Marquee Marquis

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-18T21:26:00.003-04:00

Investigating a possible war criminal?
There's an app for that.

Grade: A –

Director: Roman Polanski

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkerson, and Olivia Williams

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Roman Polanski continues to use the silver screen to both explicate and exorcise his personal demons. From surviving Nazi persecution as a child in the Kraków ghetto to the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family to his conviction – and subsequent flight from sentencing – for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski’s real-life travails have informed and defined his film oeuvre.

Reportedly, Polanski had to complete editing of The Ghost Writer from the confines of a jail cell and then under house arrest at his Swiss chalet as he fights extradition back to the United States. In his grand return to the modern thriller (his first since 1988’s Frantic), a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself living as a virtual exile in a foreign land, partly to escape prosecution for legitimate charges nonetheless brought in a kangaroo court by accusers with duplicitous motives. Sound familiar? There is a lot more than a Napoleon complex going on in Polanski’s mind when Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), compares her husband’s hermetic life on a windswept patch of Martha’s Vineyard to Bonaparte’s banishment to the island of St. Helena.

That other unique and proverbial Polanski archetype – the inquisitive, self-assured loner who foolhardily believes he has a grasp on matters that are actually well beyond his comprehension – comes in the form of a nameless author credited as “The Ghost” (Ewan McGregor), hired as a replacement ghostwriter for Lang’s memoirs after the original scribe met an untimely death.

Lang is under investigation for sanctioning war crimes while in office, chiefly acts of rendition against terrorist suspects, and this premise propels the ghostwriter’s eventual efforts to connect the dots between his predecessor’s demise and the high-stakes political intrigue at play. It is worth comparing Polanski’s use of current events to Green Zone, Paul Greengrass’ polemical Iraq War actioner. Greengrass created fictitious characters and a plot whose unrealized purpose was to elucidate its real-life backdrop. By contrast, Polanski shrewdly exploits a topical controversy solely to service a fictional storyline, in the same way the real battle over water rights in California was mere window-dressing for the personal mystery and psychological drama at the center of Polanski’s Chinatown.

The Ghost Writer thrives on atmospherics, artistry, and acting. Polanski’s skills as a visual virtuoso remain in fine form. He brackets Ghost Writer with silent images portending unseen deaths – the first a shot of an abandoned car sitting alone on a ferry boat intercut with a body washed ashore bobbing in the surf; the last the sublime sight of hundreds of pieces of paper gradually being blown into view as they progressively litter a city street. In between, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris – adapting his own novel, The Ghost – fashion a plot that is both morose and pulpy. Accented by Alexandre Desplat’s haunting, orchestral score, Polanski constructs set pieces so tense and finely tuned that they would be labeled “Hitchcockian” if this was any other director.

McGregor reclaims much of his lost luster, ably supplying his role with the right blend of self-assuredness and vulnerability. Brosnan plays Lang as a cross between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while Williams is mesmerizing as the emotionally bruised but politically savvy first lady (shades of Hilary?). There are also sharp supporting turns from Kim Cattrall as Lang’s longtime assistant (and perhaps more), Timothy Hutton, James Belushi, Eli Wallach, and Tom Wilkinson as one of Lang’s shadowy acquaintances.

But the real star is Polanski. Whatever his personal travails, he remains a master filmmaker. And, neo-noirs like The Ghost Writer are not only his distinctive wheelhouse, but also a welcome throwback to clever, taut political-conspiracy thrillers. This is the old stuff…this is the good stuff.

Neil Morris

Repo Men

2010-03-18T21:24:00.002-04:00

Just turn your head and cough

Grade: D +

Director: Miguel Sapochnik

Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga, and Liev Schreiber

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 41 minutes

You might want to watch the closing credits for Repo Men to see whether Michael Moore is listed as a co-producer of this humdrum, futuristic action-thriller/black comedy/bloody revenge spectacle.

In this not-so-distant dystopia, a shadowy conglomerate named The Union has cornered the market on manufacturing and selling synthetic replacement human organs. The catch: prices can reach the high six figures and the interest rate soars north of 20 percent. Oh, and if you default on your payments, the title characters – nicknamed “landlords” – have the authority to repossess the organs, even if it means killing you.

That’s the predicate facing one adept repo man, Remy (Jude Law), after an on-the-job electrocution gives him both an artificial heart he cannot afford – apparently, in the future the workers’ compensation laws have also been repealed – and a crisis of conscience over his vocation. After Remy goes on the lam, his former partner (Forest Whitaker) is dispatched to foreclose on his erstwhile childhood buddy’s delinquent ticker.

It’s the perils of hyper-privatized medicine combined with the evils of predatory lending – get it? Beyond the dime-store agitprop, director Miguel Sapochnik never finds a correct or consistent tone. The end result is at best slapdash and silly, at worst ugly and unpleasant. I don’t know whether health care reform needs a public option, but one thing Repo Men does not deserve is a public showing.

Neil Morris

Green Zone

2010-03-11T21:16:00.003-05:00

Aim for the cameraman!

Grade: C

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, and Amy Ryan

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Everything in Green Zone is punctuated with exclamation points. The Iraq War is LOUD! The Middle East is DANGEROUS! Helicopters, jeeps, and sprinting soldiers move FAST! No one, not even your friends and allies, can be TRUSTED! It’s not so much an adrenaline-rush as a steroid-transfusion.

Unfortunately, if you want in-depth analysis of the film’s gravamen—the quixotic hunt for weapons of mass destruction—the best you will get is Army warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) repeatedly screaming variations on “Where are the WMDs!” or “Tell me about the WMDs!”

Although a good movie can and should be made that investigates the political misinformation used to justify the war in Iraq, Green Zone, which was shot more than two years ago, feels like a dated political drama grounded in theatrics and buzzwords. The film’s in-your-face sense of urgency now seems strangely passé—it may as well be about feverously hunting for leprechauns or trying to uncover Iraq’s stockpiles of pixie dust.

Paul Greengrass, director of the latter two Bourne movies, sets the action in the spring of 2003, between the end of the initial invasion phase of the war and the formal establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority. What could have been a sweeping indictment of the way the United States bungled the formative stages Operation Iraqi Freedom is instead a reductive, fictionalized potboiler regarding Miller’s one-man mission to ferret out the truth about the covert, purportedly reliable intelligence about Iraq’s weapons program being spoon-fed to the whole world.

Along his road to going rogue, Miller encounters of host of half-written ciphers, each trying to extract information from him to further their own aims—at one point, Miller’s backpack was weighted down more by business cards than MREs. Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is a Paul Bremer-esque Pentagon hack carrying the water for his neocon minders. Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, wearing a five-day growth and constipated scowl) is the CIA bureau chief who calls bullshit on the supposedly sound intelligence regarding the presence of WMDs. And, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) is a Wall Street Journal reporter—and Judith Miller doppelganger—who, having helped Poundstone propound his warmongering propaganda, is now suspicious of him and his clandestine informant who goes by the code name “Magellan."

In Greengrass’ brilliant, affecting United 93, the director enlarged a single, incendiary incident into a broader canvas to create a taut, authentic and comprehensive portrait of the Sept. 11 attack. By contrast, screenwriter Brian Helgeland (still running off the fumes of L.A. Confidential) distills the disreputable underpinning for the war and all its complexities into a flurried chase to track down one Saddam general or commandeer one little black book.

Green Zone is credited as having been inspired by Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, the 2006 book by Washington Post war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. However, in place of the novel’s sardonic juxtaposition between the gilded, Oz-like bubble encasing the Green Zone and the social and ethnic tumult brewing outside its gilded gates, Greengrass fashions an action-thriller in which sound, fury and his camera-in-a-blender camouflage the narrative shortcomings of a revisionist fantasy in which one man uncovers and exposes the lies that led us to war. Instead, in terms of tone and relevance, Green Zone needed more Dr. Strangelove and less Jason Bourne.

Neil Morris

*Orginally published at www.indyweek.com

Remember Me

2010-03-11T21:13:00.001-05:00

If you're a good actor, then I'm James Bond

Grade: D +

Director: Allen Coulter

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Emile de Ravin, Pierce Brosnan, and Chris Cooper

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Remember Me ought to be titled Remember James Dean. In this dour effort to prove Robert Pattinson can act, nomadic TV director Allen Coulter concocts a post-modern rip-off of Rebel Without a Cause, starring Pattinson doing his best/worst Dean impersonation to play Tyler Hawkins, an emotionally troubled rich-kid with daddy issues who subsists on a diet of beer and cigarettes and sporadically attends NYU when not part-timing at the local bookstore.

The film opens in 1991 when young Ally Craig (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) watches her mother get gunned down on a New York City subway platform by a street hoodlum. Ten years later (note the time…note the place), Ally lives at home, attends college, and enjoys an uneasy relationship with her cop father, Neil (Chris Cooper, struggling with his New Yawk accent).

After Neil arrests and roughs-up Tyler, he decides to date his daughter as some half-witted measure of revenge. Naturally, before long Tyler is cooking Ally dinner, Ally is wearing Tyler’s sweats, and the two are splashing each other with water and exchanging inane bon mots: “I have a coaster if you’d like a coaster.” “Sorry, I don’t do coasters until the third date.”

We have no idea why Tyler’s business mogul father (Pierce Brosnan) is so estranged from his children or his ex-wife. Or why Tyler’s kid sister (Ruby Jerins) is bullied by the girls in school. Or why his sister getting her hair shorn by those mean girls proves the miraculous balm that heals every deep-seated dysfunction afflicting these annoying, self-absorbed cretins. Or why Pattinson and de Ravin are unable to exude even a modicum of acting acumen or romantic chemistry.

But, nothing explains the risible plot twist – one of the most tasteless since The Boy in The Striped Pajamas – that manages to run roughshod over a storyline that means so little to begin with. Remember Me? I’d rather not.

Neil Morris

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-04T21:14:00.004-05:00

Beet juice, Beet juice, Beet juice...

Grade: B –

Director: Tim Burton

Starring: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Michael Sheen, and Alan Rickman

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

There is a lot about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that’s curiouser and curiouser, but just not much “muchness.” It is a phantasmagorical fever-dream that is both absorbing and banal, a looking glass that reflects Narnia, Middle-earth, and assorted other child-escapist imaginaria while refracting its source text.

The seemingly sensible argument that Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novella Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and similar fare is undercut by Linda Woolverton’s updated screenplay, a mash-up of Alice’s Adventures with Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and the creatures inhabiting his nonsense poem “Japperwocky.” Although these narrative liberties may repulse English majors and Carroll purists, they do allow Burton the freedom to emboss the story with his own unique vision. What the director does with this license, however, is a conundrum worthy of a Mad Hatter riddle.

Ten years after her first trip to “Underland” – which she does not remember – a now 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself at a personal crossroads. Following the death of her beloved father, Alice is due to become betrothed to a man she does not love in front a throng of family and friends at a Victorian estate party. Problem is, Alice keeps wilting under the pressure and spying a strange white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and a pocket watch which, at the moment of her matrimonial truth, she chases, again, down the rabbit hole.

There, Alice encounters a host of familiar characters: the aforementioned White Rabbit (voice by Michael Sheen); the chain-smoking Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman); the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry); Tweedledee and Tweedledum; and, of course, the tangerine-hued Hatter, played to Burtonesque delirium by Johnny Depp. Seems only Alice can save Underland from the clutches of the cruel, bulbous-headed Iracebeth the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the Japperwock and restoring Iracebeth’s younger sister – the kindly, pacifist White Queen (Anne Hathaway) – to the throne.

Burton has always embodied the sentiment behind Alice’s query, “What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?” There is wonder in the film’s unrelenting visuals, comic spark, and intriguing voice works – particularly impressive is the trippy cool of Rickman and Fry, while Christopher Lee is instantly recognizable as the Japperwock’s resonant baritone. But, it is a sense of awe not shared by the surprisingly aplomb Alice. Burton’s 3D pictorial of a young girl’s arrested development and reluctant embrace of womanhood belies the fact that Alice’s entire time underground is spent having one creature after another tell her where to go and what to do. Her path seems remarkably inevitable, yet somehow the Alice that crawls out of the rabbit hole now is a budding feminist with aims of carrying on the family business and blazing trade routes to China.

The pleasingly zany spectacle of it all comes at the expense of the story’s soul. Beyond their collective lunacy – “We’re all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat famously informs – we barely ascertain any character motivation. The audience cranes its neck to hear a lone, brief exchange between the regal sisters, hoping for some nugget of exposition about the germ of their animus. The revelation that the Red Queen felt the need to behead her kingly husband passes quickly and without elaboration, much like the emotional undercurrent to her relationship with the head of her Army, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover!).

Woolverton previously penned such inoffensive Disney offerings as Beauty the Beast and The Lion King. So, her Alice in Wonderland scrub is not that surprising, nor is the fact that it may well appeal to younger viewers looking for a slightly edgy, mostly palatable diversion – how else to contextualize Hatter’s abominable final act breakdance? Burton has told interviewers that he never felt emotionally connected to Carroll’s work, and here he seems to be trying – and failing –to bring more rhyme, reason, and heart to this familiar tale. However, another Alice assertion proves as apt as ever: “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”

Neil Morris

Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Brooklyn's Finest

2010-03-04T21:10:00.003-05:00

Hey Don, there's this tax guy I gotta hook you up with...

Grade: B –

Starring: Antoine Fuqua

Starring: Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, and Wesley Snipes

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hour, 20 minutes

A thin blue film coats Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest, the director’s welcome needed return to his hardboiled cop drama roots. And, like Fuqua’s Training Day, this is a testosterone-fueled, actor-driven policier that favors melodramatics over originality.

The narrative is a loosely connected triptych following the travails of three ethically challenged police officers: A burned-down flatfoot on the eve of retirement (Richard Gere); a drug-addled, financially strapped narc (Ethan Hawke); and an undercover cop (Don Cheadle) dug deep inside the drug network of a local kingpin (Wesley Snipes). The archetypes and clichés run as long as the Brooklyn Bridge, but Fuqua infuses them with incisive character development that transcends the superficial plot and rationed screen-time.

Brooklyn’s Finest is a live Wire electrified with almost cartoonish intensity. Luckily, the actors walking this beat know the score. While an emotionally distant Gere is miscast, Hawke has perfected the man-on-the-edge role. But, the film belongs to the tremendous yet still strangely underrated Cheadle, flashing the same streetwise verisimilitude and offbeat dialogue that previously informed his performances in Out of Sight and Devil in the Blue Dress.

Neil Morris

Shutter Island

2010-02-18T23:18:00.004-05:00

I'm a sexy beast...No, I'M a sexy beast...

Grade: B

Director: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, and Patricia Clarkson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hour, 18 minutes

Even Martin Scorsese’s missteps are spectacular. Like Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski before him, the 67-year-old Scorsese tries his hand at redefining the horror-thriller genre with Shutter Island. For everyone who will regale in Scorsese’s ageless craftsmanship, others will recoil from a story that trawls mental illness, domestic violence and the Holocaust for cheap thrills and chills. Adapted from a novel by Mystic River scribe Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island is awash in the very nihilism it meekly assails, erecting thematic and historical straw men to buttress Scorsese’s provocative visual flourishes.

Leonardo DiCaprio, now firmly ensconced as the muse of Scorsese’s later career, stars as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal sent with his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to the titular (and fictitious) island in Boston Harbor. The year is 1954 and their mission is to track down an escapee from Ashecliffe Asylum, a hospital for the criminally insane. After a hurricane maroons Daniels on the island, he begins to suffer a torrent of nightmares, headaches and hallucinations that are associated with own demons, including the memories of the murder of his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), and atrocities he committed as a World War II Army grunt during the liberation of Dachau. We also discover Daniel’s real motives behind accepting his assignment to Ashecliffe, and Scorsese fashions Daniels’ torment as a caldron of 1950s paranoia and mankind’s capacity for violence. In keeping with the Eisenhowerian milieu, there is lots of chatter about atolls, A-bombs, North Korean brainwashing and even the House Un-American Activities Committee.

How all these seemingly disparate plot points are shoehorned together is half the fun—or folly—of Shutter Island. Suffice it to say there is a corker of a plot twist that, while outlandish, manages to tie up most of the loose ends. Although DiCaprio gives his white-hot beleaguered best and accent as thick as chowdah’, the film proves a divisive affair: sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening. While DiCaprio has his pick of roles (and his willingness to parlay his career capital on fare like this and Revolutionary Road is admirable), here, however, the 35-year-old actor still looks a bit young to effectively convey a world-weary war veteran and widower. Ruffalo adds little, but the other supporting cast includes meaty performances from Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, as well as memorable single-scene monologues from Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley and Ted Levine.

Like the opening shot of a seasick Teddy, Scorsese regurgitates a bevy of cinematic influences, the most obvious being Sam Fuller’s 1963 film Shock Corridor, about a journalist who commits himself to a mental institution to solve a murder. Scorsese admits being inspired by the 1940s noir thrillers of Jacques Tourneur and Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. Even casual moviegoers will see reflections of Kubrick’s The Shining and enough Hitchcock borrowings to shame even Brian De Palma: There are conspicuous allusions to Psycho, Spellbound, North by Northwest and Vertigo (a spiral staircase ascent to a tower’s overlook figures in the film’s climax).

In other words, for all its CGI genuflecting, Shutter Island is an old-fashioned potboiler that, for all its faults and self-importance, is unrelenting in its audacity and visual stimulation. In the end, your opinion of Scorsese’s oeuvre will likely dictate your opinion of this film. His devotees will be delighted: Count me in.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Wolfman

2010-02-11T22:14:00.004-05:00

Example # 137 of what I'd rather do than
have to watch The Wolfman again

Grade: C –

Director: Joe Johnston

Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes

The Wolfman 2K10 aims to revive the werewolf genre by harkening back to the storyline of Lon Chaney Jr.’s original horror classic. Instead, director Joe Johnston (Jumanji; Jurassic Park III) cranks out a schlocky creature feature occupying Thomas Schatz’s parody stage of generic evolution, paying more homage to B-monster movies than the golden age of horror films.

Borrowing heavily from Curt Siodmak’s 1941 screenplay, the story centers around Lawrence Talbot (Benicio De Toro), a 19^th century American stage actor who returns to his family’s English manse following the death of his brother. Lawrence tries to mend the strained relationship with his father, Sir John (Anthony Hopkins), but the hunt for his brother’s killer leads to an encounter with a Lycan roaming the countryside. One chomp on the neck later, Lawrence morphs into a werewolf every full moon, which in the film’s fictional hamlet seems to take place every other day despite the fact that they actually occur about once a month.

Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self’s updated script goes to great lengths to document Lawrence’s trouble childhood, including the mysterious death of his mother and his stint in an insane asylum. But, it’s a plot device that holds little import since Lawrence appears to be a well-adjusted adult until werewolf DNA infects his body. Still, that is intelligent storytelling compared to the film’s relentlessly insipid dialogue, most of it monotone mutterings between Lawrence and Gwen (Emily Blunt), his late brother’s ex-fiancée. In a matter of weeks, we’re suppose to believe that Lawrence and Gwen end up falling in love, but for the life of me I cannot fathom when, why, or how it happened. Del Toro and Blunt have rarely been worse; their lifeless line-readings are as silly as they are hollow – “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you.”

The Wolfman might have worked as satire except it lacks the essential measure of self-awareness to merit such consideration, with the possible exception of a climactic death scene that elicits (un)intended guffaws. Only Hopkins and Hugo Weaving – as a Scotland Yard investigator on the prowl for Lawrence’s hairy alter-ego – seem to grasp the inanity of it all, and in turn they chew all the scenery in sight. While Del Toro and Blunt brood over every disjointed scene, Hopkins delivers his lines with a wink and a smile. And, Weaving wraps his Agent Smith-best around howlers like, “Rules are all that keep us from a dog-eat-dog world.”

The film only succeeds when the CGI fur – and limbs, heads, blood, and entrails – start to fly; it more than earns its R-rating. Otherwise, as a drama, love story, or thriller, The Wolfman is surprisingly, disappointingly neutered.

Neil Morris

The Last Station

2010-02-11T22:10:00.002-05:00

Stop - your fake whiskers are tickling me

Grade: B –

Director: Michael Hoffman

Starring: Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, Paul Giamatti, Anne-Marie Duff, and Kerry Condon

MPAA Rating:

Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Leo Tolstoy is regarded as one of the world’s greatest novelists, penning such masterpieces as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was a Christian anarchist and educational reformer whose teachings inspired a movement formed by his followers, called Tolstoyans. But, if writer-director Michael Hoffman is to be believed, all you need to understand the famous author is summed up his quote that opens The Last Station: “Everything I know, I know only because I love.”

Divining the true object of Tolstoy’s affections is the premise of Hoffman’s film, which is set in 1910 and tracks the writer’s final days from his home at Yasnaya Polyana to the Astapovo railway station where he finally succumbed to pneumonia. We see the warring camps through the eyes of a fresh-faced disciple played by James McAvoy. On one side is Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy’s wife of over 40 years, mother of 13 children (five died during childhood), and his secretary and manger during his most productive literary years. Over time, however, their relationship soured greatly, and her role in Tolstoy’s life is eventually supplanted by his Tolstoyan followers, particularly their founder, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti).

The Last Station details the battle between Sofya and Chertkov for Tolstoy’s spirit, revolving principally around ownership of the copyrights to Tolstoy’s early, most lucrative works. Chertkov wants Tolstoy to renounce his interest in them ostensibly so they can be enjoyed freely by the Russian people; Sofya sees them as his personal and financial legacy, compensation for years of hard work and sacrifice.

Any examination of right and wrong in this conflict is a far murkier than the position Hoffman takes, which is solidly behind Sofya, a histrionic but devoted spouse who sneers at Chertkov’s duplicitous, high-minded cooing. Giamatti’s performance is delectably devious given the part he’s given; any fault in the way Chertkov is presented rests squarely on Hoffman’s one-dimensional rendering.

Hoffman ignores any detailed analysis of the sweeping political issues or influences at play, nor does he explicate obvious subplots such as why Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), Tolstoy’s daughter, aligns herself with Chertkov against her mother.

Although the screenplay is actually adapted from a 1990 novel by Jay Parini, the stagey presentation of this subject-matter makes the film feel like a cross between The Lion in Winter and The Madness of King George; indeed, Count and Countess Tolstoys’ noble titles only reinforce the palace drama ambiance.

All that said, The Last Station is not strictly a high-gloss biopic or stuffy agitprop. At its heart, this is an acting exercise for the ageless Plummer and Mirren, both Oscar-nominated for their performances. Both play their meaty roles to the hilt; Mirren gets to crash through a windows, fall into a pond, and fire off a firearm, while Plummer clucks like chicken as foreplay before one of Leo and Sofya’s few intimate moments.

The closing credits contain rare, vintage footage of Tolstoy and others characters depicted in the film. Beyond the historical significance, it is the one instance when The Last Station feels authentic, not something being projected – however ably – to the balcony of a West End theatre.

Neil Morris

Crazy Heart

2010-02-04T21:01:00.002-05:00

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar

Grade: B –

Director: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Ferrell, and Robert Duvall

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

“A recovering alcoholic country music singer/songwriter seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young woman and her son.”

Older, discerning filmgoers will recognize this synopsis of Tender Mercies, the 1983 Horton Foote-penned film that gave Robert Duvall his only Oscar. More than a quarter-century later, cinematic history is poised to repeat itself with Crazy Heart, a film with the same premise – and a supporting turn by Duvall, for Pete’s sake – that is probably going to give the just-nominated Jeff Bridges his first Academy Award.

Broadly, Crazy Heart rehashes the general theme of the down-and-out has-been looking for both personal and professional redemption. But its most glaring similarity with the likes of True Grit, Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler, and, yes, Tender Mercies is their ideation of the Jungian archetype of the Wise Old Man, an authority/father figure and spiritual guide that manifests itself in many forms. According the Jung, the Old Man represents the masculine unconscious for women. Conversely, one facet of his ascendancy to Wise Old Man is an integration of the feminine components of the psyche.

Thus, the Wise Old Man is often accompanied in literature by a young girl, personifying the melding of Logos and Eros (Meaning and Life). With the lone exception of The Wrestler, where the two main characters were closer in age, such is the case in all the films mentioned above. (As an ironic aside, Bridges is slated to star in an upcoming Coen Brothers remake of True Grit.)

In Crazy Heart, middle-aged boozy crooner ‘Bad’ Blake (Bridges) suffers a solitary life of faded glory. Once the toast of Nashville, Bad now drives his beat-up pickup from one dustbowl to another, staying in cheap motels and grinding out gigs in seedy bars and bowling allies. Bad’s salvation begins once he launches a romantic relationship with the much-younger Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an aspiring journalist and divorcée raising her 4-year-old son.

Besides its derivative storyline, this directorial debut from co-screenwriter Scott Cooper suffers from a lack of genuine chemistry between its lead actors. Beyond their distracting age difference (28 years), Gyllenhaal – long an indie darling who, admittedly, is also Oscar nominated for her performance here – has gradually devolved her once accomplished acting style into a collection of tics and mannerisms, suggesting a self-indulgence that demands roles and scenes adapt to her method instead of the other way around.

Conflict resolution comes easy, like speed bumps along the route to an altogether anticlimactic finish line. Bad’s sobriety is only an AA meeting montage away. His financial woes instantly vanish once he swallows his pride and starts composing songs again for former protégé, country music star Tommy Sweet (Colin Ferrell), who stands ready to help his erstwhile mentor. And when Bad visits a bar and loses track of Jean’s son, it only takes a few anxious moments for the boy to summarily turn-up; Jean’s ire at Bad’s irresponsibility is massively tempered by the fact that she lets an alcoholic scalawag babysit her son in the first place.

Still, even when Bad is at his baddest, he never fully loses his lovable Lebowski-esque charm. While Crazy Heart has as much originality as a country-standard cover band, Bridges’ terrific solo act is a showstopper. The film is transparently and unabashedly designed as a vehicle for his overdue Oscar, and, frankly, that’s a goal worth endorsing.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Dear John

2010-02-04T20:57:00.004-05:00

After we finish kissing, it's time to hang sheetrock

Grade: C

Director: Lasse Hallström

Starring: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins, and Henry Thomas

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

For all their schmaltzy underpinning, two things have always buoyed the movie adaptations of New Bern-based author Nicholas Sparks’ novels. Employing critic’s prerogative first is their North Carolina setting (even if they’re not always filmed in the state). Second is their durable casting, particularly romantic leads that include Kevin Costner and Robin Wright Penn (Message in a Bottle), Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (The Notebook), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane (Nights in Rodanthe).

I will not hold against Dear John that it relocates the book’s Wilmington, N.C., setting to Charleston, S.C., a change probably motivated less by artistic license than variances between the states’ respective film incentive programs. But, the casting of Channing Tatum, the hunky hulk who has mumbled his way through roles in Step Up (1 & 2), She’s the Man, Stop-Loss, and G.I. Joe, is troublesome on its face. The choice becomes downright dire once Tatum is called upon to tiptoe his way through the story’s dense emotional minefield.

While on leave from deployment as an Army Ranger and visiting his father’s beach house, John Tyree (Tatum) meets and falls for Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), a doe-eyed college student whose summer job appears to be relentless do-gooder. She works for Habitat for Humanity! She looks after her friend’s autistic child and want to work with the developmental challenged after graduation! She successfully diagnoses John’s elderly father (Richard Jenkins) as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, apparently something no health professional had ever done judging by John’s shocked reaction!

Dear John goes AWOL as a love story, the typical raison d'être for Sparks’ books/films. Contributing factors include Tatum’s performance, a splintered narrative that constantly veers from South Carolina’s shores to John’s post-9/11 reenlistment and deployment, and director Lasse Hallström’s ponderous direction, which distills John and Savannah’s coupling down to frolicking in the surf, making-out in the rain, and monotonous voiceovers of their overseas letters to each other (eventually including the eponymous missive).

The film’s saving grace is the complicated relationship between John and his father, who Jenkins plays with great skill and pathos. John’s dad loves his son but doesn’t possess the ability to fully express it, while John loves his father but lacks the understanding to cope with his emotional deficits. Their strained bond throws the emotional gut-punch inherent to every Sparks tearjerker. More importantly, it’s also Dear John’s most earnest and reflective segment.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

When in Rome

2010-01-29T00:58:00.005-05:00

Totally abulous

Grade: F

Director: Mark Steve Johnson

Starring: Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Anjelica Huston, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, Bobby Moynihan, and Danny DeVito

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

In the timewaster When in Rome, Josh Duhamel plays a sportswriter whose erstwhile football career ended when he was struck by lightning during a game. Amazingly, this ultimately irrelevant factoid is not the strangest part of this awful film – not by a long shot.

For starters, this latest cinematic IED from “director” Mark Steven Johnson (Ghost Rider; Daredevil) is another incarnation of the insidiously fashionable premise of the hardnosed, talented working girl whose life is nonetheless an abject failure because she hasn’t gotten hitched yet. Let me say it here and now – henceforth, no film with this plotline will ever get a positive review out of me.

Oh, if only the incompetence stopped there. While in Rome for her sister’s whirlwind wedding to a stereotypical Italian hot-blood, Beth (Kristen Bell) – a chronically single New York City-based art curator – meets-cute with the hunk of her dreams, Nick (Josh Duhamel), at least until Beth spies Nick smooching some bella donna. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Italian lady in the red dress will turn out to be some friend or relative, and, thus, where the story of Beth and Nick is headed.

That, however, is when the banal turns bizarre. In a fit of self-pity, Beth pilfers three “magic” coins (and one poker chip) out of a Fountain of Love. Seems idiotic legend holds that doing so means the person who tossed it in will fall hopelessly in love with you.

Set aside the crippling coincidence that the four coins Beth pinches all belong to men living in New York City. What is just as off-putting as the folly that a woman is eternally deficient until she has a man steering her life’s ship is the notion that any man consumed with undying love is essentially a stalker. In Beth’s imbroglio, she must suffer the obsessive affections of a street magician (Jon Heder), an Italian sketch artist (Will Arnett), a sausage magnate (Danny De Vito), and an ad body model (Dax Shepard, the lone oasis in this comedic wasteland), all whom are able to track Beth down whenever and wherever.

Whose love is for real? Will Beth and Nick get together? How will I ever get back the 85-felt-like-185 minutes I spent watching this junk? Of course, what else should you expect besides a cinematic cow pie from the screenwriting team that brought us The Family Man, Evolution, and the retched Old Dogs?

This film’s surreal tenor is a slipshod stab at a Bollywood-style romantic farce, an allusion driven home by the song-and-dance routine the cast performs over the closing credits, which is a Bollywood staple. It’s the best part of When in Rome – the actors finally seem to be having some fun, and the audience finally gets to bolt for the theater exit.

Neil Morris

The Messenger

2010-01-29T00:54:00.003-05:00

Grade: A –

Director Oren Moveman

Starring: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, and Samantha Morton

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

The best war movies don’t always take place on the battlefield.

Film classics such as The Best Years of Our Lives, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Born on the Fourth of July are grounded in the unfortunate truth that the theater of war extends from the frontline to the home front. Even still, the backdrop for The Messenger, writer-director Oren Moverman’s astonishing debut, is especially resonant (and cinematically uncharted). The film follows two soldiers assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service, responsible for visiting and informing families of the deaths of their loved ones.

Before even a modicum of character development, this is a profound premise. These ‘messengers’ are themselves soldiers must repeatedly re-suffer their own wounds and demons through experiencing the raw grief of others. In many instances, the mere sight of them standing on a doorstep is enough to provoke grown men into fits of unbridled anguish.

One of the soldiers is Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a highly decorated, seriously wounded, and psychologically scarred Iraq war vet winding down his remaining months of enlistment. His partner is Cpt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a thrice-divorced recovering alcoholic ramrod who represses his own demons behind a façade of carefully proscribed Army protocols: Never touch the family members; use only clear words like “died” and “killed” in order to avoid the vagaries of euphemisms such as “gone” or “fallen”; etc.

Early scenes in which Montgomery and Stone carry out their sad duty during a series of home visits – and, in one case, inadvertently encounter the parents of a fallen solider in a grocery store – are the film’s heart-wrenching emotional core. Moverman’s deft presentation keeps these honest and moving moments from becoming manipulative or polemical.

During one notification, Montgomery becomes drawn to Olivia (Samantha Morton), a war widow, and their relationship skirts procedural and ethical boundaries. Moverman lingers over this subplot to the point that it becomes a tedious guessing game of “will they are won’t they” (and “should or shouldn’t they”). Ultimately, however, Montgomery and Olivia (and Stone, for that matter) are all lost souls whose pain shares a common origin, each searching for the solace of a kindred spirit.

Besides its affecting subject-matter, the strength of The Messenger is its ensemble cast. Not since The People vs. Larry Flynt has Harrelson been this good, running the emotional gambit to play the tortured, complex Stone. Morton continues to solidify her standing as one of our best, most underrated actresses. But, this film truly belongs to Foster, who previously turned heads with roles in Alpha Dog and 3:10 to Yuma. Here, the young method actor effortlessly disappears into his role, producing the sort of stellar, transcendent performance that defines and catapults careers.

The Messenger makes an interesting companion to The Hurt Locker, the two being the most mature films yet set against the backdrop of the Iraq war. While Hurt Locker is largely defined by its milieu, the message of The Messenger applies just as intensely to any military conflict during any era.

Neil Morris

Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Extraordinary Measures

2010-01-22T00:12:00.003-05:00

And over here, I've outlined how we manage to sustain our careers.
It's a complex formula.

Grade: C

Director: Tom Vaughen

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Harrison Ford, and Keri Russell

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

To paraphrase Simon & Garfunkel, “Where have you gone, Han Solo?”

Appearing as a literal reflection of his bygone glory, it is telling that Harrison Ford’s most memorable recent film performance was the brief glimpse of his Star Wars star-maker in (500) Days of Summer. In recent years, Ford’s onscreen offerings have been a series of forgettable, phoned-in variations on the same crotchety curmudgeon persona.

In Extraordinary Measures, Ford accomplishes the near-impossible. He not only convinces us look back fondly on the halcyon days of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but he also makes us yearn for the blessed sanctuary of scenes in which costar Brendan Fraser appears without him.

Based on true events, the story behind Extraordinary Measures is undoubtedly inspiring. Fraser plays John Crowley, a biotechnology executive whose two youngest children are afflicted with Pompe disease, a degenerative neuromuscular disorder with no known cure. Facing the impending death of his children, Crowley reaches out to Dr. Robert Stonehill (Ford), a research scientist living in flyover country and one of the leading theorists on Pompe disease. Crowley and Stonehill team up to supply the respective bucks and brains behind a biotech startup dedicated to discovering and expediting a treatment for Pompe’s.

Director Tom Vaughan merits credit for a respectful depiction of the interplay amongst the Crowley family. In contrast to other films that often wallow in every manipulative, heart-wrenching symptom and setback, time is spent showing the Crowleys as steadfast parents trying to help their children lead the most normal lives possible. Likewise, even when wheelchair-bound or bedridden, Pompe sufferers Megan and Patrick are cast as precocious and mischievous – in other words, they act like regular kids.

Where the film begins to falter is when the family drama segues into a medical drama revolving around Crowley and Co.’s foray through the financial/bureaucratic labyrinth of medical research and development. This is heady, informative stuff in the right cinematic hands. Here, however, it’s presented more like a film adaptation of “Biotech Startups for Dummies” shoehorned into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

From one scene to another, John Crowley is either a devoted, undaunted dad or a resourceful businessman. But, the film does not attempt to effectively bridge the gap between these two sides of the same character until the film’s final act, when Crowley and Stonehill cut some bioethical corners to ensure Megan and Patrick take part in clinical trials of a possible treatment. Until then, it is a rather discomforting to watch Crowley celebrate earning millions off his biotech startup while his children continue to deteriorate.

But, the real problem is deciphering what purpose Stonehill serves in this story. Seeing how the screenplay is based a book by Geeta Anand named “The Cure,” it is no shocker where this story is heading. And, the real-life Stonehill, Dr. William Canfield, was probably instrumental in any medical breakthrough. Within the context of this film, however, what’s surprising is that Stonehill is not ultimately responsible for the enzyme developed to treat Pompe’s. He’s just an irascible, eccentric egghead who doesn’t return telephone calls left by the parents of sick children pleading for Stonehill’s help in his chosen area of expertise. He yells at and alienates his family, friends, and coworkers. And, he holds his specialized knowledge for ransom hoping some desperate dad will bankroll his exit out of a low-paying college research job.

Right after Crowley throws caution to the wind by leaving a lucrative corporate career to relocate his family to Nebraska and start his business with Stonehill, he visits the doctor to discuss strategy in advance of an upcoming meeting with potential venture capitalists. Instead, Stonehill just heaves a file folder full of crumpled papers at him and leaves to go bass fishing. The scene is intended to make Stonehill look folksy; instead, he just comes off like a jerk.

Extraordinary Measures is the first movie released by the production subsidiary CBS Films. With its formulaic plotting, plodding pacing, and even the actual use of Eric Clapton’s “Change The World,” it looks more like something usually broadcasted on the company’s TV network arm. Instead of medical miracles, the film’s title more aptly describes what’s necessary at this point to resuscitate Harrison Ford’s ailing career.

Neil Morris

The Lovely Bones

2010-01-14T21:16:00.001-05:00

Wait, you're not a vampire, are you?

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, and Rose McIver

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

It’s not the story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl that makes reviewing The Lovely Bones such a thorny undertaking.

If anything seemed like a sure thing, it was the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s mega-bestseller – it remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year – directed by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, helmsman of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, and apropos of Sebold’s dark subject, Heavenly Creatures.

Instead, apart from Stanley Tucci’s acclaimed turn as serial killer George Harvey, The Lovely Bones has been shut out of the awards season accolades. Frankly, some of the catcalls are nitpicky and unjustified. One of the most repeated criticisms is Jackson’s decision not to shoot the book’s gruesome, emotional touchstone, in which Harvey rapes and dismembers 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, Oscar-nominated for Atonement). Jackson proclaimed such a scene would “make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch” and that he had “no interest” in filming “anything that depicted violence towards…a young person in a way that was serious…”

Jackson’s larger, more cogent point is that the lurid rendering of such a heinous act is so combustible that it would suck the narrative and emotional oxygen out of the rest of the film. Indeed, The Lovely Bones is principally the story of Susie’s journey to an afterlife called “the in-between,” where she looks down on not only her killer, but also her family and friends as they struggle to cope with her death.

Jackson’s CGI-laden rendering of Susie’s hereafter is both risky and problematic. His ceaseless psychedelic representations are seemingly lifted from Terry Gilliam’s cutting room floor. But, the tableau is occasionally bucolic and evocatively spiritual. When Jack (Mark Wahlberg), Susie’s grieving father, smashes the collection of ships-in-a-bottle he and his deceased daughter once constructed together, the juxtaposition of life-sized shipwrecks that simultaneously occur along a rocky coastline in Susie’s afterlife is an affecting blend of bombast and melancholy.

The real problem with The Lovely Bones is that Jackson seems caught in his own in-between world. For starters, he adopts the book’s early-1970s suburbia setting, a milieu that speaks more to Sebold’s age (born in 1963) than any meaningful approximation of “more innocent times.” More significantly, Jackson takes the book’s already cumbersome plot points and lacquers them with jolting narrative and tonal shifts. The story’s meditative core metastasizes into a psychological thriller, police procedural, revenge saga, love story, coming-of-age tale, dark comedy, family drama, and, yes, spiritual odyssey. Taken individually, some of these subplots work well. As a whole, the result is schizophrenic and strangely emotionless.

Wahlberg proves both too young and lacking in emotional depth to portray the tormented Jack. Carolyn Dando and Reece Ritchie seemingly trained at the Twilight acting academy to play, respectively, the clairvoyant Ruth Conners and Susie’s would-be heartthrob, Ray. The rest of the otherwise game cast is repeatedly squandered: Susan Sarandon’s role as boozy Grandma Lynn is played for incongruous comic relief; the part of Abigail (Rachel Weisz), Susie’s mom, is edited down to the point of inertia; Lindsey (Rose McIver), Susie’s sister, primarily plays Nancy Drew and jogs around her neighborhood…a lot.

Even the precocious Ronan is reduced to monotonous narration and gaping at green screens. Her talents, like the other moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout The Lovely Bones, suffocate under the weight of great expectations and muddled implementations.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

A Single Man

2010-01-14T21:12:00.002-05:00

Did we just slip into an Abercromie & Fitch ad?

Grade: B

Director: Tom Ford

Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, and Matthew Goode

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 41 minutes

The goal of a good fashioner designer –like a film director – is to stylize humanity without sacrificing its spirit.

As the decade-long creative director for Gucci, Tom Ford helped turn around an ailing brand and earned international acclaim. Now, Ford has turned his attention to Tinseltown by directing his first movie, A Single Man, based on the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood. Set in 1962, it depicts one day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 50ish, gay English college professor living in a Los Angeles glass-and-timber home, eight months after the sudden death of his longtime partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). George not only lives a closeted life but is unable to openly unburden himself of the pain caused by the death of his beloved. Finding no meaning in a life of emotional solitude, George prepares to commit suicide.

A Single Man benefits from maintaining a narrow focus on its troubled protagonist and expressing broader social commentary only by extension, although the lone notable exception is when George lectures his class on the persecution of minorities by way of manipulating society’s fear.

Ford’s background figures highly in his directing, as Single Man contains moments of filmmaking at its most exquisite. The camerawork, costumes, set designs, and brooding soundtrack are so sumptuous they essentially become their own characters. For a while, Ford employs his visual devices to conjure a meditative, melancholy portrait of an otherwise successful man weary of bearing the yoke of private torment and public repression.

At the same time, there is no moment of George’s everyday too mundane to merit its own slow-motion montage, or too inconsequential to warrant a plaintive string accompaniment. Some of the visual imagery quickly grows pretentious, including recurring underwater footage of a floating nude male body.

What rescues the film are its two headline performances. Foremost is Firth, who effectively underplays to convey George’s crippling inner anguish. Take, as one of many fine examples, when George learns of Jim’s death by telephone and informed he is not welcome at the “family-only” funeral. With camera in close-up, the range of emotions Firth conjures while barely cracking his visage is an acting masterclass.

The other is Julianne Moore’s brief but blazing turn as George’s longtime, gin-fueled gal pal, Charley, in many ways the film’s most complex character. George and Charley share both a deep friendship and fleeting past sexual relationship. But, while they rely on each other for moral and emotional support, each is a fractured soul. Charley remains torn between sympathy for George and her resentment that the one man she ever truly loved could not reciprocate, instead turning into a “fucking poof.”

Firth and Moore breathe life into Ford’s glossy canvas, elevating A Single Man from a superficial photo spread into a work of poignant elegance.

Neil Morris

Leap Year

2010-01-07T23:34:00.002-05:00

Grade: C –

Director: Anand Tucker

Starring: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, and Adam Scott

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

Missing only a leprechaun jonesing for his Lucky Charms, the Irish-set Leap Year loops in as many lush landscapes and quirky archetypes as the Emerald Isle can bear. If it were a product of the country’s tourism board, the film would be a four-leaf clover. As a romantic-comedy, however, it’s cinematic stein of stale ale.

Dismayed that her cardiologist boyfriend, Jeremy (Adam Scott), hasn’t yet proposed marriage, Anna Brady (Amy Adams), a Boston-based apartment stager (a distinctive occupation that, naturally, figures nada in the film’s inert plot), Googles the supposed Irish custom that says women may propose to their reluctant beaus every four years on February 29.

Well, it just happens that Jeremy – who’d rather tend patients than his gal – is in Dublin for a medical conference on leap day. So, Anna packs her Louis Vuitton and strikes out for Ireland to pop the question herself. However, weather-related contrivances plant Anna somewhere along Ireland’s coast, a two days drive away from engagement.

So, Anna needs a ride into town. And, the town’s only courier is a handsome, boorish bar/innkeeper named Declan (Matthew Goode). And, Anna and Declan can’t stand to be in each other’s presence. You don’t need an itinerary to see where this story’s heading; the only hard part is figuring out why you chose to go along for the ride.

Director Anand Tucker (Shopgirl; Hilary and Jackie) has a grasp of visual style, but he buries his romantic plotline somewhere between stepping in cow pies and wringing chicken necks. Lame pratfalls and DOA yucks litter the comatose screenplay by go-to hacks Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont – their writing credits could fill the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart. The film wants to emulate gender-bickering classics like It Happened One Night. Instead, it’s part of an odd trend of women’s pictures in which the smart, independent woman must get abased before she wises-up and hooks-up with the man of her dreams – who she usually met just 48 hours ago or so – and dump her otherwise innocent boyfriend.

Adams deserves better than slumming in some mindless January release. If only Leap Year were the sort of film that came ‘round as often as its namesake.

Neil Morris

Youth in Revolt

2010-01-07T23:26:00.003-05:00

Tyler Durden says to start lifting weights

Grade: B

Starring: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Zach Galifianakis, Erik Knudsen, Steve Buscemi, Adhir Kalyan, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, and Justin Long

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

It’s a familiar plotline for anyone who has watched movies since the 1980s: sexually frustrated teen seeks to lose his virginity, falls head-over-heels for a beautiful girl, and then undergoes a series of wacky exploits on his way to accomplishing his goal.

That director Miguel Areta (The Good Girl; Chuck & Buck) embraces such a shopworn subgenre in adapting C.D. Payne’s farcical coming-of-age novel Youth in Revolt is itself an ironic commentary on the landscape of cinematic comedies. Still, this is no Porky’s or slice of American Pie. Youth in Revolt owes more to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Little Darlings, and even Jean-Luc Godard, and while it may not be in the same class as that esteemed company, it is heady, hilarious fare that is already the surprise film of the young year.

Michael Cera has seemingly played the character of precocious, neurotic teenager Nick Twisp since his Arrested Development days. The 16-year-old Nick is a Holden Caulfield with a penchant for Sinatra and autoeroticism who longs to both shed his virginity and sever ties with his divorced parents (Jean Smart and Steve Buscemi). Mom cycles through loser boyfriends while Dad is shacked up with a bikini-clad blonde closer to Nick’s age.

When Mom’s latest lout (Zach Galifianakis) lands in hot-water, they and Nick take refuge at Restless Axles, a Christian trailer park in northern California. Enter Sheeni Saunders (newcomer Portia Doubleday), an erudite Lolita with an abiding love for all things French, including her pinup of Jean-Paul Belmondo. She and Nick wax whip-smart and commence a PG-rated summer fling, but his coitus interruptus proves to be Sheeni’s handsome, French-speaking, piano-playing, Futurist percussive poetry-spouting boyfriend, Trent (Jonathan Bradford Wright).

When Nick returns home and Sheeni leaves to attend a French boarding school in Santa Cruz, his solution on how they might reunite revolves around mischief created by François (also played by Cera), a pencil-mustachioed, Gitanes-smoking figment of Nick’s imagination. The brazen François – part Jeff Spicoli, part Belmondo in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou – embodies Nick’s id and represents the sort of man he believes girls prefer. Spurred on by his inner Tyler Durden, Nick conflagrates his hometown of Berkley and sabotages Sheeni’s schooling.

Payne’s sharp wit translates well to the screen in the hands of writer Gustin Nash, whose coming-of-age Charlie Bartlett plowed similar, albeit less fertile ground. There are occasions late in Youth in Revolt when its comic elements almost explode into brilliant, full-blown surrealism, especially a couple of shroom-tripping sequences: Nick incorporates sex-manual illustrations into the first, while the other finds Sheeni’s otherwise bible-thumping dad (M. Emmet Walsh) smearing mashed potatoes all over his face over Thanksgiving dinner.

However, virtually all the film’s characters are zany to the point of derangement. Without a reliable straight/sane counterpoint, the narrative nearly implodes into inanity – casualties include underwritten supporting turns from Ray Liotta and Justin Long, who plays Sheeni’s half-baked brother. These spells are saved by Erik Knudsen as Nick’s childhood friend Lefty, Adhir Kalyan – who mirrors Cera’s deadpan wit – as Nick’s new high school pal Vijay, and Fred Willard as an aging hippie. But, ultimately this is Cera’s show, and he exhibits range while carrying the film on his lanky back.

Youth in Revolt congeals romance, sex, and infatuation into one dysfunctional, indispensable confection. Circumstance forces Nick to disguise himself in drag before he can finally enter Sheeni’s boudoir. In the end, love begets masculinity, not the other way around.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

2010-01-07T23:19:00.002-05:00

Why so serious?

Grade: B –

Director: Terry Gilliam

Starring: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Verne Troyer, Richard Riddell, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

The central figure in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is not the eponymous thousand-year-old storyteller – played by the equally ageless Christopher Plummer – who rambles around London aboard a steampunk carriage with his travelling theatre troupe, offering audience members the chance to escape reality through a “magic mirror” that actually serves as a portal into the doctor’s phantasmagorical mind.

Instead, the real star is director Terry Gilliam, the mad cinematic wizard who has described his latest shambolic fantasy trip as “autobiographical,” the story of an aging showman with a vivid imagination “being frustrated, trying to amaze people and they’re not paying attention.”

On cue, Imaginarium comprises everything that is both ingenious and infuriating about Gilliam (Brazil; The Fisher King). The former Monty Python member’s visual flourishes remain as dizzying and hypnotic as ever, but they obscure the same lack of narrative underpinning that has crippled many of his lesser concoctions.

Parnassus’ gift is the product of a deal with the Devil (a remarkably creepy Tom Waits), who has come back to collect his end of the bargain, the doctor’s daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole). Enter Tony (the late Heath Ledger), a mysterious amnesiac who joins the tatterdemalion sideshow and eventual offers way to improve its commercial fortunes. “We need to meet the public halfway,” he explains. “The secret is not to hide, to go places people never expected you at.”

Ledger passed away mid-production before his scenes through Parnassus’ looking-glass could be shot. Gilliam’s solution was to cast a trio of actors – Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell – as extra-dimensional variants of Tony, a stopgap measure that actually works rather well within the Imaginarium’s otherworldly context.

A pall hangs over Imaginarium, but most of it necessarily stems from Ledger’s presence and the foreknowledge of his real-life demise. Still, while this vehicle may be a polished clunker ill-equipped to carry its star very far, Ledger manages to wring out one last dynamic performance, as he did so often during his truncated career.

There is an abundance of ideas free-floating throughout Imaginarium’s ether. Gilliam takes swipes at those who suggest he modulate his moviemaking for the masses. Indeed, Gilliam’s casting of four A-listers to play Tony – while dictated by tragic circumstance – can be seen as a cynical commentary on Hollywood’s affinity for celebrity over content when it comes to gauging a film’s marketability.

But, while Gilliam may cast himself as a cinematic martyr, many of his wounds are self-inflicted. His storyline here is typically outlandish, if not indecipherable, a rickety framework for the director’s disjointed CGI-laden sequences. Coherence remains illusive, seemingly only one enlightening but ultimately nonexistent scene away. Gilliam devotees may decipher some order out of the onscreen chaos, but the rest of us will welcome our return trip back to reality.

Neil Morris

*Originally published on www.indyweek.com

Best Films of the Decade: 2000-2009

2010-01-01T15:42:00.012-05:00

by Neil Morris

Ever since Moses brought down the stone tablets from atop Mount Sinai, people have gravitated to the Top 10 list. Perhaps no entity – aside from David Letterman – has utilized this olden construct more than film critics, who each year employ it to apply one last stamp of (dis)approval to the world of cinema.

Once every decade, however, we enjoy the rare treat of reaching back in time to not only rehash the best films of – you guessed it – the last ten years, but also reassess the way films have improved or withered with age.

In compiling my roster of the ten best films during 2000-2009, I looked back at the annual top 10 lists I began formally assembling in 2002, the year I began writing movie reviews. For starters, my top two films of the decade were released before then, and nothing I have seen during the ensuing seven years of critiquing films threatened their place atop my list.

Moreover, of all the films I declared at the time to the best of their respective years, only five merited a spot among the decade’s top ten. Over time, a number of films have grown in my estimation, while others have not matured as well, each for a variety of reasons. That is the wonder of cinema: the way a film speaks to you evolves due to personal and societal changes.

So, I commend to you – and your Netflix queue – my choices for the best films of the last decade. See you in another ten years!

Best film of the decade: Requiem for a Dream – Director Darren Aronofsky took Hubert Selby’s book about drug addiction and created a kinetic, transcendent masterwork about loss and unfulfilled promise. A trendsetter, including both visually and for Clint Mansell’s relentless score, this gut-punch of a film – more than any other this decade – advanced the medium of cinema.

2. Memento – Christopher Nolan’s best film remains this hypnotic thriller/character study, not his otherwise superb Batman entries. More than a structural gimmick, this is sublime cinema that combines indie inventiveness with populist moviemaking, resulting in a neo-film noir that is made better by its narrative loose ends.

3. The Pixar canon – Besides saving and revolutionizing the waning animated movie genre, Pixar’s sterling film collection stayed enjoyable to viewers of all ages while managing to mature with its audience. Consider this: 7-year old kids who started off watching Toy Story back in 1995 became the 15-year olds diving into the underwater Finding Nemo, 16-year olds flying away with The Incredibles, 19-year olds escaping into the world of a Parisian kitchen in Ratatouille, 20-year olds captivated by the futuristic WALL-E, and today’s 21-year olds floating away to far-off adventure in Up.

4. There Will Be Blood – Part Citizen Kane, part Stanley Kubrick, director P.T. Anderson’s tour de force speaks to the valor and iniquity of American individualism, and also encapsulates the longstanding feud between capitalism and orthodox religion. Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of oilman Daniel Plainview is arguably the defining film performance of the decade.

5. United 93 – The most emotionally affecting film experience of the decade. Five years after September 11, 2001, director Paul Greengrass accomplishes the unthinkable: a technically proficient rendering that horrible day that manages to honor the departed, praise the heroes, explicate and damn the villains, and skewer the bureaucratic morass that paralyzed our governmental institutions. It is not only an exacting post-mortem on the day our world stood still, but also a celebration of the better angels of our nature.

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Far and away, the most underrated film of the decade. Director Andrew Dominik – backed by a haunting score and gorgeous cinematography from the indomitable Roger Deakins – composes a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on celebrity and the concept of hero-worship, a longing gaze on the sepia-soaked days of yesteryear refracted into a piercing commentary on our con

temporary culture.

7. Munich – Critics have lashed Stephen Spielberg’s most provocative film with every strap of iniquity – amoral; pro-Jewish; anti-Israel; pro-Arab; anti-American; misogynistic; an act of appeasement; etc. These contrasting labels are integral to Spielberg’s complex portrait of Israel’s reaction to the murder of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and, by extension, America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. The film is designed not to advocate, but equally critique the sons of both Isaac and Ishmael.

8. The Bourne trilogy – This is the authoritative movie series of the decade (not Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or the Star Wars prequels), along with being the most exhilarating, intelligent additions to the indispensable action-thriller lineage.

9. Traffic – Using several interconnected storylines, Steven Soderbergh conjured a sprawling, multi-faceted examination of the war on drugs from viewpoints both macro and personal. This is filmmaking at its most epic and informative.

10. City of God – The beauty of this film, set amidst the favelas of Rio De Janeiro, can be found in its narrative scope and visual poetry. Director Fernando Meirelles crafts a gritty, powerful saga that is as poignant as it is brutal.

Best of the Rest: Children of Men; The Wrestler; King Kong; Friday Night Lights; The Aviator; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2; The Queen; Slumdog Millionaire; About Schmidt; Gangs of New York; Million Dollar Baby; 21 Grams; Whale Rider; Infernal Affairs; The Pianist; House of Flying Daggers; Batman Begins; The Dark Knight; Bridgett Jones’s Diary

Best and Worst Films of 2009

2009-12-31T01:37:00.018-05:00

By Neil Morris

At the risk of sounding like the “Grumpy Old Man” skit Dana Carvey used to perform on Saturday Night Live, 2009 was the most lackluster year for film in over a decade. Don’t get me wrong: there were a number of superb movies and acting performances. But, unlike every year I can remember, there was not those one or two films that stood apart from the rest and achieved a measure of greatness.

The reasons for this slump – an opinion shared by many critics more seasoned than myself – are wide-ranging but ultimately inscrutable. James Cameron returned to directing feature films, Quentin Tarantino took time off from sitting on film festival juries and the talk show circuit to add to his directorial catalog, and Pixar submitted its annual superlative entry. But, many of the decade’s most accomplished filmmakers were absent from theaters this year, including Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, P.T. Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Iñárritu, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. Films from Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood, and Steven Soderbergh met with mixed reviews, while Rob Marshall and Ang Lee threatened to make us forget they were ever competent directors.

Moreover, a decade-long decline in quality roles for female actors reached its ebb in 2009. Just when a woman seems poised to finally win the Best Director Oscar, the search for outstanding lead actress performances this year is like going on an egg hunt two weeks after Easter. A search of festival circuit and indie cinemas might have unearthed such hidden gems as Carey Mulligan in An Education, Tilda Swinton in Julia, and Michelle Monaghan in Trucker. But, while Meryl Streep is perhaps the finest female actor of our time and was delightful as Julia Child in Julie & Julie, when a role as slight as this – in a film as forgettable as this – catapults to the top of probable Oscar winners, it is a dilemma that portends an industry-wide plunge. Indeed, the bulk of our most decorated film actresses not named ‘Streep’ spent 2009 marooned on the shipwreck Nine.

What is heartening about this year’s best films, however, is the sizable number of young and/or unheralded directors already putting their stamp on the film scene. In a year when the big names were AWOL, the up-and-comers pulled up the slack. So, without further adieu (or more talk about how things were “back in my day”), here are my selections for the best and worst movies of 2009.

Top 10 Films

Best Film of 2009: (500) Days of Summer – This anti-love love story eschews the insipid troupes that have gradually atrophied the romantic-comedy genre. Instead, it is an examination of infatuation and, more commonly, the kind of white-hot romantic relationships that often burn out as quickly as they ignite. And, director Marc Webb’s underrated visual expressionism is captivating and humorous without becoming indulgent. This is a witty, refreshingly original portrait of Gen-Y love that speaks to audiences of all ages. Although it punctures the illusion of happily-ever-after, the film’s affirming final scene reminds us that love is always just another season away.

2. The Damned United – The criminally ignored biopic is a sports-related movie, but it’s not the typical “sports movie.” The story of famed British soccer coach Brian Clough – portrayed brilliantly by the equally undervalued Michael Sheen – and his ill-fated 44-day stint as head of top-flight Leeds United in 1974 – contains little actual game play, and reverses the typical sports movie story arc; here, success turns into failure. Screenwriter Peter Morgan fashions a character study of the corrosive effects of pride and obsession, all revolving around an underdog whose success blossoms only on fields barren of expectations.

3. The Hurt Locker – The first worthy movie set around America’s current war in the Middle East is an exploration of a soldier’s survival instincts and their eventual war-torn psychological distortion that the only way to feel alive is to keep facing death. Newcomer Jeremy Renner is superb as a hotshot “blaster” whose mission is to defuse or otherwise nullify enemy mines and IEDs. Director Kathryn Bigelow returns after a seven-year layoff to not only fully realize her filmmaking potential, but perhaps become the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar.

4. Up in the Air – Working within his now-established formula of quirky romances set within tableaus informed by weighty social topics, director Jason Reitman crafts a timely and timeless film that hearkens back to such worldly comic masterpieces as Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, Ernest Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. George Clooney lends his trademark retro leading-man charisma to a middle-aged “career transition counselor” facing a personal crossroads. Playing his respective coworker and love interest, Anna Kendrick would feel right at home in a screwball comedy while Vera Farmiga radiates the sophisticated sexuality of classic film noir divas.

5. The Messenger – Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson play two casualty notification officers who give notice to the families of fallen soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. An ethical dilemma unfolds when Foster’s character becomes involved with a widow played by Samantha Morton. These are three of the best acting performances of 2009 in an intelligent, affecting screenplay co-written by debut director Oren Moverman.

6. Up – This is – say it together – “Pixar’s annual entry in the best films of the year.” When an elderly widower (Ed Asner) – drawn and voiced to resemble a sexagenarian Spencer Tracy – faces encroaching urban sprawl and involuntary relegation to a retirement home, he decides to follow through on he and his late wife’s promise to one day journey to the wilds of South America by literally floating away and planting their fixer-upper dream home atop the mystical Paradise Falls. This is mature animated filmmaking that will make you laugh and cry…and that’s just within the first 15 minutes. It is a film about longing and discovering that adventure isn’t necessarily “out there,” but may be closer to home.

7. District 9 – This sci-fi thriller from director Neil Blomkamp depicts the chaos and racism that ensues throughout Johannesburg, South Africa when extraterrestrial aliens become marooned on Earth and attempt to integrate into human society. The faux-documentary approach that dominates the film’s opening half lends an unsettling verisimilitude to the aliens and their earthly subculture. The second half revolves around a government agent (Sharlto Copley) who contracts a strange virus that begins to slowly transform his DNA and appearance into that of an alien. There’s obvious analogy between the treatment of the aliens and human racism. The most difficult question facing audiences members is – if faced with the reality of such extraterrestrials living among you – whether you would actually support the restrictive, oppressive measures designed to keep them at bay.

8. Goodbye Solo – Ramin Bahrani’s third critically acclaimed feature film – after Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, (# 7 on last year’s list) is an ethereal meditation on mortality and displacement centered around an African immigrant cap driver (Soulyemane Sy Savané) and his taciturn fare, a septuagenarian (erstwhile Elvis bodyguard Red West) bent on ending his life. From its nocturnal forays through Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s downtown tobacco district to the striking imagery atop Blowing Rock National Park, this film’s haunting air lingers long after its closing credits.

9. The Road – This ultra-faithful adaptation of Cormac McCathy’s bleak, post-apocalyptic novel is a survival story about a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and his Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who embark an odyssey that embodies the dual meaning of the film’s title. Their trek carries them down treacherous highways and byways, and their journey carries with it mankind’s path toward rebirth and redemption. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) wields a keen command of craft, setting, and atmosphere.

10. Avatar – James Cameron’s epic return to feature filmmaking after his Titanic rainmaker reestablishes him as the DeMille of our time. What separates Cameron from the Michael Bays of the world is that his visual masterworks are accompanied by a soul. The film’s post-9/11 symbolism is a bit heavy-handed. But, this giant leap forward in the art of moviemaking deserves recognition. Admit it: you’re already counting-down until the Blu-ray DVD release.

The Best of the Rest

A Serious Man; Star Trek; Fantastic Mr. Fox; Inglourious Basterds; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Everlasting Moments; Michael Jackson’s This Is It; The Way We Get By; The first 11 minutes of Watchmen

The Bottom Feeders

Worst Film of the Year: All About Steve – It’s a good thing this monumental misfire – concocted by the same screenwriter as the equally wretched License to Wed – was released before, not after, Sandra Bullock’s Oscar-bait turn in The Blind Side. Otherwise, it would have been her Norbit. Bullock plays Mary Horowitz, crossword puzzle writer and a single flibbertigibbet living at home with her parents. A blind date with a television cameraman (Bradley Cooper) both stokes Mary’s carnal fires and sends her freak flag flyin’. It is not just that Mary is exceedingly annoying; what’s more disconcerting is that Mary is so clearly psychotic that it is impossible to find any modicum of humor in her eccentricities. When I reviewed the movie in September, I wrote this “is the first film unworthy enough to be considered the worst movie of this year. Here’s hoping I am not unfortunate enough to endure anything that threatens to steal its crown.” I wasn’t, thankfully.

Old Dogs

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Obsessed

My Life in Ruins

Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen

Whatever Works

Nine

The Pink Panther 2

Law Abiding Citizen

Hannah Montana: The Movie

Year One

Most Pleasant Surprises

A Christmas Carol

The Damned United

District 9

Extract

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Good Hair

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Michael Jackson’s This Is It

Star Trek

Most Disappointing

Amelia

Angels and Demons

Land of the Lost

Nine

The Soloist

Taking Woodstock

Terminator Salvation

The Young Victoria

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-27T20:33:00.004-05:00

Robert Downey recreates that time he
broke into his neighbor's house.

Grade: B

Director: Guy Ritchie

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, and Eddie Marsan

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hour, 8 minutes

Guy Ritchie’s kinetic update might not be “your father’s Sherlock Holmes,” but it’s a lot closer to your great-great grandfather’s. The reimagining of Holmes actually took place throughout the 20^th century on film and television with Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett’s beloved portrayals of Holmes as an over-mannerly sleuth in the Masterpiece Theater mold.

While Ritchie’s frenzied filmmaking style is strictly mod, his Sherlock Holmes is patterned more after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s complex, flawed literary incarnation. As narrated by his partner and friend Dr. John Watson, Holmes is an intellectual eccentric with a massive ego, eager to foil his criminal prey but mistrusting of the police. He is a skilled bare-knuckle brawling, has significant vices, including cocaine and morphine addictions, and possibly suffers from Bipolar disorder.

These traits inform Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, ably played by Robert Downey Jr., although the film does not dwell on Holmes’ dark side. Still, it is replete with Downey’s trademark idiosyncrasies – at this point, it is difficult to decide whether Downey’s personal travails inform his performances or merely steer his choice of roles. Regardless, his breezy Holmes keeps matters light and captivating throughout the film’s many saggy spots.

Set in London of 1891, the film’s original story opens with Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) apprehending the murderous, mystical Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), then later scrambling to track him down again after he apparently uses his knowledge of the black arts to rise from the dead and reanimate a secret society bent on world domination, called the Temple of the Four Orders.

Along the way, Holmes is reacquainted with Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), an American grifter described – as in Conan Doyle’s books – as the only woman to outwit and, thereby, intrigue Holmes. While Adler’s appearance is a welcome nod the Holmes canon, Downey and McAdams share bare-bones onscreen chemistry.

On the other hand, the film’s most layered relationship is the bromance between Holmes and Watson, who Law portrays not as Nigel Bruce’s bumbling oaf, but as a curious, capable companion who has aspirations of his own – including impending nuptials to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) that Holmes aims to thwart. In Holmes, the buttoned-down Dr. Watson finds an outlet to quench his thrill-seeking thirst instead of his own dormant gambling addiction, while Holmes placates Watson’s nascent deductive abilities because he values the presence of his loyal ally.

While not an origin story, Sherlock Holmes borrows narrative elements from Batman Begins, including setting the stage for revealing the hero’s definitive foe in the inevitable sequel – here, it is a faceless Professor Moriarty. However, when Holmes begins to squat and hallucinate in the middle of pentagrams and deciphering ancient spells and map patterns to predict where the killer will strike next, the script devolves into a Victorian-era version of The Da Vinci Code.

Still, when Holmes finally provides the obligatory “big reveal” during a fight atop the still-under construction Tower Bridge, there isn’t a corresponding “big cheat”; rather, most of the answers have been in front of you all along. While the film’s coda feels perfunctory and Ritchie’s editing is choppy at best, it is small distraction from Downey’s humorous, spot-on performance, Law’s capable supporting turn, and Ritchie’s manic, steampunk rendering of 19^th century London. No, this isn’t your father’s Sherlock Holmes. Thankfully, it’s elementary that it might be your kids’.

Neil Morris

Up in the Air

2009-12-23T15:57:00.006-05:00

I've heard of cardboard cutout characters,
but this is ridiculous

Grade: A –

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Maybe Diablo Cody wasn’t really the brains behind Juno after all.

With just three feature films now under his belt, Jason Reitman has ensconced himself as a talented, unique filmmaker and torch-bearer for the seriocomic lineage. For today’s movie audiences, he is the mature antidote to the cut-rate knockoffs of Judd Apatow’s comedies of arrested development. More broadly, Reitman brings to mind such comic past masters as Ernest Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, who were all adept at depicting love in dark and cynical settings.The Reitman formula—as best it can be distilled—consists of quirky romances set within tableaus informed by weighty social topics, whether it is the tobacco industry in Thank You For Smoking, teenage pregnancy in Juno or mass unemployment wrought by corporate downsizing and Cost leadership in his latest, Up in the Air, a film that has already garnered widespread honors and Oscar buzz.

The intelligence of Up in the Air lies in its ironies. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a smooth-talking, veteran “career transition counselor,” a euphemism for being a hired gun paid to handle employee layoffs by corporate bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. Ryan and his company rely upon the misery of others for their own success. In this most impersonal of settings, the jocular Ryan specializes in providing the illusion of a human touch. Walter Kirn, from whose 2001 novel the film is loosely adapted, says in the film’s notes that “Ryan is like a masseur who comes in and sort of rubs your shoulders while rolling your desk chair into the elevator.”

Personally, however, Ryan is an isolato who embraces the nomadic lifestyle that comes with his profession. Living hub-to-hub, he has mastered the nuances of air travel, from choosing the proper luggage to the gauging the fastest check-in line, and navigates terminals with the agility of Baryshnikov. But spiritually, Ryan is as vapid as his spartanly decorated home apartment: He eschews deep personal entanglements or ambitions, his sole dream being to finally reach the rarified air of 10 million frequent flyer miles.

It is no accident, then, that romance falls his way during a layover in a hotel bar with a fellow traveler, Alex (Vera Farmiga)—one thing leads to another after they begin comparing platinum club cards. Their burgeoning relationship leads Ryan to reassess his views on love and companionship. Meanwhile, he also finds his professional life in tumult thanks to a brash neophyte, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who sells Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on a cost-cutting method of video conferencing that will enable terminations to be handled without Ryan or his coworkers ever having to leave their Omaha, Neb., home office.

Fearing this threat to his airborne existence, Ryan takes Natalie on a cross-country firing expedition in an effort to teach her the folly of her system. At the same time, Ryan struggles to cope with his growing feelings for Alex and the pressure to attend the impending nuptials of his kid sister (Melanie Lynskey). Facing midlife, Ryan starts to wonder if it’s finally time to grow up.

Ryan’s firing sessions are the film’s most tense, affecting scenes. Reitman and screenwriter Sheldon Turner occasionally struggle to balance their populist and satirical impulses by playing too clever with the jobless zeitgeist, a deficit aggravated—not alleviated—by the fact that Reitman fills these scenes with real people who’ve recently lost their jobs. This sort of self-congratulatory casting carries an unsavory aroma similar to the search for destitute extras in Slumdog Millionaire or Joe Wright’s The Soloist. However, the film exonerates itself from the charge of exploitation by giving these extras screen time during the closing credits, where they reveal more information about their situations.

Up in the Air hearkens back to such socially conscious comic masterpieces as Wilder’s The Apartment, Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Clooney’s retro leading-man charisma is perfect for this material, while the talented Kendrick would feel right at home in a screwball comedy and Farmiga radiates the sophisticated sexuality of classic film noir divas. And, just when you think you’ve got the film’s flight plan figured out, Reitman takes an unexpected detour toward a more open-ended, melancholy denouement that evokes the title of this timeless and timely film.

Neil Morris

It's Complicated

2009-12-23T15:54:00.003-05:00

You're old...isn't that funny?

Grade: C

Director: Nancy Meyers

Starring: Meryl Street, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinksi, and Lake Bell

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

“It’s Complicated” is, indeed, but just not in the way one would expect. At its rail-thin best, it is a leisurely tale about two former spouses who – years after he, Jake (Alec Baldwin), left she, Jane (Meryl Streep), for a younger set of abs with a conspicuously natty name, Agness (Lake Bell) – begin to rendezvous in secret at sundry bedrooms and her kitchen. Being that the ways to a man’s heart are through his stomach and other lower extremities, it is little wonder that Jake begins to long for the comforts of what might have been instead of weekly trips to the fertility clinic with his headstrong trophy wife. There is something relevant here to ponder: The vain hunt for eternal youth versus the earned dividends of hearth and home.

It’s a universal story, really. Oh, unless you don’t own a boutique bakery and live in a sprawling Santa Barbara ranch house that you want to remodel with a new kitchen and bedroom (sledgehammer irony alert…). Or, if you’re not a Porsche-driving attorney who can apparently spend every waking minute jetting from coast-to-coast to jump in the sack with your ex-wife. Or, unless your grown children aren’t a gaggle of lobotomized Stepford kids who can emote either hurt or hilarity, but only on cue, and who have married and/or graduated college but always seem to be around for dinner parties and sleepovers where the whole family dons their pajamas and munches popcorn while watching The Graduate.

In truth, It’s Complicated is more the insular perspective of writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose innocuous parables of independent women that she wrote while married in her 20s and 30s – Private Benjamin and Baby Boom –have given way to pseudo-feminist pap the now-divorced Meyers spins about high-strung, self-pitying SoCalers of privilege with “problems” the average moviegoer could only hope to have the chance to suffer – Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and now this.

Poor Jane feels a bad case of empty nest syndrome coming on, despite her bustling business, creature comforts, dalliance with Jake, and the non-threatening advances of her architect, Adam, played by an emasculated Steve Martin. All the while, she is cheered on her middle-aged coffee klatch – including the suddenly ubiquitous Rita Wilson, happy to walk-through only her third-worst film of 2009 behind Old Dogs and My Life In Ruins.

Movies are about escapism, and perhaps some will identity with scenes in which Jane and Jake both mourn and guffaw how time (and, in Baldwin’s case, bad eating habits) have ravaged their once-youthful bodies. But, jokes like Jane and Adam rediscovering the joys of getting stoned are overbroad and simple-minded – usual only to allow Martin to flash some glimpse of his inner wild and crazy guy. Almost every one-liner, sight-gag, and screwball set piece falls flat, none of them advancing the film’s purportedly complex tableau.

Fans of Baldwin and John Krasinksi will barely recognize them as the same talented comic actors from 30 Rock and The Office, respectively. For her part, Streep is in full Mamma Mia mode, trying to use her trademark chortle to mask the film’s numerous cinematic sins. Alas, this task proves too complicated, even for one of our greatest film actresses.

Neil Morris

Nine

2009-12-23T15:49:00.003-05:00

Victoria's Secret

Grade: D +

Director: Rob Marshall

Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Stacy Ferguson, and Sophia Loren

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

Revisiting the musical genre for the first time since his Oscar-winning Chicago, director Rob Marshall adapts another Broadway production based on previous work with Nine. The film is based on the Tony-award winning musical, itself derived from an Italian play by Mario Fratti inspired by Federico Fellini’s 1963 autobiographical film, 8 ½ . Even if the pedigree for Marshall’s film is as muddled as a Fellini storyline, one thing is crystal clear: Nine is a bombastic mess.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays esteemed 50-year-old Italian director Guido Contini, now suffering a midlife crisis and bout of writer’s block just as filming is poised to begin on his epic comeback, tentatively titled Italia. As Guido tries to jumpstart his creative juices, he is forced to confront his chaotic personal life by reconciling a bevy of formative women in his life. They include Luisa (Marion Cotillard), his diffident wife; Carla (Penélope Cruz), his comely (and cuckoo) mistress; Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his platinum-blond film-star muse; Lili (Judi Dench), his confidant and costume designer; Stephanie (Kate Hudson), an American Vogue fashion reporter; Saraghina (Stacy Ferguson, a/k/a Fergie), a mondana from his youth; and his mother (Sophia Loren).

Set in 1965, Nine aims to present a multilayered, contemplative examination of life, love and craft, much like its Fellini forbearer. In actuality, the screenplay by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella depicts the philandering, chain-smoking, sports-car driving Guido as a monumental bore who spends more time lamenting his inability to make new films than convincing us he was ever capable of crafting one.

There is a glint in Day-Lewis’ eye that suggests a great actor aching to unleash his talents but not quite sure how with the material he’s been given. Even still, Guido’s accent—particularly when singing—sounds weirdly like The Count from Sesame Street. That is better than Dench, I suppose, who doesn’t even try; her brogue is as Italian as Chef Boyardee.

The already lackluster narrative interludes feel like mere bridges to the next musical offering. With the occasional exception of Luisa, the rest of the female characters exist mainly for their particularized songs, most of them burlesque, kitschy spectacles that are a bit like watching a Cirque du Soleil show sans the acrobatics. Indeed, this disposable use of seven A-list actresses is emblematic of 2009’s woeful roster of female film roles.

The only thing worse than Guido’s chronic, self-induced malaise is Maury Yeston’s ear-gouging lyrics. The original Broadway numbers are grueling enough, including the treacly “My Husband Makes Movies” and a garish production of “Be Italian” featuring Fergie. What’s more, Yeston penned three new songs for the film, including Hudson’s retched “Cinema Italiano” (sample lyrics: “Those scenes I love to see / From Guido’s POV / There’s no one else with his unique director’s vision”).

Forget Guido—those responsible for Nine were apparently the ones afflicted with a bad case of writer’s block. In their case, the cure is worse than the disease.

Neil Morris