Archive for November, 2009

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City Lights

November 10, 2009

City Lights along with The Gold Rush, both by Chaplin, are easily two of the greatest screen comedies ever made. Chaplin invested so much emotional depth in his Little Tramp that the comedy arose from that character organically, like a flower, always natural, always earned, always stemming from the innermost yearnings of character and of how he relates to the situation at hand. And, while I’m on it, here it is: Chaplin was easily the greatest actor of silent cinema, hands down, no competition. He innate genius for characterization and for being emotionally present in every second of every frame gives any of our more “modern” actors a run for their money. Also, Chaplin is, without doubt, the most influential comedian in cinema history: You can see traces of his influence, most obviously, in Jerry Lewis and all the way to Jim Carrey, Michael Richards’ Kramer, and, even, in Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson. Chaplin was our first master, the comedian-filmmaker who demonstrated how to negotiate that delicate tightrope between comedy and sentiment to monumental effect.

In the past several decades, Chaplin’s reputation has been overshadowed by a re-awakening of Keaton appreciation. Keaton was awe-inspiring at setting up and executing comic set pieces. But I’ve never felt as emotionally connected to his characters as I do to Chaplin’s. The Tramp makes a bead for the soul, and, in his travails, you’re with him every step of the way. Chaplin was not primarily a filmmaker the way Keaton was–Keaton hooks us in with clever design and editing rhythms (but this can become wearisome, and it admittedly takes some stamina for me to make it through a Keaton movie). In contrast, Chaplin was a sentimental storyteller with a special, maybe unequaled, genius for character development. It’s where the germ of his comedy was cultured.

City Lights, with marvelous simplicity and narrative clarity, depicts a romance between the Tramp and a blind flower girl. The Tramp tries to keep her from getting evicted and then to raise money for a surgery that will restore her eyesight. His accidental catalyst is his bumbling, on-again, off-again friendship with a drunken millionaire, who the Tramp saves from suicide. Every scene of the movie is gorgeous, often hilarious (especially the scenes in the boxing hall where the Tramp bumbles and cajoles his way through a nasty face-off with the local brute). City Lights is a great gift to all of us by a filmmaker at a latter-day peak of his genius. To see anything by Chaplin is to nourish the soul. Chaplin is good for the world.

Grade: A+

Directed by: Charles Chaplin
Written by: Charles Chaplin
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers, Charles Chaplin, Al Ernest Garcia

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Classics, Comedy | Leave a Comment »

Chungking Express

November 9, 2009

Though not as emotionally satisfying as Happy Together, Chungking Express is still a giddy and energetic movie in its own right, telling two distinct stories both of which pivot around a bustling Hong Kong lunch counter. Both stories are about cops, each of whom has been dumped by his respective girlfriend and now wants to forget about her and move on. The first story, in my opinion, follows its whimsical, wistful hero as he slurps through nearly-expired cans of pineapples (his ex-girlfriend’s favorite fruit) in a symbolic effort to forget her. He subsequently falls in love with a mystery woman–presumably a drug trafficker and criminal. The second story involves a spunky and spirited girl who, through her variously eccentric ways, tries to get a gloomy cop to forget about the airline stewardess who’s just dumped him, and make him fall in love with her instead. Though these stories aren’t particularly deep, I love Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic exuberance–it’s clear from just watching his films that the guy loves making them. Not only that, he takes a genuine interest in human beings, in trying to understand them for all their ridiculousness. Kar Wai masterfully commits to celluloid the textures and moods of Chungking Express’ urban milieu. He gives us a pair of not-entirely-successful romantic stories but, fuelled by his cinematic fervor and exuberant use of music (another Wong Kar Wai trademark), it’s irresistible.

Grade: B

Directed by: Wong Kar Wai
Written by: Wong Kar Wai
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow

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

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

November 9, 2009

It’s difficult to parse out the associations–literary, symbolic, mythic, etc.–from the intrinsic merits of this first installment of the Narnia series. I say it’s difficult because we live in a time when, as a society, we seem to be craving these primal, communal, iconic representations of good triumphing over evil: The popularity of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter films/books, this season’s King Kong, and the anticipation for next year’s Superman are all obvious proof. We live in times when our collective morale has hit rock bottom, or close to it.

Nothing in our world right now–the way its leaders are running it (especially our own)–jives with our ingrained sense of what is right, good, just, real. So we seem to be craving these simple yet direct allegories to wash out the bad taste of our daily realities, maybe more so now than, well, anytime since the Vietnam Era. Joseph Campbell, in discussing the timeless appeal of myths, mentions how human beings have always looked to these good-over-evil storylines to palliate our moral and mortal fear of the world around us. I think mass audience movies–the popular arts, in general–are meant to appeal to us on a very fundamental, simplistic level. It’s how myths convey their meanings–by appealing to our hearts, not our brains. The brain, moreover, is an overrated organ, anyway: The world isn’t going to improve on brainpower, but on “heartpower” (as corny as that sounds). All this is a roundabout way of pointing out that it’s tough to address Andrew Adamson’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s books. As a movie, it’s professionally competent and well paced, and touches on all the traditional tropes of the fantasy-adventure genre.

So, having said all that, The Lion, The Witch… is a Christian allegory in which four siblings–the Pevensies–having escaped from the London Blitz of WWII, find sanctuary in a country manor. There, upon entering a mysterious wardrobe closet, they chance upon a magical land fallen under the gloomy spell of the so-called White Witch (Tilda Swinton). Talking beavers inform the incredulous children of a prophecy in which four humans, one day, will aid Narnia’s forces of good–led by Alsan, a properly majestic lion and the story’s Christ figure–in vanquishing the White Witch and restoring peace and joy to Narnia. Soon, the siblings find themselves preparing for an imminent battle with the White Witch over the fate of Narnia.

Along the way, in order to save the children from jeopardy, Aslan sacrifices himself. This is no spoiler–Aslan’s self-sacrifice is central to Lewis’s Christ allegory–while the children, backed by a loyal legion of mythical and magical creatures, do battle with the White Witch, backed by her army of fearsome beasts. I found Lewis’s story, as filmed by Andrew Adamson, enormously simplistic and, perhaps for that reason, enormously effective. The parable of the Christ figure saving a world under the shadow of evil through pure faith and goodness is eternally resonant in our world, answering our need for self-realization and redemption in our daily lives. So, I think to a significant degree, this movie trades on the easy but powerful emotions. The question is: Does the movie do so on its own merits?

Adamson’s direction, for its part, is straight-ahead, workmanlike, with little flair outside the bounds of Lewis’s blueprint. The movie’s CGI, on the whole, is excellent, especially the chattering animals and the climactic battle sequence–which, by the way, can’t escape being a minor knockoff of Peter Jackson’s ground shattering work in LOTR. Then, again, fairly or not, all fantasy-adventures will hereupon be compared to LOTR. The acting is solid enough–the children give innocent, guile-free performances, Tilda Swinton’s authority on screen elevates every scene she’s in, and there’s nice clean-up work from the always-marvelous Jim Broadbent in a role that’s much too short.

That brings me to the movie’s main flaw: its script. While Narnia breezes by, even at 140 minutes, I felt its characters needed padding out. The story could do with more scenes up-front of the Pevensie siblings and their mutual bond, and, likewise, more scenes of Broadbent’s Professor Kirke, with his wisps of quirky wisdom, and more of a sense of Narnia itself. Unlike Jackson’s depiction of Middle Earth, Adamson’s Narnia doesn’t feel like a place unto itself, living and breathing, but just an extension of the plot. Its textures and borders don’t feel lived-in, but, rather, perfunctory, a sort of generic Never-Never Land, akin to a child’s run-of-the-mill fantasy daydream. Still, Narnia’s overall production is fabulous, and the story’s religious symbolism and mythic appeal transfers to the screen intact. My guess is that The Lion, The Witch… will appeal to our jaded, consumer- and cynicism-driven age and to all of us in need of a jab of earnest, old-fashioned moralism to save the day. There are plenty of us out there who need it right now.

Grade: B

Directed by: Andrew Adamson
Written by: Ann Peacock, Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cast: Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anne Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, Jim Broadbent, James McAvoy

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Fantasy | 1 Comment »

Chloe in the Afternoon

November 9, 2009

The final installment of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, Chloe in the Afternoon is a beautiful character study about what it is to love one woman and yet be in love with all women. Frédéric (Verley), a very levelheaded Parisian businessman with a wife and two kids, one day encounters a woman, Chloé, who he used to know years ago. Before long, they’re meeting every afternoon, over drinks or whatever, chatting, divulging intimate details about themselves. Frédéric first thinks of Chloé as an oddball, a neurotic, and brushes her off casually. But when she begins to treat him indifferently, he gets riled up and all the more drawn to her. And you can’t necessarily blame the guy: Chloé’s portrayed as a very exciting, sensual woman who also happens to be an unpredictable head-case; she hops from bed to bed, attaches herself to men who never love her and, before long, moves on. She also can’t keep a job down. Chloé’s the kind of brash, slightly dangerous woman that all men, at some time or another, have fallen for.

Eventually, Frédéric finds himself at the brink at which he must face his lust for Chloé head-on. Contrary to stereotype, his wife, Hélène (Françoise Verley), isn’t some insufferable ball-and-chain but an alluring, free-minded woman: beautiful, smart and a devoted mother. And, to be fair, Frédéric’s no slouch either: he’s a sensitive guy, devoted to his wife but also honest about how Chloé makes him feel. Indeed, he starts out the movie confessing that marriage has made him feel cut off from all the women he sees all around him. He’s attracted to all of them, yet his genuine loyalty to his wife offsets those more primal yearnings. It’s a testament to the honesty with which Rohmer depicts Frédéric’s marriage that his and Hélène’s final scene is such a knockout.

As opposed to Kubrick’s inane Eyes Wide Shut, which crossed similar thematic ground but turned its protagonist’s honest desires into the stuff of psycho-dramatic tripe, Rohmer steers the humanist road to far more poignant effect. Rohmer never resorts to stereotypes: These characters are all vivid, believable, complex creations in whom we see ourselves. Chloé is a superb example of how culturally bound stories, when told simply and delicately, can find universal resonance. As an added bonus, it also offers an intriguing peek into Parisian middle-class life in the early 70s.

Grade: A

Directed by: Eric Rohmer
Written by: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Françoise Verley, Daniel Ceccaldi

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Classics, Drama, Romance | 1 Comment »

Children of Men

November 9, 2009

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Based on the novel by P.D. James, director and co-writer Alfonso Cuarón’s futuristic adventure derives its power from a premise as potent and primal as they come. Early in the 21st century, women are, suddenly and inexplicably, rendered infertile. No one knows why; reasons ranging from environmental pollution and genetic testing are cited as possible culprits. That’s neither nor there, however, because both mankind and civilization are rapidly unraveling. The world that Children of Men’s hero, Theodore Faron (Clive Owen), an erstwhile social activist, inhabits is riddled with political instability, terrorism, riots, economic crises and nuclear conflagrations. Britain has become a police state, violently quashing all discontent. Because of large-scale illegal immigration into Britain from less stable parts of the world, the country has adopted a violent policy against it. Everywhere we see police rounding up migrants into buses, hauling them off into Guantanamo-like detention camps. They’re ruthless in how they treat citizens who, in turn, have become disaffected, or else taken up arms in their struggle against the system. Terrorism and persecution widespread. The use of legalized over-the-counter euthanasia drugs is encouraged for all.

So it’s no surprise that when Baby Diego dies, everyone everywhere is sent into a grief-stricken tailspin. Reputedly the youngest man on Earth, Baby Diego is killed in a violent incident that characterizes the tenor of the times. The event underscores the fragility of the fate of our species, a twist of the proverbial knife already embedded in our backs. But Faron’s already inside his own grief vortex; twenty years ago, right around the time when pregnancy rates worldwide were dropping, he and his former wife Julian (Julianne Moore) laid to rest their own child. It was, in a way, the end of both their lives.

Those pieces in place, Cuarón shunts into action mode, “chase picture” mode to be exact, after Julian pays the disaffected Faron a surprise visit. She tells him about Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a teenage girl who miraculously happens to be pregnant, and charges him with the task of transporting Kee and her nurse, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to the coast where they can be delivered into the hands of a benevolent organization called the Human Project. The existence of the Human Project is itself open to question, a rumor more than a fact, but it’s a chance Faron decides is worth taking; the world’s too dangerous to entrust with anything this precious. Faron’s not kidding either, for no sooner have they set out on the road than the group is set upon by sectarians determined to make Kee’s soon-to-be-born baby the poster child for their revolution.

Children of Men exudes an aura of effortlessness in how it lays out the particulars of its complex social and political realities. The pandemonium that wracks this future-world feels both logical and palpable; without that crucial sense of plausibility, Cuarón and company’s script would’ve been lost at sea. The same can be said of Cuarón’s assuredly brilliant direction, at much at ease with developing a range of absorbing characters as with staging one riveting action set piece after another. Owen creates the kind of hero you can’t help but immediately sympathize with and root for: Faron is a bedraggled Everyman, he has no power, no authority, and he wouldn’t know how to use a firearm if he found one in his hands. But, wounded by the loss of his own child, he’s the heart and soul of the picture, driven solely by his desire to save. And not just Owen; Children of Men is marked by high caliber performances throughout, particularly from Ferris, whose Miriam is Kee’s only protection and professional support; from Chiwetel Ejiofor whose militant leader Luke’s yearning for revolution becomes wrongly enmeshed with his desire to co-opt Kee’s child; from Ashitey whose Kee’s vulnerability is shielded only by her maternal pluckiness; and from the ever-watchable Michael Caine as a pot-smoking, lank-haired eccentric who’s the closest thing Faron has to a guide and benefactor.

Through a series of escapes and captures, Faron, Kee and Miriam manage to flee Luke and his organization only to wind up in a Homeland Security detention camp. In depicting their arrival at the camp, Cuarón’s acutely evokes, without exploiting, our collective incredulity for places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Cuarón’s sequence is frightening and bears the stamp of truth for anyone who’s seen images in the news of hooded prisoners, Gestapo-like guards, and unwholesome, barbed-wire ringed compounds. It’s at the camp that Cuarón’s direction (and his picture) gathers steam. He begins with an excruciatingly suspenseful sequence in which Faron tries to find Kee — in the final pangs of labor — a safe corner in these pellmell surroundings where she can give birth, and builds to a bravura climax as Faron must infiltrate a war zone to fetch Kee and her newborn. Cuarón’s courage and craftsmanship — together with the skills of his superb cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — prove themselves in a shattering single-take sequence in which a very simple but enormously effective juxtaposition is established between the roar of gunfire against the crying of an infant as Faron tries to sneak mother and child out of a besieged building. A more mind-blowing display of technical virtuosity in tandem with emotional power hasn’t been burned into celluloid since the opening of Saving Private Ryan. At one point in Children of Men, Miriam comments how the voices of children are what keep the world from tipping into self-destruction. That sentiment is borne out precisely and perfectly in Cuarón’s final scenes.

All that keeps Children of Men from achieving masterpiece status is a greater sense of Faron himself. The script never delves deeply enough into Faron’s character; we know that he’s a burned-out shell of a man, haunted by feelings of fatelessness, but, of Faron’s inner life, we glean very little. Rather, he is a flat character who goes from one challenge to the next, as demanded by the story and with an attitude that remains the same whether he’s fetching a cup of coffee or a baby from a burning building. Faron should have been Cuarón’s bid to assert his personality over this material, an opportunity to provide his “spin” on the terrible state of the world (real and allegorical) and perhaps his own world-view as an artist. Children of Men gives us Cuarón the prodigal filmmaker, notching another success in a long string of them, though it comes frustratingly close to giving us Cuarón, the newly minted auteur.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam, Danny Huston, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Peter Mullan, Pam Ferris, Michael Caine

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Science Fiction, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Changing Times

November 9, 2009

In writer-director André Téchiné’s strangely moving love story, Changing Times, the middle-aged Antoine (Gérard Depardieu) confesses how he longs one day to reunite with his first love, Cécile (Catherine Deneuve). But he wants to wait till she’s grown older, after her children have left the roost. Then, like a gallant knight, Antoine wants to show up at her door and save his beloved Cécile from the impending loneliness of her twilight years, after which they will live happily ever after, together. He describes how that moment of reunion will be like a resurrection for Cécile, a reawakening to the beauties and joys of living. Truly, it is only by burying the past, by shucking off the garb of one’s institutional roles–wife, husband, son, sibling, friend–and reawakening to our own true feelings can we hope to have any happiness in love and life.

Antoine arrives in the port city of Tangiers under the pretext of overseeing the construction of a television facility for a French media company. But his real motive is that Tangiers is where Cécile lives. While Antoine has struggled to get over her, Cécile has succeeded most assiduously in repressing her past with him. She’s now married to a Moroccan doctor, Nathan (Gilbert Melki), a charming, amiable man who makes no qualms about his womanizing.

On the outside, Cécile seems a woman completely content and composed: She has an orderly home life with Nathan, and enjoys her day job as a d.j. playing French pop songs at a Moroccan radio station. Yet her composure is brittle. Deneuve keeps her face taut, her delivery straightforward, matter-of-fact; Cécile is the kind of woman for whom a tragic emotional breakdown is just waiting to happen.

The damage Antoine weathers, meanwhile, is largely physical, beginning with a nose-first smash into a glass wall as he tries to flee a busy supermarket where he’s just spotted Cécile. Nathan, the dutiful doctor, comes to his aid, and, just like that, Antoine has entered Cécile’s domestic fold. In their awkward first meetings, during with the precipitously frank Antoine sets forth his feelings for Cécile , Téchiné is sure to reap both humor and a bittersweet pathos as the woman pulls away from him with a businesslike insistence.

When Cécile’s son Sami (Malik Zidi), his Moroccan-born girlfriend Madia (Lubna Azabal), and their 9-year-old son drop in from Paris, all sorts of cats are let out of the bag. Madia’s in Tangiers to reconcile with her long-estranged twin sister Aicha (also played by Azabal) who’s stayed behind in their family village looking after their aging, ailing parents. Sami’s agenda involves reviving an old love affair with a young Morroccan man. His closeted homosexuality dovetails nicely with the rest of Téchiné’s framework built around disconnected interpersonal ties–a gallery of people who, out of guilt, shame or the fear of loneliness can’t face the truth about themselves, let alone admit it to each other.

If Cécile’s supposed to be uptight, she’s got nothing on Madia’s sister, Aicha–a woman not so much devout as insistent about her Muslim orthodoxy. Aicha refuses to see Nadia, for whom she obviously still bears anger for unspoken past grievances, and fears she’d contaminate her religious purity by consorting with a Westernized Muslim woman. While Nadia slips into a drug-induced stupor, It’s like that in the world Téchiné’s creates in Changing Times: No one is willing to put down their self-ordained guards for reasons of self-preservation.

I realize all of this sounds like heavy melodrama, an entanglement of pretentious gestures, but Changing Times is surprisingly sweet, simple, straightforward. Whatever thematic high-handedness Téchiné can be charged with (he’s French after all; they can’t help it), you can’t fault him on the purity of his storytelling nor his admirably expressive cinematic style. Antoine’s emotional conundrum finds a perfect parallel in the nervy, touch-and-go shooting and editing rhythms, which are offset by the quieter, more measured rhythms found in Cécile’s scenes. Finally, the performances are uniformly excellent, but this is Deneuve and Depardieu’s show all the way. The screen legends turn in gorgeous, guileless performances here, and it’s a pleasure to be party to their often lovely scenes together. Buriel and resurrection, literal and figurative, are inevitable for Antoine and Cécile. Both pay their separate price, but, once the debris is cleared, the resurrection that Antoine speaks of is, nonetheless, sweet reward.

Grade: B+

Directed by: André Téchiné
Written by: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Pascal Bonitzer
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Lubna Azabal, Malik Zidi, Tanya Lopert, Jabir Elomri, Nabila Baraka, Nadem Rachati

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

Cavite

November 9, 2009

Cavite by gutsy Philipine-American filmmakers Neilla Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon will probably be cited in years to come as a classic example of the post-9/11 action thriller. Jihadist terror is worked into Cavite not only as a plot device, but, more subversively, as a subject of socioeconomic critique. As Adam (played by co-director and co-writer Gamazon), the movie’s hapless young victim, moves through Cavite–the Philippine city of the movie’s title–we glean the close proximity between those who wield terror, and the society in which such people thrive. Dela Llana’s camera turns its eye unflinchingly on the squalid warrens and streets in which a desperate population must live, beholden to both an oppressive poverty and to the American fast food and soft drink multinationals that feed upon them, monopolizing their values. A withering examination of the correlation between terrorism, poverty, and globalization is not foremost on the minds of Cavite’s makers, but it is bound up tightly to its action and setting–both of which are so vividly realized that they generate much of the energy and appeal behind Dela Llana and Gamazon’s script. From the get-go, it’s clear that a delirious desire to make a frenetic thriller is what drove these tag-team filmmakers; you can practically hear the snap and sizzle of sparks around the edges of its images and the soldering-iron editing. Cavite was made for very little money, but what it has in spades is passion, talent, and a tightly structured script–ingredients that trounce any amount of money a studio will throw into own routine product.

The movie gets off the blocks fast, a little too fast, as Adam arrives in the title city to attend his father’s funeral when a cellphone call from a member of a terror outfit informs him that he has kidnapped his mother and sister. The terrorist-caller threatens to kill them both if the befuddled Adam does not comply with his demands. An odyssey undertaken by foot and rickshaw, through the city’s rank and stifling streets, ensues as Adam, his ear trained to the cellphone, abides by everything the terrorist orders him to do, however whimsical or dangerous. The patter between Adam and the terrorist can get tedious, but it’s appropriately tense, spiked by the latter’s taunts and Adam’s desperate efforts for answers and explanations. And what Adam finds out is exactly what makes Cavite so noteworthy: a conflation of the personal and the political, in which his alienated relationship with his deceased father is suddenly altered by a revelation that not only challenges his impression of him, but holds the lives of many innocent civilians in the balance. It’s Cavite’s trump card, and it plays it wonderfully, weighing Adam’s panic and guilt over the actions he’s ordered to take against his own roiling conscience.

What makes Cavite so absorbing, however, is also what works against it. Dela Llana and Gamazon are so gonzo about making their movie that they forget about variation. If they’d been more mindful about rhythm, about modulating mood, their narrative could’ve benefited in the manner that all of Hitchcock’s did so brilliantly. Unfortunately, in this sense, Cavite is a one-trick pony. Even in Adam’s quieter early moments and during his exhausted intervals later on, the filmmakers can’t help but jangle the movie (and our nerves) with ill-placed hyperkinetic tension. A little of Cavite truly goes a long way. Then again, I’d choose a filmmaker who has too much love for his medium any day over one who hasn’t enough, or, worse yet, is plain indifferent to it. The latter, if you don’t already know, is the prevailing industry standard. Thank your stars for Cavite.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Neill Dela Llana, Ian Gamazon
Written by: Neill Dela Llana, Ian Gamazon
Cast: Ian Gamazon, Dominique Gonzalez, Jeffrey Lagda

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

Casino Royale

November 9, 2009

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The 21st Bond film is also the first truly worthy spin through the Bond universe since Roger Moore’s goofy escapades of the late 70′s/early ’80s. I enjoyed the gravitas that Timothy Dalton brought to the role in his pair of outings, and the élan with which Pierce Brosnan went through 007′s paces from 1995′s Goldeneye to 2002′s Die Another Day. But as smooth and stalwart a Bond as Brosnan was, the franchise producers never handed the actor a vehicle equal to his stature. Indeed, Die Another Day may have come closest — a silly but exciting enough thrill ride, whose cheesy get-ups and entendres were somewhat compensated for by Halle Berry as an impossibly sexy spy who matched up well with Brosnan. With Casino Royale, the folks behind Bond bring in a new man: Daniel Craig. Like many others, I have admired Craig as an actor (Road to Perdition, Layer Cake) but felt unsure, even incredulous, of how he’d modify (read: tamper with) what gold-standard bearer Sean Connery, then Moore, Dalton and Brosnan had molded and perfected over forty-plus years. I was on my guard.

Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, together with Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash), reach back to Flemming’s first Bond novel, an origin story of sorts, to give us a glimpse of Bond when he was first promoted to “007″ status in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The story offers an occasion to trace the shaping of the Bond persona into the one by which we associate him — the debonair spy and ladies’ man, who’d just as soon kill you as look at you. Casino Royale imagines Bond (or the pre-Bond) as an impulsive mercenary whose hot-headedness and ego compromise his ability to make cool, calculated judgments. Craig’s Bond shoots first, asks questions later. He’s prone to make decisions out of blind pride than shrewd tact, and he’s also the first Bond who isn’t afraid to show his softer side. Here, in other words, we find a complex, fully-rounded character, a romantic as attuned to his heart as to the mission at hand, and, as Anthony Lane in The New Yorker put it, the series’ “first proper bleeder.” This guy gets bruised and banged up enough in one movie to make up for twenty movies in which Bond escaped without a scratch and with his hair hardly out of place.

The plot of Casino Royale is (relative to many previous entries) refreshingly lean and coherent. It concerns a financier/broker of terrorist activities, named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). Le Chiffre, a scarfaced, sourpussed gentleman-gambler whose bad eye leaks blood at the first sign of distress, invests his clients’ monies into operations, i.e. terrorist strikes, meant to sabotage the financial health of massive corporations. When one such operation doesn’t come off as planned and his clients are champing at the bit for the recovery of their investments, Le Chiffre decides to hold a high-stakes poker tournament at the swank titular casino-hotel in a bid to recover his clients’ fortunes. That’s when Bond charges in; as much as M (the always-regal Judi Dench) has her misgivings about the loose cannon Bond, she assigns him the mission of trumping Le Chiffre at the poker game and close down his terrorist racket. Sent to watch over the money, floated by the British treasury, to be staked in the game is Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). She’s sinuous and beautiful enough to qualify as a Bond Girl, but exceeds the narrow limits of that role thanks to Green’s reserved, sensitive performance.

A good second-half portion of Casino Royale is taken up by the critical poker face-off with Le Chiffre. The proceedings are lengthy, but not without their share of breathless diversions. These include a headlong confrontation in a stairwell between Bond and some pissed-off terrorists, to another inside a grimy post-industrial torture chamber in which Bond’s manhood is threatened with mutilation (and after which the males in the audience won’t be able to shake away the thought of testicular pain for days afterward), to a mad dash to Bond’s Aston Martin where a conveniently placed defibrillator is all that stands between the spy and a rapid death-by-poisoned martini. That last scene is an amusing metaphor not only for how Casino Royale is the Bond people’s bid to jumpstart their franchise back to relevance, but also for Lynd’s literal and figurative reviving of Bond’s heart.

Sparks fly the instant Bond and Lynd meet, but their mutual attraction is communicated largely through the language of verbal jabs and mischievous asides that keep both of them on their toes. In terms of steaminess and sex, Casino Royale is pretty modest compared to most Bond films, and when Bond does get busy, it’s not motivated by momentary lust or sexual manipulation, but something far tougher to wriggle out of: Love. As scripted, the central romance between Bond and Lynd that takes over the film’s second half is handled shoddily and in too-broad strokes. Luckily, Craig and Green’s commitment to their roles and their on-screen chemistry compensates. Craig capably crosses a great deal of emotional territory, from the tough-guy posturings of a more traditional Bond to a genuinely human vulnerability, with almost no help from the script itself.

Casino Royale brings Goldeneye director Martin Cambell back into the fray. Campbell has a knack for creating crisp, adroit action sequences. In fact, the footchase that opens the film ranks as among the most exihilarating ever staged, as Bond pursues a terrorist through the pell-mell streets of a tumbledown Madagascar neighborhood. The chase blows through a construction site, then up the dizzying heights of a gantry where one delirious stunt after another is breathtakingly pulled off. Aided by vertiginous stuntwork and whipsmart editing, it’s also a fantastic introduction to Craig’s gangbusters take on Bond. Wisely, though, Campbell doesn’t try to top his opening, but keeps his action scenes thereafter limited to short bursts, while he takes up the issue of what do with a spy obstinately in love with an accountant, a woman compromised by her own mysterious past. Hard lessons lie ahead for this start-up Bond, chiefly among them: Trust no one and nothing, least of all the romantic flutterings of one’s own heart.

What stays with you, whether you’re a Bond fanatic or a casual viewer, is Daniel Craig himself. He has the chops to pull off a Bond at once in-your-face but also emotionally nuanced; his is the first Bond we relate to as a flawed, sympathetic human being, rather than as a cultural monolith. Craig plays Bond as a product of abandonment, of working-class anti-bourgeois anger, as a man driven to lonesomeness by a harsh upbringing and determined to use the system to take out his aggressions against it as much as to earn his keep. The question of whether Craig’s Bond is faithful to Flemming’s version isn’t as important as whether Craig can continue to offer us a Bond this compelling in future installments, in which the now-chastened and newly minted 007 becomes a character of diminishing emotional returns.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Martin Campbell
Screenplay by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis
Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Caterina Murino, Simon Abkarian, Isaach De Bankolé, Jesper Christiansen, Ivan Milicevic

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Cars

November 9, 2009

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the 1991 Michael J. Fox vehicle Doc Hollywood will experience a twinge of unwelcome déjà vu while watching Pixar’s latest animated juggernaut, Cars. In that early ’90s “gem,” a cocky cosmetic surgeon, en route to Los Angeles in his sports car, got sentenced to community service after ramming into and destroying public property while speeding through a small town. The moral realignment of the doctor followed a predictable, easily digestible course as he got in touch with his civic-mindedness, and fell in love with a spunky small-town beauty. Cars borrows the Doc Hollywood template, but replaces its human characters with their anthropomorphized car equivalents. There are many problems with this, regardless of how you feel about anthropomorphic cars.

Till now, Pixar’s had a pretty spectacular track record in terms of pure storytelling–their product’s deftly blended visual imagination and technical virtuosity with Spielbergian sentiment spiked with a mild, kid-friendly sarcasm. That narrative cocktail has been wildly popular with audiences ever since Toy Story, but, as Cars so dreadfully proves, Lasseter and company have mixed this one once too many times. For the first time, Pixar’s storytelling feels thoroughly by the numbers, as if these CGI mavens finally decided they hit on a tried-and-true formula worth repeating ad nauseam. Their latest project feels at every level on cruise control. True, Pixar has delivered its share of lukewarm material, but even its till-now weakest movie Monsters, Inc. had its moments of freshness and exhilaration (the roller-coaster-like finale in the fright factory, the run-in with the Abominable Snowman, in particular). Cars, on the other hand, conjoins the Doc Hollywood beat sheet with Pixar’s moral dictate that all their movies chart the same moral arc and contain characters who learn the same tripe about humility and friendship.

Cars’ fill-in-the-blank screenplay concerns a cocky rookie racecar, Lightning McQueen, who dreams of winning the upcoming championship and luxuriating in the fame, riches, and celebrity endorsements that come with success. En route to the race in California, Lightning gets stranded in the ramshackle hamlet of Radiator Springs. Sentenced to repairing the road that he tore up upon his arrival in town, Lightning’s initial moping and whining transforms into a realization that, in life, it’s not whether “we make good time” that matters, but rather–are you ready?–that “we have a good time.” Everything else about Cars is just as trite. The middle section of this plodding 116-minute clunker involves Lightning’s budding friendship with a slow-witted hillbilly tow truck, and a romance with a sweet-but-spunky Porsche. Finally, it’s McQueen’s admiration for a washed-up former racing champion (voiced by Paul Newman), now living bitterly in the backwater, that turns him on to the beauty of loyalty and friendship.

What troubles me more than the obviousness of Cars’ screenplay is that it took eight people to patch it together: Lasseter and three co-writers, two guys credited with “Story,” and two more credited with the hoity-toity moniker of “Additional Screenplay Material.” That’s seven more than it took to write Chinatown. Perhaps the most unfortunate decision behind Cars was conceptual. The NASCAR storyline seems of little interest to its 5-year-old target audience (halfway through the screening, the child beside me began snoozing), the pre-teen crowd just doesn’t jive to Pixar’s too-cute cartoonishness, while the adults will all groan and squirm at the movie’s stale tricks.

Lasseter conceives of the Cars universe as inhabited totally by various types of four-wheelers–a concept not only aesthetically monotonous (as the shots of a coliseum packed with these equally ugly-looking things testify), but imaginatively sound only on the surface. Unlike Toy Story, wherein the fate of its man-made protagonists, sometimes hinged on the actions of their human masters, there isn’t a single acknowledgement of a human being here, which is rather ridiculous considering that humans are the only reason cars exist. Had Lasseter and his co-writers drawn on the fears and conflicts that humans represent to their fossil-fuel burning existence, then we might’ve had the rudiments of an interesting screenplay.

As slick, richly detailed as its CGI design is, Cars is just another leap forward in animation’s baffling march towards photorealism: Its images come to us buffed and waxed. Yet all that resplendent realism gets us no closer to smart, chancy storytelling and towards the inner illumination in the specatator that is the destination of all true art. Instead, we find the obligatory sweeping shots of race tracks, desert buttes, and “you are there” POVs of racecars zipping along chasis-to-chasis, all of it noisy, boring, and, frankly, smug. Smugness pervades Cars top to bottom and wall to wall, aggravated by the tired shticks turned in by its cast.

Owen Wilson has now officially overstayed his welcome, having plied his lovable doofus bit once (twice, thrice?) too many times. Newman’s turn as a redeemed old fogy is as tired as his character. A greater cause for concern is that Lasseter feels content to play up for laughs stereotyped variations of his “non-white” cars. For example, we get Flo, the sass-talking “black” classic with the fins, and Ramone, the hydraulically tricked-out cruiser who seems the multiplex version of the Hispanic gangsta. This is Disney/Pixar’s version of ethnic diversity–stripped of context and paraded on view for whitebread amusement. Cars is a steep step downwards for all and everything concerned, unless you’re a Caucasian sports car.

Grade: D

Directed by: John Lasseter
Written by: John Lasseter, Dan Fogelman, Philip Loren, Kiel Murray, Robert L. Baird, Dan Gerson, Jorgen Klubien, Joe Ranft
Cast: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Larry the Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, Guido Quaroni, Jenifer Lewis, Paul Dooley, Michael Wallis, George Carlin, John Ratzenberger, Michael Keaton, Joe Ranft

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Animation | Leave a Comment »

Paranormal Activity

November 9, 2009

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Buzz-wise, Paranormal Activity might be the most successful DIY horror flick since The Blair Witch Project, and it’s as effectively scary as its groundbreaking predecessor. But it’s probably even more riddled with the inane character and story craft issues that bedeviled Blair Witch. With its elaborate mythology and back story, not to mention one of the shrewdest marketing campaigns in recent movie history, Blair Witch managed to make its invisible, resident evil that much more dread-inducing, all the way to the terrifying finale in the scariest haunted house since Jonathan Harker knocked on Dracula’s door. By comparison, Oren Peli’s project in simpler and easier in how it reaps its frights, and ten years since Blair Witch, in an era when the public knows how to digest the “home movie” aesthetic as part of its cinema consumption diet, it’s already won the “will they show up?” battle that was a huge question mark for Blair Witch distributor Artisan.

Katie and Micah (the characters are given the names of the actors playing them) are a happy San Diego couple, but, when Katie confesses that, since childhood, she’s been “stalked” by a troublesome spectral presence during sleep, Micah makes up his mind to capture evidence of the intruder by setting up a camera in their bedroom. What begins with unnerving but innocuous happenings — creaking doors and strange noises — escalates into the realm of the genuinely creepy and alarming. All of which begs the question why these two continue to film their torture in light of the hellish goings-on, and how they can continue to sleep at all, let alone in that infernal house? Truly, there are too many glaring problems of logic and motive in Peli’s screenplay for us to take his characters seriously on any level, and it’s obvious that Katie and Micah are just the means by which he can foist his nighttime gimmickry on his breathless audience.

Peli employs that familiar first-person, point-and-shoot, home-movie technique so what we see throughout is the footage that Micah shoots. It’s strains credulity, as it did in Blair Witch and Cloverfield, why any character would and could continue shooting video in such circumstances but questioning that choice would bring down these films’ entire conceit, so we play along. Daytime scenes consist of largely ludicrous and forced debates between Katie and Micah as to whether she should seek out professional help, i.e. a demonologist, to exorcise the demon haunting her. Micah resists Katie’s pleas, being somehow too proud to concede, and too determined to vanquish their tormentor on his own.

The paranormal events become so flagrant in nature that the characters’ resistance to seeking radical solutions and the script’s own resistance to smarten itself up become exasperating. All of Peli’s chips are on the nighttime scenes; he’s got nothing else. But what he does have is pretty chilling stuff and it comes down to his simple, static framing, consisting of the bed, the doorway, and the dark corridor beyond. Rarely has so much attention and expectation in all my movie viewing been weighed on the screen’s negative space: everything of value in Paranormal Activity originates in the uninhabited, nearly featureless left third of the camera frame set up in the bedroom. I guess that’s the hallmark of all horror: it’s always what’s off-screen or hiding in the dark that grabs our attention, and Peli exploits this notion exceptionally well.

When it’s all said and done, if you remember Paranormal Activity at all, it won’t be for the characters or Peli’s story craft — they’re both irrelevant to what will really get your pulse racing: The mysterious thuds and rumblings on the soundtrack, the ghostly ruffling of bedsheets, shadows and footprints appearing out of nowhere. And we realize that, when you get down to it, those are all the ingredients a nifty horror flick really needs.

Grade: B

Directed by: Oren Peli
Written by: Oren Peli
Cast: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Horror | Leave a Comment »

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