Films Shown in 2008
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - Rated R - 123 minutes - Scope
The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, "but he tolt me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes." These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist. The man is named Anton Chigurh. No, I don't know how his last name is pronounced. Like many of the words McCarthy uses, particularly in his masterpiece Suttree, I think it is employed like an architectural detail: The point is not how it sounds or what it means, but the brushstroke it adds to the sentence. Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a tall, slouching man with lank, black hair and a terrifying smile, who travels through Texas carrying a tank of compressed air and killing people with a cattle stungun. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again. Chigurh is one strand in the twisted plot. Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff played by Jones, is another. The third major player is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a poor man who lives with his wife in a house trailer, and one day, while hunting, comes across a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. Vehicles range in a circle like an old wagon train. Almost everyone on the scene is dead. They even shot the dog. In the back of one pickup are neatly stacked bags of drugs. Llewelyn realizes one thing is missing: the money. He finds it in a briefcase next to a man who made it as far as a shade tree before dying. The plot will involve Moss attempting to make this $2 million his own, Chigurh trying to take it away from him and Sheriff Bell trying to interrupt Chigurh's ruthless murder trail. We will also meet Moss' childlike wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald); a cocky bounty hunter named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson); the businessman (Stephen Root) who hires Carson to track the money after investing in the drug deal, and a series of hotel and store clerks who are unlucky enough to meet Chigurh. "No Country for Old Men" is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made "Fargo." It involves elements of the thriller and the chase but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him. Chigurh is so evil, he is almost funny sometimes. "He has his principles," says the bounty hunter, who has knowledge of him. Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy. The $2 million turns out to be easier to obtain than to keep. Moss tries hiding in obscure hotels. Scenes are meticulously constructed in which each man knows the other is nearby. Moss can run but he can't hide. Chigurh always tracks him down. He shadows him like his doom, never hurrying, always moving at the same measured pace, like a pursuer in a nightmare. This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian" (Ridley Scott's next film), and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where the riverbank caves in, the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. The movie also loves some of its characters, and pities them, and has an ear for dialog not as it is spoken but as it is dreamed. Many of the scenes in "No Country for Old Men" are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo." To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another. By Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
THE KITE RUNNER - Rated PG-13 - 128 minutes - Scope
How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn't depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner," based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan. The story begins with boys flying kites. It is the city of Kabul in 1978, before the Russians, the Taliban, the Americans and the anarchy. Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) joins with countless other boys in filling the sky with kites; sometimes they dance on the rooftops while dueling, trying to cut other kite strings with their own. Amir's friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the family's longtime servant Ali, who has been with them for years and has become like family himself. Hassan is the best kite runner in the neighborhood, correctly predicting when a kite will return to earth and waiting there to retrieve it. The boys live in a healthy, vibrant city, not yet touched by war. Amir's father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), is an intellectual and secularist who has no use for the mullahs. Baba, whose kindly eyes are benevolent, loves both boys. There is a neighborhood bully named Assef, jealous of Amir's kite, his skills and his kite runner. On a day that will shape the course of many lives, he and his gang track down Hassan, attack him and rape him. Amir arrives to see the assault taking place, and to his shame, sneaks away. Then a curious chemistry takes place. Amir feels so guilty about Hassan that his feelings transform into anger, and he tries insulting his friend, even throwing ripe fruit at him, but Hassan is impassive. Then Amir tries to plant evidence to make Hassan seem like a thief, but even after Hassan (untruthfully and masochistically) confesses, Baba forgives him. It is Hassan's father, Ali, who insists he and his son must leave the home, over Baba's protests. The film has opened with the modern-day Amir, now living in San Francisco, receiving a telephone call from Rahim Khan: "You should come home. There is a way to be good again." Then commences a remarkable series of old memories and new realities, of the present trying to heal the wounds of the past, of an adult trying to repair the damage he set in motion as a boy. For if he had not lied about Hassan, they would all be together in San Francisco and the telephone call would not have been necessary. Working from Khaled Hosseini's best seller, Forster and his screenwriter David Benioff have made a film that sidesteps the emotional disconnects we often feel when a story moves between past and present. This is all the same story, interlaced with the fabric of these lives. There is also a touching sequence as Amir and his father, now older and ill, meet a once-powerful Afghan general and his daughter Soraya (Atossa Leoni). For Amir and Soraya, it is instant love, but protocol must be observed, and one of the movie's warmest scenes involves the two old men discussing the future of their children. I want to mention once again the eyes, indeed the whole face, of the actor Homayoun Ershadi, as Amir's father; here is a face so deeply good, it is difficult to imagine it reflecting unworthy feelings. What happens back in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in the year 2000 need not be revealed here, but the scenes combine great suspense with deep emotion. One emblematic moment: A soccer game where the audience, all men and all oddly silent, is watched by guards with rifles. The film works so deeply on us because we have been so absorbed by its story, by its destinies, by the way these individuals become so important that we are forced to stop thinking of "Afghans" as simply a category of body counts on the news. The movie is acted largely in English, although many (subtitled) scenes are in Dari, which I learn is an Afghan dialect of Farsi, or Persian. The performances by the actors playing Amir and Hassan as children are natural, convincing and powerful; recently I have seen several such child performances that adults would envy for their conviction and strength. Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, as young Hassan, is particularly striking, with his serious, sometimes almost mournful face. (The boy now fears Afghan reprisals for appearing in the rape scene, and the producers have helped to relocate him.) One of the areas in which the movie succeeds is in its depiction of kite flying. Yes, it uses special effects, but they function to represent what freedom and exhilaration the kites represent to their owners. I remember my own fierce identification with my own kites as a child. I was up there; I was represented. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the kite flyer (Amir) and the kite runner (Hassan). Perhaps that sad wisdom in Hassan's eyes comes from his certainty that all must fall to earth, sooner or later. This is a magnificent film by Marc Forster, now 38, who since "Monster's Ball" (2001) has made "Finding Neverland" (2004), "Stay" (2005) and "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006). All fine work, but "The Kite Runner" equals "Monster's Ball" in its emotional impact. Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.
JUNO - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Flat
Jason Reitman's "Juno" is just about the best movie of the year. It is very smart, very funny and very touching; it begins with the pacing of a screwball comedy and ends as a portrait of characters we have come to love. Strange, how during Juno's hip dialogue and cocky bravado, we begin to understand the young woman inside, and we want to hug her. Has there been a better performance this year than Ellen Page's creation of Juno? I don't think so. If most actors agree that comedy is harder than drama, then harder still is comedy depending on a quick mind, utter self-confidence, and an ability to stop just short of going too far. Page's presence and timing are extraordinary. I have seen her in only two films, she is only 20, and I think she will be one of the great actors of her time. But don't let my praise get in the way of sharing how much fun this movie is. It is so very rare to sit with an audience that leans forward with delight and is in step with every turn and surprise of an uncommonly intelligent screenplay. It is so rare to hear laughter that is surprised, unexpected and delighted. So rare to hear it coming during moments of recognition, when characters reflect exactly what we'd be thinking, just a moment before we get around to thinking it. So rare to feel the audience joined into one warm, shared enjoyment. So rare to hear a movie applauded. Ellen Page plays Juno MacGuff, a 16-year-old girl who decides it is time for her to experience sex and enlists her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an experiment he is not too eager to join. Of course she gets pregnant, and after a trip to an abortion clinic that leaves her cold, she decides to have the child. But what to do with it? She believes she's too young to raise it herself. Her best girlfriend Leah (Olivia Thirby) suggests looking at the ads for adoptive parents in the Penny Saver: "They have 'Desperately Seeking Spawn,' right next to the pet ads." Juno informs her parents in a scene that decisively establishes how original this film is going to be. It does that by giving us almost the only lovable parents in the history of teen comedies: Bren (Allison Janney) and Mac (J.K. Simmons). They're older and wiser than most teen parents are ever allowed to be, and warmer and with better instincts and quicker senses of humor. Informed that the sheepish Paulie is the father, Mac turns to his wife and shares an aside that brings down the house. Later, Bren tells him, "You know, of course, it wasn't his idea." How infinitely more human and civilized their response is than all the sad routine "humor" about parents who are enraged at boyfriends. Mac goes with Juno to meet the would-be adoptive parents, Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). They live in one of those houses that look like Martha Stewart finished a second before they arrived. Vanessa is consumed with her desire for a child, and Mark is almost a child himself, showing Juno "my room," where he keeps the residue of his ambition to be a rock star. What he does now, at around 40, is write jingles for commercials. We follow Juno through all nine months of her pregnancy, which she pretends to treat as mostly an inconvenience. It is uncanny how Page shows us, without seeming to show us, the deeper feelings beneath Juno's wisecracking exterior. The screenplay by first-timer Diablo Cody is a subtle masterpiece of construction, as buried themes slowly emerge, hidden feelings become clear, and we are led, but not too far, into wondering if Mark and Juno might possibly develop unwise feelings about one another. There are moments of instinctive, lightning comedy: Bren's response to a nurse's attitude during Juno's sonar scan, and her theory about doctors when Juno wants a pain-killer during childbirth. Moments that blindside us with truth, as when Mac and Juno talk about the possibility of true and lasting love. Moments that reveal Paulie as more than he seems. What he says when Juno says he's cool and doesn't even need to try. And the breathtaking scene when Juno and Vanessa run into each other in the mall and the future of everyone is essentially decided. Jennifer Garner glows in that scene. After three viewings, I feel like I know some scenes by heart, but I don't want to spoil your experience by quoting one-liners and revealing surprises. The film's surprises, in any event, involve not merely the plot but insights into the characters, including feelings that coil along just beneath the surface so that they seem inevitable when they're revealed. The film has no wrong scenes and no extra scenes, and flows like running water. There are two repeating motifs: the enchanting songs, so simple and true, by Kimya Dawson. And the seasonal appearances of Paulie's high school cross-country team, running past us with dogged consistency, Paulie often bringing up the rear, until his last run ends with Paulie, sweaty in running shorts, racing to Juno's room after her delivery.
Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
PERSEPOLIS - Rated PG-13 - 95 minutes - Flat
I attended the Tehran Film Festival in 1972 and was invited to the home of my guide and translator to meet her parents and family. Over tea and elegant pastries, they explained proudly that Iran was a "modern" country, that they were devout Muslims but did not embrace the extremes of other Islamic nations, that their nation represented a new way. Whenever I read another story about the clerical rule that now grips Iran, I think of those people, and millions of other Iranians like them, who do not agree with the rigid restrictions they live under, particularly the women. Iranians are no more monolithic than we are, a truth not grasped by our own zealous leader. Remember, on 9/11 there was a huge candlelight vigil in Tehran in sympathy with us. That was the Iran that Marjane Satrapi was born into in 1969, and it was the Iran that ended in the late 1970s with the fall and exile of the shah. Yes, his rule was dictatorial; yes, his secret police were everywhere and his opponents subjected to torture. But that was the norm in the Middle East and in an arc stretching up to the Soviet Union. At least most Iranians were left more or less free to lead the lives they chose. Ironically, many of them believed the fall of the shah would bring more, not less, democracy. Satrapi remembers the first nine or 10 years of her life as a wonderful time. Surrounded by a loving, independently minded family, living in a comfortable time, she resembled teenagers everywhere in her love for pop music, her interest in fashion, her Nikes. Then it all changed. She and her mother and her feisty grandmother had to shroud their faces from the view of men. Makeup and other forms of Western decadence were forbidden. At her age she didn't drink or smoke, but God save any women who did. Satrapi, now living in Paris, told her life story in two graphic novels, which became best sellers and have now been made into this wondrous animated film. The animation is mostly in black sand white, with infinite shades of gray and a few guest appearances, here and there, by colors. The style is deliberately two-dimensional, avoiding the illusion of depth in current animation. This approach may sound spartan, but it is surprisingly involving, wrapping us in this autobiography that distills an epoch into a young women's life. Not surprisingly, the books have been embraced by smart teenage girls all over the world, who find much they identify with. Adolescence is fueled by universal desires and emotions, having little to do with government decrees. Marjane, voiced as a child by Gabrielle Lopes and as a teenager and adult by Chiara Mastroianni, is a sprightly kid, encouraged in her rambunction by her parents (voiced by Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) and applauded by her outspoken grandmother (Danielle Darrieux). She dotes on the stories of her spellbinding Uncle Anouche (Francois Jerosme), who has been in prison and sometimes in hiding, but gives her a vision of the greater world. In her teens, with the Ayatollah Khomeini under full steam, Iran turns into a hostile place for the spirits of those such as Marjane. The society she thought she lived in has disappeared, and with it much of her freedom as a woman to define herself outside of marriage and the fearful restrictions of men. Sometimes she fast-talks herself out of tight corners, as when she is almost arrested for wearing makeup, but it is clear to her parents that Marjane will eventually attract trouble. They send her to live with friends in Vienna.Austria provides her with a radically different society, but one she eventually finds impossible to live in. She was raised with values that do not fit with the casual sex and drug use she finds among her contemporaries there, and after going a little wild with rock 'n' roll and acting out, she doesn't like herself, is homesick, and returns to Iran. But it is even more inhospitable than she remembers. She is homesick for a nation that no longer exists. In real life, Marjane Satrapi eventually found a congenial home in France. I imagine Paris offered no less decadence than Vienna, but her experiences had made her into a woman more sure of herself and her values, and she grew into -- well, the author of books and this film, which dramatize so meaningfully what her life has been like. For she is no heroine, no flag-waving idealist, no rebel, not always wise, sometimes reckless, but with strong family standards. It might seem that her story is too large for one 98-minute film, but "Persepolis" tells it carefully, lovingly and with great style. It is infinitely more interesting than the witless coming-of-age Western girls we meet in animated films; in spirit, in gumption, in heart, Marjane resembles someone like the heroine is "Juno" -- not that she is pregnant at 16, of course. While so many films about coming of age involve manufactured dilemmas, here is one about a woman who indeed does come of age, and magnificently. Although France selected "Persepolis" as its official Oscar entry in the foreign-language category, the film was not among the nine titles chosen for the second round of nominations. It was, however, nominated for best animated feature.
Review by Roger Ebert; www.rogerebert.suntimes.com
THE BAND'S VISIT - Rated PG-13 - 89 minutes - Flat
The eight men wear sky-blue uniforms with gold braid on the shoulders. They look like extras in an opera. They dismount from a bus in the middle of nowhere and stand uncertainly on the sidewalk. They are near a highway interchange, leading no doubt to where they’d rather be. Across the street is a small cafe. Regarding them are two bored layabouts and a sadly, darkly beautiful woman. They are a band from Egypt, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Their leader, a severe man with a perpetually dour expression, crosses the street and asks the woman for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. She looks at him as if he stepped off a flying saucer. “Here there is no Arab culture,” she says. “Also, no Israeli culture. Here there is no culture at all.” They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “The Band’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all. The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), is amused. No hotel. They communicate in careful, correct English; she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfiq explains their dilemma. They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in a place has that almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in. Tewfiq starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled (Saleh Bakri). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s cafe. It is strange, how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture, even though the writer-director Eran Kolirin uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the cafe — and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant. Dina offers to put up Tewfiq and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her cafe) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfiq. Even adultery seems weary here. When the three end up back at Dina’s apartment, where she offers them wine, the evening settles down into resignation. It is clear that Dina feels tender toward Tewfiq, that she can see through his timid reserve to the good soul inside. But there is no movement. Later, when he makes a personal revelation, it is essentially an apology. The movie avoids what we might expect, a meeting of the minds, and gives us instead a sharing of quiet desperation. As Dina and Twefiq, Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai bring great fondness and amusement to their characters. She is pushing middle age, he is being pushed by it. It is impossible for this night to lead to anything in their future lives. But it could lead to a night to remember. Gabai plays the bandleader as so repressed or shy or wounded that he seems closed inside himself. As we watch Elkabetz putting on a new dress for the evening and inspecting herself in the mirror, we see not vanity but hope. Throughout the evening, we note her assertion, her confidence, her easily assumed air of independence. Yet when she gazes into the man’s eyes, she sighs with regret and mentions that as a girl she loved the Omar Sharif movies that played daily on Israeli TV, but play no more. There are some amusing interludes. A band member plays the first few notes of a sonata he has not finished (after years). A bandmate calls him Schubert. A local man keeps solitary vigil by a pay phone, waiting for a call from the girl he loves. He has an insistent way of showing his impatience when another uses the phone. In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves. “The Band’s Visit” has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.
Review by Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.suntimes.com
STREET KINGS - Rated R - 109 minutes - Scope
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High-stakes cop dramas nowadays need to find that balance between good and bad, right and wrong, action and story. Having all flash and no cash is what plagues many of them: the filmmakers think that audiences don't care that the mayor's daughter or the fire chief's Dalmatian but how bullets will they fire from their guns, how many cars with they total or what building to they have to destroy to accomplish that. Others simply toss together so inane, banal dialogue for over two hours and call it visceral drama when it should be called snooze cinema. Ah, but dear readers, I know you are much more intelligent than that, and so do the filmmakers of "Street Kings." LAPD Vice Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is no simple black and white; he's more of a gray, blurring the distinctions of cops and the bad guys, such as setting up a couple of Korean gang members to steal his car that has a military-grade machine gun in the trunk-all to kick in their door, blow them away, and save twin girls being used as teenage objects of desire. His direct superior, Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), lauds Tom while turning a blind eye to how he made the big saves and arrests. However, Tom's methods don't come with a sense of guilt and depression as he downs shooters of vodka while patrolling the deep, gang-infested neighborhoods of the city of angels-all to cover the death of his wife.
Then, word comes to light that Tom's former partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews) has been snitching on Tom and his fellow vice busting crew but Tom will be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak. When Tom shows up at a convenience store to talk to and try and reason with Terrence, two gangbangers bust in and shoot up the place-and Terrence. Video surveillance shows that Tom could be implicated in the crime.
Popping up is Capt. James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) from internal affairs, wanting to help Tom come clean and bust a few bad cops along the way. Meanwhile, Paul Diskant (Chris Evans) is the robbery homicide detective in charge of piecing together Washington's slaughter and teams with Tom "off the record," so to speak, in a separate, guerilla-style investigation and Tom's own brand of justice while discovering new and interesting details that twist along the journey. This is the second film from director David Ayer, who's best know for writing the script to "Training Day," which gave Denzel Washington an immense amount of hard-hitting dialogue to construct a performance that garnered a Best Actor Oscar. During Ayer's directorial debut, 2006's "Harsh Times," he brought a similar powerful yet under appreciated performance from Christian Bale as an ex-Army ranger dealing with the mental trauma of the vast violence he's experienced. For his sophomore effort, Ayer gave writing duties to another talented writer: author James Ellroy. Ellroy wrote the books that were transformed into the films "The Black Dahlia" and one of my personal favorites and arguably one of the bets films of the 1990s "L.A. Confidential" and he brings us a screenplay here with such vibrant, albeit colorful, language and a gripping story that is one of the year's first great screenplays-and one of the year's best films. Reeves continues to show his unabashed dramatic talent that erases his "Bill & Ted" years: he's matured and grown into his own. And when you pair him up with such a powerhouse of an actor like Whitaker, sparks and emotion fly. Whitaker turns in yet another towering performance, another actor who earned his due just over one year ago when claiming the Academy Award for Best Actor for his commanding performance of dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." Also of impressive yet underused work is Hugh Laurie, who is conveniently introduced here at a hospital, an obvious yet still humorous, tongue-in-cheek reference to his famed status as the title doctor on the hit TV show "House." In a way, the film plays a bit like an ensemble piece, but you can't share the wealth of these three talents. Ayer is also good at painting a very accurate portrait of life in the crime-ridden areas of Los Angeles, including actors who were at one point gang members themselves and rappers known for their own hardcore image, including The Game and Chicago-native Common, who has a budding acting career ahead following last year's "American Gangster," this summer's "Wanted" with Angelina Jolie and a rumored part in Warner Bros' delayed "Justice League" as the Green Lantern.
I was with this movie from start to finish, even during the slightly uneven pacing of some parts of the film and the predictable, if not expected, ending. "Street Kings" doesn't have to worry about doing the job by the rules: it breaks them all to create tension, suspense and character that go beyond the laws of entertainment and acting.
Review by Matt Sheehan, movieweb.com
Paranoid Park - Rated R - 84 minutes - Flat
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Paranoid Park is a swooping skateboarding free zone where young men learn to fly. It’s also the title of Gus Van Sant’s most recent film, a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth. Like most of Mr. Van Sant’s films “Paranoid Park” is about bodies at rest and in motion, and about longing, beauty, youth and death, and as such as much about the artist as his subject. It is a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment. One of the most important and critically marginalized American filmmakers working in the commercial mainstream, Mr. Van Sant has traveled from down-and-out independent to Hollywood hire to aesthetic iconoclast, a trajectory that holds its own fascination and mysteries. The Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has been instrumental in Mr. Van Sant’s recent artistic renaissance — evident in his newfound love of hypnotically long and gliding camera moves — though his tenure in the mainstream has left its mark too, as demonstrated by his rejection of straight narrative. As in three-act, character-driven, commercially honed narrative in which boys will be boys of a certain type and girls will be girls right alongside them. The boy in “Paranoid Park,” Alex (the newcomer Gabe Nevins), lives and skates in Portland, Ore., where one evening he is implicated in the brutal death of a security guard. In adapting the young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, Mr. Van Sant has retained much of the story — a man dies, Alex writes it all down — but has reshuffled the original’s chain of events to create an elliptical narrative that continually folds back on itself. Shortly after the film opens, you see Alex writing the words Paranoid Park in a notebook, a gesture that appears to set off a flurry of seemingly disconnected visuals — boys leaping through the air in slow motion, clouds racing across the sky in fast — that piece together only later. With his on-and-off narration and pencil, Alex is effectively shaping this story, but in his own singular voice. (“I’m writing this a little out of order. Sorry. I didn’t do so well in creative writing.”) Although you regularly hear that voice — at times in Alex’s surprisingly childish, unmodulated recitation, at times in dialogue with other characters — you mostly experience it visually, as if you were watching a still-evolving film unwinding in the boy’s head. Mr. Van Sant isn’t simply trying to take us inside another person’s consciousness; he’s also exploring the byways, dead ends, pitfalls and turning points in the geography of conscience, which makes the recurrent image of the skate park — with its perilous ledges, its soaring ramps and fleetingly liberated bodies — extraordinarily powerful. Mr. Van Sant’s use of different film speeds and jump cuts, and his tendency to underscore his own storytelling — he regularly, almost compulsively repeats certain images and lines — reinforces rather than undermines the story’s realism. With its soft, smudged colors and caressing lighting, “Paranoid Park” looks like a dream — the cinematographers are Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li — but the story is truer than most kitchen-sink dramas. This isn’t the canned realism of the tidy psychological exegesis; this is realism that accepts the mystery and ambiguity of human existence. It is the realism that André Bazin sees in the world of Roberto Rossellini: a world of “pure acts, unimportant in themselves,” that prepare the way “for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning.” The pure acts in “Paranoid Park” mostly involve young male skateboarders gliding and sometimes hurtling through the air. Shot in both grainy Super-8 and velvety 35-millimeter film, these bodies appear alternately grounded and out of this world, reflecting extremes of physical effort while also suggesting different states of being. The Super-8 images of young men rolling along concrete, flipping boards and attitude, have the vaguely battered quality of old home movies, as if someone had just pulled the footage from a drawer. The glossier 35-millimeter images, by contrast, look almost monumental, epic, nowhere more so than when Mr. Van Sant shows one after another skateboarder suspended in the air at the peak of his jump, each a vision of Icarus. Closer to earth, Alex roams through his world like an alien, a zombie, a prisoner, mostly mute, his features fixed, face blank and impenetrable. He says little, betrays less. His smiles are brief, infrequent. He’s adrift in a sea of near-strangers, including his parents, who are almost as conceptual as those in “Peanuts” (Dad’s tattoos notwithstanding), and his girlfriend (Taylor Momsen), a coltish cheerleader who wants to lose her virginity to him for the sake of convenience. (Mr. Van Sant has rarely been as patient with his female characters as he is with his male ones.) Alex’s single close connection is with his friend Jared (Jake Miller), who brings him to the skate park with the warning “No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park.” Mr. Van Sant has always made a home for lost boys, from River Phoenix’s wanderer in “My Own Private Idaho” to the ghostly Kurt Cobain figure who roams through “Last Days,” those downy, itinerant beauties whose words stick to their tongues and whose pain seems as bottomless as their eyes. In some respects Paranoid Park represents adulthood; the critic Amy Taubin has provocatively suggested to Mr. Van Sant that the film’s subtext is that of a gay initiation. (He didn’t disagree.) Both readings are ripe for the picking. But what strikes me the hardest about “Paranoid Park” is the intimacy, the love — carnal, paternal, human — of Mr. Van Sant’s expansive, embracing vision. No one is ever really ready for Paranoid Park, but neither do you have to go there alone.
Review by: Manohla Dargis, nytimes.com
Horton Hears a Who - Rated G - 86 minutes - Flat
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Of all the Dr. Seuss classics, Twentieth Century Fox made a suitable choice to adapt “Horton Hears a Who!” to the big screen. This 1954 tale not only creates a dual world of life-size and minuscule characters – i.e., the Whos of Whoville, who inhabit a city situated on a mote of dust as if it were a planet. The allegories of this tale are made accessible for young readers. As Horton, the happy-trotting elephant of the Jungle of Nool, discovers Whoville with a very keen ear, Theodor Geisel's (Dr. Seuss) simple metaphysical tale inspires kids to wonder about the world around them, especially everything they cannot see. In the 1950s, as TV arrived to American homes, Geisel encouraged kids to go outside and let their minds illustrate for them. Sources as wide-ranging as the “Twilight Zone” and the 2001 Farrelly brothers animated film “Osmosis Jones” owe a debt to Geisel's light-handed metaphor, which Chuck Jones made into a cartoon for television in 1970. And the thematic richness doesn't end there: when Horton spreads word of the newfound city and vows to protect it, others from the Jungle of Nool treat him like a dangerous rebel, one whose fantasies will ruin the minds of children. Horton becomes the target of something like a witch hunt – in a book appearing after the McCarthy hearings, let's not forget – and must make the members of Whoville heard, or they'll be destroyed. In a story about inspiring wonder, Horton's persecutors symbolize influences out to kill youthful imagination. This production delivers “Horton” as a richly animated tale. In the opening scenes, Horton (voiced by Seuss-vet Jim Carrey, earning his keep with vigor) appears lively enough that kids will forget that he's an illustration. The real treat comes when Whoville appears onscreen, and classic Seuss is brought to the world of modern animation. The Whos have an endearing stiffness that the storybook characters suggest, when it would have been all too easy to embellish them into something alien to the source material. (Think of the recent big screen “Garfield,” who couldn't be a distant cousin of the original – or even Jim Carrey's Grinch, for that matter.) This Whoville is the bustling little city that we all read about, led by the lovable Mayor (Steve Carell, matching Carrey in vocal umph), with his dozens of children and an inclination for slipping up. Even if Horton's world can't shine like Whoville, this movie's visuals keeps things vivid, while digital animation is so often crisp, precise, and cold. For adults, the images of Whoville grow commonplace after awhile, similarly to how the visual inspiration in “The Simpsons” movie couldn't last its feature length. And hearing Steve Carell's frantic calls to save Whoville will hit a sour note for older viewers, as it reminds us of "Evan Almighty's" attempts to deal with a flood in that overproduced wreck of a film. But all this won't mean a thing to the kids, who at the screening I attended were dazzled by the interchange from Horton's world to Whoville, as one strives to help the other. The young viewers cheered their way to the triumph, and I can imagine them looking out of car windows in wonder as they rode home from the theater.
Review by Matthew Sorrento, filmthreat.com
Son of Rambow - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Scope
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Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) have nothing in common besides being 11 years old. Shy, lonely Will belongs to the Plymouth Brethren religious sect that makes no allowances for such worldly distractions as television or movies. Lee is the class hellion, an aggressive kid who probably spends more time in detention than in class. But a chance encounter between the two leads to an unlikely friendship and a burgeoning partnership as junior auteurs in Garth Jennings' hysterically funny, yet terrifically sweet homage to childhood and movies in the wonderful Son of Rambow. Jennings was only 11 himself when the original Rambo movie, First Blood, came out, and the writer/director who would go on to co-found the Hammer & Tongs video outfit and to direct the lively big-screen adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, pays tribute to the influence Sylvester Stallone's violent action hero had on his life. When Will accidentally watches a pirated video of First Blood, he is entranced, imagining himself as the "son of Rambow." That fits in perfectly with Carter's plan to make a movie to enter into a young filmmaker's competition. He recruits Will as both actor and stunt man in a series of dangerous gags, any one of which looks like it might lead to Will's death by misadventure. There is more, of course, such as the way the project sets Will on a collision course with his family's religious beliefs, to the consternation of his widowed mother, Mary (Jessica Stevenson). Carter, too, has family troubles, with a neglectful, globetrotting mother and an older brother resentful of his babysitting role. Then there's Didier (Jules Sitruk), the older French exchange student—the coolest kid in school—who catches wind of the project and decides he wants to be part of it, to Will's delight and Carter's disgust. What is readily apparent in all of this is that Jennings remembers exactly what it was like to be a movie-mad kid. Will and Carter's adventures may be exaggerated—especially some of the stunts that send Will flying through the air like a missile—but there is also the ring of truth in the idea of these little boys making like pint-sized Cecil B. DeMilles as they mount their own epic. The friendship that develops between the pair plays true, as well; for as different as they are, each is isolated, both at home and at school. Beneath their disparate surfaces, they have everything in common. But Son of Rambow is not just about these two lads; it is also about England during a particular era. Jennings captures the '80s in all its absurd, big-haired glory—the fashion, the pop music, even the Space Dust candy (the U.K.'s answer to Pop Rocks). An early scene in a movie theater establishes the era perfectly, as Jennings' camera pans over the crowd and every single person (kids included) has a cigarette clenched between their teeth. It's a visually arresting image that sets the time even as it creates a laugh. This was supposed to be Jennings' feature debut, but it turned out to be easier to finance the much bigger Hitchhiker's Guide than this more modest affair. That under-appreciated first effort was a lot of fun, but Son of Rambow is the superior film.
Money might buy bigger toys, but it can never replace heart, and that is something this terrific comedy has in abundance.
Review by Pam Grady, reel.com
Then She Found Me - Rated R - 100 minutes - Flat
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“Then She Found Me,” a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment. The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not. In fact, the movie, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, has enough material for two such farces. In one, a childless mother obsessed with her ticking biological clock becomes pregnant after clumsy breakup sex with her husband of less than a year. (Her obstetrician is played by, of all people, Salman Rushdie.) In the other, a woman who has just lost her adoptive mother is suddenly besieged by a garrulous local talk-show personality who claims to be her biological mother. The movie is unusually sensitive to the anxieties around adoption. Shortly before her death, April’s ailing mother (Lynn Cohen) argues that there is no difference between raising an adopted child and one of your own; her daughter should cease fretting and adopt a Chinese baby, she declares. April’s vehement refusal to consider the possibility rings as a tacit insult to her mother’s parenting skills, but the simmering conflict is never brought into the open. Ms. Hunt takes every opportunity to avoid easy comic shtick and cutesy-poo sentimentality in an effort to make her characters act and sound like real people. Where typical Hollywood comedies erase ethnicity, Ms. Hunt emphasizes her characters’ various shades of Jewishness. April doesn’t seem especially religious, but in the opening scene she goes through a Jewish wedding ceremony with her childish husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), who goes to live with his mother after their breakup. “Then She Found Me” also clearly indicates that the characters’ lifestyles are not unrealistically comfortable. All the stars, including Ms. Hunt, are pointedly deglamorized. April, alarmingly gaunt, with straining neck tendons, appears to wear little or no makeup. As her biological mother, Bernice Graves, Bette Midler is a blowsy, plump loudmouth and bottle redhead whose obsequious behavior makes much of what she says sound false. Indeed some of it is. In her first of several lies, she claims that April was conceived in a delirious one-night stand with Steve McQueen and relinquished for adoption after three days.April’s would-be romantic savior, Frank (Colin Firth), the recently divorced father of two children (one is April’s pupil), looks as if he is going to seed. Spluttering, neurotic and hot-tempered, he has all the romantic promise of an over-the-hill Lancelot astride a tottering nag. Frank also lives in a seedy suburban neighborhood far from any center of action. Mr. Broderick’s Ben is a bloated, inarticulate man-child. His two awkward sex scenes with Ms. Hunt (one in the back seat of a car) are desperate, joyless quickies that involve minimal undressing and leave April confused and Ben apologetic. It falls to Ms. Hunt to stir these character types and clichéd situations into a palatable stew of genuine human emotions. As April cautiously makes her way, you can feel Ms. Hunt, both as director and actor,
discarding sitcom conventions to shoot for something deeper and truer. And she achieves it, mostly through the shaded performances of Mr.
Firth and Ms. Midler, as well as her own. Mr. Firth’s Frank is hyper-emotional to a degree rarely seen in male characters in mainstream movies.
When Frank gets upset, which is frequently, his face reddens, he bluntly speaks his mind and he often excuses himself to go for a walk and let off steam.
Ms. Midler’s Bernice is a credible portrait of a narcissistic drama queen with a good heart beneath her celebrity bluster. Connections between the characters
deepen in spite of misunderstandings and obstacles. After April and Frank acknowledge their mutual attraction, their wary courtship proceeds in fits and starts,
but they keep at it. Life isn’t easy for April as she muddles along, but you feel she is headed in the right direction. Review by Stephen Holden, movies.nytimes.com
Mongol - Rated R - 126 minutes - Scope
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While the historical accuracy may be dodgy, Mongol is a sweeping and quasi-mythical epic that recalls Lawrence of Arabia. Centered on the rise of Genghis Khan, the film is an enthralling tale, in the style of a David Lean saga, with similarly gorgeous cinematography. It combines a sprawling adventure saga with romance, family drama and riveting action sequences. The film has a visceral energy with powerful battle sequences and also scenes of striking and serene physical beauty. Its only flaw: there might have been one battle too many. Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano is impressive and haunting, playing Khan as both a fearless warrior and a feeling human being. He is not played as a barbarian as much as he is an inspiring, visionary and, yes, ruthless leader, driven by commitment to his people and his family. We see the early fire in the conqueror's youthful years and watch as he is imprisoned, tortured and endures to become a man who conquered a huge swath of the world. We also see that he was sustained by his lifelong love, Borte (Khulan Chuluun), a strong and spirited woman who was his trusted advisor. Director Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains) illuminates Khan's life in a multi-dimensional way, and his re-creation of the bleak and expansive beauty of Mongolia in the 12th and 13th centuries is arresting. Mongol is quality escapism: an exotic saga that compels, moves and envelops us with its grand and captivating story. Review by Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Note by Note - NR - 88 minutes
A grand piano represents a remarkable fusion of engineering and artistry, technical savvy and soul. It's a complicated machine capable of playing the most delicate melodies. Making one takes a lot of blood, sweat, and elbow grease, as Ben Niles proves in his obsessive new documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.
Niles follows a single Steinway piano over the yearlong process of transforming wood, wires, and an endless assortment of precise components into a vessel for musical beauty. All sorts of painstaking labor has to take place before little Johnny can pound away at a crude approximation of "Chopsticks." Niles' film opens up into a mellow, serene meditation on musicians' symbiotic relationship with their instruments, the rewards and costs of craftsmanship in an age of industrialization, and the timeless mystique of the piano, a finely tuned machine with a direct line to the human soul.
The eloquent professional pianists queried here, including Harry Connick Jr. and Lang Lang (who tells an amusing anecdote about how a Tom & Jerry cartoon inspired his lifelong passion for the piano), attempt a spiritual communion with their instrument of choice. Steinway is piano porn for inveterate ivory-ticklers whose hearts skip a beat at the sight of a Steinway glistening in the sunlight. For non-musicians, however, it can be awfully dry, and Niles never explores the bitter irony of fundamentally working-class people painstakingly creating objects of beauty and art they couldn't possibly afford. The Steinway employees and the professional musicians who travel the world playing their products each make their livings with their hands, but in vastly different ways. It's a testament to the film's artistry that it almost never feels like a feature-length Steinway infomercial. Then again, infomercials are seldom this leisurely paced or austere.
Review by Nathan Rabin
Young @ Heart - Rated PG - 109 minutes - Flat
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The Rolling Stones, as it turns out, are not the only senior citizens singing rock 'n' roll. Another, rather unexpected group is singing lyrics that are more cutting edge and performing on-screen antics that are considerably more amusing. You won't believe the world of "Young@Heart," but you'll have a hard time resisting it. The irresistible New England chorus of senior citizens proves you're never too old to rock. The Young@Heart Chorus is a 24-member singing group from Northampton, Mass., average age 80, who spend a chunk of their golden years touring the world and singing covers of songs from groups like the Talking Heads, the Clash and Coldplay. It's safe to say that the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" has never had a more heartfelt rendition. This may sound like a suspect enterprise, a musical gimmick impossible to embrace, but the reality is otherwise. For what the members of this uncanny chorus lack in pure ability they make up for in irrepressible spirits and a desire to simply have fun. It's as much of a heady tonic for these folks to take on these unlikely lyrics as it is for us to watch it all go down. Of course, when you're of a certain age, learning rock lyrics is not always easy, and we look on as the group members scrutinize words with huge magnifying glasses and hold their ears as they listen to the loud originals. But, under the firm-but-fair direction of Bob Cilman, who's led the group for 25 years, these troupers slowly but surely rise to the occasion, delighted to have a purpose in life and as willing to have fun in the process as people one-quarter their age. Directed by Stephen Walker, "Young@Heart" the film is similarly slow getting going. Walker, a British TV documentary maker, narrates the film himself, and his overly chipper voice-over initially borders on being intrusive. But when the chorus starts to sing, when, for instance, animated 92-year-old former war bride Eileen Hall rips into the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go," none of that matters. Just as eye-popping are the videos for songs like David Bowie's "Golden Years" and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" that veteran independent cinematographer Eddie Marritz shoots with a gleeful energy. The frame of "Young@- Heart" is a seven-week rehearsal period during which the chorus is expected to learn some difficult stuff, including Sonic Youth's unsettling "Schizophrenia" and Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can," which uses the word "can" a memory-challenging 71 times. For a group whose members have trouble remembering the words to James Brown's "I Feel Good," this is quite an undertaking.
Alternating with rehearsal footage are home visits where we learn something of the personalities and the back stories of the choristers. This is especially effective when Cilman decides to bring back two former members who left because of declining health but are now well enough to rejoin. With an organization whose members are this old, the question of mortality is bound to come up, and that turns out to be one of the shocks as well as one of the graces of "Young@- Heart." When the chorus sings Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" to an audience at Hampshire Jail at a particularly emotional moment, many of the inmates are literally moved to tears. What we learn is that the age of these singers is not some glib contrivance but the heart of the matter. In a culture that venerates youth and considers aging the worst of all fates, to see these men and women having the time of their lives near the end of their lives couldn't be more refreshing. We want these wonderfully alive people to go on singing forever, most of all, perhaps, because we know there's no way they can. Review by Kenneth Turan, LA Times Movie Critic, kenneth.turan@latimes.com
The Little Red Truck
"Imagine sixty kids staging a full-scale musical in six days. "The Little Red Truck," a new, award-winning documentary film, records the emotional highs, lows and in-betweens of more than 250 kids in five communities when Missoula Children's Theatre, via its signature little red truck, comes to town.
It's magic and mayhem captured through the lens as the kids, under the direction of the two professional tour actor/directors who come with the touring truck, audition, rehearse, mess up, have the occasional meltdown, overcome personal obstacles, jump for joy, don costumes, and eventually grace the stage for a one-hour performance. But more than that, it's a laugh-out-loud and uplifting movie that's perfect for kids and their parents.
The film won "Best Feature Documentary" at the International Family Film Festival in Hollywood and has been awarded the Dove Foundation Family Approved Seal."
Kit Kittredge - Rated G - 101 minutes - Flat
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Considering that it is inspired by one of the dolls in the American Girl product line, "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" is some kind of a miracle: an actually good movie. I expected so much less. I was waiting for some kind of banal product placement, I suppose, and here is a movie that is just about perfect for its target audience, and more than that. It has a great look, engaging performances, real substance and even a few whispers of political ideas, all surrounding the freshness and charm of Abigail Breslin, who was 11 when it was filmed. The movie is set in Cincinnati at the dawn of the Great Depression; perfectly timed, it would appear, as we head into another one. Kit pounds furiously on the typewriter in her tree house, determined to become a Girl Reporter, while a big story is happening right downstairs in her family house: The mortgage is about to be foreclosed. Her dad (Chris O'Donnell) has lost his car dealership and gone to Chicago seeking work, her mom (Julia Ormond) is taking in boarders, and there's local hysteria about muggings and robberies allegedly committed by hobos. Kit actually meets a couple of hobos. Will (Max Thieriot) is about her age, and his sidekick Countee (Willow Smith) is a little younger. They live in the hobo camp down by the river, along with as nice a group of hobos as you'd ever want to meet. Kit tries selling their story and photos to the editor of the local paper (a snarling Wallace Shawn). No luck. But other adventures ensue: She adopts a dog, her mom acquires chickens, Kit sells the eggs, and the new boarders are a colorfully assorted lot. And she sees such unthinkable sights as neighbor's furniture being moved to the sidewalk by deputies. Will that happen at her address? The boarders include a magician (Stanley Tucci), a nurse (Jane Krakowski), the erratic driver (Joan Cusack) of a mobile library truck and assorted others, eventually including even a monkey. Kit's mom hides her treasures in a lock box, but it is stolen, and unmistakable clues point to the hobos. A footprint found under a window, for example, has a star imprint that exactly matches the boots found in Will's tent, and the sheriff names him the prime suspect. But hold on! Kit and her best friends Stirling and Ruthie (Zach Mills and Madison Davenport) develop another theory, which would clear Will and implicate someone (dramatically lowered voice) a lot ... closer to home. All of this (the missing loot, Kit's ambitions and Those Important Clues) are of course the very lifeblood of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, and "Kit Kittredge" not only understands that genre but breathes life into it. This movie, intelligently and sincerely directed by Patricia Rozema ("Mansfield Park"), does not condescend. It does not cheapen or go for easy laughs. It is as serious about Kit as she is about herself, and doesn't treat her like some (indignant exclamation) dumb girl. If you have or know or can borrow a girl (or a boy) who collects the American Girl dolls, grab onto that child as your excuse to see this movie. You may enjoy it as much as they do -- maybe more, with its period costumes, settings and music. The kids may be astonished that banks actually foreclosed on people's homes in the old days (hollow laugh). And there may be a message lurking somewhere in the movie's tolerance of hobos. The American Girl dolls have already inspired TV movies about Molly, Felicity and Samantha. What's for sure is that if "Kit Kittredge" sets the tone for more upcoming American Girl movies, we can anticipate some wonderful family films. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Visitor - Rated PG-13 - 103 minutes - Flat
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So much film criticism focuses on directors that we sometimes forget what draws most people to the screen: the prospect of seeing an actor connect with a role and really live it. That connection can’t be willed, and it can empower an average performer to give an outstanding performance—how else could Jennifer Garner, as the yearning adoptive mother in Juno, steal scenes from a brilliant young brat like Ellen Page? Directors who understand how to handle actors often describe their job not as barking orders like Otto Preminger but as creating a work environment in which the actors can find their characters. Thomas McCarthy, a busy actor (he played the corrupt young Baltimore Sun reporter on the last season of HBO’s The Wire), has written and directed two features—The Station Agent (2003) and now The Visitor—and in each he’s excelled at pulling actors into his stories with roles written especially for them. This strategy has resulted in some truly memorable characters. Perversely, both movies are about men who can’t connect. Fin McBride, the brooding dwarf in The Station Agent, is so fed up with people’s humiliating reactions to him that when he unexpectedly inherits a disused railroad station in rural New Jersey, he retreats into it like a monk. Still the world dogs him: the local convenience store owner rudely snaps his picture, and the local librarian is so startled by him that she yelps and drops a stack of books. McCarthy wrote the role for Peter Dinklage, whom he’d directed in a play years earlier; even so, it required a strong acting commitment. “Dink is one of the funniest guys I know,” McCarthy told usedwigs.com. “We really had to strip him down. That’s tough for an actor, especially someone like Peter who has used his sense of humor to get through life. . . . [Fin] doesn’t want to be charming, he doesn’t want to be flirty, he doesn’t want to be sarcastic. He really just wants to be left alone.” Dinklage gives a remarkably controlled performance; there’s a lifetime of pain in his mild remark that he doesn’t like bars. McCarthy achieves a similar alchemy in The Visitor with Richard Jenkins, for whom he wrote the role of Walter Vale, a middle-aged economics professor grappling with the death of his concert pianist wife. Like Fin, Walter wants the world to go away: he blows off his students, zones out at departmental meetings, and listens to his wife’s CD while cooking spaghetti sauce to be eaten alone. When his Connecticut university sends him to New York to deliver a paper, he arrives at the apartment he and his wife kept there for years and finds an immigrant couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), have been conned into renting the place. They quickly agree to clear out, but Walter takes pity on them and invites them to stay for the time being. Jenkins, a balding, bespectacled character actor perhaps best known as the ghostly father on Six Feet Under, has enjoyed a long Hollywood career playing dry, buttoned-down types—doctors, lawyers, executives—and he seizes on the role of Walter, a man no one seems to notice. “I understood this man,” Jenkins recently told the New York Times. “I understood his reluctance to reach out, to become part of things.” The first scene of the movie shows Walter taking piano lessons from a rather severe older woman, and afterward, when he politely tells her he’s going to end the lessons, there’s a beautifully played comic moment in which she admits he lacks a “natural gift” and offers to buy his piano. Later, as Walter grows more friendly with Tarek, a warmhearted Syrian percussionist, he discovers he has a talent for rhythm and begins experimenting with the djembe. Before long Tarek has him out in the park with an afternoon drum circle, incongruous at the funky gathering in his starchy suit and tie. Jenkins shows the man’s modesty and discomfort, but also his decency and, when events turn painful, his strength. The first time Jenkins saw the finished cut of The Visitor, he reportedly told McCarthy, “I’ve been waiting my whole career to do a movie like this.” The Visitor largely recycles the character dynamic of The Station Agent. Tarek isn’t far removed from Joe Oramos (Bobby Cannavale), the outgoing Cuban-American hot dog vendor who coaxes Fin out of his shell. And just as Fin endures the agonies of unrequited love for Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson), a troubled married woman who lives nearby, Walter falls in love with Mouna (Hiam Abbass), Tarek’s dignified and beautiful mother. Yet this time McCarthy allows his story to unfold into a political drama: Tarek is stopped by plainclothes policemen in the subway, busted as an illegal immigrant, and remanded to a detention center in Queens. Walter makes it a personal mission to free Tarek, hiring an immigration attorney and taking a leave of absence from his job to stay in New York. The irony is overwhelming and yet somehow muted: Walter Vale is learning to open himself up again in a country that’s closing itself down. Because Mouna and Zainab are both illegal immigrants, Walter is Tarek’s only visitor, and they nurse their friendship from opposite sides of a Plexiglas window. The detention center is a weirdly anonymous building adorned with the bland acronym UCC (United Correctional Corporation). “It doesn’t look like a prison,” says Mouna as she and Walter survey it from a distance. “I think that’s the idea,” he replies. The lack of connection with the outside world clearly preys on Tarek; as he explains to Walter, the lights are on 24 hours a day, and there’s no outdoor area for the 300 detainees, just a room with an open roof. When Walter brings notes from Mouna and Zainab, he has to hold them up against the window, modestly turning his head as Tarek reads. During one visit Tarek begs Walter to drum on the table for him: “Come on, I need some music, man!” Walter obliges, tapping out a beat on the narrow table they share, and Tarek joins in. I’m not surprised to learn that this element of the story also grew out of a personal connection. In his research for the movie McCarthy got involved with the Sojourners, an outreach program at Riverside Church in New York, and spent about a year visiting detainees at a center in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. One was a Nigerian man who’d been in detention for three and a half years and asked McCarthy to help process his deportation case so he could return to his native land. “I kept visiting him, trying to do what I could,” McCarthy told ifc.com. “You get very involved. I’d find myself visiting him on holidays, or leaving Manhattan early from work to go see him. You know, it’s someone you care about.” He might be speaking for Walter, but he might as easily be speaking for the viewer who forms an attachment to his characters. The best movies are like a visit you wish would never end. Review by J.R. Jones, chicagoreader.com
The Foot Fist Way - Rated R - 83 minutes - Flat
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Mix some "Bad Santa," with a splash of "Napoleon Dynamite" and shake it up with a whole lot of whoop ass and you've got one of the funniest martial arts movies since "They Call Me Bruce?” Despite its clunky title, The Foot Fist Way has plenty of moments of gut-busting humor. The title comes from the literal translation of tae kwon do, which is the milieu in which this agile low-budget comedy takes place. Danny McBride is hilarious as the strip-mall martial arts master Fred Simmons, an egomaniacal dolt of a man who is shockingly self-deluded, obnoxious and bullying, particularly with small children and women. His behavior often is hilarious but just as frequently cringe-inducing. The contrast between his moronic persona and the tenets of tae kwon do that he piously espouses — self-control, courtesy, integrity and indomitable spirit — makes for a clever farce. Its home-movie quality provides the ideal style to tell the story of this two-bit blowhard. Still, the film is drolly written, and the roughness around the edges is part of its charm. Writer/director/producer/co-star Jody Hill probably has a bright future making similarly amusing movies. Will Ferrell and his production company bought the film, which was made for a reported $70,000, and Ferrell has been busy promoting and publicizing it. Foot Fist is more original and comical than such low-budget sleeper hits as Napoleon Dynamite or Hot Fuzz, and its spoofing style is bound to appeal to fans of Ferrell's Anchorman or Talladega Nights. Simmons is a small-time, out-of-shape instructor who still brags about the championship he won in 1991 and idolizes a dopey martial arts/movie star named Chuck "the Truck" Wallace (Ben Best), a low-rent rock 'n' roll version of Chuck Norris. Simmons is married to the bimbo-esque Suzie (Mary Jane Bostic), who is ultra blonde, aggressively tanned and favors spandex. When Fred finds out she has casually cheated on him (a habit he refers to as her "ways"), he begins to fall apart. His inexplicably loyal students become fodder for his misplaced rage, and a young female practitioner has to endure his pathetic efforts to impress and romance her, which develop into disturbing stalker-like actions. When Fred takes two students and a creepily intense yellow-haired friend (hilariously played by director Hill) on a road trip to meet his idol, the movie begins to go a bit astray. But McBride has created such a vivid character that you forgive the movie its lapses. By the time he sells his fire-engine-red sports car to have enough money to lure Chuck the Truck to his suburban dojo, we actually feel for the foolish fellow. And when Chuck and Suzie hook up, as anyone watching could predict would happen, we actually find ourselves rooting for the idiotic Fred over those two lowlife louts. This is a really small film, shot in 19 days, and it's a little rough around the edges, but it's got a huge comic heart that's undeniable. Most notable is Danny McBride's performance as the brutal Mr. Simmons. This is one of those classic characters you could watch all day and never grow tired of. And Ben Best is hilarious as Chuck “"The Truck”" Wallace, an obvious Chuck Norris clone. If you like funny and if you like martial arts, then "“The Foot Fist Way"” is going to be right up your alley. A hit at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, The Foot Fist Way is a refreshingly silly and clever portrait of a strikingly daft and clueless man. Review By Claudia Puig, usatoday.com
Flight of the Red Balloon - NR - 115 minutes - Flat
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Paris (and France in general) tends to be a habitat seen in big sweeps and large outside shots, attesting to the ongoing American romanticizing of the City of Light. The Eiffel Tower looming large in the background, the stoic Arc de Triomphe, the rolling lawns in front of the Basilique du Sacre Coeur: However intimate the city's candor might be, film has always taken Paris in with its monuments, landmarks, and open spaces as pieces of a collective familiarity. With the exception of a lone, beautiful coda within the Musee d'Orsay, the very body responsible for the film's funding, Hou Hsiao-hsien's gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon drifts away from these environs, making a film about Paris life that seems uninterested in Paris as a city. Based on, or perhaps just familiarized with, Albert Lamorisse's French children's classic The Red Balloon, Hsiao-hsien moves the focus from a child and his balloon to a child, his frazzled mom, and his new Chinese nanny, a young filmmaker on a student visa. In an odd act of attentiveness, the nanny, Song (a great Song Fang), begins to make a student film about the red balloon floating around her arondissement, co-starring her ward, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Explaining how she got the balloon to move exactly how she wanted, Song briefly talks about green screens and the pratfalls of modern, low-budget filmmaking, giving Hsiao-hsien a behind-the-scenes fantasia of sorts within his own film. Simon's father, a writer in self-imposed exile in Montreal, has only one interaction by phone, but his presence is aptly felt through Simon's mother's (Juliette Binoche) barbed interactions with her husband's friend and current tenant, Marc (Hippolyte Girardot). Binoche is a dream. Like the city in which the film is based, Hsiao-hsien has stripped Binoche of her token abilities: her dark hair mussed and badly dyed into a blonde mess, her usual role as center of gravity thrown into a state of utter upheaval, her coy beauty mutated into a palette of raw nerves. Yet, through this act of deviation, Binoche gives one of her best performances to date, at once completely spontaneous and thoughtfully patient. In a year brimming with great French films (Heartbeat Detector, The Duchess of Langelais), it's ironic that the most successful of them would come from the Chinese-born, Taiwan-educated Hsiao-hsien. Like Wong Kar-wai's first immersion into foreign language cinema, the English-tongued My Blueberry Nights, Hsiao-hsien continues to study the same tropes of his outstanding Chinese output: loneliness, isolation, stilted love. It also touches on the polarizing effect of city life and travel, a strong force in the master's 2005 tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, Caf Lumiere. But whereas Kar-wai's exercise coaxes out the director's inevitable faults, Balloon highlights Hsiao-hsien' staggering strengths, both aesthetically and technically speaking. Like the rest of Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre, his latest feels like the culmination of all his works beforehand. Working with the masterful cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, Hsiao-hsien, who gave his actors full character histories but no written dialogue, delivers all the film's action in confined settings. A cramped, cluttered apartment, a darkened puppet theater, and the narrow streets of Paris managed to breed inspiration for Hsiao-hsien's actors. Shot in his patently-resplendent long takes, the aesthetic is seemingly unencumbered, but, coupled with Chu Shih Yi's gentle sound design, the images breathlessly unspool into suites of effortless intricacy. As Suzanne argues heatedly with Marc downstairs, Hsiao-hsien's camera wanders around the apartment as Song and Simon prepare for a mid-day snack and a blind tuner repairs Suzanne's piano. All the sounds and movements of the characters co-mingle, interact, climax, and then gently descend. You won't see anything as rapturous as this in any film this year. — Review by CHRIS CABIN, www.reel.com
Sex and the City - Rated R - 145 minutes - Flat
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The moment that Sex and the City truly arrives on the big screen is the big fight scene (you knew there'd be one, even if you haven't seen the trailers) between Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) on the streets of the Big Apple. They were supposed to be getting married. He freaked out and ran (or, this being New York, was driven) away. Now he's doubled back. Carrie, a hellhound in Vivienne Westwood, advances on him with her bouquet. He recoils in horror and confusion. Petals and leaves fall in slow-motion. It's like a breakup directed by Sam Peckinpah.
It works because it's exactly what fans have come to expect of the popular HBO series that ran from 1998 to 2004. There are squabbles and tears, histrionic reactions that gradually subside into wound-licking, heartfelt confessions and clever keyboarding rhetoric; then the whole cycle repeats. Disciples of Jane Goodall could leave Gombe and the chimpanzees for someplace with more taxis and a better class of latte, and still pen sociological masterworks drawn from the lives of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte.
Of course, between the long, loving panoramic shots of the perfect penthouse apartment, the hunting and gathering of designer purses and no fewer than three fashion montages, it's a wonder there's any room for plot, let alone sex, in Sex and the City. That the movie manages to spend time in and out of bed with each of its four protagonists is a testament to writer/director Michael Patrick King, who keeps the action moving with the aplomb of a champion plate-spinner. It also doesn't hurt that the movie has a running time of two and a half hours, a length usually reserved for films whose focus is Oscars, not Oscar de la Renta.
Finally, there's the fact that the foursome is actually a gestalt, with sexy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) as the id, practical Charlotte (Kristin Davis) as superego and writer Carrie as the overarching ego. There's also Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, the do-it-all/have-it-all working mother, whose exclusion from Freud's theory must have been some kind of slip.
The story begins four years after the series ended, which means Carrie and friends are firmly in their forties and, thankfully, not afraid to admit it. Carrie has even been given an assignment by her editor at Vogue (a nice cameo by a tough-talking Candice Bergen) to write about her impending nuptials with Big from the point of view of "the last single girl in New York." Since Big's proposal was an off-hand "I wouldn't mind being married to you ..." we can sense an impending, Peckinpah-like collision of wedding planning priorities between the two lovebirds.
Meanwhile, Miranda dumps her man after he admits to a one-night stand, Samantha tries to make monogamy work with a self-obsessed actor in Los Angeles - this also allows for many high-pitched-shrieky reunions every time she unexpectedly arrives in New York - and Charlotte worries her marriage is too blissful to be true. We should all have such anxieties.
But the real star is Conspicuous Consumption, making an early entrance when Carrie describes her dream apartment as "real estate heaven" before asking: "If you live here, what is there to fight about?" Closet space, it turns out, although Big quickly rectifies that by installing a walk-in with more square footage than most West-Side walkups.
After the wedding collapses like so much meringue, the four friends engage in the ritual of "let's not waste a pre-paid honeymoon vacation in Mexico," one of several instances in which children, lovers and responsibilities are neatly forgotten for as long as the script demands.
Carrie then hires a personal assistant played by Jennifer Hudson, last (and only ever) seen as the ingenue in Dreamgirls. Hudson represents the new generation of New York women on the make, arriving from Missouri already possessed of insider knowledge, a company called Bag Borrow or Steal that she describes as "Netflix for purses." (I thought it was the best joke in the movie, too, but it turns out to be an actual enterprise.)
From here it's just a matter of bringing everyone back to a happy place, which means each character has to re-learn something about herself that we knew before the movie even began. Nevertheless, it's supremely satisfying, and a guilty pleasure to boot, especially when watching a character scream "My very own Louis Vuitton!" with more heartfelt emotion than any protestation of mere romantic love in the movie so far. Sex and the City continues to peddle its message of true love, but since "happily ever after" doesn't come with a price tag, it would like us to remember that the next most important thing is to accessorize. Chris Knight, National Post
GONZO: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - Rated R - 120 minutes - Flat
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In all the memories gathered together in "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," there was one subject I found conspicuously missing: The fact of the man's misery. Did he never have a hangover? The film finds extraordinary access to the people in his life, but not even from his two wives do we get a description I would dearly love to read, on what he was like in the first hour or two after he woke up. He was clearly, deeply, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and after a stupor-induced sleep he would have awakened in a state of withdrawal. He must have administered therapeutic dozes of booze or pills or something to quiet the tremors and the dread. What did he say at those times? How did he behave? Are the words "fear and loathing" autobiographical?
Of course, perhaps Thompson was immune. One of the eyewitnesses to his life says in wonderment, "You saw the stuff go in and there was no discernible effect." I don't think I believe that. If there was no discernible effect, how would you describe his behavior? If he had been sober all his life, would he have hunted wild pigs with a machine gun? Thompson was the most famous (or notorious) inebriate of his generation, but perhaps he really was one of those rare creatures who had no hangovers, despite the debaucheries of the day(s) before. How much did he consume? A daily bottle of bourbon, plus wine, beer, pills of every description.
The bottom line is, he got away with it, right up until his suicide, which he himself scripted and every one of his friends fully expected. As a journalist he got away with murder. He reported that during a presidential primary Edward Muskie ingested Ibogaine, a psychoactive drug administered by a "mysterious Brazilian doctor," and this information, which was totally fabricated, was actually picked up and passed along as fact. Thompson's joke may have contributed to Muskie's angry tantrums during the 1972 Florida primary. No other reporter could have printed such a lie, but Thompson was shielded by his legend: He could print anything. "Of all the correspondents," says Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, "he was the least factual, but the most accurate."
He was an explosive, almost hypnotic, writer, with a savage glee in his prose. I remember eagerly opening a new issue of Rolling Stone in the 1970s and devouring his work. A great deal of it was untrue, but it dealt in a kind of exalted super-truth, as when he spoke of Richard Nixon the vampire roaming the night in Washington. Thompson had never heard of objectivity. In 1972 he backed George McGovern as the Democratic nominee, and no calumny was too vile for him to attribute to McGovern's opponents in both parties. I suppose readers were supposed to know that and factor it into the equation.
This documentary by Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side," "No End in Sight") is remarkable, first of all, for reminding us how many pots Hunter dipped a spoon in. He rode with the Hells' Angels for a year. Ran for sheriff of Pitkin County and lost, but only by 204-173. Covered the 1972 and 1976 presidential primaries in a way that made him a co-candidate (in the sense of co-dependent). Had a baffling dual personality, so that such as McGovern, Jimmy Buffet, Tom Wolfe and his wives and son remember him fondly, but could also be "absolutely vicious."
He taught himself to write by typing Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" again and again, we're told. How many times? we ask ourselves skeptically. Was that part of the fantastical legend? Nobody in the film was around while he was doing it. He became famous for writing about "the Edge" in his Hells' Angels' book--that edge of speed going around a curve which you could approach, but never cross without wiping out and killing yourself. He did a lot of edge-riding on his motorcycle, and never wiped out. He said again and again that the way he chose to die was by his own hand, with a firearm, while he was still at the top. He died that way, using one of his 22 firearms, but "he was nowhere near the top," says Sondi Wright, his first wife.
He started to lose it after Africa, says Jann Wenner, who ran his stuff in Rolling Stone. He went to Zaire at great expense to cover the Rumble in the Jungle for the magazine, got hopelessly stoned, missed the fight (while reportedly in the hotel pool), and never filed a story. "After Africa," says Sondi, "he just couldn't write. He couldn’t piece it together." He did some more writing, of course, such as a heartfelt piece after 9/11. But he had essentially disappeared into his legend, as the outlaw of Woody Creek, blasting away with his weapons, making outraged phone calls, getting impossibly high. Certainly he made an impression on his time like few other journalists ever do; the comparison would be with H. L. Mencken.
This film gathers interviews from a wide and sometimes surprising variety of people (Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Hells' Angel Sonny Barger). It has home movies, old photos, TV footage, voice recordings, excerpts from file about Thompson). It is narrated by Johnny Depp, mostly through readings from Thompson's work. It is all you could wish for in a doc about the man. But it leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself? And what about the hangovers?
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