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| Diary | Movies | Books | Music | Humor | Travel |
The Descendants
Alexander Payne is one of my favorite living directors. I finally had a chance to see his new film, The Descendants. His early films all took place in his home state, Nebraska. In Sideways he ventured all the way to California. In the new film, Payne takes us to Hawaii, deploying the natural beauty of the island to a great effect. The Descendants is considerably darker and sadder than About Schmidt. But Payne uses the healing power of the beautiful Hawaiian landscape to tell another deep story about the human condition. This is art. Don't miss it.
Friends with Benefit
Romantic comedies used to have few explicit sex scenes. In 1989 the film When Harry met Sally pushed the boundaries of the genre when Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in a restaurant (see the funny scene). Friends with Benefits focuses the first half on the bedroom and how to create comedy around the lovemaking act. Except for the last scene, which is very well done, I felt like I had seen the story a million times.
Whale Story
Anyone who feels particularly strong affection for animals, Dolphin Tale will love this film. The movie starts out unpromising but then manages to tell a new chapter the human-animal relationships. Even those who feel that it is pathetic that many people seem to value pets more than other human will find Dolphin Tale at heart-warming story.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
When I read that Brad Bird (who made the wonderful Pixar films The Incredibles and Ratatouille) was recruited to direct Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and that he gave it a special touch, I could not resist to watch this improbably action adventure. Bird did not write the script and hence was rather confined what he could do with film. The entire series could be called "Mission Improbable". But if you are willing to suspend your critical faculties and just enjoy the fast paced, often surprising action sequences and amazing technological feats, this cloak and dagger secret service film will not disappoint you. If, however, you have not seen The Incredibles or Ratatouille, make sure that watch them first because they are even better.
Crazy, Stupid, Love
The first three quarters of the film are stupid. No, boring is a better word. Everything feels staged. You feel that you are watching a comedy without soul and intelligence. But then suddenly it all changes, you are in for a big surprise and the film comes to life. I wonder if it would be been possible to create this dramatic turn of events without boring me out of my mind for most of the film.
Mrs. Doubtfire
Robin Williams is one of the most talented comedians alive. The range of voice impersonation he can do is amazing. Some of his talent is on display in Mrs. Doubtfire. The film was made in 1993 and feels a bit outdated. There are funny moments but the most enjoyable part of the film is to watch Robin Williams impersonate an old English house sitter.
Our Idiot Brother
If you think you have an idiot brother, watch this film and you will realize that you brother is actually pretty smart. Ned (Paul Rudd) is the brother of three intelligent, good looking and charming sisters and a pretty dumb mother. Paul is not intelligent my any definition of the world, apparently inheriting most genes from his mother. There is something painful to watch someone who is stupid but not overtly handicapped as Forrest Gump. The pain becomes less throughout the film as Ned's take on life--to trust everyone and to love unconditionally--proves to be winning strategy for happiness. If you are into romantic comedy but want to see something different and have 90 minutes to kill, this film will amuse you mildly. Most importantly you will think that your brother not stupid.
Midnight in Paris
The criticism that I and others have leveled against Woody Allen's recent work seems to have stung. When Allen moved his camera to London a few years ago, got the same stories transplanted from New York to London. The difference in language seems to have freed Allen. Midnight in Paris only feels a bit repetitive of his previous work. Mostly it is a very clever and cute adaptation of the idea of time travelling. Allen's alter ego, a writer (Luke Wilson) who feels more comfortable in the past than present suddenly finds himself in the 1920s meeting the great artists of the time. Luke Wilson gives spectacular performance. Taken this 2-hour trip to Paris is worth the price of the movie ticket.
Apparently there is a good new documentary on Woody Allen's work showing this weekend on PBS.
Easy Rider
Some have billed Easy Rider the mother of all road movies. Until the end, it is very difficult to figure out where this journey is leading to and what the whole point of the film it. It starts out in the American West. Two bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) set out to travel east after doing a drug deal in L A, which gives the cash to pay for it. The film covers beautiful landscape of the American Southwest and the hippy culture that started in the 1960s. (If you have never been to America, it would be a nice introduction to landscape.) On the journey the meet people from all walks of life. But there seems no purpose to the journey. Only at the end it becomes clear that the film wants is a philosophical meditation on what freedom really is. I will not give away the surprising final scene.
Crazy Beautiful
There is a fine line between being a genius and being crazy, so a popular saying goes. It is difficult to know whether Vincent Van Gogh, one of whose paintings is a key feature of my homepage design, became insane only later in life after contracting syphilis or whether the roots of his mental illness lie much earlier in his life and paved the way for his creative genius. Cleary, Van Gogh is an example of the proverb that opened this review. At age 37 craziness fully took hold of him and he shot himself dead. When you take a look at his paintings you realize that, even if they depict something a bit crazy, they are beautiful. For the average mortal, however, craziness is generally not related to beauty but to ugliness and destruction. When we see someone act really crazy, we fear that the person will self-destruct sooner or later. This assumption is what the film Crazy Beautiful plays with.
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Contagion — Nothing spreads like fear
Nothing spreads like fear is a great subtitle. Unfortunately, the film is a disappointment. After living through September 11, SARS, and most recently the Fukushima nuclear disaster, we all have a pretty good sense that our world could suddenly be turned upside down. Many of us might die because of a natural or manmade disaster. Steven Soderbergh is not up to the task of telling us something more about how ours fears than we already know. The movie feels fabricated and is a waste of time. Watching the footage from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster would give you much deeper insight into how fear spreads. The German public became so concerned about nuclear energy that the chancellor Angela Merkel made a full u-turn in her nuclear policy.
The Sound of Music
To get in the spirit of Octoberfest, I watched the iconic romantic musical for a second time in my life. The mountains around Salzburg are still amazing but the film has aged less well than My Fair Lady. Too often you notice that the scene is shot in a Hollywood rather than on location in Salzburg. Our eyes have become too discerning about simple tricks in the art of making movies. There will be a remake of My Fair Lady coming out soon and I would welcome a remake of The Sound of Music. But the audience nowadays for a new version of the Trapp family story may be smaller than the more ageless theme and spectacular writing in My Fair Lady.
Two Lovers
I had not seen the poster for the film because otherwise I would have noticed that Two Lovers is not about two people. During the film you realize it is about at least 3, possible 4 people, who are trying to figure out who they want to be with. We all know that this is not an easy question and some of us are a lot better in figuring it out. Two Lovers is nothing like The Lover which indulges in sexy cinematography. Here the existential problem of sorting through all the conflicting impulses is in foreground. The director does not seduce you with romantic landscapes and enticing human bodies but rather uses the rather dreary background of a Brooklyn apartment building to stage a drama of the human heart. This is not a film you have to see but if you do see it, you will agree that it manages to penetrate the human condition much more deeply than your typical romantic comedy.
Broken Embraces
Pedro Almadovar surprises you again with Broken Embraces. Unlike Woody Allen who now makes the same movie over and over again, Almadovar in all his recent films has broken new ground in his quest to lay bare before our eyes the variety in the human experience. During the first hour I wondered where the film was going and feared that Almadovar was following perhaps in Woody Allen's recent footsteps. But then the movie takes a turn for the expected and pace accelerates, leaving you breathless about the turn of events. Almadovar has constructed a tragic mystery that nonetheless lifts your spirit because you realize that--however fleeting happiness with another person may be--one second of it may nourish you for eternity.
Almanya — Welcome to Germany
When the economy took off in the 1950s, Germany experienced severe labor shortages. So employer unions and politicians hatched the idea to import guest workers from Turkey and other southern European countries. By the middle 1970s these "guest workers" were allowed to bring their families to Germany and settle there permanently. Today, about 3.5 million people of Turkish origin are living in Germany. Because for hundreds of years citizenship in Germany has been tied to blood relationship, integrating foreigners into German society has been a lot more difficult than integrating new waves off immigrants into the U.S. Children of immigrants in the U.S. see themselves by their teenage years as American wherever they come from. German society made it very difficult even for German-born children Turkish families to identify themselves foremost as Germans. During the past decade a number of films have been made by such children, chronicling the identify challenges their lives in Germany would entail. The best one to date is Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland.
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Cedar Rapids
Selling insurance is one of the most boring jobs in the world. But some people's personality seems to be uniquely suited for this line of work. Tim Lippe is one of them. The most excitement Tim has experienced in life to date is having sex with his former 7th grade teacher (Segourney Weaver) once week. But now he is sent on a road trip to Cedar Rapids. There he is introduced to the most fun insurance people you can imagine. Gorgeous women (e.g. Anne Heche) are chasing this nerd and giving us a few laughs. I enjoyed the film a lot more than the 40-year-old virgin but it definitely is not a film you must see.
Bridesmaides
Watching a teenage girl lose her boyfriend of 3 weeks is a lot less scary than watching a woman in her late 30 losing her boyfriend of three years. The film relies on the fact that as adults we all realize that the teenage girl is probably better off being "back on the market" where her twenty-year-older self enters a "bad market." There are already many film in the Getting-Ready-for-a-Wedding genre. Except for the last 15 minutes the film is banal and boring compared to even such light fare as Four Wedding and a Funeral. If you want to see an initially funny and the deep film about marriage, see the splendid Barney's Version. The writer Mordecai Richler uses a plot line in Barney's Version that I once had developed but now no longer can claim as mine: Boy waits long time to marry. Has found great spouse. But at the wedding he meets someone who he instantaneously recognizes as the person he should have married. Bridesmaides never reaches such deep waters.
Boys Don't Cry
I knew nothing about the plot of Boys Don't Cry. But somehow the title was so familiar. It must be a famous movie. For the past year or so I have been participating in a video rental service that sends me in a new film from my wish list whenever I send the previous one back. A few weeks ago Boys Don't Cry arrived in my mailbox. For me the charm of the film was that I had no idea what would happen, whether the film was really good and whether I would watch it until the end. I want to leave it that way for you. The film is definitely worth seeing. It is a bit heavy but I would not want to have missed it. The acting of Hilary Swank is spectacular. I found her more compelling in this film than A Million Dollar Baby. Boys do cry sometimes.
Never Let Me Go
The book on which the film is based was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was nominated by Time magazine as the best novel of 2005. Every basic ethics discussions ponders the question whether it is moral to take organs of one person to save a few other persons. The film is sophomoric, disgusting and sad.
Coco avant Chanel
The Supreme Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "I know pornography when I see it." Watching Coco avant Chanel I became less sure that I could identify in all instances of prostitution when I see it. Early in her adult life, Coco tracks an aristocrat to his country mansion and then exchanges sex for food, lodging, and social climbing. So we may ask: What is the big difference to her taking money for sex to pay rent a nearby apartment and cook her own food? The film follows Coco until she makes a big in the fashion world. Coco clearly was a trailblazer and I enjoyed watching her find her path. The most appealing feature of the film is its understated, classic style. The director managed to imbue entire film with the core of Chanel's fashion sense.
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies is not entertainment in the popular sense of the word. It places high demands on the viewer. Think of it as going to a museum whose paintings are challenging for the senses; or going to the theater to see a modern piece like Waiting for Godod. A group of British children become stranded on a desert island without any adults there to supervise or guide them. I am not sure if there is a recorded case in history that would gives us any clues how a group of isolated children would actually organize their society. In the book by the same name, William Golding, imagines what kind of society the children would build for themselves. In his vision, the forces of savagery will appeal so strongly to the children's mind that they will be hard to resist. Adult societies, of course, often struggle with the same forces. The 2nd part of the film explores this battle between the forces of savagery and civilization. If you want to know how it ends, find an evening when you are willing to sit through Peter Brooke's film.
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The King's Speech
Think back to the terrifying moment when you gave your first public speech. You may be a great storyteller when surrounded but friends and family. But now you step onto the podium looking out to an audience of strangers who are all focused on you starting your speech. Your mouth is getting dry, your tongue is getting heavy. The audience is waiting for you to say something and you know you might not be able to pull this off well and be branded failure in full public view. Now imagine that you a have a stammer since childhood. This moment will be even more terrifying. Welcome the opening scene of The King's Speech, which chronicles the ascent of George IV to the British thrown in 1936. During the first half of the film I was a bit unconformable because it seemed to me a rather overt promo for the Monarchy. While I don't object that countries like Great Britain and Sweden continue to having a King or Queen, I don't support the idea that a country like the U.S.A or Germany should bring in a monarchy. But later on the film becomes so good that I left the theatre content.
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A Passage to India
Do novelists and poets change the world or do simply please and entertain us? I suspect that the best novelists sense the early signs of a new mood and outlook. If truly gifted, they are able to put in words and stories such a new outlook, infect the rest of us with it, and thereby pave the way for sometimes dramatic social changes. In his novel A Passage to India, E. M. Forster exposes the hypocrisy the British engaged in while in ruling India. While thinking of themselves as the most civilized people on earth, they treated Indians as subhuman. British rule was already questioned in 1924 when Forster's novel was published. Yet it took another 23 years until Indian independence. Watching the film version of the novel, it seems to me that British readers of Forster's novel would have been infected with the sense that British rule is unjust. The first 60 minutes of the film are slow and I was about stop watching. But then the drama picks up and the next 90 minutes are wonderful.
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My Fair Lady
George Cukor, the director of this extraordinarily fun film, admitted: Give me a good script, and I'll be a hundred times better as a director. My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. The writer won the Nobel Prize in literature (1925) and later an Oscar for the film version of Pygmalion (1938). Shaw, who was also the co-founder of the London School of Economics, delivered to Cukor great material about a low class girl (Eliza Doolittle) and a professor (Higgins) who takes a wager that he can turn the impulsive, crude, uneducated flower girl into a lady. The professor's goal is to use his scientific expertise in how people learn to speak language properly to teach Eliza and pass her off as an aristocrat at the Queen's ball six months later.
Everything about the film is perfect. It represents Hollywood at its best. I don't see how the remake of the film planned for 2012 can top the 1964 production.
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Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. I mean both the BBC film adaptation of Flaubert's famous novel as well as the story itself. First a few words about the film and then about the story. Especially in the first half, the director moves us quickly through the life of Emma Bovary. The 19th century setting is beautifully staged. Gustave Flaubert's 1856 book, regarded by many as of the ten best novels ever written, operates on many levels. It is so rich that right after watching the film I am tempted to read the book itself to see how Flaubert communicated the psychological drama with words alone. On one level, Flaubert demolishes the idea so central in Western culture over the past centuries, namely, that romantic love of one other human being and the feelings it creates in our hearts is the only road to happiness. In her quest to feel the excitement of romantic feelings that she believes are required for meaning and happiness, Emma Bovary dedicates her entire life to escaping what she regards a boring relationship.
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Apocalypse Now (Redux)
The first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now are magnificent. My eyes were glued to every pixel on the screen. But following Captain Willard on his long journey from Saigon up a river to Cambodia where he is supposed to assassinate a U.S. general gone mad becomes tiring. The Redux version of the 1979 film is definitely too long. I have seen my share of Vietnam movies. This one is short on action and long on setting scenes like a painter would have. (I have never been to Vietnam and I found the landscape cinematography beautiful.) Apocalypse Now focuses on the psychological damage the war did on American soldiers. It does very little to explain why the American government got sucked into this war. The documentary The Fog of War is much better on this front. You can skip Apocalypse Now but not the The Fog of War.
The Darjeling Limited
This is Wes Anderson's best film to date. It reaches the same depth of Rushmore, but instead of staying in the same Chicago suburb, the director takes us on a wonderful road trip to India. Unlike Life Aquatic, which also wanted to be an adventure film, The Darjeling Limited is never boring because even when the pace of film slows down, we learn to know more interesting bist about the characters. Three brothers have not seen each other for over a year after their father's funeral. Their mother never had much of a motherly instinct and apparently spent much of her maternal career running away from the family. The oldest son, who just was in a teribble car accident, wants to recreate at least the strong bonds between brothers by going on a joint trip spirtiual trip. I know a number of people who went to India to fix their spirits, but returned unhealed. Will the brothers suffer the same fate? Go watch this film to find out.
The Social Network
When historians sit down to write the history of first decade of the 20th century, they would have likely used a few years ago labels such as the Rise of the Internet or Googlemania. If Facebook continues to grow and add functions at its current pace (email will soon be integrated with its message service), historians may simply refer to our time as the Age of Facebook. 500 million plus people have now signed on to Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, you will not want to miss the exquisite film about the beginnings of Facebook and its now 26-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who--just like Bill Gates--dropped out of Harvard to seize a rare business opportunity. The film is made by real pros who know how to create drama. Even if some stuff is invented to add more drama to the story, the film captures the heart the Facebook story and is a facinating watch. The ad for the film is one of the best promotional line I have ever read: You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
My Wes Anderson Film Festival continues. This week I screened his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). While Anderson pushes the cinematography onto a higher plane than in Rushmore or Bottle Rocket, the characters here feel more constructed and synthetic. Owen Wilson co-wrote the first two Anderson films. Perhaps he brought greater depth to the characters. The motor driving The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is the imaginative power fueling the script and the love for constructing detailed sets for each scene. Think of a Jacque Costeau documentary, Finding Nemo, and All About Schmidt or Sideways rolled into one. The eye is enchanted. Yet at times the film felt slow because we never sense that something dramatic is about to happen with any of the characters.
Rushmore
Wes Anderson's 2nd film, released in 1998, is an even bigger surprise than Bottle Rocket. The 15-year old hero, Max Fisher, loves his elite prep boarding school but he faces a pressing problem. Although he leads almost every extra-curricula club in the school and although he is a genius on many fronts, he is academically underperforming and on the verge of being expelled. Falling in love with a teacher does not help his cause. Anderson goes even further than in Bottle Rocket to drill deeply into the complexities of human relationships. Anderson places five other main characters into Max's world and every single relationship is unique but deep. I enjoyed every minute of this extraordinary film. Go see it. And after you have watched it read a bit more about the fascinating back ground of the film on Wikipedia. Anderson's 2nd film also lost money, proving that high art and commercial success often do not coincide.
Bottle Rocket
A few months ago I read a story about the director Wes Anderson in the New Yorker. Anderson was hailed as an innovative filmmaker with a peculiar style. I had seen his The Royal Tenenbaums when it came out and found the film different but not particularly compelling. It struck me as trying to take a different perspective for the sake of taking a different perspective, rather than trying to take a novel perspective to shed light the centrality and challenges of family in our lives. The portrait of Anderson in the New Yorker, however, made it apparent that there was more to this filmmaker that met the eye in the The Royal Tenenbaums. I just watched his first film ever, Bottle Rocket. It was a complete commercial failure, but boy is this film a charmer. I can fully understand why Martin Scorsese named Bottle Rocket one of his top-ten favorite movies of the 1990s. Bottle Rocket follows three losers in a rich Texas neighborhood who come to the conclusion that "crime does pay."
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A Single Man
If we don't meet or if we lose the one person we are meant to be with, then our life is not worth living. Everything becomes meaningless. This is the key premise of the film. It is wrong. But if you suspend your critical faculties and assume this idea is correct for the duration of the film, A Single Man is a beautiful exploration of the premise. Fashion designer Tom Ford brings his aesthetic sensibilities and his 23-year experience of living with one and the same gay partner to direct a film that is nothing like what the enticing trailer made you believe. I want to live in the house of lead character, an Englishman (Colin Firth) who has taken up the teaching of literature in some LA college, calls his own. (I now wish more directors had studied interior design like Tom Ford!) Colin Firth delivers a spectacular performance. Aesthetically the film appealed to me more than its 1998 cousin, Gods and Monsters.
My Darling Clementine
When you visit Tombstone, Arizona, you will be struck by how small the town is yet how big a role it plays in the mythical version of American history. My Darling Clementine is the third movie I have seen about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the gunfight at the OK Corral (Tombstone, 1993, & Wyatt Earp, 1994, are the others). John Ford (director) gave this 1946 version a different look and sensiblity. Shooting landscapes for along time, he is trying to give you a sense what it felt like to live in the West in the 1880s. David Brooks identified correctly that the challenge in the Wild West was to build communities in the absence of a strong local governments (see his editorial). Wyatt Earp is even shyer with ladies (Clementine) than in the other films. There is a funny line when Wyatt has fallen in love with Clementine who by anyone's standards is a stunning lady. Wyatt to the Bartender: "Have you never been in love." Bartender: "No, I have been a bartender my entire life."
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Vicent wants the Sea (Vicent will Meer)
Vincent suffers from Tourette's syndrome, "an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic" (Wikipedia). When his mother dies, his father, a politician in Bavaria, sticks him into an institution of people with mental problems so that his tic gets cured. Now we are in location explored by earlier films such as Rain Main and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The film at times is funny and has a few deep moments, but it also deteriorates into cheesy kitsch. It is also too close the earlier German film The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), which was a lot better and I recommend you see instead.
Family Wedding, Youth in Revolt, Arthur, and Brooklyn's Finest
Four films: two good, two bad. Family Wedding, which chronicles the challenges of marrying across cultural and racial boundaries, had great comic potential but delivered a lame treatment of the subject. Youth in Revolt is the opposite: a film about love that is poetic and deep. Two thumbs up. Arthur, mixing animation with human being acting, turned out better than anticipated. It celebrates the power of the human imagination. I will see the next installment. Brooklyn's Finest was a waste of time because this film was already made many times.
United 93
We all roughly know what happened in the case of United 93. It was the fourth plane that was hijacked on September 11, 2001, to hit a high profile target. In this case, it was not the World Trade Center or the Pentagon but possibly the White House or the Capitol Building. If the Presidential mansion had been destroyed, September 11 would have been an even more shocking event. The plane never hit its target because some passengers found out via phone during the flight that two planes had struck the world trade center and they realized that their hijackers in all likelihood would fly the plane into another high profile target. To prevent this larger catastrophe, they banded together, stormed the cockpit, and overpowered the hijacker flying the plane, leading it to crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I have seen my share of films in the airplane hijacking/catastrophe genre, but this one is different because we know it is based on a real event
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Crazy Heart
I will always remember Easter 2010 as the Crazy Heart weekend. Aside from Avatar a few weeks ago, this is my favorite film in a long time. I knew before walking into the cinema that the film followed at country singer who had seen better days. Critics also raved about Jeff Bridges performance. Yes, his performance deserved an Oscar. But the most amazing person connected with the film is the first-time director Scott Cooper. Cooper was trained as an actor but never became a superstar. We are all better off for it because the man as a poetic sensibility that is put to better used as a writer and director. Every detail about the film is right. Cooper refused to shoot in Canada to save costs because he knew that original scenes in the Southwest would please our eyes and fit much better to country music. When I reviewed Walk the Line, I confessed that I could not relate to the music because country was foreign to my ears.
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Sherlock Holmes
Guy Richie took some liberties in wooing young audiences to see his version of Sherlock Holmes. The historical--but let us not forget fictional--19th century character invented by the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is quite meticulous with his personal hygiene and does not seem to have any constitutional interest in the opposite sex. Richie's Sherlock only puts drops of water on his body when it is absolutely necessary. One could mistake his Sherlock for a homeless street bum. Richie's Sherlock could also pass for a Don Giovanni who is merely between affairs rather than an incurable bachelor. Richie cast Sherlock Holmes in the genre an action movie, putting it closer in the tradition of James Bond or Jason Bourne films. Yet in one way Richie stayed faithful to the character in the Conan Doyle books. Sherlock Holmes is one hell of a detective. His powers of reasoning are peerless.
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The Hurt Locker
A few years ago I was staying for a night in a motel in the vicinity of the Washington airport. Breakfast included. USA Today placed before my door as is customary for this kind of American establishment. I read this snapshot of American life at the breakfast table. Next to me sits a man in his early 30. He is looking for conversation and connection. After training in Texas he is being shipped out to Iraq via this airport. The politicians make the decisions. We just hope that we are doing the right thing. His IQ is in the lower ranges. I come to share the trace of fearfulness about his future that has enveloped his being. "Can I have your email address so that I can write from Iraq," he asks me. How can I say 'no'. I never heard from him again. There are two possibilities: Everything went so well that he didn't feel the need to write. Or he simply got himself killed soon after he arrived in Iraq.
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New Moon
The sequel to Twilight is a big disappointment for the adult mind. Only teenage girls with a crush on Robert Pattison will enjoy this film. Nothing new happens. Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward (Robert Pattison), leaves her so she can be safe. Bella is crushed and becomes depressed. She spends a lot of time with Jake, who develops a big crush on her and now competes with Edward for Bella's love. Jake also moonlights as a werewolf. Edward, believing that Bella died, wants to commit suicide. But Bella finds him in Italy just in time to prevent his suicide. They promise each other to stay together forever. The End. We are ready for the next episode, Eclipse, coming out in June.
Up in the Air
What is a perfect night at the movies? A splendid dinner before! Short ticket lines! Then a surprisingly deep film with George Clooney in the lead! The words "deep" and "George Clooney" typically don't go hand in hand. But a strong novel by Walter Kirn and a director (Jason Reitman) who can bring into focus at the same time life's joys and disappointments provide a platform for Clooney to deliver a compelling performance. Clooney is Ryan Bingham who travels some 320 days a year from one American city to another to fire people on behalf of their employer. Once in a while he also gives motivational speeches that have become so popular in many American hotel conference rooms. Among the 300 odd million Americans, there may not be a single person who completely fits Bingham's profile of being rather content although he has no family, no significant other, no close friends, and not even place to come home to.
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Candy
The first half of the film was so painful to watch that I considered turning off the DVD player. Strangely enough when words on the screen announce that we are now entering HELL (this is after the two lovers Dan (Heath Ledger) and Candy (Abbie Cornish), according to earlier words of the screen, were in HEAVEN and then came down to EARTH), moments of poetry give us reprieve from the self-destructive ways of two beautiful junkies. For the most part, it is simply depressing to see two young people throw away their lives because of drugs. Now that Heath Ledger is dead after too many drugs found their way into his blood, the film is even more painful. Candy is worse than bitter sweet. Don't try it.
Whip It
Girl Power comes to Texas. Drew Barrymore's directorial debut is weak. But I enjoyed learning about the sport Roller Dirby. I had never seen it before. The sport is a bit rough yet fun to watch. Hey, what do you expect of Texas!
An Education
The skill of con artists is not specialized to particular types of people. The best of them such as Bernie Madoff in recent times fool almost everyone. That is what makes them so dangerous. Teenage girls falling for the bad guy is not news. But parents falling for the bad guy is an underexplored theme in the movies. If you are a parent of a teenage daughter, this film will be an educational experience. It does a very nice job in capturing the mood of 1960s Britain. We follow the journey to adulthood of a 16-year-old daughter who comes from a lower middle class family. Father and mother's only wish for their talented daughter is to attend Oxford. But suddenly a much older man appears on their doorstep and he shakes the very foundations of this socially ambitious family.
UP
It is difficult not to repeat myself in reviewing Pixar movies. Once again the studio has made a superb film. Unlike many sequel franchises that tend go downhill pretty quickly, Pixar's line of films is one wonder after another. Like all the other Pixar films, UP works for young and old. This time even the very old. See this movie with the entire family and embark on a marvelous adventure to South America.
It's Complicated
"50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce," says Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri. Sometimes I hear arguments that the divorce rate is so high because people go into marriage without sufficient commitment. I don't think that a large number of people say to themselves on the day of their wedding as if they are selecting a restaurant for evening: "If it does not taste good, I will simply go to a different restaurant after the entre." Most people I know find divorce quite unpleasant. Especially when there are children involved, one never fully get's divorced. Typically at least one of the partners is deeply disappointment that the idea of being together for the rest of the life did not work out. Not infrequently this let-down partner hopes that a miracle will happen and reunite the failed couple.
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The 40-Year-Old Virgin
The trailer was a lot funnier than the whole film that was only mildly amusing. The subject, of course, is serious. Human beings are designed to have sex but some people are extremely shy and lack social skills to hook up. The entire premise of the film that at age forty you can lose your virginity strikes me as highly unlikely. I once met a 65-year-old virgin who shared with me his philosophy of sex. I came away with the view that once he had hit forty, his chance of losing his virginity had dropped to virtually zero. That is why he was still a virgin at 65. Yes, the tagline of the film is correct: "The longer you wait, the harder it gets." The film felt too constructed because the hero gets lucky in the end. I don't think that life is that kind for most 40-year-old virgins.
Avatar
What a stunner! Turn the clock back 200 years. Not even the photograph has been invented. Here you are minding your business, strolling into your local pub. After your first beer with friends and family the room is magically transformed into a modern day 3-D theatre, and you are treated to the visual beauty of James Cameron's Avator. Grandpa and grandma would probably have a heart attack. They could not fathom that such a lifelike motion picture was possible. Are my eyes fooling me? Is the devil playing a trick on me? No, you are in a time machine, taking you 200 years into the future, and witnessing a major event in the history of motions pictures. Marrying animation with a new 3-D camera technology, James Cameron has taken film-making to a whole new level. Unlike Titanic, where Cameron used simply characters, this sci-fi adventure is populated by a wide range of interesting characters. Foremost, of course, are the avatars.
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This is it
Even by the standards of the recent fall of Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson is in a class by himself. He went from the biggest star on the planet to the erratic weirdo who could never fully shake the suspicion that his love for children went a bit too far when he routinely invited kids over for sleepovers to his ranch Neverland Unable to control is profligate spending habits, MJ stared bankruptcy in the eye. Many commentators believed that he had signed the contract to give the 50 plus live concerts in London to regain his financial solvency. In the weeks before the first concert date, rumors were flying that Michael Jackson was not healthy enough to survive the live show marathon in London. Suddenly MJ was dead even before a single concert took place. This is itchronicles the preparations for the London concert. The film confirms the theory that his doctor's negligence caused MJ death rather than the strains of preparing for the concerts.
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The Informant
The Informant (played by Matt Damon) is about a shady corporate whistle-blower. The trailer promised much more than the full product delivered. The big mistake was to try to turn the film into something of a comedy. This attempt fell flat. Thumbs down.
Atonement
My first reaction to Atonement was: I have seen this film before. Aristocratic daughter and son of servant fall in love. The differences in social class make it impossible for them to be together. The romance shatters. But before long, the film takes an unexpected turn and my second reaction became: This is a marvelous drama. The human brain is designed for people to survive. When you have done something terrible, beating yourself up for it and becoming all depressed does not have survival value. Suppression rather than atonement is a far more common reaction. Atonement, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Ian McEwan, is remarkable because the sister of the heroine commits a terrible transgression but years later is able to admit her awful dead. She sets out to atone and win back her older sister's respect and love. But then war comes and plays havoc with everyone's plans.
Bright Star
Boy, you have to be a true romantic to enjoy this film. A few weeks ago I wrote about John Keats in my diary. He is a magnificent poet. But this film about his love for Fanny Brawne is tough to sit through unless you are able to be deeply moved by true romance and require no drama: nothing much to happens except two people who are deeply in love with another. The Immortal Beloved film about Beethoven's love interest is an cliffhanger compared to Bright Star. John Keats's inner life and the poetry it allowed to emerge are much more rewarding than this film. If only Keats had not died at the tender age of 25.
Pirate Radio
This film is a like a glass of wine that you first don't like because the taste is so foreign (British dry humor). But after you continue to drink you warm up to the taste. And towards the end it becomes a quite magnificent comedy. Rock n' Roll in the eyes of the autorities had the status of gangster rap. If you are into the history of rock n' roll, even if it is fictional, Pirate Radio film has some funny moments.
Two Cars, One Night
Rarely do I see good short films. Two Cars, One Night is a sweat little film. I stumbled across it on home page of youtube. I have no idea how this film became so popular within little more than a week. I guess most of us appreciated the romance of childhood once we are adults.
Watch it.
500 Days of Summer
Think back to a past relationship. If you have kept a diary, read the entry for every day for as long as the relationship lasted. At the end of each day, decide whether you felt good or bad because of the person you were with. This will allow you to do a brutally honest accounting of how much happiness or suffering a relationship has brought you. Now imagine that you assign each day in the relationship a number from 1 to the last day. Let's say it lasted 500 days. Now randomly pick out days, and reread your diary. This is exactly what 500 Days of Summer does, except in the medium of film. It is brilliant because it captures so well the ups and downs of every past relationship. After all, if it had not downs, it would not be past relationship! Don't miss this wonderful film about the 500 day relationship between Tom (boy) and Summer (girl). It breaks new ground in how to tell a story.
Recount
The film takes a look behind the scenes of how Gore and Bush fought out their electoral battle for five weeks after the election. Even for someone who read the newspaper every day during this period, the writer and director manage put on a gripping drama. Clearly, the movie is written from the Democratic (loosing) perspective. But with the exception of how James Baker and Warren Christopher are portrayed (the come across differently when they are on TV), the film is splendid.
The Proposal
The Proposal is a lot better than I had expected after seeing the trailer for it. The short preview made it look like a silly film with a lame plot and stale humor. The heroine (Sandra Bullock) starts out a bitch. She is the chief editor of a distinguished book publisher in New York City. Showing how far women have come, she successfully harasses our hero (Ryan Reynolds). In an effort to avoid deportation from the U.S. because of a visa violation, she forces him to agree to marry her. Our hero goes along with her proposal not simply because he is weak but because he able to get something in return: The heroine agrees in return to promote our hero from her mere assistant to an independent editor at her publishing house. If you are up do date on immigration law enforcement, you will know that the IRS does not like it when you marry someone just to help them stay in the country.
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Cloud 9 (Wolke 9)
The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society's predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen's drama is not about the psychological challenges of growing old: losing your partner, falling in love again, wanting physical intimacy with someone who perhaps no longer cares for it. Dresen wants to demonstrate how we can be spooked by breaking many taboos of contemporary sensibilities. Hollywood staffs sex scenes with young women; he opens the film with a long sex scene with a woman in her late sixties and a seventy-six year old man. Even more shockingly, he gives the lead female character Inge (very well-played by Ursula Werner) the psychology of a sixteen-year-old girl who is naive, emotional, reckless, and irrational.
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The Times of Harvey Milk
This documentary about the life of Harvey Milk starts at the moment of his election to the city council of San Francisco. Compared the recent motion picture Milk, the film begins a bit slow but then becomes a wonderful depiction of what made Milk a great politician. It is quite remarkable to see him organize the gay community into a political force. All in all, the documentary is more gratifying than the motion picture because Milk playing Milk is a lot more convincing then Sean Penn playing Milk. Towards the end, the director devotes considerable time trying to figure out what motivated Dan White to shoot the major of San Francisco and Harvey Milk. No good answers emerge from White's biography. The film cannot uncover any evidence of psychological instability or sublimated aggression that periodically would have erupted. I suspect that if White hadn't had a gun readily available at home the day of the crime, he would have calmed down
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Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old. He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The reason for this is simple: unlike Allen he does not write his own scripts. When Eastwood secures a good script as in the case of Gran Torino he makes great films. Gran Torino is takes place in a decaying working class neighborhood in Michigan. Whites are moving out and relatively poor immigrants move in. Putting it mildly, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is not happy about this development. But after his wife dies, his anti-foreigner sentiments are challenged by the charms of the two teenage kids of the Vietnamese family that has moved in next door to him. Now you are treated to a wonderful story. I don't want to give it away. Go see the film.
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Rebel Without A Cause
Drama about family relations. Deep insight into the human psyche. Great film. Great emotions. Great acting by James Dean. Tribute to troubled children. Love. Nathalie Wood.
Briefly Noted: 17 Again, Bride Wars & Hildegard
Zack Efron is beautiful and fun to watch. Matthew Perry is a letdown. But 17 Again has a few good lines. Bride Wars is a real chick flick. Men will not understand what the whole thing is about. Hildegard, a film about the first part of the career of post-WW II actress and singer Hildegard Knef, is not nearly is good as La Vie en Rose, the film about the life of Edid Piaff that I reviewed in an earlier entry.
Milk
Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character. Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of playing a gay man lies beyond Penn's skills. This is crystal clear at the end of film when we see a snipped of the real Harvey Milk for a mere 30 seconds: Here it becomes painfully apparent that Penn comes no where close to capturing the real Harvey Milk. Penn's failure is a stark reminder that we all may misjudge the range of our abilities. While the film does a good job in telling the basic facts about the life of Milk, it does not illuminate at all the motive that led, Dan White, a fellow member of the city council kill Milk and the Major Moscone. The ending credits refer to a documentary called the "Life and Times of Harvey Milk."
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Hollywood at its best. The film lifts a simple idea from a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into first-class entertainment that touches on deep emotions of the human condition: being in love, getting older, and dying. Hollywood works its magic by hiring great writers (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord) who take Fitzgerald's plot line of a baby boy who is born old and gets younger and put together a narrative that is much grander than the original short story. Add to this a competent director (David Fincher), two of today's biggest stars in the leading roles (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), and a team of splendid set and make-up designers. Voila, you have all the elements of a great movie. The only weakness in this production is the editor: The film could have been half an hour shorter. But the production is so good that you can even forgive this weakness.
Lawrence of Arabia
Watching one of the great films in the history of the art form always fills me both with excitement and trepidation, particularly when the film was made a long time ago. Some films are timeless; others translate very poorly from the past into the present. Gone with the Wind bored the teenage me beyond belief because I felt that it was always clear that the actors were acting rather than truly experience the emotions of their characters. I thought the love story that allegedly existed between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhed Butler was simple fake, destroying the entire film for me. Many years ago I saw segments of Lawrence of Arabia but only now have I been able watch this three-and-a-half hour movie marathon in its entirety. One feels that the film was shot a few decades ago but this does not take away from its power. The Middle East is still in a political quagmire.
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The Baader Meinhoff Complex
In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer's union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists. Breloer's Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims, as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.
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Angels and Demons
The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The last 25 minutes bring an unexpected turn of events that left me moderately satisfied with the film.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
This fairy tale reminded me of children's theatre, a visit at the circus, and a Hollywood love story and action film all mixed into one. It is fun to watch Jonny Depp play a pirate who has been deposed by his crew and now wants to regain his position as the captain of a famed pirate sailing ship. Some of the dialogues are excellent. The writers know how to put together entertainment for all ages.
The Reader
The slim book on which the film is based is a wonderful read. Knowing the book makes the film much less exciting. The first hour feels very slow, particularly because book felt brisk. In the second hour the drama receives a jumpstart and you forget that you are sitting on perhaps a not so comfortable seat in the movie house. I read the book in one evening and savored the experience. After two hours watching The Reader I felt drained. A story nourished by the background of German society's difficulty to come to terms with what Germans did between 1933 to 1945 was turned in the film into a story about how individual lives are messed up by experiences during childhood and youth. That story we have heard a million of times. Commercially the film benefitted from being made by Hollywood.
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Slumdog Millionaire
Last time I looked, India had the second largest film industry in the world. Yet very seldom a Bollywood movie reaches the eyes of a western audience. The genius behind Slumdog Millionaire is to make Western filmmakers translate a Indian based-story into a western film format. In the process, a magnificent film has arrived on American shores that will be a strong contender for the Oscars. The film is a fairy tale for adults with great dramatic and romantic force. Its wonderful story gives you a glimpse of India--with all its contradictions--that most Americans and Europeans would have never seen. The film covers a 25-year period in the life of Jamal and his slightly older brother Salim who grow up in the slums and later are pulled apart because of differences in personalities and circumstances. Emotionally the first part of the film reminded me of Cinema Paradiso, the second part of teenage delinquency epics, and the final part of modern game show
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Tarnation
In my junior or senior year I formulated this motto: I want to turn my life into a work of art. What I had in mind was something like this: Rather than turning out work that could be construed as art I wanted to make sure that my life as a whole was esthetically compelling. Given the gifts and option available to me, I wanted to mold my life into something could compete with what is widely considered a compelling work of art. Jonathan Caouette, in his stunning autobiographical documentary Tarnation, turns his life into a work of spectacular art. But watching the film I realized that when I hatched my plan I conceived it as way to live forward. Caouette looks backward at age 30 and tries to make sense of his strange family life by construction an autobiography using only photos, super 8, answering machine messages, and video snippets that he collected since he was eleven years old.
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Frost-Nixon: The TV Interview
Even if you have already seen the 1976 film All the President's Men with Dustin Hofmann and Robert Redford playing the two Washington Post journalists (Woodward and Berstein) who exposed the Watergate scandal or the 1994 BBC documentary Watergate: Third Rate Burglary, this 1977 interview of a British journalist with Richard Nixon about Watergate is a fascinating 75-minute documentary. Initially, Nixon's arguments that he did not commit a criminal act reminded me of Bill Clinton's parsing of language when he was asked in a courtroom whether he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. But later in the interview Frost pushes Nixon into the corner where Nixon let's down his guard and makes some amazing declarations.
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Doubt
A psychologically pleasing story offers you some resolution at the end. John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of Doubt, denies you this pleasure. He errs on the side of wanting to teach you too much. He wants you to be in doubt at the end of the film and this means never revealing what really happened. The film takes place in a catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. The head nun (Meryl Streep) suspects that the school's priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is abusing his position of power. She harbors no doubt and uses all her political skill to get the priest to resign. In the end, after the priest is gone, she admits to her confidant that she is in doubt but we never find out if the priest did anything wrong. If you are someone who already knows that we never can be absolutely sure, the movie will not give you much.
The Edge of Heaven
The German title of the film (Auf der anderen Seite) means something like “on the other side”. Fatih Akin, the German writer and director of Turkish background has wonderful material to work with (growing up with Turkish parents in Germany) but lacks the skill the shape the material into a first class film. He comes across like a recent film school graduate who received money to turn his school project into full feature film: the writing is unfocused and, worse, he shoots the film in such a way that you always remember that everything is an act rather than real. By not allowing the fundamental magic of movies to unfold where you loose yourself into the plot as if you were watching a real thing, Aktin is making it unnecessarily hard for the viewer. I recommend that you watch instead The Lives of Others which shows you what a good filmmaker can do with powerful material.
Twilight
Most people I know woke up to the full powers of the flesh sometimes in their second decade. Some experience this discovery as 'no big deal;' others are thrown off balance. Trying to explore this new territory with some success often proves dauntingly difficult. Many films have been made about teenage romance. A few of them are delightful to the adult mind. Twilight is one of them. It takes you to a different place: A truly dangerous love affair that every parent, for once, would have a right to oppose: Do you want your teenage daughter fall in love with a classmate who happens to be Vampire? Visually, the film takes you to stunning views and mood of the Pacific Northwest. You don't want to miss these vistas.
Good Night, and Good Luck
At the Oscars award show not long after Good Night, and Good Luck came out in 2005, the host made a joke about the long-term bachelor George Clooney who directed and starred in the film. It went something like this: “George Clooney is the sexiest man alive. He can date any women he wants. And he does. But Clooney is notorious for not wanting to commit. Recently, he went on a first date with beautiful young actress. She was all smitten. Like a true gentlemen he took her home at night and at her door he said to her: “Good night, and good luck.” This joke at Oscars was much better than the film about the journalist Edward R. Murrow who helped to bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy with CBS news program. (Murrow always ended in program with the line “Good night, and good luck.”)
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
As far as action films go, the previous episodes of the Indiana Jones franchise left me pretty unmoved. Archeological treasure hunts were never my cup of tea. For this reason, I could have easily done without Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But here I am on the airplane. What the heck, let’s see what the 60 year-old Harrison Ford is up to. It was a pretty smart move to make the 22-year old Shia LaBeouf the co-star of the film. Without LeBeouf, Harrison Ford acting like young Tarzan in the rain forest would have looked entirely ridiculous. The film starts out terrible and becomes a little better. I had the most fun watching Cate Blanchett in the role of Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, a crazy Soviet scientist. Just like in I am not there she towers over everyone else. The last James Bond movie (Casino Royal) or the Jason Bourne films are a lot better.
Wall E
If you are like me and wonder how Pixar can pull off one creative blockbuster after another, here is an interesting peek behind the scenes of the studio. In an interview the writer and director of Finding Nemo and Wall E, Andrew Stanton, intimates that Finding Nemo did not work as a film until very late in the production process when creative team figured late in the production process that they needed to change the personality of Memo of give the film its captivating dramatic force. Pixar movies, we learn, are not the superb product from day one, but gradually improve. Wall E took over a decade from the initial conception to the completed film. The finished product is yet again a masterpiece. Unlike previous Pixar films, Wall E has a dead serious subject. Planet earth is a post-apocalyptic rubble field, inhabitable by humans. The only creatures left behind is the little robot Wall-E and a cockroach that roam what appears to be the greater New York area.
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3:10 to Yuma
To test the picture quality of a Blue-Ray high definition TV video disc, I watched 3:10 to Yuma. This western, starring Russel Crow and Christian Bale, has beautiful landscape photography that is much sharper on Blue-Ray than anything I have seen on TV before. The film itself was pretty mediocre except for the last 20 minutes, when it becomes psychologically interesting. Good and evil suddenly turn and you don’t feel like you have seen this kind of movie before. I had to watch these last minutes twice because I did not understand a crucial line that unexpectedly turns the entire plot.
300
300 is different from any movie I had seen before. The closest would be Chinese films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with the magical fighting scenes. Yet these Chinese films still are far from where 300 takes you. For my eyes, the film pushes boundaries of cinema as an art form. 300 tells the story of a historical battle in which 300 Spartan battled hundreds of thousand Persians intent on subjugating all Greek city states. (I cannot tell more without giving it away). I typically don’t like brutal, bloody films. But the makers of the film based on graphic novel (never new they existed) prove that even slaughter can be made artful. Anyone who wants to see a cinematic innovation and is able to stomach some really terrifying carnage, rent 300.
Mama Mia!
Mamia Mia!, this was worse than I had feared. I did not even get a great tour of the Greek islands. I was the first to leave the cinema. Now I was watching people coming out. Women smiled, men looked pained, albeit a bit proud they took their lady to the movies. Cinema, in my view, has rendered opera unnecessary. What makes a great movie is that, unlike opera or its modern incarnation--the musical--, it makes you forget that you are watching a staged reality. The best movies become lifelike. You think you are watching reality. In Mamia Mia! you never forget that you are watching a show. A good playwright like Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) could have managed to write a decent script around the songs of Abba. But Catherine Johnson lacked the skills and produced childish superficial love story. Pierce Brosnan (the former James Bond) is not able to act out his inane role. Meryl Streep does better with hers,
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Tropic Thunder
There is a reason why in most films different people take on the roles of the writer, director, and the lead actor: Rarely is one and the same person equally good at all these jobs. Tropic Thunder stars Ben Stiller, and is written and directed by Ben Stiller. That was a mistake. When I saw the trailer a few weeks ago, my hopes soared. Perhaps Tropic Thunder was going to be as funny as There is something about Mary. Far from it, the new Ben Stiller vehicle only provokes a few laughs. The story (a film crew making war movie in Vietnam comes under real attack) is rather weak, a mumble jumble of ideas that Stiller had over the years. The best part of the movie was Tom Cruise, who plays a slimy, foul-mouthed, overly hairy Hollywood producer. Cruise steals the show from Stiller, even though he only played a minor character, in a sideline of film. I am not going to see another film written and directed by Stiller any time soon.
The Dark Knight
When Heath Ledger died early this year, I was deeply disturbed by his death. I surprised myself by the strength of my sadness. What made it so difficult to accept his untimely death was my sense that this extraordinary talent could have mesmerized us for decades to come with his acting skills. The best thing about The Dark Knight is Ledger’s performance. How can a twenty-eight year old play the Joker, who has a much older persona? Having seen all few the recent spider man movies, I felt the Dark Knight breaks little new ground except for being much darker than any of the other films in this genre. Running 152 minutes, I left the theatre feeling overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending battle scenes between good and evil. The plot could have been streamlined by an hour without losing anything.
Sex and the City
The four ladies of HBO’s “Sex and the City” comedy series continue their adventure in New York. The writers infused the film with a good sense of fun. At times it is also a bit sexually daring, but for the most part it falls into the genre of a tame romantic comedy. This is not a movie that will make it into the top 250 hundred films of all time but it offers light entertainment if that is what you are seeking.
Briefly Noted Airline Movies: Married Life et al.
Flawless was better than my neighbor on a previous flight made it sound. It has an interesting psychological twist at the end. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is more fun to watch than the first Harry Potter, a flick that bored me out of my mind. Leatherheads, directed and strarring George Clooney is mediocre screwball comedy. Married Life is the best argument for staying single yet the best of the four films.
Penelope
My expectations about this airplane film were modest. A family is cursed and the fist female bay will be born with a pig’s nose. Ok. A little children’s movie. Yet to my surprise Penelope is one of the most clever films I have seen in a while. It is Cinderella, Romeo and Julia, Miss Piggy and teenage beauty obsession all mixed together in a magical realistic fairy tale reminiscent of Charles Dickens. Few movies can please both the young and adult mind. This one can.
We Own the Night
We Own the Night transports you back into the disco era. Drugs were a big part the Studio 54 scene (I visited famous disco once before it closed and marveled about Grace Jones’s rooftop haircut). One son of a family of senior police officials son a night club. Before long he has to choose between his law enforcement family and the vast opportunities given to him by the Russian owner of the club. Skip this film and instead watch the documentary of Studio 54 produced by VH1.
No Country For Good Men & There Will Be Blood
Both films have high ambitions: they want to capture the spirit driving American society. In the Coen brothers’ No Country For Good Men America is at its core only greed and violence. The writer and director of There Will Be Blood offer a more balanced and accurate depiction of America. There is violence but there is also hard work and tender feelings, especially toward children. There is greed but also wealth generation that benefits the community. There Will Be Blood is slow because it strives to portray in detail just how difficult it was to develop the American continent. Daniel Day Lewis deservedly received an Oscar for his unusual performance as the lead character.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry reminded me of an episode of the Love Boat in the 1980s. After yet another romantic disappointment, a lady decides that she had it with men. She meets a notorious womanizer on the boat. To get the woman "into the sack", the gigolo plays the role of a man who claims that he also never wants to start a new relationship. To make their commitment to abstinence even stronger, the womanizer proposes after a few encounters that they should sleep in the same bed andprove to themselves that they are capable of foregoing sex. The lady agrees, but her hand reaches over to his side of the bed before longThe next morning the love boat has a new romantic pair. Back to Chuck & Larry. Chucks wife has died and he no longer is entitled to spousal benefits from the City of New York, which would help his children in case he would also die. Chuck asks his womanizing best fried to pretend that he is his domestic partner.
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I am not there
About three years ago I acquired a collection of the best Bob Dylan records. I was surprised how many songs I knew, reminding me just how influential Dylan's music had been during the past four decades. I am not there is an artistic experiment that manages to be a total failure. Todd Haynes wants to tell the story of Bob Dylan by showing him through entirely different characters, ranging from a young black vagabond kid to middle-aged cowboy. At the end of the film I yearned to simply listening to Dylan's songs rather than seeing the collage of biographies of different people that are supposed to stand for the life of Dylan. Dylan's songs tell you more about him than this "art-film". The one saving grace is Cate Blanchet, who plays one of the characters representing Bob Dylan. She does a much better job than all of the other stars (Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger) who had signed to represent through a role Bob Dylan.
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Hancock
You have never seen a super hero movie like this one. The people who made this film re-invented the format. I admit it: I was jealous of the creativity the writers show off in this cool film. Hancock is a homeless drunk with real temper issues. Watch him as he is trying to work out his issues while is keeping LA safe.
Live Free or Die Hard
Die Hard is not the kind of title that lures me into the theatre. But one day in a hotel room somewhere around the globe I came across a TV channel that showed one of the earlier Die Hard movies. I don’t remember which one it was. It played in New York City. The film was entertaining. I heard that Die Hard 4 had a new twist. Yesterday I needed some distraction from work and decide to watch Bruce Willis back in action as John McClane. Willis’s stunts defy the laws of physics, but the drama is pretty clever. A group of terrorists is shutting the entire country down by taking control of all U.S. major computer networks that underpin the digital economy. Apparently in the past few weeks we came close to a complete meltdown of the global financial system. Against this backdrop, the film felt timely and scary. Bruce Willis saves the day. In real life, one small town cop will not save the country from a systematic failure of the federal government.
Bee Movie
Shrek 1 and 2 bored me sufficiently that I never watched the entire movie. Could the makers of the Shrek sequel come up with an animation film that could compete with Pixar creations? Yes, but only after teaming up with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Having watched a very funny trailer for the film a few months ago, I wanted to see the Bee Movie. Just like the Pixar movies, this film puts a smile on your face. Ohhh, life is good when someone as funny as skillful as Jerry Seinfeld gives a young bee the ability to talk to humans and file a class action in the New York State superior court. Enjoy!
La Vie en Rose
La Vie en Rose is the mirror image of August Rush. Telling the story Edid Piaf's exotic life, the film easily feels real and authentic. For an ear that grew up on pop and classical music, it is difficult to connect to the French style of singing in the 1920s and 1930s. I could not hear what made Edid Piaf's singing so extraordinary. By contrast, the first time August Rush touches a guitar to make music, it is apparent that this kid is a genius. You can see and hear it. I found La Vie en Rose to be in a similar league as Ray and Walk the Line. In regard to the superb acting, the most compelling scene takes place on the first date that Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) has with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Cotillard task is to show in her face that Piaf, who grew up in a whorehouse and has had a long list of lovers, is smitten with Marcel in a way she had never felt before (a "coup de foudre" as the French would say). Cotillard deserved the Oscar this year for this scene alone.
August Rush
Enjoying music seems to be hardwired into our brains. The wild success of the iPod is strong testimony that everyone loves music. I have yet to meet someone who does not like to listen to melodic sounds. August Rush is a 10-year old boy stuck in an orphanage somewhere just outside of New York City. He deciphers music in the many regular sounds of everyday life. He also believes that he can hear musical messages from his parents. His fellow orphans think that August is just a freak. One day August decides to hitchhike to Manhattan to look for his parents. Within 24 hours August morphs into a child prodigy who would have given young Mozart a run for his money. For once I can give away how the story ends: happily. Repeatedly deus ex musica comes to aid the plot. All the stars align perfectly at every single juncture to bring the story to the one conclusion that was possible in a universe ruled by a micro-managing, all-powerful, music-loving God:
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Charlie Wilson's War
Hollywood gives you an entertaining history lesson on how the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a likable congressman who is more interested in alcohol and good-looking women than passing any law. While he lacks diligence and determination on the congressional floor, he recruits what he regards a dream-team staff: all staffers are female and one is looking better than the next. Wilson has no legislative record whatsoever until he becomes aware of the plight of the Afghani people who are fighting the Soviet Army at enormous costs to their own population. After sleeping with a rich Texas Redneck (Julia Roberts), Charlie becomes serious and maneuvers Congress into providing the Afghani people with all the money they need to win the war. The most enjoyable character in the film is Philip Seymour Hofmann who plays iconoclastic CIA officer in charge of helping the Afghani effort against the evil empire.
Juno
It is difficult for me to write these lines about such a charming film. The plot has a number of unfortunate flaws. Juno, the character and the actress playing the role, are magnificent. But the story feels constructed by a writer rather than based on real lived experience. Juno is barely sixteen and seduces a nerdy classmate into having sex. She is not using any contraceptives and falls pregnant. The entire film is devoted to her struggle with figuring how to deal with her situation. What she does do in the end does not make sense to me. Her stepmother and her father were an option that she did not consider at all. It is great fun to watch Juno and her family compete with one another hurling out comic lines. You don't hear regular family dinner conversations the way they occur at Juno's house.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
The first 45 minutes of this sequel about the life of Queen Elizabeth are the most gratifying film opening I have experienced in months. It is not the plot that glues your eyes to the screen but the way the director shoots the scenes and moves quickly from one location to another. The camera is always in motion, filming from unexpected perspectives. You feel like being introduced to a whole new way of film-making. Unfortunately the director is not able to sustain this wonderful approach and the film settles into more familiar grooves. Since we know how the story will end (Elizabeth will not have children and she will triumph to make it her Golden Age), the second half of the film is merely good. Clive Owen as Mr. Releigh shows that he can also play a charming happy fellow. The historical setting is beautifully rendered, except for two computer generated scenes of a large forest and a battle on sea which seem--well--computer-generated rather than real.
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License to Wed
One of the big ironies of modern society is that we require people to obtain licenses for important and trivial tasks before we let them lose onto the world. I remember being told in my late teens. The of two most important decisions in life about choosing the right job and the right wife. For almost every job we need to demonstrate qualification before we can get hired. But when it comes to marriage anyone having reached the appropriate age can self-declare to be ready for the task of committing for a life-time. License to Wed thinks this to be ridiculous. The reverend Frank (Robin Williams) believes that a couple should first go through a rigorous program of examinations before they can be declared fit to marry. Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) enlists reverend Frank to help her figure out whether Ben Jones (John Krasinski) is the right one. I thought that the film's premise was clever but the execution left much to be desired.
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Road to Perdition
This dark, prohibition era, film is a bit hard to swallow. By design it is unlike The Untouchables where good triumphs over evil. Human life does not count for much in a Mafia-ruled Midwestern town. The film has a number of technical flaws that disturb the attentive viewer. The most intriguing feature of the film is how the narrative begins and ends. The opening words run: There are many stories about Michael Sullivan. Some say he was a decent man. Some say there was no good in him at all. But I once spent 6 weeks on the road with him, in the winter of 1931. This is our story. The final words bring the narrative to a wonderful closure: I saw then that my father's only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931.
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