Archive for December, 2008

Milk

December 30, 2008

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Rarely has an actor disappeared into a role as completely as Sean Penn does in Milk, Gus Van Sant’s deeply affecting tribute to the 70′s era gay civil rights crusader. Penn’s performance here ranks as his very best, alongside his mesmerizing turn as a death-row inmate in Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking from 1995. Nothing the actor has done since can prepare the viewer for the miraculous gift of a performance he delivers in Milk — a gift to his profession, to his audience, but, most of all, to Harvey Milk himself. There is no Sean Penn in this film — no sense of an actor “acting,” there is no ego, no self-awareness, no flamboyance. There is only the man he portrays, and it’s a performance worth a thousand terrible ones from mediocre performers who we are regularly subjected to.

Gus Van Sant’s film is also no routine biopic. It is not so much a chronological accounting of its subject’s life as it is a richly layered portrait, an affectionate and personal poem dedicated to the memory of a social hero. That Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor and the first openly gay elected official in America, lived a controversial life in politics that ended all too briefly by assassination is not the end but the beginning of Van Sant’s telling. Milk’s death is framed in the context of sacrifice and as a tragic consequence to his years of charismatic and fearless service to the cause of bringing gay equality and civil rights to the American mainstream.

Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay focuses on Milk’s final eight years, chronicling his move to San Francisco’s Castro district in the early 70′s through his galvanic rise to prominence in the city’s — and the nation’s — political life. The Castro of that era is gorgeously evoked throughout by Van Sant’s superb cinematographer Harris Savides. It’s the exuberance of this neighborhood that draws Milk here from New York in the early ’70s. When he opens a modest camera store with his boyfriend Scott Smith (James Franco), he has no inkling of political activism till he begins to take part in mobilizing a gay-friendly business ethic in his local community. Soon, the camera shop turns into Milk’s election headquarters when he makes a series of bids for office, staffed by what would become his core political team, culminating in his winning the city supervisor seat in 1977.

Milk’s private life — his relationships with Smith and later with Jack Lira (Diego Luna) — suffer, even tragically, at the hands of his demanding public life. But the 70′s was a volatile time for the gay rights movement when such right-wing zealots as Anita Bryant and State Senator John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) were successfully mounting anti-gay movements across America, repealing referendums meant to protect gay rights. Milk was among the sole voices of anger and resistance against that tide of intolerance, the movement required his constant vigilance, and Van Sant and Black effectively paint a vibrant picture of the politically combustible gay scene at this time. The Castro was prone to uprisings — violent at times — and ugly police reprisals, it was both the epicenter of the gay movement, and a barometer of gay culture in America.

If there is any notable flaw in Black and van Sant’s telling, it may be that it is too affectionate, too titled toward the cause of canonizing Milk at the expense of fairly depicting his and his milieu’s less endearing attributes. Van Sant wants a saintly eulogy to Milk, and that deprives his subject some of his complexity — we do get a taste of his overweening egoism and manipulativeness once Milk is in office, but, for the most part, Van Sant’s portait is, above all, his bid to canonize his subject, so the Milk that we see here is a largely charming and endearing personality.

Milk is also something of a valentine to the Castro of the 70′s, alive with love and political activism, dispensing with the nastier aspects of drug abuse and decadence — the very things that fueled conservative America’s prejudice towards the gay community in the first place. As a result, many of Van Sant’s supporting characters — those in Milk’s inner circle– are rendered a bit too much like happy, enthusiastic disciples, and the community at large as the gay version of Haight-Ashbury, American’s hippie central. Josh Brolin, however, does a fine job as Supervisor Dan White, Milk’s primary political opponent — a Catholic who finds himself backed into a corner in a changing political climate, and out-politicked by Milk’s chicanery. Here, White is a weak but sympathetic figure, and the pathos Brolin brings to the role is critical in adding an even-handedness to Van Sant’s telling.

On balance, the talent and dedication on hand here far outweigh any carping about Black and Van Sant’s biases. The film is as much a joy to watch as it seems it was to make. It’s filled with so much vitality, charged by the filmmaker’s inner conviction to bring this story to the screen, that one comes away admiring the filmmaking while feeling deeply touched, even inspired, by the fiery life at the film’s center.
Grade: A-

Directed by: Gus van Sant
Written by: Dustin Lance Black
Cast: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco, Alison Pill, Victor Garber, Denis O’Hare, Joseph Cross, Stephen Spinella, Lucas Grabeel, Brandon Boyce
Rated: R
Runtime: 130 min.

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2008, Drama, Genres | 1 Comment »

Frost/Nixon

December 27, 2008

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The British TV personality David Frost, the celebrity interviewer, variety-show host and light satirist, achieved a media coup when, in 1977, he conducted an extended series of interviews with the disgraced President Nixon. In the years since his resignation, Nixon had retired into a kind of passive-aggressive silence over his culpability in the Watergate scandal. The occasion of the interviews gave Nixon a p.r. opportunity to re-connect with the American public, to tout his achievements and save face over Watergate. Nixon’s roundabout show of contrition that culminated the interviews was the closest he ever got not only to conceding his involvement in Watergate but to apologizing for it.

Peter Morgan deftly adapts his play for the screen, so much so that Frost/Nixon feels at home in the cinematic medium, as if it belonged there all along. That’s high praise for a writer who deliberately wanted to make his play as resistant to screen adaptation as possible. Morgan’s screenplay is a model of pacing and scene craft conjoined with character development.

One thing is clear: Frank Langella is masterful as Nixon, towering above all else in the film. Langella’s performance goes beyond imitation to scour up the turmoil inside the heart of an embittered, conflicted man. Langella’s Nixon is a tragic figure, proud, intelligent, but undone by forces he can’t control — his paranoia and his generally unlikeable temperament. Langella conjures all of this up in an astronishing portrait, one that’s almost as poignant as his work in 2007′s superb Starting Out in the Evening in which he played a has-been novelist trying to re-charge his career. Langella didn’t get Oscar recognition for Starting Out in the Evening, but the Academy would be hard-pressed to ignore him this time. And while Langella deserves all accolades, on balance Frost/Nixon is a rather tepid, typically tasteful and polished Hollywood drama.

Director Ron Howard keeps his themes broad and palatable. Not surprisingly, his execution isn’t incisive or daring, so much as professional, hitting every note in the screenplay as he crafts, in essence, an old-fashioned David-and-Goliath story: David Frost, a TV showman, is a man out of his depth when he proposes to go head-to-head with the bulldog politico Nixon, much to the consternation of network TV execs who expect a ratings disaster. Frost foots the bill for the interviews on his own, including Nixon’s up-front fees, banking that a major network will buy broadcast rights down the road.

It’s a high-wire act for Frost who, as played by Sheen, is naive and fatuous about American politics. He hires a pair of American researcher/consultants, James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), both of whom want to take Nixon to task on Watergate. Their venom towards Nixon is soon equalled only by their disdain for Frost when the President wipes the floor with him in the first several rounds of the interviews. Nixon dominates the conversations, steering away from troublesome topics like Vietnam into sentimental anecdotes that makes him seem like the nation’s doting uncle.

The boxing metaphors are loud and up-front as Frost takes a beating during these early sessions, investors back out, and Frost and his partners are scrambling to take control of the dialogue. An extended research montage ahead of the defining Watergate interiew is the cerebral equivalent of Rocky doing one-handed push-ups or hauling logs up a snow-covered hillside.

Frost/Nixon is a well-behaved bit of political vitriol, and not really as biting as it thinks it is. Aside from Langella and the always-enjoyable Kevin Bacon, playing Nixon’s advisor Jack Brennan, everyone runs through their paces agreeably. And it’s not that Sheen (who’s essentially re-creating his stage role), Rockwell or Platt are mediocre actors, it’s just that neither the script nor Howard provide them much in the way of subtext or shadings to sink their teeth into.

There are couple of reasons why Frost/Nixon fails to raise the temperature: One is that Ron Howard is an unchallenging filmmaker — he is an exceptionally competent craftsman, but with no particularly deep, against-the-grain personal philosophy or point-of-view. He’s an optimistic, fun-loving storyteller in the grand Hollywood tradition, and that may work for Night Shift (his best film), Cocoon or Splash, but it doesn’t do much for more internally complex stories like A Beautiful Mind (his worst film).

Frost/Nixon acquits itself through Langella’s performance and Morgan’s tight script, but Howard fails to give the material a pointed spin. And that brings up the story’s other great flaw: It has no immediacy. The film is not about an event but a conversation about an event, years after it actually happened, and now presented for an audience three decades hence. The fires tend to cool from such a long distance.

We’ve got two fighters in the ring, one young and naive, the other aging and possibly insane. Frankly, neither one matters 30 years on, when the dust has long settled. And where Howard misses a key opportunity is in making this material more prescient, drawing a parallel between the cultural fallout of Nixon’s denial and arrogance and the situation in America now, in the twilight of a disastrous administration. If he had been an angrier filmmaker, who knows, we might’ve had the film to match, and one worth rooting for.
Grade: B-

Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: Peter Morgan
Cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Toby Jones, Andy Milder, Matthew Macfadyen
Rated: R
Runtime: 122 min.

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama, Genres | Leave a Comment »

Slumdog Millionaire

December 25, 2008

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Manic energy, above all, powers Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, a deliriously Dickensian romance set in modern Mumbai, written by Simon Beaufoy. Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel) a teenager from the slums who becomes an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. He does so well on the show that on the eve of his run for the million-dollar question, he’s hauled in by the police on suspicion of cheating. How could a lowly slumdog, after all, know the answers to every question on the game show? The host — played by Bollywood star Anil Kapoor with hammy swagger — is rightly flummoxed and so is the police detective (Irfan Khan, who essentially reprises his solid turn from Michael Winterbottom’s first-rate kidnapping drama A Mighty Heart).

Slumdog Millionaire is structured as an inquiry, told largely through Jamal’s flashbacks, into how he knew the game-show answers and, more importantly, why he knew them: the boy’s in love, and every answer he knows is a consequence, one way or another, of his friendship with the gorgeous Latika (Freida Pinto). His appearing on the show is his bid to attract Latika’s attentions, and finally to win her over. It’s a tough road, though, because Latika, whose life has been no less difficult than Jamal’s, is now ensconced in the plush world of a well-known Mumbai don.

Jaman and Latika grew up together amid’s Mumbai’s squallor. Then, after the Hindu-Muslim riots of the early 90′s, their lives spiralled into an abyss of misfortune that would make Oliver Twist shudder. Their worlds eventually separate into parallel but perilous lives. Along with his cunning companion Salim (Madhur Mittal), Jamal falls in with a troupe of professional child-beggers overseen by a scurrilous, Fagin-esque leader. They escape and manage to make a living through petty theft and fleecing tourists. All the while, though, Jamal dreams of Latika. They do reunite, but the occasion is brief, laced with heartbreak and, worse, betrayal at the hands of Salim.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire is Jamal’s Hail-Mary effort not only to put his own poverty and criminality behind him, but Latika’s too. It’s his ultimate act of love and rebellion. Love is the great motivator all through Slumdog — Jamal’s love for Latika informs every scene, every sacrifice and act of courage — but what Boyle and Beaufoy forget to supply as they fashioned their picaresque is any tangible chemistry between their lovers: There is none. Jamal’s is but a schoolboy crush taken to extremes, and Latika’s interest in him feels incidental. If it weren’t for her misery and peril, living essentially as an indentured sex slave to a mafia don, there would no reason for her to seek out Jamal, her sole savior.

In the course of their tale, we’re never convinced that these two are soulmates; they’re brought together more by the exigencies of plot than anything else. In his review of the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane hit the problem on the head (and, in the process, described Boyle’s cinema as a whole) when he said his “characters lunge at experience, although the films themselves hardly dare to ask how much, or how little, that experience has been worth.” Slumdog Millionaire, in other words, in an exercise in expert style and mechanics, but little soul or feeling. Those are deep, evasive things for a storyteller to get his hands around. But without them, there is no story, only kinetic imagery.

The other major flaw is that of extreme contrivance. It’s not that lowly Jamal, against immense odds, finds himself a guest on a nationwide hit game-show, but the tenuous — even ridiculous — circumstances under which he learned the answers. This critic greatly doubts that a blind Indian beggerboy, no matter how intelligent, would know that Benjamin Franklin is on the U.S. hundred dollar bill — knowledge that Jamal uses to answer one of his questions. In another instance, Jamal tracks down Salim by quickly running his name through a call-center database. And that’s only a smidgeon of the far-fetched nature of Slumdog’s narrative conceits. I would have no trouble swallowing any of it if Boyle and Beaufoy had delivered on their love story. If Jamal and Latika’s aching need to be with each other had been convincingly presented, it would’ve smoothed over every bump and hole in their plotting.

But Boyle is less interested in human chemistry and more in technical chemistry. He’s a terrific filmmaker (Trainspotting and 28 Days Later bear that out), but he’s taken on something here that he can’t quite live up to: Capturing the soul of a complex Indian metropolis, while telling a deeply human story. But to Boyle, Mumbai is just a playground of poverty, filth, and deprivation. There is nothing distinctly Mumbai here, everything seems filtered through stereotypes, even Latika’s mafia don sugar-daddy, who’s just a raffish, foul-mouthed cad seems lifted from any bad Bollywood melodrama. Boyle’s Mumbai could just as well be Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro or Lagos. A sea of miserable faces, churning and scurrying, ekeing out a meager living. And it bothered me that, yet again, a Western filmmaker has brought his camera to exploit Indian poverty (Louis Malle’s horrid Calcutta was an early offender and Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding a more recent one), without capturing the spirit of its people and culture. Slumdog is merely India as Westernized thrill ride.

Not that a galvanized portrait of India is a bad thing. Watch Ram Gopal Varma’s Company for a jolt of Mumbai criminality from a filmmaker who knows it first hand. What Slumdog needed was a Mumbai filmmaker like Varma — an Indian equivalent of Mexico’s Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien) or Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles (City of God) — to tell this story. At least then we would’ve had an indigenous voice, melding style and detail in nuanced, authentic ways, letting Mumbai truly come alive on screen. It’s about time we come up with a name for how India — or maybe all Third World cultures — are exploited by Western filmmakers. Thirdploitation, anyone? I think it’s got a nice ring to it.

Still, there’s plenty in Slumdog to be charmed by. Freida Pinto as the object of Jamal’s love is a sight for sore eyes; she’s definitely the world-cinema beauty of 2008. And Boyle’s style, for all its flaws, is compulsively watchable, propelled by a joyous, hip-hop-meets-bangra score by A.R. Rahman, whose work here above anyone else’s is world class. Rahman’s score is the Slumdog’s true winner, what I’ll keep coming back to long after Boyle’s circus-tent of a movie packs up and fades from my memory.
Grade: B-

Directed: Danny Boyle
Written by: Simon Beaufoy
Cast: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Freida Pinto, Irfan Khan, Mahesh Manjreker, Uday Chopra, Sharib Hashmi
Rated: R
Runtime: 120 min.

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Genres, Romance | 24 Comments »

Quantum of Solace

December 24, 2008

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With their acrobatic and daringly shot action sequences, the Bourne series stole some of the thunder from the Bond franchise as it stumbled and skidded through the Pierce Brosnan era. Then Paul Greengrass’s formidable work in The Bourne Ultimatum seemed to pound the last nail in the Bond coffin, in a sense, rendering the British superspy a tuxedoed dinosaur. Luckily for Bond, we got Daniel Craig and Casino Royale, a jolt to the spinal cord of a franchise fast slipping away on the wheels of invisible cars and cartoonish plotlines. Craig was the bad-ass answer to Bourne. Craig’s Bond is a thinking-man’s killer, a thug with brains. And courtesy of Casino Royale’s Martin Campbell, we got brilliantly shot, vertiginous set pieces (the opener of Casino ranks with the rooftop chase in The Bourne Ultimatum as among the best ever staged and filmed). And, most of all, we got a class-act of a screenplay by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade — paced deliberately, like the 60′s era Bond flicks, and featuring a terrific build-up of suspenseful, richly realized scenes.

Haggis, Purvis and Wade return for another stab at Bond, but this time — perhaps smug and punch-drunk from the success of Casino Royale — they approach their project clumsily, sloppily, with little regard for dramatic and narrative coherence (not unlike, say, how the makers of the first Pirates of the Caribbean went about botching the subsequent entries in their bloated series).

Craig is the sole reason Quantum of Solace passes muster. The writing, directing and story structure are all varyingly inept and ludicrous. The villain is a charmless bore. The “Bond Girl” has got spunk, but she’s given short shrift in the plotting. But, most of all, we simply don’t care how the story turns out, so long as it ends sooner rather than later (mercifully, at 105 minutes, Quantum is one of the shorter Bond films).

Quantum’s screenwriters have cooked up a forgettable flapdoodle about Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), the venal head of a nefarious title conglomerate, in the business of commandeering a country’s water supply and then extorting vast sums from its government before releasing access to it. Greene is in cahoots with the corrupt South American General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), and planning to choke the water supply in Bolivia.

Looking to exact payback for the death of his girlfriend Vesper in Casino Royale, Bond follows the trail straight up the Quantum food chain, and quickly sets his sights on Greene. Bond soon crosses paths with the sultry Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a woman on her own mission of revenge — hers is against Medrano for murdering her family when she was a child.

Together, they track Greene and Medrano down at a massive Quantum facility in the midst of the Bolivian desert. It’s an edifice that supposed to hark back to the bizarre Ken Adam sets from the 60′s era Bonds, but this one feels arbitrary and chintzy, existing for no other purpose than to give Bond a backdrop for his fight scenes. It’s but a glorified matchbox for the setting off of the film’s climactic explosions.

While director Forster manages to helm one riveting sequence in which Bond and Camille, at the cockpit of a battered transport plane equipped with only one parachute, must fend off fighter jets, the remainder of Quantum’s action scenes are indistinguishable, inferior riffs of similar ones from the Bourne films. Three of them assault the audience in the first 30 minutes alone; indeed, the script is bafflingly top-heavy with action, with the result that the set-up to the story never gets a chance to breathe and develop. Bond simply caroms from one chase and fisticuffs to another with some breathless expository dialogue in between, and we feel as dazed and pummelled as Bond’s victims.

Forster is out of his element here as director. He seems determined to pile on the gritty violence, and prove his mettle in the testosterone genre, but he falls flat with his incoherent action scenes and the uninvolving interpersonal filler. Jeffrey Wright as Bond’s CIA liason Felix Leither and Giancarlo Giannini, always a pleasure to watch, as undercover Bond ally, Mathis, are both altogether wasted.

What we’re left with, then, are the sterling Craig and Judi Dench, returning as M. These two actors have real chemistry together on screen, and bring class and gravity to their roles and to this franchise. Forster, his screenwriters and the Bond producers benefit from them by default; these actors already came with the package. For their part, they squander an ace Bond and a handful of able and talented actors, and give us a Bond entry as weak as they come.
Grade: C

Directed by: Marc Forster
Written by: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Jesper Christensen, Gemma Arterton, Joaquin Cosio
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 106 min.

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Genres, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Transsiberian

December 22, 2008

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Brad Anderson (The Machinist) assays Hitchcock territory, and does a fine job in this riveting thriller about an American couple traveling across Russia on the titular express train and getting caught up in drugs, murder and the watchful eye of a suspicious detective. Having wrapped up a charity mission in China, the mid-western hayseed Roy (Woody Harrelson) and his wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer), a recovering drug addict, decide to book passage on the Transsiberian and take in the famed Russian hinterland.

They end up sharing their berth with another couple — a young American runaway, Abby (Kate Mara), and her Eurotrash boyfriend Carlos (Eduardo Noriega). With his easy smile and bedroom eyes, Carlos works his scruffy, roguish charms on Jessie, who’s taken with his aura of mystery and bad-boy mischief. He’s everything she left behind in her free-living drug days, and still pines for privately. While Roy is busy doting over train engines and rail gauges (he’s a train buff), Jessie shares an impulsive intimacy with Carlos that starts a chain of consequences that ends fatally for Carlos. That’s when Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy’s plot kicks into gear.

What was a holiday one minute turns into a nightmare of paranoia, guilt, and suspicion as Jessie now harbors the secret of what befell Carlos while the two were out in the desolate country. The suspense gets racheted to tantalizing levels when Roy and Jessie are approached by Grinko (Ben Kingsley) who claims to be a detective on the hunt for drug smugglers believed to be on board the Transsiberian. When Jessie discovers a load of Russian dolls that belonged to Carlos stashed in her luggage — dolls containing heroin — she realizes the mess she’s gotten herself into. What’s more, it dawns on Jessie and Roy that Grinko’s intentions are more ruthless than he’s letting on.

Anderson and Conroy do an excellent job of drawing out the tension between Jessie and Grinko while the oafish Roy becomes the unsuspecting barrier protecting Jessie from her potential inquisitor. Jessie can’t hold out forever, of course; soon enough, the two find themselves in Grinko’s clutches.

In neat and deft maneuvers, Anderson and Conroy use the violence and desperation of their characters to drive them forward and against each other like chess pieces. The wintry Russian desolation makes for a bleak and menacing game board, for sure, of which this script and cast make maximum utility. The weakest link here — and the one factor that could’ve easily derailed Transsiberian — is the nauseating Carlos. The mystery man’s grinning, conniving persona is an unwelcome irritant, a derivative of a thousand Eurotrash cliches, and his exchanges with Jessie, while sexually charged, are generally pathetic in their see-through insinuations. While Carlos is the instigator of Anderson and Conroy’s entire premise, his character amounts to tedium which, thankfully, ends with his departure, leaving room for Kingsley to show up and take command of the narrative.

Kingsley sinks his teeth into his role, he’s clearly having a blast, and we take delight in watching the seasoned actor playing the dubious Grinko. Mortimer too comes to life once the peril to her character becomes immediate, and Anderson’s handling of Jessie’s attempts not to lose her cool vis-a-vis Grinko and Roy and to save herself from a desperate scenario would make Hitchcock smirk with quiet pride. It was the Master’s favorite set-up after all: An innocent who finds the murderer’s weapon planted in his hands, and who must now do his damndest to keep authorities off this trail.

Transsiberian never quite worked up the media attention it deserved in the festival or theatrical circuit in 2008. But as Hitchcockian thrillers go, it’s one of the smarter and more absorbing ones made in recent years. And it gives the enterprising and versatile Kingsley one of his juiciest and most memorable roles in years.
Grade: B+

Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Brad Anderson, Will Conroy
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega, Thomas Kretschmann
Rated: R
Runtime: 111 min.

Posted in Best of 2008, Genres, Noir, Thriller, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Nothing But the Truth

December 19, 2008

The plot for Nothing But the Truth, writer-director Rod Lurie’s excellent parable of our power-mad post-9/11 government, takes its cue from the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown in a 2003 Washington Post that touched off a furor over whether the Bush Administration wasn’t motivated by revenge against Plame’s husband, a U.S. ambassador who contradicted the government’s claim that Saddam Hussein was building WMD. Replace Iraq with Venezuela and WMD with an attempted assassination of the U.S. President and you’ve got the scenario behind Lurie’s dynamite bit of political fiction.
Read it here…

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Genres, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

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