character study and a detailed, elegiac portrayal of the end of an era. I acknowledge Wayne’s performance as one of his finest, perhaps his best.

Truth is blended with fiction as Wayne portrays John B. Books, a notorious gunman dying of cancer. Books plans to die with guns blazing, ridding the town of three good-for-nothings in the bargain. Meanwhile, Wayne seems to have planned for this touching performance to be his last one.

The setting is Carson City, Nevada, in 1901. Queen Victoria has died, and the town is entering modern times with its streetcars, automobiles, electric lighting, and indoor plumbing. In this time and place, there is little tolerance for anachronisms like a “shootist.” Books would like to hide from his renown and die in peace, but the past keeps returning in the form of would-be assassins; a reporter who would like to make money writing dime novels about his shootings; a former floozy and flame who would like his last name; and the resident Marshal Thibido (Harry Morgan in quirky, humorous performance) who wants Books to get out of town.

Staying at a boarding house, but not as a “permanent” boarder, Books develops a warm understanding, after considerable friction, with the landlady, Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall), and he has the chance to straighten out her wayward son, Gillom (Ron Howard), who seems headed down the wrong path in life.

The best scenes in The Shootist involve Wayne and Bacall. Books tries to play the soft-spoken gentleman, and Bond learns that Books is not a cold-blooded killer; he is a dying, lonely man in need of companionship. In these well written, witty, understated, and poignant scenes, Wayne reveals a talent for control and subtle delivery.

In his final scene with Bacall, he wants to make his departure for his suicidal shootout as uncomplicated as possible. Intercepted by Bond, he must summon the courage to say a very final good-bye. Of all the countless lines Wayne uttered in his career, I think this one is his most heartfelt.

I had a dream once that John Wayne had made another film after The Shootist and it was finally found, restored, and released. From the details in the dream, I tried to piece together what this movie might have been about.

It’s a Western. Wayne plays a character who is a cross between Rooster Cogburn and Ethan Edwards. He must reluctantly come out of seclusion and rid the territory of some bad guys. The film ends with a suspenseful shootout, but Wayne’s character doesn’t die. The film is touching and dramatic.

The dream is wishful thinking for another John Wayne gem to add to the pool of fine movies that rose above run-of-the-mill “John Wayne movie” status. Wishful thinking, and yet even in those run-of-the-mill actioners, John Wayne’s charm shines through and I always enjoy his comforting, touching film presence. As it exists, John Wayne's body of work offers a variety of memorable moments.

The Unknown Identity

2011-02-24T15:24:00.008-05:00

As I sat enjoying how Unknown builds some interesting atmosphere and considerable tension to its own credit, I was pleasantly entertained by how its derivative plot echoes classic thrillers such as Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Bourne Identity, and a lesser known Gregory Peck thriller, Mirage (1965), in which a physicist suffers amnesia, endeavors to substantiate his identity, and runs into a plot to get his secret formula for a clean atomic bomb. Dubious identity, deception, amnesia, assassination plots, secret formulas: all of these elements can be found in the thrillers listed above as well as in Unknown, the new thriller starring Liam Neeson as a man who may or may not be bio-physicist Martin Harris.

In addition, the visually engaging atmosphere of snowy Berlin, and plot elements such as the ex-Stasi inspector, played by Bruno Ganz, evoke those splendidly intricate, somber Cold War thrillers of the 1960s, classic films like The Ipcress File (1965) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), as well as the more obscure A Dandy in Aspic (1968), a favorite of mine, with Laurence Harvey as a British double-agent and assassin hounded by a monomaniacal Tom Courtenay, with East Berlin evoked as a dismal Cold War limbo.

I liked how Unknown taps into that bygone genre. We have the bearded doctor, who looks like Freud, going on about the mysteries of the human brain; Ganz’s great performance as the proud ex-Stasi, dying of lung cancer from cheap Commie cigarettes, who can tell when a man is lying or not; and all the uptight German officials demanding Martin’s passport, while underlings smirk superciliously in disbelief. Diane Kruger does a wonderful job of adding to the trappings of that genre by portraying Gina, the street-smart Bosnian illegal alien, a taxi driver until a fateful accident lands Martin and her in the Spree. Kruger as Gina is feisty and resourceful, and I love her tight-lipped, accented English, and her tongue-in-cheek delivery that recalls Inglourious Basterds.

Yep, there’s nothing new in Unknown, but I have to admit I enjoyed watching it until the ending throws Neeson’s character into a 360 that’s hard to justify. The setting engages, the inevitable car chase has its thrills, and the acting is more than serviceable. Neeson has cast a mold that he repeats with solid presence in numerous films (Unknown resembles Taken (2008) in many ways). Ganz stands out for his textured portrayal of the old Stasi inspector, and Kruger is fun to watch as she bravely helps Martin when all she really wants to do is make enough money so she can get out of "zhis place." As Martin’s wife (or is she?), January Jones is attractive, bland, and affectless, though her soft delivery might remind you of Janet Leigh, which is at least in keeping with the film’s Hitchcockian aspirations.

I Am Number Four

2011-02-19T11:04:00.006-05:00

It is easy to see that I Am Number Four is based on a best-selling young adult science fiction novel, the first in a proposed series. Its main characters are teenagers. Its setting is the typical small-town public high school replete with outcasts, nerds, and bullies. Its main character, John Smith (very handsome Alex Pettyfer), has paranormal powers, attracts the pretty outsider girl, and saves her from bullies, just like Edward in Twilight. Turns out that John Smith is a Lorien on the lam, one of nine such Loriens endowed with Legacies (special powers), pursued by nasty aliens called Mogadorians, who look like a cross between a piranha and Gary Busey and are determined to kill all the Loriens who stand in the way of their intergalactic conquests – I think. Like most teenage aliens on the run, John wants a normal life, so against the paranoid wishes of his guardian, Henri (Timothy Olyphant), he picks the easiest way to a normal life: he enrolls in a high school in Paradise, Ohio.

What follows is stock Disney Channel teen melodrama. John captures the attention of Sarah (Dianna Agron), the wholesome, blonde-haired girl who is into photography. This makes jealous the resident bully, Mark (Jake Abel), and John makes things worse for himself when he defends the persecuted nerd, Sam (Callan McAuliffe), who believes in all things extraterrestrial. With all the cyber bullying that goes on, John’s face is plastered all over the Internet, and the Mogadorians drive in for the kill, towing a horse trailer containing twin CGI monsters that moved too quickly for me to describe. In the final battle, John and friends are saved by a Beagle that turns into a mace-tailed creature and a cute Aussie chick, who drives a Bugati, Hollywood’s ubiquitous motorcycle of the moment. She turns out to be Number 6. Ooh, aah! (Where the fuck is number 5?) And, you guessed it, John, 6, and Sam journey on, keeping ahead of the Mogadorians as they search for the rest of the Loriens, thereby setting us up for the sequel.

Now, I’m a sucker for any halfway decent sci-fi movie, but I’m insulted by a movie that plays like an episode from a Disney Channel television series. The pace is slow, the urgency is smothered by stock high school scenes, and the supposedly sinister Mogadorians are innocuous. I have to say I enjoyed the faithful Beagle who turns into a cross between a lynx and an ankylosaurus, but there’s no suspense here and no sense of alien awe in connection with John’s discovery of his powers. Not one framed image stands out to be remembered. The only thing that this film elicits is an intensified disdain for movies that are part of a series, movies based on television shows, and movies like this one – anything that threatens to turn movies into television shows, a thing I fear more than an alien invasion.

The Eagle

2011-02-16T17:17:00.001-05:00

The Eagle, an earnest adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, offers a solidly engrossing first half as Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), the son of the commander of the “Lost Ninth Legion,” assumes command of an isolated fort in Roman-occupied Britain in the 2nd Century AD. As the stolid by savvy Marcus, Channing Tatum exhibits commendable screen presence as he shapes up his fearful, grumbling Latin grunts like an American officer bolstering reluctant soldiers in a forlorn Vietnam firebase. Marcus senses danger and expertly prepares his men for a nighttime assault. Unfortunately, excessive fast-shutter speed camerawork makes most of the action a blur. Meanwhile, the film’s memorable long shots frame this Roman outpost of progress under brooding skies and establish its very convincing presence.

After a thrilling scene in which Marcus forms his men into the testudo in order to charge through a Celtic horde and save Roman captives from decapitation, the wounded commander ends up convalescing in a tranquil Thames-side villa where he gets the aged good council of Uncle Aquila (Donald Sutherland). There, Marcus plans a journey to retrieve the Ninth’s golden eagle in order to reinstate his dead father’s lost honor.

As Marcus, guided by a Briton slave, Esca (Jamie Bell), travels north through rugged landscapes filmed in Hungary and Scotland, the scenes of riding and camping and riding slow things down. Attacks by “rogue warriors” and Celts, who look a cross between Pawnee warriors and Queequeq in John Huston’s Moby Dick, pep things up though they turn the movie into a different sort of film. Mark Strong as the fierce Celtic Chieftain, Guem, steers the story toward melodrama, but the film’s rich settings hold your attention.

Ironically, a lot of dying is done to win back a dead man’s honor. Marcus’s motives might be something only an ancient Roman could understand, but the film offers a matter-of-fact depiction of a simple tale of honor set convincingly in a muddy, murky ancient Britain, and I enjoyed the film’s sincerity and the atmospheric images it presents.