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Silver Linings Playbook

December 7, 2012

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You have to hand it to David O. Russell. Since his debut feature, Spanking the Monkey in 1994, he has steadily proven himself to be a worthy descendent of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. More than any other Hollywood filmmaker, Russell has demonstrated a facility with nutty situations, screwball energy, and eccentric characters, the kind of facility that recalls Sturges in his Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek heyday, the kind that approximates the manic farce of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot together with the acerbic wit and sentiment of The Apartment. Movies like Flirting with Disaster (my vote for Russell’s best movie), I Heart Huckabees, and his latest, Silver Linings Playbook all have the pace and hysterics to match Hollywood’s screwball tradition and no other filmmaker seems capable of sustaining a sense of sheer lunacy–that is, an edgy, barely contained craziness–over a feature-length movie without losing his audience. Yet, as entertainingly oddball as Playbook is, the movie derives much of its pleasure from its offbeat energy, soft-heartedness, and the roiling tensions that preoccupy its largely two-dimensional characters.

Insanity, or at least some degree of it, is all over this movie. Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solatano, just released from a mental institution after a violent episode that’s scared off his wife. He moves back in with his parents, played by Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver, vows to clean up his act, and win back the affections of his estranged wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), who’s taken out a restraining order on him. Of course, Pat functions in a kind of manic delusional state, just as his father–as warm and genuine as he is in his love for Pat–is an obsessive-compulsive Eagles football fan whose life pivots on the outcomes of football Sundays. Because he can’t get to Nikki, Pat enlists the aid, however grudgingly, of Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), one of her friends. Tiffany herself has more than her share of emotional issues; she’s struggling to put the grief and guilt over her husband’s death behind her. So she pours her energies into a dance competition and makes a deal with Pat: if he agrees to be her dance partner in the competition, she’ll cooperate in his attempts to win back his wife. Pat and Tiffany’s uneasy alliance warms to a mutually dependent friendship that, after some ups and downs, blossoms into, you guessed it, an old-time romance.

Five years ago, Mark Wahlberg–an actor who’s been featured in three of Russell’s movies–would have played Pat; the role of the off-kilter yet adorably sweet working-class misfit seems tailor-made for an earlier Wahlberg incarnation. Cooper gamely fills Wahlberg’s shoes here; his comic timing and intensity level matches that of his predecessor. And, as the volatile Tiffany, Lawrence is consistently watchable. De Niro and Weever nicely counterpoint each other with the latter serving as a kind of buffer for the neurotic excesses of the former. But, when all’s said and done, Silver Linings Playbook is as aggressively offbeat as it is aggressively by-the-numbers. This is a tried-and-true, paint-by-numbers rom-com whose adherence to convention is masked by Russell’s brand of anarchic comedy. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, so the story goes–what’s different this time around are the players and the twists in the path that lead us to the end. Russell doesn’t really offer a new take on family or interpersonal dynamics and we never feel that Pat, Tiffany, or anyone else here are particularly authentic human beings, just a collection of tics, oddities, and obsessions. But, for what it’s worth, Silver Linings Playbook is grounded in real heart–an embrace of such eternal virtues as true love, parent-child bonding, and self realization–and it delivers the kind of sharply timed laughs that Sturges and Wilder would’ve appreciated.

Grade: B-

Directed by: David O. Russell
Written by: David O. Russell
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Anupam Ker, John Ortiz, Julia Stiles, Brea Bee

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

Mr. Arkadin

May 31, 2012

An exasperating movie whose beauties need to be extracted from the mire of its bungling weaknesses. Mr. Arkadin is the cinema equivalent of a down-and-out scamp with an irresistible personality, a movie whose topsy-turvy production history is typically Wellesian: Shot in 1954 as a Spanish-French collaboration, Welles fiddled with editing Arkadin for months before his producer wrested it away and edited it as a conventional, chronologically linear story (contrary to Welles’s more intricate, Citizen Kane-like vision of it) and called it Confidential Report. That was, more or less, the release version of “Mr. Arkadin” until the Criterion Collection helped assemble what it calls The Comprehensive Version, that is, a version of the film as close to Welles’s vision as possible. The Comprehensive Version stays true to the flashback structure that Welles had in mind and posits about 15 additional minutes of footage in conformance with his original script. So, if you’re going to watch Mr. Arkadin, Criterion’s Comprehensive Version is probably the one best in line with what Welles would want you to see.

Welles himself dons the beard and opera cape of the titular Arkadin, an eccentric, pompous, egotistical billionaire (a variation on the kind of roles that Welles excelled at playing, beginning with the equally tragic, equally imposing Charles Foster Kane). Claiming amnesia, Arkadin enlists the services of Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), an American ex-pat in post-War Europe, a black-market smuggler, to investigate his origins. Van Stratten’s job is to find out how Arkadin came to become Arkadin; that is, how a poor refugee from Poland rose from the ranks to become one of the world’s most legendary industrialists. It’s only as Van Stratten becomes aware of the trail of bodies lying in the wake of his investigation that he suspects that Arkadin has more up his ample sleeves than he bargained for, and that he himself is in line to be one of Arkadin’s victims or his fall guy. What links Van Stratten to Arkadin is the latter’s daughter, Raina (Paola Mori). Van Stratten is in love with Raina while Arkadin wants to shield his daughter from anyone with knowledge of his less-than-squeaky-clean past.

With its hectic, lurching pace, uneven (if not downright awful) performances and a hodgepodge of a script riddled with scenes that barely make dramatic sense, Mr. Arkadin wears all the battle scars of a movie hobbled by budget and a slapdash production (and post-production) made all the more tenuous by Welles’s capricious working methods. That his vision for Arkadin was never fully realized is less a surprise than Criterion being able to piece together the Comprehensive Version, thanks to meticulous scholarship and research.

As pulp noir, Mr. Arkadin is not particularly successful because it’s haphazard elements prevent any coherent sense of story and suspense. Van Stratten, as a character, is never very appealing; he never projects the authentic desperation and contained poise of a noir anti-hero, a fugitive in search of redemption, and there’s nothing romantic about his persona at all. What Welles needed was a strong, silent Robert Mitchum or Sterling Hayden type. What he got was someone closer to William Bendix by way of Andy Devine, garrulous and irritable.

Granted, Arden’s performance speaks less of his talent and more of Welles’s ill-thought-out direction of it. Indeed, weak or slapdash performances abound in Arkadin: Mori as Van Stratten’s love interest is neither particularly sexy nor charming, and she comes off as just a rich girl wearing the costume of a grown-up sophisticate; Patricia Medina as Mily, who also wants the goods on Arkadin, is so temperamentally all over the place, we can’t be sure if she’s a sly gold-digger or an innocent naif in a bad situation. In any case, Welles’s preoccupation seems to have been with his own role. Welles plays Arkadin with his always-amusing blend of kitschy, charismatic bravado; he’s a commanding presence eliciting either delighted chuckles from fans of his larger-than-life stagecraft or groans from those who’ve had enough.

Still, for all its flaws, Mr. Arkadin is a mesmerizing experience, a schizoid crime caper that’s half-potboiler and half-reverie. While the script threatens to implode with its incoherence, the acting can be awful and the pacing erratic, there are also scenes of pure cinematic bliss. And the last is why we come to Welles anyway. The scenes, for example, in Arkadin’s Spanish castle draw from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in their expressive, geometric use of interiors and of the vast landscapes. The sequences in Munich, Mexico, North Africa and a terrifically oddball one inside Arkadin’s storm-tossed ship are all hallmarks of kooky expressionism (a la Carol Reed’s The Third Man) melded with a chic, ultra-modern visual posturing that presages Fellini and Antonioni.

A personal favorite is the scene in which Arkadin asks Van Stratten to investigate his past. The exchange takes place in what is presumably a secretary’s office, littered with filing cabinets, but, in the spell of the movie’s imagery and setting, this office becomes an obscure catacomb in some bizarre alternate reality. Watching this scene, I always wonder what secrets those filing cabinets contain, why there are no windows in this “office,” and ponder the room’s stuffy, claustrophobic atmosphere. Knowing that Welles shot the movie in scattershot fashion, the scene and space have a hit-and-run, spit-and-glue quality about them. It’s a scene in which we really have to play “pretend,” because Welles insists we do and the fact that we don’t fully buy what’s being sold on-screen only pulls us more insistently into the story.

I suppose that these details — some deliberate, some incidental, some subjective — are what set Mr. Arkadin apart. Details packed into moments that combine to make Arkadin less a movie than a dream of a movie you thought you once watched. It’s that dream-like quality that makes this an eternal, ethereal experience, something that’s rarely felt at the movies. And only when the movies in question are conjured by the most wizardly of filmmakers.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Orson Welles
Written by: Orson Welles
Cast: Robert Arden, Orson Welles, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Medina, Akim Tamiroff, Paola Mori, Katina Paxinou, Gregoire Aslan, Peter van Eyck

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Classics, Crime, Genres, Noir, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Undefeated

February 18, 2012

Undefeated is such a well-meaning, heart-on-its-sleeve documentary that one feels morally obligated to write words in praise of it. In fact, anyone admitting to a dislike of the film runs the risk of being called a heartless crank. Having scored a 2011 Academy Award nomination in the Best Documentary category, it’s safe to say that Oscar voters are not in the camp of doubters and naysayers.

There is, after all, so much to appreciate in directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s film about a North Memphis high school football coach and his hardscrabble Menassas Tigers’ 2009 miracle season. The documentary vividly profiles each of its four principal subjects: There is the compassionate and voluble coach Bill Courtney, whose commitment to his players borders on saintly; the troubled Chavis, battling anger issues as he seeks to be a mature team leader; the sweet-tempered O.C., blessed with superior talent but struggling with academics in his quest for a scholarship; and “Money,” an honors student and undersized lineman with a never-say-die attitude. Read the full review here

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Documentary, Sports | Leave a Comment »

The Ground Truth

February 6, 2012

After viewing Patricia Foulkrod’s profoundly moving “The Ground Truth,” I kept wrestling with the question, “Is this a documentary or a fantastically put-together PSA urging veterans’ rights?” Foulkrod approaches her subject matter with the even-tempered poise of a documentary maker, but make no mistake: This is an angry film. “The Ground Truth” profiles the wartime experiences of several veterans as they struggle to re-adjust to civilian life and with the VA bureaucracy, which persists in making their lives hell as they seek help for their mental and physical wounds.

As such, “The Ground Truth” is not a deliberately laid out, documentary-like inquiry into that vast, messy, internally contradictory quagmire called “the truth.” You won’t find comparisons between, say, incidences of psychological trauma among veterans of the current war and those returned from WWII or Vietnam, complete with a gamut of old-school veterans, military historians and analysts. Foulkrod does proffer the token psychologist and neuro-specialist to back up the soldiers’ stories with empirical reasoning. But, for the most part, she keeps the spotlight on a cross-section of Iraq veterans, and the stories they need to tell. The Ground Truth, in my opinion, skates the boundary between documentary and polemic, but not in the hammer-to-the-head manner of Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight. Without the intrusion of graphics or charts, she foregrounds the words and personalities of her haunted, impassioned subjects. The result is perhaps the most important protest statement yet committed to film since the outbreak of war three-and-a-half years ago.

“The Ground Truth” takes us step-by-step through the veterans’ entire tour-of-duty experiences. There are passages here that feel repetitive and others in which a flurry of provocative ideas are only glanced over. But, at 75 minutes, this material is brilliantly, compactly structured. And it doesn’t matter where you stand on the war (though it’s almost impossible to be anything but vigilantly pessimistic about the Bush Administration’s motives behind it, and the prospects of any peace in the region for generations yet). Indeed, it’s irrelevant, because Foulkrod’s concern is the psychological and spiritual toll that this war has taken many of its veterans.

Unlike other wars, the enemy in Iraq doesn’t announce itself, dressed in fatigues, arrayed across some battle line. The enemy, instead, is all around you, camouflaged among the innocent men, women and children who inevitably fall prey to the crossfire in the streets. The intense guilt and paranoia, as much as the veterans’ physical scars, inform a great deal of “The Ground Truth’s” first-person accounts. It’s heartbreaking to learn what these veterans and their families must cope with each day, but Foulkrod makes sure to alchemize our pain into focused rage as, one by one, her interviewees speak out against the military establishment’s indifference or unwillingness to address their situation.

These soldiers aren’t passive victims, either; many have sought to communicate “the ground truth” of this war to the American people. Veterans Kelly Dougherty and Paul Rieckhoff, for instance, have founded groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Soldier-artist Sean Huze writes plays on the subject. Others like Aidan Delgado, Demond Mullins, and Camilo E. Mejia are among today’s most vocal anti-war critics. Mejia perhaps most poignantly captures the activists’ creed when he says, in effect, that there’s no greater freedom than the freedom found in following one’s conscience. Foulkrod astutely ends her film on that note, conveying a message about the liberating power of protest, and the socially crucial need for each of us to follow our inner voice, in wartime and beyond.

Grade: A

Written/Directed by: Patricia Foulkrod
Cast: Herold Noel, Robert Acosta, Sean Huze, Kelly Dougherty, Nickie Huze, Denver Jones, Joyce Lucey

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

The Stranger (aka Agantuk)

January 27, 2012

When Satyajit Ray died in 1992, we lost among the last of a certain breed of artist: the socially conscious classicist. Ray was influenced in equal parts by the Western artistic tradition and by the Bengal Renaissance of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, perfectly realized in the literature of Rabindranath Tagore. In Ray’s cinema, we find compositions at once present and detached, functional yet poetic, serving a masterful formalism absorbed from Renoir and De Sica, Ray’s cinematic mentors. Within that framework jostle themes of survival amidst loneliness, the status of women, the decadence of the rich, old-world hypocrisy and new-world corruption, all of which rattled the Bengali status quo. Like Tagore’s sensuous riverscapes, Ray’s worlds — from the downtrodden huts and tenements of the Apu Trilogy to the ornate drawing-rooms of Jalsaghar and Charulata — thrive with detail. His cinema trains us to pay attention to set design, body language, gesture, the words left unsaid, all the while guiding us with the telling close-up, the insinuating tracking shot, the long take, the play of light and shadow.

“The Stranger” was Ray’s last film. I would not place it among his greatest, nor is it a film I would choose to introduce Ray to those unfamiliar with his cinema. But as the filmmaker’s final statement, a slap in the face of an entire social class — one that Ray devoted several pictures to criticizing — it’s as direct and as graceful as they get. Here is one satirical comedy that speaks its mind and doesn’t have to feel ashamed about itself in the morning.

On the surface, “The Stranger” is about trust and identity, as the well-off Bose family of Calcutta is paid a visit by a man who calls himself Mitra (Utpal Dutt) and who claims to be the wife’s long-lost uncle. Explaining his 35-year absence to his niece Anila (Mamata Shankar), Mitra recalls how, as an arts student in the mid-50′s, he chanced upon a picture of the Altamira cave paintings — primitive stone-age art that, he knew instantly, could never be rivaled for its authenticity, its immediacy. “After Altamira,” Picasso declared, “all is decadence,” and, after journeying all over the West, Mitra would surely agree. Having roamed the “civilized” quarters of Europe and America, Mitra explains how he grew bitter with the West’s obsession with technology (and nuclear one-upmanship), while its sickest and poorest continued to suffer. He turned to living with Native Americans and South American tribes. Civilization is just a cover, a word behind which all manner of evils and hypocrisies exist. “Savage” cultures, on the other hand, may not be perfect, but at least they are honest about themselves and co-exist peacefully with their environment.

Mitra’s presence in the Bose household triggers suspicions over his motives. While Anila bids to authenticate Mitra’s identity, humoring him with conversation and Bengali hospitality, her husband Sudhindra (Deepanker De) stashes away the family’s art pieces, and snoops out whether the self-proclaimed uncle’s sudden appearance has anything to do with a decades-old unclaimed inheritance. The only member of the family most open to believing Mitra and believing in him is the Boses’ young son, Satyaji (Bikram Bannerjee) — still innocent of social wiles.

Gradually, Ray uses Mitra’s presence to get at something deeper and more insidious, namely, that tendency in our “civilized” natures to judge self-righteously any culture we consider inferior or “savage.” The idea is first treated comically as Ranjan (Rabi Ghosh), a buffoonish actor, turns up and tries to suss out the visitor. His bungling efforts only show him up for what he is: a gossip-monger, a purveyor of lowbrow and scandal, something that Mitra has tried to escape from his whole life. Later on, a tragic version of that scene unfolds, this time as a mock cross-examination in which Prithwish (Dhritiman Chatterjee), a pompous lawyer, grills Mitra about his history and tries to shame him for his affinity with “barbaric” peoples. His efforts, morally anyway, have the exact opposite effect. For all his Enlightenment rationale, Prithwish’s bourgeois values, rife with double-standards and quick-to-condemn arrogance, makes him exactly the sort of “civilized” personality Ray is railing against throughout “The Stranger.” It’s during this sequence that we begin to sense that Mitra is, to a great extent, a stand-in for Ray himself, eager now in the twilight of life to sound off against the bourgeois smugness festering in his own culture. Indeed, we find Ray’s doppelgangers in both Mitra and the innocent Satyaji (a name not far removed from Satyajit) — characters who’ve either yet to be corrupted by “civilization” or who have successfully withstood its effects.

Mitra is not permanently estranged, though; there is hope at home, evidenced by Anila and Sudhindra’s final gestures to shed their urbane trappings. Their attempt to reconcile may be but a slight concession to our “wild side,” but it speaks volumes in Ray’s subtle vocabulary. In terms of its pacing and subtlety of style, “The Stranger” is arguably among Ray’s least accessible works. Those familiar with his cinema, though, will know where to look to find rewards — we find it in the cavernous corridors, stairways and antiques of the Bose household, bespeaking bourgeois indolence; in the sequence of carefully timed close-ups as the camera roves between faces masked in half-light; we find it in the extraordinary sequence in which Anila tries to impress Mitra with her sumptuous lunch of mutton, fish, lentils and Bengali “fancy crisps” — items that amuse more than awe the worldly and modest Mitra. With Ray, we’re guaranteed standout performances — whether farcical or dramatic — and The Stranger is no exception. Dutt, as the wise, gently acerbic Mitra is the film’s eloquent center of gravity, while De, Ghosh and Chatterjee are all pitch-perfect, variously flummoxed, bumbling or self-consciously stern. “The Stranger” cannot boast the lyrical energy of Ray’s 1955-1975 period; it’s the product of an artist whose temperament (and health) had since mellowed. It is, however, a beautiful valediction by a great filmmaker anticipating his own departure, whose message is as profound as any in a majestic career.

Grade: A-

Written/Directed by: Satyajit Ray
Cast: Dipankar Dey, Mamata Shankar, Bikram Bhattacharya, Utpal Dutt, Robi Ghosh, Promode Ganguly

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama, Foreign, Genres | 2 Comments »

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

January 26, 2012

Near the close of Errol Morris’ documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” the eponymous 87-year old former Secretary of Defense quotes a few lines from T.S. Eliot that aptly and poignantly sum up the documentary’s theme of moral reflection. “We shall not cease from exploration,” McNamara says, “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” That he chokes back tears while pondering the profound truth of that passage speaks volumes about the gravity of such reflection for McNamara and about his ambivalence for the place that he has returned to.

That place in which he now finds himself and on which he reflects, I think, is his conscience, his own sense of humanity. It has, over his lifetime, taken its share of beating and bending in the service of realpolitik, but, in the end, we are encouraged and even inspired to find that McNamara’s conscience is in good order. From his days helping to strategize the “efficient” destruction of Japan in WWII on through his tenure as Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, presiding over the imbroglios in Cuba and Southeast Asia, McNamara’s explorations have taken him through some rough existential territory, in a century split apart and scarred by moral chasms.

“The Fog of War” is more than a history lesson and a biography of a fascinating American thinker. As McNamara parses through the political events and crises that enmeshed his career, the movie becomes a deeply felt testament of a man struggling to wring meaning and redemption out of history’s hard, unyielding surfaces. He may defend or rationalize everything from the firebombing of Tokyo to the necessity of escalating tensions in Vietnam, but he is just as quick to heap criticism—whether explicitly or veiled in his troubled ambivalence—on himself as he ponders America’s complicity in the 20th century’s great conflicts, and his own involvement in them.

Morris structures “Fog” as eleven segments, each exploring a different facet of McNamara’s notions about the morality of war and human nature. As they relate directly to his life and career, they become a primer for understanding his character, his evolving thought and, indeed, his humanism. Woven elegantly around McNamara’s interview are enriching archival newsreels, photographs, taped conversations and beautifully, often lyrically, staged recreations. It is Morris’ tried-and-true aesthetic, a probing, mesmerizing style which matches up so well with McNamara’s enormous intelligence and charisma as to make “Fog” his most satisfying work since “The Thin Blue Line.”

Indeed, for more than its sobering view of warfare and humanity, I was struck by “Fog of War’s” power as an intimate character study. McNamara, with his rarefied intellect, may seem at first, above the common fray. But, in the end, he is like all of us who struggle to reconcile with our own pasts and live by our principles so that, on arriving where our journeys began and seeing that place anew, we may be at peace with what we find.

Grade: A

Directed by: Errol Morris
Cast: Robert S. McNamara

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

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

January 24, 2012

In 2003, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski shanghaied Disney’s ride into a madly popular swashbuckler. The movie made a boatload of booty, and made Johnny Depp a bona fide movie star. Its sequel, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” takes all that was so charming about the first “Pirates” — its resurrection of a classic Hollywood genre, pirate-talk humor and Depp’s fey mincing as Capt. Jack Sparrow — and amps it up to the wattage of a Looney Tunes cartoon. “Dead Man’s Chest” hails from the “Bigger Is Better” school of filmmaking, whose dean is Jerry Bruckheimer. By “bigger,” I mean in all its dimensions: the movie is the original’s louder, faster, more effects-crazy twin brother. It’s also snottier and more spoiled — a Bruckheimer spawn, after all. What did you expect?

Once again, scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio shunt Sparrow and the ever-hapless lovers Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) through another treasure-hunt storyline, and tangling with yet another crew of preternatural villains. The latter are captained by the squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) who, after a thwarted romance, secrets his broken heart into the titular chest and commences to terrorize the high seas. Because Jones and his shipmates’ fates are entwined with the seas’, they’ve anthropomorphized into various icky-looking sea creatures. What’s more, Jones’ possession of the chest also lends him the power to summon the Kraken, that ship-destroying sea monster of ancient Norse fables. Who let him in here is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, when news of the chest reaches tight-assed seaman Culter Beckett (Tom Hollander), he blackmails Will into recovering it, holding his spunky lass Elisabeth as ransom. For help, Will seeks out pirate-at-large Jack Sparrow. Sparrow’s got the dirt on Jones’s curse; he’s himself condemned to share in Jones’s fate if he doesn’t figure a way to break it. Elizabeth escapes Cutler’s custody, and, in her wedding gown, hotfoots it in pursuit of Will. By now, Elliott and Rossio’s script resembles a big-budget clusterfuck, crashing towards the inevitable throwdown with Davy and the Kraken. A superfluous plot detour on a cannibal island is but a clumsily staged send-up of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” complete with Sparrow outrunning large rolling objects and hungry natives. “Dead Man’s Chest’s” climax involves yet another instance of antics atop and inside rolling objects, proving the old adage: Why settle for one when you can have two for twice the cost?

“Dead Man’s Chest” taps into our need for air-conditioned escapism, and, to be fair, it’s effects are a marvel of digital realism. But Bruckheimer’s effects-makers go to gratuitous lengths to force a gee whiz out of their audience, especially in the case of Jones and his gnarly crew, whose slimy deformities don’t so much amaze as repel, and expensively so. This leaves Depp and his cohorts to mug, pose, and caper through Verbinski’s frenetic telling. Depp, rather than stretching his characterization of Sparrow, is sadly limited to playing up his cartoonishness; more than once, Sparrow’s panicked face is the punchline to another in a minefield of effects-rigged comic setups. Right from the get-go, there’s an unsettling immodesty about “Dead Man’s Chest,” a presumption of its own charm and popularity without bothering with anything as unsexy as story craft, character development, or a cleanly defined narrative arc. No, it pummels us into submission. And if you’re going to mutiny, matey, then you can just walk the plank.

Grade: C

Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook

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

Open Water

January 24, 2012

Susan and Daniel (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) are your typical work-obsessed couple drifting apart in the American suburbs. But, when left to fend for themselves in tropical, shark-infested waters, they cling to each other so desperately, it’s almost sad and touching. That is, until those fins break the surface again, triggering panic on the screen and setting our nerves on edge. “Open Water” is a textbook example for how to build and sustain tension, develop character and even sneak in wry social commentary over a tightly wound eighty minutes.

Gutsily made by husband-and-wife filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, “Open Water” disarms the viewer (à la “The Blair Witch Project”) with its no-frills, home-video ethos, but, make no mistake, this is shrewdly calculative filmmaking. The story is straightforward, opening in Susan and Daniel’s leafy, SUV-appointed home as the cell phone-toting couple pack up for an island vacation, wondering if they’ll still get email where they’re going. In a few deft strokes, the filmmakers establish their couple and whisk them off to their tropical getaway.

Kentis and Lau assuredly develop the couple’s close-knit but none-too-romantic routine, intimately conveyed by actors Ryan and Travis. To soothe away workaday stress, they embark on a deep-sea dive. From the movie’s premise, we know that this is an ill-fated outing, that the couple will be left behind by a bungling boat crew. But we watch anyway, uneasily but riveted, as the movie puts its pieces into place. Then, from their initial petulance at finding themselves abandoned, through their spasms of antagonism, their attempts to cope and overcome and, finally, their realization that all is futile against a menace largely unseen, “Open Water” becomes an expertly modulated horror movie.

Perhaps the greatest irony in “Open Water” is the claustrophobia of its setting. The sea that looks so limitless and wide-open eventually feels so confining, availing the characters with the barest hopes for survival, not least of which is that its predators simply stay away. The water’s lapping and splashing sickens us as much as it does Susan and Daniel, and the predators most definitely do not stay away. Kentis and Lau know that horror can never be fully realized till the lights are out, and they gain maximum fright wattage out of the all-enveloping darkness of night with only flashes of lightning to orient us. At this point, the filmmakers teasingly cross-cut to scenes of island revelry, but the festive music is muted, faraway, thereby punctuating the ever-growing distance between Susan and Daniel and the lives they’ve left behind. It is here that the absolute meaninglessness of the material world, one of comfortable jobs, SUVs and cell phones, is most keenly felt, pitted against the cunning and merciless forces of nature.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Chris Kentis
Cast: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein

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

The Motorcycle Diaries

January 24, 2012

Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’s “The Motorcycle Diaries” is about the eight adventurous months that Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his lifelong friend, Alberto Granado, spent traversing South America in 1952. Adapted by playwright José Rivera from both Guevara and Granado’s memoirs, the movie charts their journey and, as it does, tries to use its awe-inspiring physicality to mirror young Guevara’s inner political awakening. That the movie is about one of today’s most revered revolutionary icons proves to be both its saving grace as well as its unmanageable burden, owing to its script’s inherent weaknesses.

Salles starts his story off in Buenos Aires as Guevara (Gael García Bernal), a bright-eyed 23-year-old medical student, bids goodbye to his family and climbs onto a ramshackle motorbike with Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), a 29-year-old biochemist. Both are giddy with wanderlust, hungry for experience. Being free-spirited idealists, the young doctors make for a leper colony in the Amazon where they wish to volunteer their services. Along the way, the horny Granado cavorts with local girls, Guevara nurses his aching love for the daughter of an aristocratic landowner, but, most of all, they observe, with horror, the social injustice and poverty that pervades their continent.

Sadly, “Diaries” does little to vindicate the legacy of Guevara, who, since his death, has largely become an abstraction, a pop commodity. As an examination of the forces that shape a man’s destiny, the movie is unconvincing. Rivera’s coming-of-age script takes on a by-the-numbers feel which Salles handles with gracelessly staccato-like pacing, if only to race over the movie’s insubstantial surfaces. As a result, we know too little about the sensitive young Guevara at the movie’s outset, apart from his privileged family life, to truly feel for what he becomes—and what he’s on his way to becoming—at the movie’s end. Remove the ennobling specter of Guevara from “Diaries,” and you can hear its script’s creaky legs giving way.

What does prop the movie up are its intimate moments, those in which Guevara converses with the poor with the urgency of a social worker. Here, Salles adopts a documentary-like virtuosity, a wonderfully employed device, especially as Salles contrasts it with the more epic grandeur of “Diaries’” open spaces. Indeed, as the adventurers wend their way through South America’s richly varied terrain, the movie becomes a soul-stirring paean to the continent’s beauty. Cinematographer Eric Gautier and Production Designer Carlos Conti masterfully evoke the textures and colors of early ’50s Latin American culture, creating images that move to the indigenous rhythms of Gustavo Santaolalla’s lively music. Garcia Bernal and de la Serna offer heartfelt, charismatic performances which, combined with Salles’s poetry of majestic landscapes and poverty-worn faces, give “Diaries” its simple, enduring appeal.

Grade: B

Directed by: Walter Salles
Written by: Jose Rivera
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mercedes Morán, Jean Pierre Noher, Lucas Oro

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

Monster

January 24, 2012

With her performance in “Monster,” Charlize Theron charges down the gates that have confined her to typecasting limbo and sets a new standard by which to measure her future work. In Patty Jenkins’ writing-directing debut, Theron plays Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed six men in the ’80s before she was caught and, in 2002, executed.

“Monster,” at heart, is not a slasher movie but a tortured love story between Wuornos and her teenage girlfriend, Selby Wall (Christina Ricci). Their relationship is a refuge from the despair in their separate lives: Wuornos’ lifelong degradation at the hands of men draws her to the affections of a female partner; Shelby, a lesbian, clings to Wuornos because she allows her the financial and sexual escape from the conservative stranglehold of her family.

The manipulative and desperate nature of their relationship is what kicks “Monster’s” narrative into gear. To ensure their cash flow, Selby cajoles the reluctant Wuornos into continuing to ply her trade. One night, in a fit of rage, Wuornos shoots the man who has just tortured and raped her. The trauma of this event takes her already dubious attitude to men into the realm of full-blown murderous hate.

Jenkins’ direction is assured throughout, but her opening scenes are the most powerful, depicting that sad, provincial America of trailer parks and roller rinks—that trashy, seedy outpost of frizzy hair and Journey ballads by which we are just as fascinated as depressed. As it goes, “Monster” gets increasingly bogged down in its more literal-minded melodrama, as Wuornos kills and steals, and the couple tries frantically to dodge the law. Jenkins’ ethereal early scenes are trampled over by hardworking but labored episodes of escalating tensions.

Between the two leads, Theron handily dominates. With the help of some weight gain and Tony G.’s masterful make-up effects, Theron’s transformation, down to her cocky strut and countrified twang, is startling. More than that is how confidently and naturally Theron humanizes a woman long-branded in the media as a monster. For her part, Ricci cannot reconcile Selby, the dreamy-eyed adolescent with Selby, the manipulative black widow, into a cohesive characterization. As a result, she stumbles along to Theron’s beat. Adding his salty, flint-eyed presence to the mix is Bruce Dern who graces the movie briefly as Thomas, Wuornos’ trusty father-figure.

“Monster” is a workhorse of a character study. Its plodding, sporadically effective script may not entice much, but it finds a haunting eloquence thanks to Theron’s lacerating, career-defining performance.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Patty Jenkins
Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Lee Tergesen, Annie Corley

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

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