Carina Chocano, Film Critic
October 24, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'
" Synecdoche, New York," screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's wildly ambitious directorial debut, recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely. Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the "precession of simulacra," a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely.
September 28, 2008
APPRECIATION
Paul Newman wielded his beauty like a craftsman
Paul Newman, that pure and concentrated essence of classic movie stardom, reinvented himself a couple of times in the span of his long career, until he ended up playing the kind of guy he might have become had he never left his native Shaker Heights, Ohio: an ultra-conservative, cold-fish Midwestern lawyer, married for decades to the same woman (see his performance in the Merchant-Ivory jewel box "Mr. And Mrs. Bridge," from 1990).
June 6, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Go-Getter'
When his mother dies after a long illness, Mercer White (Lou Taylor Pucci) steals a beat-up old Volvo from a carwash and takes off on the great American hipster road trip. Mercer is in search of his long-lost, half-Mexican half-brother, Arlen, whom he hasn't seen in years, but in true road movie tradition, he is actually in search of himself.
May 30, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Sex and the City'
IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to talk about the new “Sex and the City” movie without first mentioning "Sex and the City," the HBO series; or the rabid fan devotion it enjoyed; or the equally fervent antipathy (female and male) it inspired on socio-political grounds (sort of like the late-'90s equivalent of not letting your daughter play with Barbies); or the recently much-affirmed straight-male aversion to the series, predicated on cooties. In fact, the film arrives shrouded in such a fog of expectation, preconception, anticipation and (now with more post-Hillary bite!) gender bias that it's hard to see -- or write about -- the movie for the trees.
May 30, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Bigger, Stronger, Faster'
Sylvester Stallone, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 1980s saw an explosion of butt-kicking in America, observes Christopher Bell in the raucously funny and surprisingly insightful prologue to his debut documentary, "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*." And as a 12-year-old kid from a loving but undeniably short and doughy family in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Bell and his brothers were particularly susceptible to the message. As he reminds us, the don't-mess-with-the-U.S. Reagan years were an overheated response to '70s downers such as the Iran hostage crisis. But for the Bell boys, it was simply a call to ripped, bulging arms.
May 30, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Edge of Heaven'
Near the beginning of Fatih Akin’s captivating “The Edge of Heaven,” a lonely widower (Tuncel Kurtiz) trolls Bremen, Germany's red-light district before settling on a middle-aged prostitute called Jessie (Nursel Köse). Kurtiz's Ali is Turkish but raised his now-grown son in Germany. Jessie, whose real name is Yeter, has a college-aged daughter back home in Istanbul to whom she sends money for school. Both are alone and alienated from their children. After learning that Yeter is Turkish, Ali proposes an arrangement he thinks will suit them -- he'll pay her what she makes at the brothel if she'll come live with him.
May 9, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Mr. Lonely'
You could call Harmony Korine’s "Mr. Lonely" a comeback, but that would imply the return was anticipated, or that it heralds a return to form. I'm not sure either description applies. "Mr. Lonely" is just as unconventional, by Hollywood standards, as his earlier films, if markedly less pugnacious.
May 9, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'What Happens in Vegas'
The most annoying expression-turned-official city slogan ever is now a major motion picture starring Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher. Finally! They play a pair of odd-couple New Yorkers whose initial hostility is followed by more hostility, then by the obligatory race to re-get the girl, this time via water taxi. Happily, the eleventh-hour declaration does not take place in front of a correctly diverse crowd breaking into applause. Small mercies.
May 2, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Redbelt'
Peer pressure is tough, especially when it's pervasive, grown-up and institutionalized. In samurai movies, as in westerns, the warrior is often faced with a choice between individual morality and fealty to the tribe. Individual morality tends to prevail until society can be established and impose order, though in contemporary samurai movies, like Jim Jarmusch's excellent "Ghost Dog," both choices can be rendered absurd by the circumstances.
April 25, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Baby Mama'
Is Tina Fey, former head writer for "Saturday Night Live" and creator and star of one of the best shows on television, "30 Rock," going to get hit with a knee-jerk media backlash now? It could happen, given the blood-thirst that motivates so much cultural writing these days and, of course, her "convention-defying" success. I'm never quite sure that the conventions defied are real rather than media-made, but whether her new comedy "Baby Mama" blows up or is quickly ushered off the national stage like a grateful documentarian at the Academy Awards, it's a pretty safe bet that Fey's exotic status as a funny, smart woman over 35 will be cited.
April 25, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Then She Found Me' with Helen Hunt and Colin Firth
A movie about a woman in her late 30s who is desperate to have a baby is a hard sell in the male teen-oriented movie environment of today, or so the story goes in nearly every mainstream media outlet, including this one. That's because there's practically a law stating we must acknowledge prevailing perceptions largely created and maintained by their constant acknowledgment, before we go on to reify them further. Who am I to buck the trend?
April 25, 2008
MOVIE REVIEW
'Body of War'
ON Sept. 13, 2001, after watching footage of President Bush brandishing his bullhorn atop the rubble of the World Trade Center, Tomas Young, a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., enlisted in the Army. He thought he'd be sent to Afghanistan to smoke the evildoers out of their caves, as had been suggested. Instead, after completing his basic training at Ft. Hood, Texas, he was shipped to Iraq where, five days later, he was shot through the spinal cord and paralyzed from the chest down while riding through Sadr City in an un-armored, uncovered Humvee.
December 28, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Orphanage'
A handful of kids play a game of "statues" in the misty garden of a grand, somewhat lugubrious house on Spain's northern coast. The house is a small orphanage run by nuns, and the little girl who's "it" is named Laura. She's about 7, clearly the leader of the group, and is about to be adopted by a family. She turns her back to the other children and counts to three as they sneak up behind her and try to tag her. When she swings around, they freeze. This happens several times -- Laura turning her back to the approaching gang, the kids creeping up on her while she looks the other way, then stopping and hiding in plain sight when she whirls around -- until the scene starts to take on dreadful, uncanny connotations.
December 25, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Persepolis'
The characters in Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud) are simple, friendly black-and-white line drawings, as uncomplicated as characters in a children's book. Which is precisely what throws you when they get themselves put in prison or in front of a firing squad. Satrapi, who in the graphic novels on which the film is based recalls her upbringing in Tehran during the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, has said that she made her characters abstract so that they'd be more universal, so that we could see "us" in them. And it works.
November 14, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Southland Tales'
Abyzantine doomsday freakout that also somehow feels eerily familiar, "Southland Tales" is Richard Kelly's panoptic denunciation (or sendup, it's hard to tell) of the imminent, oil crisis-fueled apocalypse as seen from Los Angeles. The movie was booed at Cannes when it screened there last year, though I don't know what that says about it beyond noting that it joins the ranks of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" and Pamela Anderson. Since Cannes, "Southland Tales" has been extensively re-cut -- though, at 2 hours and 24 whacked-out minutes, it's hard to imagine what it looked like before.
November 2, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Bee Movie'
"ACCORDING to all known laws of aviation," says a voice at the beginning of "Bee Movie," which bears the double distinction of being Jerry Seinfeld's first foray into animation and DreamWorks' first foray into Jerry Seinfeld, "there is no way a bee should be able to fly." The voice explains that bees' wings are too short and their bodies too round to make getting airborne very likely. Then it adds, "Bees, of course, fly anyway, because bees don't care what humans think is impossible."
November 2, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
Lumet's mastery shines in 'Devil'
Few contemporary American directors have plumbed the problem of morality quite like Sidney Lumet. Then again, few American directors have been contemporary for as long as he has. Lumet is 83, and his career has spanned half a century and more than 40 movies -- not all of them good, obviously. But the good ones are great. The director is never more energized or interesting than when he squeezes his all-too-human characters into vise-tight spots of their own construction, then watches as the unforeseen, unintended consequences bloom. If any director will make you think twice about not thinking through a life-changing decision, it's Lumet.
October 19, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Rendition'
The latest in a series of films to dramatize the internecine mess that is the war on terror via overlapping stories playing out in far-flung places, "Rendition" couldn't be timelier. It opens just a week after the Supreme Court declined to review the case of misidentified, wrongfully "enhanced-interrogated" Khaled Masri on the grounds that it could expose state secrets.
October 12, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'
When we last saw the Virgin Queen (as incarnated by Cate Blanchett), it was 1558 (in 1998) and she had just completed her transformation from girl monarch to royal icon. The transformation that took place in "Elizabeth" seemed to stem from two wise decisions: remaining unmarried and switching to kabuki makeup. "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" (a title that strikes me as a missed opportunity -- something like "Elizabeth I:II: Caged Heat" would have better captured the essence) gives us the imperious and always majestic Blanchett as the middle-aged queen, last portrayed at that age by Helen Mirren and Judi Dench.
October 12, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Sleuth'
In the 1972 film "Sleuth," a hammy chamber piece based on a play by Anthony Shaffer, a young hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) arrives at the costume- and prop-stuffed manse of aging crime novelist Andrew Wyke (played with cuckoo brio by Laurence Olivier), who greets him as "the man who wants to marry my wife." In the remake, Jude Law plays Tindle, and Caine, who plays Wyke, greets him as "the man who's . . . my wife." Tindle chokes on his Scotch but the gleam in his eye could light a stadium. "She's . . . me," he replies, with the mock disingenuousness of a smart-alecky fifth-grader. In this battle royal between sex and money, there's no trace of the initial decorum of the original, which had Milo painfully lay out his humble origins and polish his bootstrap bona fides for Wyke's inspection. This time, the cat-and-mouse game is played by a couple of weasels. Which is a lot more like it.
October 5, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Darjeeling Limited'
It's hard to approach a new film by Wes Anderson without feeling like you've walked into an argument. There's something about his dollhouse aesthetic, his storybook formality, his miniaturist's attention to detail and his dogged belief in the power of objects to elicit the most oblique and recondite emotions that seriously sets people off. Why is a question for another paragraph, but needless to say it's exactly this staunch commitment to artificiality that makes his work what it is.
October 5, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Heartbreak Kid'
Like the 1972 Elaine May classic that inspired it, the Farrelly Brothers' remake of "The Heartbreak Kid" is the story of a guy who gets married, regrets it and falls in love with another woman while on his honeymoon. That, more or less, is where the similarities end. But why get bogged down in comparisons, when the new "Heartbreak Kid" stands entirely on its own merits as a grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.
September 28, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Feast of Love'
Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy "Feast of Love," though none of its splendors rings true. That's because in the Arcadian, storybook Portland, Ore., in which the movie is set, love is a simple binary system -- it's either on or off, pure or compromised, hot or age-appropriately snuggly. (The last one depends on whether the female half of the couple in question -- or both halves, if they're cute young lesbians -- is young and pretty enough to merit some full frontal nudity and scenes of vigorous sack action.) What it's not is complicated, or nuanced, or interesting.
September 21, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Last Winter'
Freud described the uncanny as the horror that stems from something that feels familiar and unfamiliar at once, caused by the return of something that was concealed or repressed. It's a feeling that courses through Larry Fessenden's "The Last Winter," which is set and partly shot in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (The rest was shot in Iceland.) It also sums up the plot of the movie, a contemporary gothic thriller about the perils of messing with nature.
September 21, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Jane Austen Book Club'
The notion of Jane Austen as palliative for all that ails you reaches its warm and cuddly apotheosis in "The Jane Austen Book Club," adapted from the novel by Karen Joy Fowler. Capably, if not exactly artfully directed by longtime screenwriter, first-time feature director Robin Swicord, "Book Club" is a widget carefully engineered to comfort, console and sell like hot cakes since it was but a gleam in the author's eye, and Swicord doesn't mess with the formula.
September 14, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Blame It on Fidel'
Anyone who's ever spent any time with kids knows that by nature they're conservative, bordering on reactionary. So it's not surprising that when 9-year-old Anna de la Mesa (Nina Kervel) finds herself caught up in the maelstrom of her parents' sudden conversion from well-groomed Parisian bourgeoisie to hairy left-wing activists, she freaks out and entrenches.
September 14, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Eastern Promises'
David Cronenberg has always had something to say about the grotesque transformations that result when science and technology transgress the flesh, and the ensuing social breakdown. But there was a time when he spoke about it in the language of experiments, infections, mutations, identity-altering drugs, malignant broadcast signals, genetic accidents.
September 7, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Hunting Party'
"Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true," reads a title card at the start of "The Hunting Party," Richard Shepard's film about journalists turned bounty hunters in postwar Bosnia. Which doesn't seem quite right. There are plenty of invented absurdities in there too.
September 7, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Dans Paris'
Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's "Dans Paris" plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages. Perhaps not surprisingly, if nonsensically, the movie quotes Salinger at every opportunity in telling the story of a pair of handsome young brothers experiencing love and loss in Paris. Well, at least we'll always have it.
August 31, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Nines'
"Creator" is a job description that gets tossed around a lot in Hollywood without much thought to its transcendental implications. But screenwriter John August ("Go" and "Big Fish") had plenty of time to ponder them during a highly creative nervous breakdown in 2000, after he was fired from a TV show he had created. The experience of being exiled from his own imaginary world (the show, "D.C.," continued for a while without him), left him dangling in a kind of limbo between his real life and his fictional one, and inspired the mysterious and often hilarious ontological freak-out that is "The Nines," his directorial debut.
August 31, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Live-in Maid'
Among Latin Americans of any means at all, live-in domestic help is an everyday part of middle-class life, neither remarkable nor grand. I mention this because it's crucial in understanding Argentinean director Jorge Gaggero's wonderful "Live-in Maid," which garnered the special jury prize at Sundance in 2005. The story of a housekeeper's final days in the home of her employer of 30 years, the film hinges on a set-up that, to American eyes, may look rarefied, but is in fact commonplace.
August 24, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Nanny Diaries'
THERE'S a throwaway gag near the end of "The Nanny Diaries" that hints at some of what's so perplexing and off-the-mark about this plodding and generic adaptation, which by rights should have been pure, eat-the-rich summer fun: Relaxing on the beach in Nantucket, a Park Avenue dowager shoos away her 6-year-old grandson when his nanny dashes off to use the bathroom. See, Grandma doesn't want to be disturbed -- she's on the last chapter of "The Devil Wears Prada."
August 10, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'2 Days in Paris'
2 Days in Paris" is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.
August 3, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Becoming Jane'
The actress Anne Hathaway may someday fulfill her costume biopic destiny by assuming the role of her literary namesake, Shakespeare's wife, but in "Becoming Jane," she takes on the far more daunting task of playing Jane Austen. Few writers enjoy a following as loyal or fervid or frankly well-organized as Austen's, and it's hard to imagine her fans not coming after "Becoming Jane" director Julian Jarrold and screenwriters Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood with pitchforks and torches, or at the very least a letter-writing campaign.
August 3, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Ten'
David Wain, director of "Wet Hot American Summer," creator of the sketch comedy series "The State" and founding member of the improv troupe Stella, brings his popular brand of surrealist yet mundane humor to the big screen with more or less dreadful results.
July 27, 2007
REVIEW
'No Reservations'
In the poster for the new Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle, "No Reservations," the actress and her charismatic costar Aaron Eckhart are shown standing hip to hip in a restaurant kitchen, stirring up something saucy while flashing their dazzling smiles at each other. Anybody tempted by this image to go see the film would be advised to spend an evening with the promotional materials instead, because Zeta-Jones' sparkling chompers aren't much in evidence in the theater.
July 27, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Girl 27'
Writer David Stenn stumbled across the shocking story of Patricia Douglas and MGM around the time he was finishing his biography of Jean Harlow, and he immediately sprang into action: He lunched, fashionably, with his editor, Jackie Onassis, and ran it by her as the possible subject for his next book. Stenn recounts the incident early in his strangely self-obsessed documentary "Girl 27," one senses, mostly for the chance to attribute the following lines to the iconic first lady: "If anyone can find out what happened to her, David, it's you."
July 20, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Hairspray'
At first blush, the idea of a movie musical based on the Broadway musical based on "Hairspray," the film by John Waters, seems beyond derivative — it's practically inbred. So it comes as a surprise when the movie turns out to be as happy, healthy and attractive as it does. How the new film directed by Adam Shankman, written by Leslie Dixon and produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron ("Chicago") compares to the staged production I can't say, not having seen the show, but the movie's style and exuberance torpedoed my initial misgivings within seconds.
July 20, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Goya's Ghosts'
"Goya's Ghosts" is Milos Forman's first film since 1999, but you sincerely wish it wasn't. A logy, rambling period piece, it feels about as far away from the spirit of "Amadeus" as it's possible to get with wigs and britches. Focusing only incidentally on its title character, the new film wanders distractedly around 19th century Spain in search of a cohesive idea, or failing that, a through line, but it doesn't come up with much beyond the hard-to-dispute observation that power is a gateway to hypocrisy.
July 13, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Talk to Me'
"Talk to Me," which stars Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, hearkens to another era, to a time before shock jocks bestrode morning drive time like colossal blowhards. Cheadle plays Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, an ex-con turned Washington, D.C., radio and television talk-show host, beloved local icon and Howard Stern role model. Ejiofor plays the straight-laced Dewey Hughes, who put him on the air when nobody else would have. Their unlikely friendship and partnership, founded on a shared commitment to speak out against injustice, is the focus of director Kasi Lemmons' film, which observes the fervor of a bygone activist culture longingly, as if to ask, what's with everybody now?
July 13, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Interview'
The late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo), was murdered by Islamic extremists in 2004 before he could realize his idea of remaking three of his films in a New York setting with American actors. A trio of American actor-directors teamed up with producers Gijs van de Westelaken and Bruce Weiss to realize the triptych of remakes now called "Triple Theo."
July 6, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Joshua'
So, it's not "Rosemary's Baby," but George Ratliff's "Joshua" is nevertheless languidly seductive and creepy, perfect for a hot summer night when nobody has the energy to pose a lot of questions.
July 4, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Introducing the Dwights'
Jeanie DWIGHT (Brenda Blethyn) works as a short-order cook in a Sydney cafeteria, but she used to be a comedy star and wishes she still was. Everything that's funny and sad about "Introducing the Dwights," an appealing Australian comedy tinged with melancholy, springs from this simple fact. Jeanie may be a working-class single mother in her 50s, but her gargantuan need for attention gives her a mythical dimension. She's like Echidna, the mother of all monsters — half nymph, half snake. (Emotionally speaking, of course.)
July 4, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Rescue Dawn'
Werner HERZOG has been here before, and not just because he first visited this story in his 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." His first Hollywood feature, "Rescue Dawn" is a dramatic interpretation of the true-life ordeal of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped from a Laotian prisoner-of-war camp and survived weeks in the jungle just before the start of the Vietnam War. Herzog returns to the themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career — the single-minded hero with the impossible dream, the cruel indifference of nature to his desires, the obsessions that rescue and doom him. Like the protagonists of "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," Dengler is the quintessential Herzog hero, evincing a strength of purpose that strains at the edges of human potential and possessed of an unwavering certainty that flirts with crazy but — in this case, at least — declines to seal the deal.
June 29, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Evening'
An impressive pedigree doesn't always guarantee a felicitous outcome, as any number of Hapsburgs or Hiltons will confirm. Unfortunately, the same goes for Lajos Koltai's adaptation of novelist Susan Minot's "Evening," which despite its fine source material and roster of formidable talent — to glance at the poster is to realize that under no circumstances should these people be allowed to board a plane together — lurches clumsily across two very long, disconnected hours, reducing Minot's, sprawling, ethereal story to a pop psych nugget about embracing life as it comes.
June 22, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Broken English'
A wry, charming romance about a New York woman who has given up hope of finding love, or even a decent night out, Zoe Cassavetes' debut feature "Broken English" stars Parker Posey as Nora Wilder, whose middle to late 30s have bottomed out in a rut of aimless socializing, boring work and generalized anxiety. On furlough from playing the cartoonish loose cannon, the always-riveting and criminally underused Posey gives a beautifully calibrated performance, possibly her most realized and multidimensional to date.
June 22, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'1408'
"Hotels are unusually creepy places," says Mike Enslin (John Cusack), who writes cheesy tour guides of haunted places, into his voice recorder a few minutes into his stay in Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel. "How many people have slept here before me? How many of them were sick? How many lost their minds? How many died?"
June 22, 2007
REVIEW
'Evan Almighty'
MOVIESSteve Carell is lovable as God's unwilling disciple. But the comedy is less than divine.God may be in all things, but lately he seems especially at home in a certain kind of big-budget studio comedy aimed at a very particular market. That would be, apparently, the market that loves its zingy Bible puns and its adorable CGI versions of all God's creatures but doesn't want to be made to feel too bad about driving that SUV or heating 6,000 square feet in a just-sprouted development.
June 15, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Nancy Drew'
Among the many things that the new movie "Nancy Drew" gets right is its timing. Just as it was starting to look as if round-the-clock coverage of rich, debauched teen train-wrecks was the only show in town, along comes a heroine — old enough to drive but too young to get decent rates on car insurance — who isn't a sociopath, a moron or a "laid-back" invertebrate whose most salient character trait is looking hot while being supportive.
June 15, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Amu'
In Shonali Bose's debut feature, "Amu," a young Indian American woman travels to Delhi to get in touch with her roots and ends up stumbling upon a terrible secret from her country's past.
June 15, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Eagle vs. Shark'
Comparisons between the new New Zealand nerd opera "Eagle vs. Shark" and "Napoleon Dynamite" are probably inevitable, given both films' appreciation for social ineptitude at its most hopeless and intractable.
June 8, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Crazy Love'
A singular case of truth being stranger than fiction could ever hope to be, Dan Klores' meticulously sourced and researched documentary "Crazy Love" tells the story of a dangerous romantic fixation that took a dark turn and wound up splashed all over the papers in summer 1959, before we had words for things like sexual harassment. And crazy stalker.
June 8, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
"La Vie en Rose"
Marion Cotillard astonishes as Edith Piaf in 'La Vie en Rose.'Adreamlike, impressionistic biography of the singer affectionately known as "The Little Sparrow," "La Vie en Rose" flutters around the various stages of French national icon Edith Piaf's eventful life, randomly alighting on the key, often tragic moments (nobody ever went to see an artist's biopic for uplift) that shaped her.
June 1, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Golden Door'
It's hard to imagine what an original cinematic take on the 19th century Italian American immigrant experience might look like until the giant vegetables start showing up in Emanuele Crialese's beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey "Golden Door," winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.
May 25, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Bug'
One of those shifty words that happens to describe a range of unrelated yet somehow mysteriously connected ideas, "bug" — which can of course refer to a variety of insects as well as function as a synonym for things such as "to bother," "to put under surveillance" and "to totally freak out" — seems to span the range of delusional paranoid concerns like somebody planned it.
May 23, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Pirates of the Caribbean: At WorldÂ’s End'
The third 'Pirates of the Caribbean' has plenty of . . . It's possible that someone, somewhere, has put together a flowchart or diagram tracking the many plots, subplots, digressions, divagations and flights of whimsy in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," which, depending on your tolerance for Byzantine complication for complication's sake, might have been alternately titled "At Wit's End."
May 18, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Wendell Baker Story'
If, upon exiting "The Wendell Baker Story," you find yourself wondering whether we're in the midst of some kind of Baldwinization of the Wilson brothers, you may as well know this now: Three is all there is. If they seem to be proliferating, that's because their latest collaboration, "The Wendell Baker Story," involves all of them. Luke and Owen star, and Andrew co-directs with Luke, who also wrote. It creates the appearance of a crowd, this Luke wearing three times as many hats as he has heads.
May 18, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Paris, Je T'Aime'
New York may be a perennial movie character and Los Angeles a backdrop, but for elegiac representations of itself, Paris beats them both. While no other city can boast such a long-term, intimate connection with the movies, like so many cinematic icons, this one is often reduced to its moldiest clichés. Seeking to redress this problem and present the city as the dynamic, varied metropolis that it is (and not the Eiffel Tower-themed repository for gamines and baguettes it's often shown to be), producers Emmanuel Benbihy and Claudie Ossard assembled a collection of 18 shorts by 21 directors from all over the world, each set in a different Parisian neighborhood. I'd toss in a funny French interjection here if I didn't suspect it would be counterproductive.
May 11, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Chalk'
Fifty percent of teachers quit within their first three years, or so a title card at the start of the scrappy mock documentary "Chalk" informs us. And to what should we attribute this depressing statistic? It's hard to say, exactly, from watching the movie — which more closely resembles an affectionate locker room towel-snap than a hard-nosed exposé — but let's just say that despite many moments of intimate, unguarded emotion so quietly cringe-worthy you may feel your organs blushing, educators looking to mine it for improvement milestones may be disappointed.
May 11, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'28 Weeks Later'
In a bucolic, Beatrix Potter cottage turned fortified makeshift bunker, Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice (Catherine McCormack) are just sitting down to a pasta dinner with four other survivors of the viral outbreak that ravaged England in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" when their party is crashed by a raging zombie horde. You wonder: Wasn't this mess already cleared up?
May 4, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Away From Her'
"Once the idea is gone, everything is gone," Fiona Anderson (Julie Christie) says to her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and two of their friends after reaching for a bottle of wine during dinner and instantly forgetting what it is, what it's for and what it's called.
May 4, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Civic Duty'
The surveillance thriller "Civic Duty" may be the second film in a month to court comparison to Hitchcock's "Rear Window," but it's actually a dead ringer for "Falling Down," Joel Schumacher's coda for the middle-aged, middle-class American white man that came out in 1993. As the post-PC, postmillennial, somewhat Canadian edition, however, it dispenses with the reductive ethnic stereotypes that made "Falling Down" somewhat confusing (were we supposed to think that Michael Douglas' character was maybe a teeny bit justified?), instead setting its critical sights on the fear-mongering news media and its role as national psychotic.
April 27, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Snow Cake'
With his velvety baritone and his sour puss (you half expect him to leave a trail of lemon husks, sucked dry, in his wake), Alan Rickman is the ideal actor to play a very particular kind of brooder — fierce but harmless, in pain but blessed with a high threshold for it. In Marc Evans' "Snow Cake," sensitively directed from a witty, personal screenplay by Angela Pell, Rickman plays Alex Hughes, a mysterious Englishman making his way across Canada having been recently released from prison, where he landed after killing someone. Whatever the circumstances of the crime, he doesn't look like the type. Eventually it's revealed that he's not — though he does seem to attract the kinds of repeat experiences that border on symbolism.
April 27, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Next'
When we first see Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) in "Next," a confusing new thriller directed by Lee Tamahori, he's sitting alone in a diner sipping a martini and looking strikingly like Richard E. Grant after a terrible night's sleep. Cris, we soon learn, is a sad-sack Las Vegas magician whose rather astounding psychic abilities (he has the gift of being able see what happens to him two minutes in advance) have failed to attract much of a paying audience. Consequently, he's reduced to supplementing his income at slot machines and card tables — a talent that has, not surprisingly, attracted the attention of casino security and a federal agent named Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore).
February 14, 2007
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A reluctant leading man
"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," Cary Grant is supposed to have said. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." But who wants to be Hugh Grant? Not him. He finds this "Hugh Grant creation" that has supplanted him in the world bewildering. And he's not crazy about the pressure, the tabloid hostility, the "stalky" fans or the possibility he'll drag the whole business out too long and end up a parody of himself, either.
February 2, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Because I Said So'
Not long into "Because I Said So," which stars Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore as a mother and daughter bound by a mutual dependence so neurotically obsessive it makes the affair in "Last Tango in Paris" look breezy and wholesome, I was reminded of the pancake-wrapped sausage that Jon Stewart has been waving around lately on "The Daily Show."
January 26, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
'Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965'
To call "Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965" comprehensive seriously understates its scope and attention to detail. The three-hour, three-part series bills itself as the first documentary on the trial, but it's no doubt the last word on the subject too. A top-secret S.S. project devised with the purpose of annihilating every last European Jew, what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau remained clouded until two decades after the end of the war, when the truth came out over the course of 20 arduous months.
January 5, 2007
REVIEW
'Absolute Wilson'
A couple of years ago, I eagerly went to see Robert Wilson's "The Black Rider," a dark fairy tale made in collaboration with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, and fell asleep halfway through the performance. I (very reluctantly) admit to this now because after seeing "Absolute Wilson," Katharina Otto-Bernstein's fascinating documentary about Wilson's life and work, it occurs to me that had I seen the film first, my desire to stay awake might have prevailed in its heroic battle against my eyelids.
December 29, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Miss Potter'
Wander into a screening of "Miss Potter" a few minutes late to see Renée Zellweger, in a long skirt and loose bun, scribbling in a notebook while musing to herself in British-accented voice-over and you might easily mistake it for another sequel. Could it really be "Bridget Jones III: Edwardian Spinster?"
December 27, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer'
Published in 1985, Patrick Süskind's novel "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" was the unaccountably compelling story of a boy born into the smelliest time and place in history (Paris, 1783, naturellement) with a superhuman olfactory sense but no personal scent. The boy grows up to be the most gifted perfumer who ever lived, and a serial murderer. In part a parable about the mysteries of human affection, "Perfume" turned out to be wildly pheromonal itself. It was translated in 45 languages and sold 15 million copies worldwide. Besotted directors from Stanley Kubrick to Tim Burton flocked to it, Kurt Cobain wrote a song about it, and producer Bernd Eichinger, a friend of the novelist, tried so doggedly for so long to purchase the film rights that Süskind, who was adamant his book not be turned into a film, wrote a play about it.
December 20, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Painted Veil'
"The Painted Veil" is a story of gruesome revenge exacted with bloodcurdling politeness. Other things happen in it too. There is growth and redemption, incredible scenery and beautiful piano solos. But a mild-mannered English bacteriologist who drags his frivolous young wife to a remote Chinese village in the grips of a cholera epidemic as payback for her affair with a vice consul — it's just the kind of story that naturally pricks up the ear.
December 15, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Breaking and Entering'
Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme's camera loves London, it's crazy about Jude Law and Robin Wright Penn and Juliette Binoche, and it adores all the beautiful interiors and muscular construction sites and stately Range Rovers of director Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering." Which helps explain why you can come away in thrall to all the dewy skin, creamy cashmere, clever dialogue, recurring leitmotifs, new-car smell and top-shelf intentions and still feel like a jerk for more or less enjoying yourself. It looks great, but it feels funny.
December 15, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Inland Empire'
About two hours into David Lynch's "Inland Empire," Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), or Susan Blue (Laura Dern), or possibly a third, nameless döppelganger (also Dern), runs down a pitch-dark, back-country lane, her mouth frozen in a blood-chilling, smeared-clown grimace. What has inspired this look of terror is never revealed. It could be anything. An anxious, disoriented Dern has wended from one identity to the next, one reality to the next, one country to the next with such paralyzing nightmare logic for such a long time by now that there seems nothing left to do but wait for the inevitably violent end.
December 15, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Backstage'
An obsessive fan worms her way into the life of a pop star in "Backstage," which could be characterized as a contemporary take on "All About Eve," only French, and with a more self-sacrificing ingénue.
December 15, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Good German'
The first scene of Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German," which is set in Berlin at the end of World War II, instantly calls to mind Roberto Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero." The last scene is a dead ringer for "Casablanca." Book-ended between the neo-realist beginning and the iconic ending is a film noir done in the classic style. Using vintage lenses, black-and-white film (high-contrast color stock with the color pulled out, but close enough), Hollywood back lots, rear-projection, expressionistic angles, an old-fashioned score, a morally compromised hero, an alluring femme fatale and a very bleak view of the world, Soderbergh has made a movie set in 1945 that looks as if it were made in 1945. Some of it was, even. The director has included footage of Berlin after the war shot by Billy Wilder and William Wyler, for verisimilitude and (why not?) good luck.
December 8, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Architect'
Despite an intriguing premise in which the architect of a housing project is confronted by a resident-turned-activist who wants his help in getting the place torn down, Matt Tauber's "The Architect" feels schematic and contrived, like a game of four-square between Ibsen, Le Corbusier, a television executive and the Chicago Housing Authority.
December 8, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Holiday'
The alluring surfaces of other people's lives can be deceiving, though generally not in a Nancy Meyers comedy, where the thin veneer of fantasy cloaks ... more fantasy. "The Holiday" is the story of two single women who swap houses over Christmas and, because they're nice girls, wind up with the boyfriends they deserve. If you wrapped Jude Law in a bow and tucked Jack Black into a stocking with a leather bone, it couldn't be cozier or more Christmasy.
December 1, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Candy'
"Candy" is a love story about a boy, a girl and a drug. The boy is Dan (Heath Ledger), a poet and dedicated addict, the girl is Candy (Abbie Cornish), a young painter just starting out as a user, and the drug is heroin, which has cracked tougher nuts than these two in half the time. All stories about addiction amount to remakes, essentially, and "Candy," for all its sunlit surface freshness, is no exception, though it does offer the novel cinematic perspective that (quick, cover the kids' eyes) drugs are fun until they're not.
November 24, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Flannel Pajamas'
Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) meet on a blind date that oddly also briefly includes his brother Jordan (Jamie Harrold), her best friend Tess (Chelsea Altman) and their therapist. It gets stranger from there in Jeff Lipsky's offbeat second feature, "Flannel Pajamas," which follows the couple's life from giddy setup to marital strife. They fall for each other immediately, despite the fact that they have nothing in common. Justin is a big-city Jewish boy with a flashy Broadway job; Nicole is a Catholic girl from a big Montana family who has trouble keeping a gig as a sales rep. After spending the night in her awful bathroom-less apartment, Stuart asks Nicole to move in with him and let him pay off her student loans. Nicole's response is wary, though she quickly adds, "I'll take the money, though."
November 22, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Fountain'
Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" spans more than 1,000 years and feels as though it takes about that long to unfold. A metaphysical melodrama about the quest for eternal life, it makes a pretty decent case for euthanasia; here is what it's like to long for a swift, merciful end. Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot (think "Love Story" across time and space) in the hope that we'll mistake it for something deep. As pretentious as it is silly, "The Fountain" is just the type of impenetrable indulgence that gives the concept of personal artistic visions a bad name.
November 21, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The History Boys'
What is the value of education, and how does it shape our understanding of the world? These are the questions posed by "The History Boys," based on the hit play by Alan Bennett, directed by Nicolas Hytner and starring the original National Theater cast. A lively and entertaining disquisition on the purpose and uses of knowledge in a world that cares less about scholarship than quantifiable results, "The History Boys" asks us to ponder the moral consequences of reducing education to a tool for personal advancement, positing history as the infinitely malleable interpretation of recent events.
November 17, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Fast Food Nation'
Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation" can tell you that the big burger-related question of the day is not "where's the beef," but what, in the name of all that is good and pure, is in the beef. Apparently, not much that is good and pure. Beyond that, you don't want to know — and neither does the $330-billion fast food industry, which in response to Schlosser's Upton-Sinclair-of-the-Happy-Meal exposé, launched a major PR counteroffensive designed by the same people who brought us the Swift Boat campaign. (McDonald's has denied involvement.)
November 17, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'For Your Consideration'
Fred Willard's faux-hawk is possibly the best thing about Christopher Guest's "For Your Consideration," a spoof of Oscar season hype co-written with Eugene Levy. It's funny in parts but not half as inspired as past efforts. Still, Willard is a genius at playing dumb, and he knows a kindred hairstyle when he sees one.
November 10, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Copying Beethoven'
"He mooned me," Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) confesses to her persnickety engineer boyfriend, Martin Bauer (Matthew Goode), relating another day at the office with her new boss, Ludwig van Beethoven. This disclosure would be disconcerting enough if Beethoven's death didn't predate the expression (or at least its current usage) by about 140 years. But according to press notes for Agnieszka Holland's "Copying Beethoven," the soulful amanuensis and self-appointed emotional advisor to the great composer is a "fictional character based on actual persons." So she's as free to be as anachronistic as she wants to be.
Click here to view trailer
November 3, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Volver'
Like most homecomings (or at least most good ones), Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" is warm, emotional and forever on the brink of tears — peppered with bouts of pique, old resentments that flare up and moments of intense and lyrical longing. But what matters most are the kisses — madcap machine-gun smacks that the characters plant on each others' cheeks as though underlining their affection in triplicate. The title means "coming back," and it marks a return, as the Spanish director has said, to the La Mancha of his youth, to his comedic roots, to the world of women, to mothers and to the actress Carmen Maura, one of the original "Chicas Almodóvar" with whom he had a painful falling out 16 years ago.
October 27, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Death of a President'
Gabriel Range's "Death of a President," a potato so hot the Toronto Film Festival's schedule referred to the movie only by its initials until a week before its premiere, has been so well and thoroughly flamed since September that it lands in theaters this week obscured in smoke. Somewhere within this smoldering heap of controversy is a technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering movie that imagines what would happen if the president of the United States were assassinated — a hypothetical event it presents as calamitous.
October 27, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Babel'
If a butterfly flaps its wings in the rain forest, it will, if nothing else, set off an infinite chain reaction in the minds of Alejandro González Iñárritu and his creative collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga. The director and screenwriter have a thing for causal connections, which, in "Babel," they literally track to the ends of the Earth.
October 20, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Marie Antoinette'
Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" opens with a shot of the last queen of France reclining on a chaise while a maid tends to her feet, surrounded by a parapet of pastries. On the soundtrack, the 1980s post-punk band Gang of Four belts out its class-baiting, anti-consumerist anthem, "Natural's Not in It." ("The problem of leisure / what to do for pleasure," it goes.) A confection herself, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) selects a pastel-colored macaroon from a tray and takes a nibble. The whole time she's gazing saucily at the camera as if to ask if we'd like to make something of it. Maybe we would.
October 20, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Running With Scissors'
Why is it that sometimes there's nothing like a true story to ring false? It's a question for the ages, and there's plenty of time to ponder it during Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' bestselling memoir, which lovingly and painstakingly recounts the years Burroughs spent as the legal charge of his crazy mother's crazier psychiatrist. "I guess it doesn't matter where I begin," says the narrator, just before the movie starts. "No one is going to believe me anyway." At that point, though, there's still no reason to suspect he's right.
October 13, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Old Joy'
For all kinds of reasons, the narratives that play out in people's heads — transitory epiphanies and realizations that combine to form evanescent meaning — don't often survive untouched the passage into movies (which mostly concern themselves with supplanting them anyway). Documenting barely perceptible shifts in attitude, recording subtle changes in love, capturing the mood of an era — these tasks are generally considered better suited to prose, where a pang of annoyance or a waft of melancholy can be scaled or spelunked to their heights or depths and still feel like fleeting private experiences.
October 6, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Little Children'
About halfway through Todd Field's deeply resonant "Little Children," adulterous suburban lovers Sarah and Brad (Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson) indulge in something really naughty: They join in a moment of mass moral panic and righteous ostracism at the community pool. The cheerful chaos has just been obliterated by the discovery that the goggled and flippered town pervert, Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), has slipped into the water among the kids. Sarah spots him first, then awareness sweeps over the crowd like a wave. Parents rush poolside, children scramble out of the water or get plucked out by the armpits, babies start to wail. It's as if the shark from "Jaws" had finally found a way to justify decades of collective primal fear. Wrapping their arms around their kids, Sarah and Brad instinctively join the crowd. They may be guilty, but McGorvey, mercifully for them, is guilty of much worse.
October 6, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'49 Up'
The seventh installment in Michael Apted's ever-evolving masterpiece, "49 Up" is a buoyant surprise that, perhaps contrary to its initial assumptions, has in the long run defied more expectations than it has confirmed. Richer and more textured than its predecessors (each chapter includes interviews with the participants from every stage in the process), and more likely to inspire bouts of entirely defensible sentimentality (some reversals are nothing short of remarkable), "49 Up" is more than a deeply satisfying movie; it's a reminder of the wonder contained in ordinary lives.
September 27, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Last King of Scotland'
"The Last King of Scotland" is not based on a true story. It was inspired by "true" events, which leaves more room for invention. Based on the 1998 novel by Giles Foden, it's the story of a young Scottish doctor who in 1971 signs up with the British Ministry of Health to work in a remote Ugandan village and winds up living the high life in Kampala, clutched to the turbulent bosom of Gen. Idi Amin.
September 22, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Al Franken: God Spoke'
" Al Franken: God Spoke" is a great title for a send-up and an even better one for a Hellerian satire of institutional insanity. It sets you up to expect a merciless lampooning of the pundits and politicians who insist they are just checking off errands on the to-do list of the Almighty after every foul. So, for that matter, do the opening images of Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus' documentary. Decked out for a Playboy shoot in a robe and flowing beard, looking like a myopic Moses, Al Franken receives his own set of divine instructions from a booming voice that tells him to "start by attacking [Bill O'Reilly, et al.], then go after the right-wing media, especially Fox." So, he does.
September 22, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Science of Sleep'
Maybe I should confess that if Michel Gondry's next directing project involved rerouting traffic, I'd buy a ticket with my own money. "The Science of Sleep," Gondry's third feature, follows the under-loved "Human Nature" and the much more successful, melancholy and poignant "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It's the first of his films not written by Charlie Kaufman (though it was Gondry who proposed the idea for "Eternal Sunshine," after it was suggested to him by a friend). After seeing the third film it's easier to sort their individual talents into adjoining but separate piles. Gondry, whose artistic, free-thinking family includes two musicians, another director and an inventor, is nostalgically fixated on memory, especially childhood memory, and the role it plays in shaping the present. But he doesn't share Kaufman's more cerebral gift for precise narrative structure. "The Science of Sleep" isn't as intricately plotted as "Eternal Sunshine," nor does it rush to quite as satisfying an end. It doesn't have anyplace in particular to go, and it takes its time not getting there. But the sightseeing is fantastic.
September 15, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Last Kiss'
"The Last Kiss" is directed by Tony Goldwyn and written by Paul Haggis and based on the Italian movie "L'Ultimo Bacio." Unlike the Italian movie, this one is set in Madison, Wis., which has never looked more elegant or more temperate, or less Midwestern and fringy and bohemian than it does here. When a character mentions quitting his job at the cheese factory, I thought for a second he was referring to a cute gourmet shop. At one point, the protagonist refers to his girlfriend's breasts as her "breasts." Needless to say, no O's were flattened in the making of this picture.
September 8, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Vajra Sky Over Tibet'
The third installment in documentarian John Bush's "Yatra Trilogy," "Vajra Sky Over Tibet" is a filmed pilgrimage through Tibet's religious history and current religious community, as well as a travelogue of its fairy-tale architecture and breathtaking landscapes.
September 8, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Mutual Appreciation'
When Andrew Bujalski's first feature, "Funny Ha Ha," was released last year, the then 28-year-old director was tentatively anointed the voice of his generation. But what struck me was how articulately he seemed to speak for the generation just before his too.
September 8, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Sherrybaby'
You'd have to do the math to know for sure, but casual analysis suggests that stories about drug addicts, especially recovering ones, make up a disproportionate number of stories told on the screen. American movies are fixated on the twin forces of degradation and redemption. Whether that's due to actual audience interest in the subject matter, or to the ease with which stories about addicts fit into the prescribed dramatic structure is hard to say. Or maybe it's not that hard. The trouble with movies about addicts is that, pathos notwithstanding, the addicts themselves tend to be boring and predictable, not to mention especially vulnerable to cheap psychoanalysis.
September 4, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Idiocracy'
What does Mike Judge have to do to get a movie released and marketed? He could stop making satires as merciless and spot-on as this one, for one thing. His second film in seven years, "Idiocracy," was completed nearly two years ago and dumped on Friday, reviewless and unmarketed, in six markets not including New York and San Francisco. (Because who could possibly be interested in the long-awaited movie by the director of "Office Space" there?) It's this sort of vote of no-confidence that gets people wondering — just how bad could it be? Which raises the issue of what "bad" means to the studio that unleashed "Date Movie" and "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties" on an unsuspecting populace.
September 1, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'This Film Is Not Yet Rated'
Since 1968, when the MPAA ratings system was created as a successor to the more censorious Hays Code, the Motion Picture Assn. of America has wielded enormous power over movies. Foreign, art and independent films, which can be stopped in their tracks by the dread NC-17 rating, have been particularly vulnerable to the board's mercurial decisions.
August 25, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Buzz'
A.I. Bezzerides, Buzz to his friends, had a long, fruitful writing career in the 1940s and '50s, churning out pulp novels and scripts for film noir classics such as "On Dangerous Ground" and "Kiss Me Deadly." Yet, like many screenwriters, he remains mostly unknown today. Spiro N. Taraviras' documentary "Buzz" chronicles the life of a tireless worker of the Hollywood "dream factory" of the middle of the last century, weaving it together with stories about the working-class experience, labor practices and the Hollywood blacklist.
August 25, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Queens'
A breezy romantic farce bouncing lightly off a singular historical moment, Manuel Gómez Pereira's "Queens" takes place in the days leading up to Spain's first legal gay wedding. (Spain was the fourth country to legalize gay marriage, a little over a year ago.) The title is a play on words; the story centers around three young gay couples who plan to marry in a televised ceremony for 20. But the "queens" of the title are four of their formidable mothers.
August 19, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Snakes on a Plane'
"Snakes on a Plane" is many things. A great summer catch phrase. A possible lyric in a future Alanis Morissette song ("It's like snay-ee-akes, on a pla-a-ane ..."). A potentially big step toward the total elimination of the creative middleman in mainstream entertainment. A high school prank perpetrated on a mass scale.
August 18, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Illusionist'
Adapted from Steven Millhauser's short story of the same name, "The Illusionist" stars Edward Norton as a magician with supernatural powers, Jessica Biel as a democratically minded duchess, Paul Giamatti as an officious police inspector and Rufus Sewell as the crown prince of something resembling the Austro-Hungarian empire.
August 18, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Trust the Man'
Two New York couples work through their issues in Bart Freundlich's bizarrely off-key "Trust the Man," which stars Julianne Moore as a famous actress named Rebecca, whose husband, Tom (David Duchovny), a former copywriter turned porn-obsessed house-husband, cheats on her with a vamp from his mommy group. Tom is best friends with Rebecca's brother Tobey (Billy Crudup), who is having trouble committing to her pal Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal) after seven years of cohabitation. Elaine wants a baby, Tobey wants to be a baby. So you see the problems.
August 11, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'House of Sand'
In 1910, the lunatic Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra) leads his young, pregnant wife, Áurea (Fernanda Torres), her mother, Doña Maria (Fernanda Montenegro), and a band of men and donkeys into the sandy wasteland of the Maranhão desert in northern Brazil — which he has somehow convinced himself is prosperous land. Áurea begs Vasco to return to the city, but he refuses and begins instead to build a house in the dunes. His men quickly abandon him, and Vasco dies soon afterward, leaving Áurea and her mother stranded on the lunar landscape alone.
August 11, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Conversations With Other Women'
A man and a woman in their late 30s or early 40s meet at a wedding. She (Helena Bonham Carter) looks particularly ill-at-ease in her bridesmaid's dress as she ducks into corners trying to find a place to smoke. He (Aaron Eckhart) watches her with amused interest and finally asks the bartender to wish him luck. As the reception winds down, the two of them sit at a table, sparring lightly like strangers who've got each other's numbers.
August 4, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Brothers of the Head'
The gothic allure of the opening images hooks you immediately. Here's Jonathan Pryce, somberly attired, flipping through yellowed photos of conjoined fetuses as a car delivers him to some remote, wind-swept edge of England. Stepping out of the car, he sinks in the mire and is startled by a squawking crow.
August 4, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Barnyard'
I understand that realism is not the main goal in an animated movie about anthropomorphized farm animals, but, seriously, what's with the male cows in "Barnyard"? Did the bovine gender confusion at the heart of the story give no one pause at Paramount or Nickelodeon? Did the drawbacks of featuring a female lead so outweigh the benefits of cow protagonism that a mass species sex-change was required in order for the project to go forward? Are hornless, uddered boy-cows the next big thing in aggressively marketed, reality-displacing fallacies, like Snackwells and intelligent design?
August 4, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Boynton Beach Club'
"Boynton Beach Club" was directed by early '80s indie queen Susan Seidelman ("Smithereens," "Desperately Seeking Susan"), but it was inspired by her mother Florence's experiences after she moved to an "active adult" community in Florida. A light ensemble comedy about falling in love past retirement age, it follows the romantic adventures of a group of seniors who meet through a local bereavement support group.
July 28, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Scoop'
If Woody Allen were a painter, a lot of his movies could be classified as studies for works in progress. "Scoop" feels like a tentative doodle in the general direction of "Match Point," only chronologically reversed and more or less amusing. A murder mystery in the vein of "Manhattan Murder Mystery," the action unfolds in London, in the crispiest parts of its upper crust. It's all very civilized and cozy, which is good because the jokes, God help them, are so ancient and creaky you're compelled to offer them your seat. (No, really, it's no trouble at all.)
July 26, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Little Miss Sunshine'
"When all professions are open to all, and when one can reach the summit of each of them by oneself," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about American democracy in the 1830s, foreshadowing the massive crisis in status anxiety that would eventually compel us to buy Hummers and use phrases like "new paradigm" with a straight face, "an immense and easy course seems to open before the ambition of men, and they willingly fancy that they have been called to great destinies. But that is an erroneous view corrected by experience every day."
July 21, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'My Super Ex-Girlfriend'
Watching "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," the new comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Don Payne, I experienced a little pang of nostalgia for Psycho Ex-Girlfriend. Remember? For a week in the spring of 2001, the website created by a newly single Dallas guy to house his world-class collection of crazy voicemail messages from a jilted lover racked up hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Alas, the whole thing to turned out to be a hoax, and all 53 MP3-fulls of alternating vitriol, contempt, unhinged rage and free-form despondency disappeared mysteriously into the ether. Psycho Ex may have been a fake, but as anyone who has ever been on the receiving, administering or witnessing end of a similar situation knows, she felt hilariously, horribly, triumphantly real .
July 21, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Heading South'
Once upon a time, in the pre-AIDS late '70s, Western tourists traveled to Haiti to avail themselves of sun, fun and whatever young, handsome, hungry subject of the brutal Duvalier regime happened to strike their fancy. Some of those tourists were women "of a certain age," as the mincing euphemism goes — or, as the ladies who patronize the rustic beach resort in Laurent Cantet's "Heading South" refer to themselves, "women over 40." Never mind that some of the characters, like the one played by Charlotte Rampling, haven't seen that particular birthday in two decades. In the film, as in some sectors of society, the idea that women persist in existing past young adulthood remains a delicate subject to be dealt with discreetly and carefully, as though inquiring into an unpleasant odor.
July 14, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'You, Me and Dupree'
In the movies, letting someone crash on the couch is usually step one on the ruinous road to loss of privacy, destruction of personal property, family strife and at least one fire. And the studiously by-the-book houseguest comedy "You, Me and Dupree" leaves nothing out. When Dupree (Owen Wilson) loses his job, his apartment and his car after flying to Hawaii to be the best man at his friend Carl's wedding (he forgot to tell his boss), Carl (Matt Dillon) and his schoolteacher bride, Molly (Kate Hudson), soon find themselves sharing their love nest.
July 7, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'A Scanner Darkly'
When Richard Linklater made "Slacker" 15 years ago, he filled it with characters living in the margins of American society. Losers and crackpots by mainstream standards, they were nonetheless quite industrious when it came to questioning, doubting and worrying about the relationship between average people and the forces of government, celebrity culture and other shadowy monoliths. These characters were recognizable enough to make the movie an instant cult hit, yet neglected enough to require a catchy new nomenclature. Familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town, or the "arty" section of a big city, or a middle-class outpost in decline, they are embers of neither establishment nor, strictly speaking, the underclass. They're the dispossessed of the Information Age.
July 5, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'
It's like Lois Lane said, the world doesn't need Superman, but it could use more of Jack Sparrow. So, for that matter, could "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," the second installment in what will soon be the first major motion picture trilogy based on a theme park ride subsequently remade in its image. (Where's Jean Baudrillard when we need him?) Johnny Depp's foppish, mercurial, sexually ambiguous and probably very smelly scoundrel is the morally fluid, completely unreliable soul of the film, not to mention a welcome change from the drippy, neurotic heroes that have come to define what it means to be super in the movies lately.
June 30, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Wassup Rockers'
What's up with Larry Clark and kids in peril? In his latest lurk into the world of teenagers on the loose, Clark uses first-time actors to enact a fictional version of their own experiences. Set in South Central and Beverly Hills, the story traces a long day in the life of 14-year-old Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez) and his friends Kico (Francisco Pedrasa), Spermball (Milton Velasquez), Porky (Usvaldo Panameno), Eddie (Eddie Velasquez), Louie (Luis Rojas Salgado) and Carlos (Carlos Ramirez), a group of skaters growing up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in L.A.
June 30, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Devil Wears Prada'
Anna WINTOUR must be pleased. The new movie adaptation of "The Devil Wears Prada," adapted from Lauren Weisberger's barely skimmable roman à clef about the year she spent as the Vogue editor's assistant, not only casts doubts as to who the actual heroine of the story is, it's very clear on who's the star of the show. A serious improvement on the tantrum that inspired it, the movie is funnier and more evenhanded in its point of view. If living well is the best revenge, then being portrayed by Meryl Streep in peak comic form has got to run a close second.
June 23, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'The Road to Guantanamo'
Prolific British director Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" is a visceral first-person account of what happened to three British teenagers shortly before and for a long time after they were captured by American forces while traveling in Afghanistan in 2001. Detained for three years without charge in Cuba, where they were tortured and denied access to lawyers or their families, they were eventually released and returned to England. The recent suicides in Guantanamo make this film especially timely.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
E-mail
Digg
Twitter
Facebook
StumbleUpon
