Films Shown in 2009
Milk - Rated R - 128 minutes - Flat
Gus Van Sant's Milk is at once an homage to the country's first openly gay, publicly elected official, a love letter to the movement he aimed to forcibly expel from "the closet" and a celebration of the city in which the historic events occurred. Ironically, Van Sant's reputation for exploring the fringe (Mala Noche, Gerry) and digging beneath the painful surface of controversial or unseemly events (Elephant, Last Days) is a legacy he doesn't bask in here—but he doesn't forget it either. Like his last Oscar contender, Good Will Hunting, the script for Milk is fairly conventional. But the themes are woven masterfully and allude to consequent themes built by other Queer Filmmakers, past and present. Its oddly timed release after the 2008 elections won't temper box office attendance—especially not in San Francisco, where, I'm thrilled to report, there are parties associated with the film's release eager to reach a fanfare of which Harvey Milk himself might have approved. The Oscar Winning 1984 doc The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Rob Epstein, was a major source of material for this film and Van Sant gives a specific "Thank You" to Epstein at the end of his film. Yet, the most efficient and affecting homage made to Times is found in the stock footage. As opposed to recreating 1977 San Francisco, Van Sant employed archival material, thus asserting both the verity of the story and the role of the film as a kind of (bigger) public record of Harvey Milk, the man. It would be unfair to compare Times and Milk given the differing contexts in which the films were made. Epstein began Times before Harvey Milk's assassination and after his first project, the collectively made, granddaddy of Gay Movement docs, Word is Out. Meanwhile, Hollywood fumbled with Milk's story for moons, occasionally releasing rumors about the attachment of directors like Oliver Stone and stars like Kevin Spacey and Robin Williams. So far as the generations of remove are concerned, it's apparent Van Sant was making any and all efforts to bring Milk's story as close to its origin points as possible. The authenticity this Oregon native provides is palpable and, at times, breathtaking. Not to make too much out of the timing of this film's release or the appearance of Josh Brolin (here playing Milk's adversary, Dan White), Harvey Milk bears something in common with our exiting president: prior to middle-age, he had sacred little political activity on his record. When he left New York in 1970 with his lover Scott (James Franco), the move was a clean break from a successful but unhappy stint with a corporate workplace and a closeted life. The drive across country is captured in the car, sweetly and without sound—a sort of Kodachrome awakening and a promise to leave the staunch black/white/grey of the repressive East Coast behind. In San Francisco, the city is in full, manic, semi-chaotic, swing—a bastion of confusion and high drama. Milk and his lover take an apartment in the Castro and open a camera shop that quickly becomes a haunt for locals. It's not long before Milk becomes a community organizer. Police violence rained on the gay community, specifically targeted at gay bars; the street level beatings and slayings and one instance in which Milk is inclined to run down the street from a shadowy figure, all drill home the otherwise overlooked reality that being gay, even in San Francisco in the 70's, was perfectly unsafe. One shot of Penn standing over the body of a slain neighbor with a police officer plays out poetically, reflected on the shiny side of a whistle. The whistle was the community tool for awareness and support. The gay community carried whistles to call for support in the event violence looked imminent, or police threats were present. As a motif, the whistle was a multi-purpose tool: it was a cry out that had the potential to prove the community's power in numbers. This power is precisely what Harvey Milk found ways to harness from the beginning of his work as an activist to his transformation into an activist with a ties to power. From the necessity of protection sprang the need for exposure. A subtle and limitlessly complex theme is woven in reflections. When Milk sees a riot emerging outside the window of his camera shop, the growing mob looks like a backdrop to Penn's reflection in the proscenium like window: the moment is defining. Milk's charisma with the crowd is beautifully rendered—a ramshackle, near disaster of barely understood proclamations and surprisingly effective rabble rousing. As Milk is swept away by the masses, his partner Scott stands in front of the window—the crowd now reflected onto the window that limits him from the universe his partner works tirelessly to forge and a barrier to the life of the "openly gay" Milk. While that term ("openly gay") seems a tad outdated, the subject in the film is of great import. The reflections seem to signal an ongoing dialogue about the performance of identity and its fluid, ever changing, counterpart beneath the surface. The duality here lies with Milk as an historic figure. At once he tells his peers they need to come out because for as long as people think they don't know anyone who's gay, they'll think gay is "other" and feel no need to grant "other" rights. Living "out," in this case, is less a choice than a path of survival, as political change can hardly be expected if silence is kept. A late coming theme is that of opera and the appreciation for a drama that's so big as to exceed the boundaries of the everyday. After three unsuccessful attempts at office (one of which carried a slogan pitting Milk against the political "Machine," another necessitating he cut his hair and don a suit), Milk finally reached office under the newly designated District Supervisor system. (Wounded by the outcome of Milk and Mayor George Moscone's careers, the district system was outdated and reinstated again in 2000). Milk instructed his advisors never to wear suits, always take the stairs and to make the biggest show of it possible. This was, he was quoted as saying, his "new theatre" (but another reference to performed identity). The scenes in which Milk carries out these now legendary dialogues is understated—even though Penn and co-star Emile Hirsch (as Cleve Jones) are half dancing up the interior staircase of City Hall as they dialogue. Penn and his co-stars are repeatedly framed with an eye to the older, more Olympian detail inside City Hall, giving them a sense of perpetuity, grandeur and universality. This is, no doubt, part of the purpose and (dare I say) sanitization of the story. Ultimately, the potency of this film is also one that requires a call and the power of numbers to see effect. (Ask Rob Epstein. He'd, no doubt, agree.) It's not that Van Sant eliminates otherwise distance-making material; the sex scenes, while quite tasteful, are far from mysterious, and the kissing is sweet and constant—like life, one supposes. Yet this story, even in its tireless attention to detail and history, is still attired with Oscar appropriate finery. So, much like Harvey Milk's public transition from hippie to machine-managing public servant, Van Sant's Milk bridges a gap we've perhaps spent little time exploring. And in the space between the local and the national, the activist and the public servant, grassroots doc and wide released feature, Van Sant is transforming a city history into an American story, and affording a larger number of bodies access to the story of a man whose battle far outdates the long hours he put into it. Surely Milk knew (as does Van Sant) the march only began with him. And if that's not hopeful, it's hard say what is. Review by Sara Schieron, boxoffice.com
Slumdog Millionaire - Rated R - 120 minutes - Scope
Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the ground running. This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time, about a Mumbai orphan who rises from rags to riches on the strength of his lively intelligence. The film's universal appeal will present the real India to millions of moviegoers for the first time.The real India, supercharged with a plot as reliable and eternal as the hills. The film's surface is so dazzling that you hardly realize how traditional it is underneath. But it's the buried structure that pulls us through the story like a big engine on a short train.
By the real India, I don't mean an unblinking documentary like Louis Malle's "Calcutta" or the recent "Born Into Brothels." I mean the real India of social levels that seem to be separated by centuries. What do people think of when they think of India? On the one hand, Mother Teresa, "Salaam Bombay!" and the wretched of the earth. On the other, the "Masterpiece Theater"-style images of "A Passage to India," "Gandhi" and "The Jewel in the Crown." The India of Mother Teresa still exists. Because it is side-by-side with the new India, it is easily seen. People living in the streets. A woman crawling from a cardboard box. Men bathing at a fire hydrant. Men relieving themselves by the roadside. You stand on one side of the Hooghly River, a branch of the Ganges that runs through Kolkuta, and your friend tells you, "On the other bank millions of people live without a single sewer line." On the other hand, the world's largest middle class, mostly lower-middle, but all the more admirable. The India of "Monsoon Wedding." Millionaires. Mercedes-Benzes and Audis. Traffic like Demo Derby. Luxury condos. Exploding education. A booming computer segment. A fountain of medical professionals. Some of the most exciting modern English literature. A Bollywood to rival Hollywood. "Slumdog Millionaire" bridges these two Indias by cutting between a world of poverty and the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It tells the story of an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who is born into a brutal existence. A petty thief, impostor and survivor, mired in dire poverty, he improvises his way up through the world and remembers everything he has learned. His name is Jamel (played as a teenager by Dev Patel). He is Oliver Twist. High-spirited and defiant in the worst of times, he survives. He scrapes out a living at the Taj Mahal, which he did not know about but discovers by being thrown off a train. He pretends to be a guide, invents "facts" out of thin air, advises tourists to remove their shoes and then steals them. He finds a bit part in the Mumbai underworld, and even falls in idealized romantic love, that most elusive of conditions for a slumdog. His life until he's 20 is told in flashbacks intercut with his appearance as a quiz show contestant. Pitched as a slumdog, he supplies the correct answer to question after question and becomes a national hero. The flashbacks show why he knows the answers. He doesn't volunteer this information. It is beaten out of him by the show's security staff. They are sure he must be cheating.The film uses dazzling cinematography, breathless editing, driving music and headlong momentum to explode with narrative force, stirring in a romance at the same time. For Danny Boyle, it is a personal triumph. He combines the suspense of a game show with the vision and energy of "City of God" and never stops sprinting. When I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" at Toronto, I was witnessing a phenomenon: dramatic proof that a movie is about how it tells itself. I walked out of the theater and flatly predicted it would win the Audience Award. Seven days later, it did. And that it could land a best picture Oscar nomination. We will see. It is one of those miraculous entertainments that achieves its immediate goals and keeps climbing toward a higher summit. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Defiance - Rated R - 137 minutes - Flat
The Reader. Good. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Adam Resurrected. It's been a big year for Holocaust movies (and that's not even counting World War II movies Miracle at St. Anna and Valkyrie). Time for one more -- the Edward Zwick-directed Defiance, which tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, three brothers who for years hid more than twelve hundred Jews in the Belarussian forest.
Of that long list of Holocaust movies, I loved The Reader, though I was a little uneasy with how it baits you into Nazi-sympathizing: imagine how the movie would've played if it actually showed you Kate Winslet in action as a Nazi officer. <br />
As you might expect, there's no such moral issue in Defiance, which relies on the straightforward themes of hope, courage, and yep, defiance to become a satisfying addition to the genre.
Daniel Craig stars as Tuvia, the eldest Bielski brother, alongside Liev Schreiber as his contentious brother Zus and Jamie Bell as the younger Asael. They flee to the forest after reuniting in the wake of their parents' murder, find other runaway Jews, and take the lead. Soon a new society emerges in the forest, and eventually the Bielskis even infiltrate the Polish ghettos to rescue more Jews before they're shipped away to concentration camps.
The movie has a wide net, but if there's a central relationship, it's the rivalry between Tuvia and Zus. It's important to note that neither were above murder -- Tuvia avenges the death of his parents alone, in cold blood -- but Tuvia aims mainly to help the other survivors and avoid the Germans, while Zus would rather form a more traditional partisan group and fight the Nazis head on. Eventually Zus even leaves to join the nearby Russian army brigade, but their familial bond remains stronger than either of them would freely admit.
A new lifestyle in the woods emerges quickly, all under the rule of Tuvia. "Forest wives" and "forest husbands" pair up quickly, united by the loss of their real spouses in the outside world. All three brothers are soon paired off -- Asael with Chaya (soon-to-be-famous Mia Wasikowska, who's starring in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland), Zus with Bella (Iben Hjejle), and Tuvia with Lilka (Alexa Davalos), a beauty who you think is just going to function as arm candy but becomes one of the strongest presences in the film.
The story is emotional, exciting, and well-made. Ed Zwick is like the bizarro world version of Michael Bay -- a director of action-oriented epics who's actually well-respected instead of being known as the most successful hack in the business. Zwick's success is twofold: first, his movies are actually really good (go re-watch The Last Samurai), and second, he's actually personally invested in them. He bought the rights to the book upon which Defiance is based himself, and co-wrote the script along with Clayton Frohman.
Watching the film, it's striking just how fast new societies can rise up with their own sets of laws and customs and bond. Humans are resilient adapters -- yes, life in the forest must have frequently been hell, even worse than portrayed in the movie, but most of them did live through it. I didn't quite realize how affecting the movie was until the postscript at the end, which, by merely hinting at the legacy of the Bielskis, brought tears to my eyes. Movie Grade: A Review By: Michael Dance - The Cinema Source.Com
Revolutionary Road - Rated R - 123 minutes - Flat
'Revolutionary Road" shows the American Dream awakened by a nightmare. It takes place in the 1950s, the decade not only of Elvis but of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It shows a young couple who meet at a party, get married and create a suburban life with a nice house, a manicured lawn, "modern" furniture, two kids, a job in the city for him, housework for her, and martinis, cigarettes, boredom and desperation for both of them. The Wheelers, Frank and April, are blinded by love into believing life together will allow them to fulfill their fantasies. Their problem is, they have no fantasies. Instead, they have yearnings -- a hunger for something more than a weary slog into middle age. Billy Wilder made a movie in 1955 called "The Seven Year Itch" about a restlessness that comes into some marriages when the partners realize the honeymoon is over and they're married for good and there's an empty space at the center. Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) can't see inviting futures for themselves. Frank joins the morning march of men in suits and hats out of Grand Central and into jobs where they are "executives" doing meaningless work -- in Frank's case, he's "in office machines." He might as well be one. April suggests he just quit, so they can move to Paris, she can support them as a translator at the American Embassy and he can figure out what he really wants to do. Translating will not support their Connecticut lifestyle, but ... Paris! What about their children? Their children are like a car you never think about when you're not driving somewhere. Frank agrees, and they think they're poised to take flight, when suddenly he's offered a promotion and a raise. He has no choice, right? He'll be just as miserable, but better paid. In today's hard times, that sounds necessary, but maybe all times are hard when you hate your life. Frank and April have ferocious fights about his decision, and we realize that April was largely motivated by her own needs. Better to support the neutered Frank in Paris with a job at the embassy, where she might meet someone more interesting than their carbon-copy neighbors and the "real estate lady," Helen Givings (Kathy Bates).
Helen makes a tentative request. Can she and her husband bring their son John (Michael Shannon) over for a meal? He's in a mental institution, and perhaps some time with a nice normal couple like the Wheelers would be good for him. John comes for dinner, and we discover his real handicap is telling the truth. With cruel words and merciless observations, he chops through their facade and mocks their delusions. It is a wrecking job. Remember, this is the 1950s. A little after the time of this movie, Life magazine would run its famous story about the Beatniks, "The Only Rebellion Around." There was a photo of a Beatnik and his chick sitting on the floor and listening to an LP record of modern jazz that was cool and hip and I felt my own yearnings. I remember on the way back from Steak 'n Shake one night, my dad drove slow past the Turk's Head coffeehouse on campus. "That's where the Beatniks stand on tables and recite their poetry," he told my mom, and she said, "My, my," and I wanted to get out of that car and put on a black turtleneck and walk in there and stay. The character John is not insane, just a Beatnik a little ahead of schedule. He's an early assault wave from the 1960s, which would sweep over suburbia and create a generation its parents did not comprehend. What he does for the Wheelers is strip away their denials and see them clearly. Do you know these John Prine lyrics?
Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try an' find Jesus on your own.
Frank and April are played by DiCaprio and Winslet as the sad ending to the romance in "Titanic," and all other romances that are founded on nothing more than ... romance. They are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around. Don't think they smoke too much in this movie. In the 1950s everybody smoked everywhere all the time. Life was a disease, and smoking held it temporarily in remission. And drinking? Every ad executive in the neighborhood would head for the Wrigley Bar at lunchtime to prove the maxim: One martini is just right, two are too many, three are not enough.
The direction is by Sam Mendes, who dissected suburban desperation in "American Beauty," a film that after this one seems merciful. The screenplay by Justin Haythe is drawn from the famous 1961 novel by Richard Yates, who has been called the voice of the postwar Age of Anxiety. This film is so good it is devastating. A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?
Review by Roger Ebert; www.rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Reader - Rated R - 123 minutes - Flat
The crucial decision in "The Reader" is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general. The film intends his decision as the key to its meaning, but most viewers may conclude that "The Reader" is only about the Nazis' crimes and the response to them by post-war German generations. The film centers on a sexual relationship between Hanna (Kate Winslet), a woman in her mid-30s, and Michael (David Kross), a boy of 15. That such things are wrong is beside the point; they happen, and the story is about how it connected with her earlier life and his later one. It is powerfully, if sometimes confusingly, told in a flashback framework and powerfully acted by Winslet and Kross, with Ralph Fiennes coldly enigmatic as the elder Michael.
The story begins with the cold, withdrawn Michael in middle age (Fiennes), and moves back to the late 1950s on a day when young Michael is found sick and feverish in the street and taken back to Hanna's apartment to be cared for. This day, and all their days together, will be obsessed with sex. Hanna makes little pretense of genuinely loving Michael, who she calls "kid," and although Michael has a helpless crush on Hanna, it should not be confused with love. He is swept away by the discovery of his own sexuality. What does she get from their affair? Sex, certainly, but it seems more important that he read aloud to her: "Reading first. Sex afterwards." The director, Stephen Daldry, portrays them with a great deal of nudity and sensuality, which is correct, because for those hours, in that place, they are about nothing else. One day Hanna disappears. Michael finds her apartment deserted, with no hint or warning. His unformed ego is unprepared for this blow. Eight years later, as a law student, he enters a courtroom and discovers Hanna in a group of Nazi prison guards being tried for murder. Something during this trial suddenly makes another of her secrets clear to him and might help explain why she became a prison guard. His discovery does not excuse her unforgivable guilt. Still, it might affect her sentencing. Michael remains silent. The adult Michael has sentenced himself to a lonely, isolated existence. We see him after a night with a woman, treating her with remote politeness. He has never recovered from the wound he received from Hanna, nor from the one he inflicted on himself eight years after. She hurt him, he hurt her. She was isolated and secretive after the war, he became so after the trial. The enormity of her sin far outweighs his, but they are both guilty of allowing harm because they reject the choice to do good. At the film's end, Michael encounters a Jewish woman in New York (Lena Olin), who eviscerates him with her moral outrage. She should. But she thinks he seeks understanding for Hanna. Not so. He cannot forgive Hanna's crimes. He seeks understanding for himself, although perhaps he doesn't realize that. In the courtroom, he withheld moral witness and remained silent, as she did, as most Germans did. And as many of us have done or might be capable of doing. There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along. Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, "I was only doing my job. I didn't know what was going on." President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does. Many of the critics of "The Reader" seem to believe it is all about Hanna's shameful secret. No, not her past as a Nazi guard. The earlier secret that she essentially became a guard to conceal. Others think the movie is an excuse for soft-core porn disguised as a sermon. Still others say it asks us to pity Hanna. Some complain we don't need yet another "Holocaust movie." None of them think the movie may have anything to say about them. I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe. What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But if we were one of the rest of the Germans? Can we guess, on the basis of how most white Americans, from the North and South, knew about racial discrimination but didn't go out on a limb to oppose it? Philip Roth's great novel The Plot Against America imagines a Nazi takeover here. It is painfully thought-provoking and probably not unfair. "The Reader" suggests that many people are like Michael and Hanna, and possess secrets that we would do shameful things to conceal. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Wrestler - Rated R - 109 minutes - Scope
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"The Wrestler" is about a man who can do one thing well, and keeps on doing it because of need, weary skill and pride. He wrestles for a living. Pro wrestling is a fake sport, right? Yes, but as an activity, it's pretty real. I watch it on TV with fascination. It's scripted that the villain sneaks up on the hero, who pretends not to see him, and pushes him over the ropes and out of the ring. Fake. But when the hero hits the floor, how fake is that? "Those guys learn how to fall," people tell me. Want to sign up for the lessons? Mickey Rourke plays the battered, broke, lonely hero, Randy ("The Ram") Robinson. This is the performance of his lifetime, will win him a nomination, may win him the Oscar. Like many great performances, it has an element of truth. Rourke himself was once young and glorious and made the big bucks. He did professional boxing just for the hell of it. He alienated a lot of people. He fell from grace and stardom, but kept working, because he was an actor and that was what he did. Now here is his comeback role, playing Randy the Ram's comeback. This is Rourke doing astonishing physical acting. He has the physique of a body builder, perhaps thanks to some steroid use, which would also be true of Randy. He gets into the ring and does the work. Rourke may not be physically performing every single thing we see, including the leaps off ropes and ladders and the nasty falls. Special effects have robbed movies of their believability. But I've seen a lot of F/X, and I have to say it looked to me like he was really doing these things.
Not that it matters. It appears that he is, and his ring performances and the punishment he takes supply the bedrock for the story, which involves his damaged relationship with his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and what he hopes will become a relationship with the stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). Except for his backstage camaraderie with other wrestling old-timers, Randy has burned all his bridges in life. Stephanie is far, far from happy to see him at her door again. And he doesn't quite believe Cassidy, whose real name is Pam, when she carefully explains that she is not available. Here is the irony, which he won't accept. Cassidy is as much a performer as Randy. He is a ring worker. She is a sex worker. They put on a show and give the customers what they want. It pays the rent. There is always a chasm between pros and their audiences. That's why so many show-biz people marry each other. Magicians say, "The trick is told when the trick is sold." Think about that. But Randy has grown a little wiser with the years, less blinded by stardom, more able to admit emotional need. Maybe, too, he was using more drugs in those days, and they always take first place before relationships. (He gets a sales pitch from a fellow wrestler who seems to stock more drugs than Walgreens.) Randy has a residual charm and sentimentality, which helps him and also deceives him. He makes some small progress with his daughter. And as for Cassidy -- have you ever seen Marisa Tomei play a bitch? I haven't. I don't know if she can. She seems to have something good at the heart of her that endows this stripper with warmth and sympathy. Not that Randy should get his hopes up. The most fascinating element in Darren Aronofsky's film is the backstage detail about wrestling. He does this so well, yet has never made a film even remotely like this before. In the snow and slush of New Jersey, Randy and his opponents make the rounds of shabby union halls, school gyms, community centers and American Legion halls, using whatever they can find for dressing rooms, taping their damaged parts, psyching themselves up and agreeing beforehand on the script. We learn how they make themselves bleed, prepare for violent "surprises," talk through each match. And then they go out and do it. As nearly as I can tell, their planning only means that they get hurt in the ways they expect, and not in unforeseen ways. I cared as deeply about Randy the Ram as any movie character I've seen this year. I cared about Mickey Rourke, too. The way this role and this film unfold, that almost amounts to the same thing. Rourke may not win the Oscar for best actor. But it would make me feel good to see him up there. It really would. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Last Chance Harvey - Rated PG-13 - 99 minutes - Scope
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"Last Chance Harvey" is a tremendously appealing love story surrounded by a movie not worthy of it. For Dustin Hoffman, after years of character roles (however good) and dubbing the voices of animated animals, it provides a rare chance to play ... an ordinary guy. For Emma Thompson, there is an opportunity to use her gifts for tact and insecurity. For both, their roles project warmth and need. When "Last Chance Harvey" gets out of their way and leaves them alone to relate with each other, it's sort of magical. Then the lumber of the plot apparatus is trundled on, and we wish it were a piece for two players. One subplot, scored with funny-bumpy-scary music, is entirely unnecessary. And even with the two stars onscreen, there is too much reliance on that ancient standby, the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude. But what's good is very good. Hoffman plays Harvey, a failed jazz pianist who has found success writing jingles for TV ads. Thompson plays Kate, an airport interviewer for a British agency. Harvey flies to London to attend his daughter's wedding, and in the space of 24 hours he learns that he has been fired and that his daughter would prefer her stepfather gave her away. At the same time, Kate is ignored on a blind date and has to deal with a mother who fears her new neighbor is a vivisectionist. They met briefly when Harvey was rude to Kate at the airport. The next day, when both are deep in misery, they find themselves the only two people in a pub. Harvey recognizes her, apologizes and, out of desperation, tries to start a conversation. She resists. But notice the tentative dialogue that slowly allows them to start talking easily. It's not forced. It depends on his charm and her kindness. Pitch perfect. But then the dialogue fades down, and the camera pulls back and shows them talking and smiling freely, and the music gets happier, and there is a montage showing them walking about London with lots and lots of scenery in the frame. The movie indulges the Semi-OLI more than once; it uses the device as shorthand for scenes that should be fully transcribed. In "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset," Richard Linklater sent Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talking all through a night in Vienna and all through a day in Paris, and never let them stop, and kept his camera close. Why didn't Joel Hopkins, the writer-director of "Last Chance Harvey," try the same? He had the right actors. Hopkins gets one thing right. They stay outdoors. Going to his hotel or her flat would set the stage for body language neither one is ready for. They avoid the issue by walking around London, although unfortunately Hopkins sends them mostly up and down the Victoria Embankment and the South Bank, so he can hold the Thames vista in the background. We get more montages of them walking and talking, as substitutes for listening to a conversation we've become invested in. One subplot works well. After Kate starts Harvey talking about why his relationship with his daughter failed, she tells him he must attend her wedding reception. He says she must go with him. He will buy her a dress. There is a gratuitous and offensive montage of her trying on dresses, including one frilly gown that looks perfect for a fancy dress ball in "Gone With the Wind." Not only is this montage an exhausted cliche, they're in a hurry, remember? But when they get to the reception, Harvey is touching in a carefully worded speech. The subplot that doesn't work involves Kate's mother (Eileen Atkins). She peers through her curtains at her suspicious neighbor, thinks she sees him carrying a body to the woodshed and speed-dials her daughter every five minutes. Every time we cut to her, we get that peppy suspense music, as the movie confuses itself with light comedy. "Last Chance Harvey" has everything it needs but won't stop there. It needs the nerve to push all the way. It is a pleasure to look upon the faces of Hoffman and Thompson, so pleasant, so real. Their dialogue together finds the right notes for crossing an emotional minefield. They never descend into tear-jerking or cuteness. They are all grown up and don't trust love nearly as much as straight talk. Hopkins deserves credit for creating these characters. Then he should have stood back and let them keep right on talking. Their pillow talk would have been spellbinding.
Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Waltz With Bashir - Rated R - 87 minutes - Flat
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“Waltz With Bashir” is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film. Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary, a phrase that sounds at first like a cinematic oxymoron. Movies like Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and Brett Morgen’s “Chicago 10” have used animation to make reality seem more vivid and more strange, producing odd and fascinating experiments. But Mr. Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power. That it is also a cartoon is not incidental to this achievement. Art Spiegelman, in “Maus,” turned an unlikely medium — the talking-animal comic book — into a profound and original vehicle for contemplation of the Holocaust. Similarly Mr. Folman, crucially assisted by his art director, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, has adapted techniques often (if unfairly) dismissed as trivial into an intense and revealing meditation on a historical catastrophe and its aftermath. “Waltz With Bashir” will certainly enrich and complicate your understanding of its specific subject — the Lebanon War and, in particular, the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangist fighters at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps — but it may also change the way you think about how movies can confront history. Why did Mr. Folman, who has worked on more conventional documentaries in the past, decide to use animation in this one? The answer to the question is another question: How else could he have recorded dreams, hallucinations and distorted memories, his own and those of other veterans? The core of “Waltz With Bashir” is a series of conversations between the director, depicted with graying hair and a thoughtful demeanor, and other middle-aged Israeli men who were in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, when the Israeli Defense Forces pushed up through the southern part of the country toward Beirut. Most of them were in the western part of that city from the 16th to the 18th of September, when Christian militiamen slaughtered as many as 3,000 civilians, ostensibly to avenge the death of Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected president, who had been assassinated a few days before. More than 20 years later Mr. Folman confronts his interlocutors amid the trappings of their relatively calm daily lives. (All the interview subjects speak in their own voices except for two, whose dialogue has been dubbed.) One lives in the Netherlands, where he owns a chain of falafel restaurants. Another appears in a martial arts studio. Others reminisce in their apartments or in bars, and as each tells his story, the scene dissolves and we see a younger version of the same man — usually leaner, perhaps cleaner-shaven or not as bald but still recognizable — in the nightmarish landscape of war. The freedom afforded by animation — a realm where the prosaic standards of verisimilitude and the inconvenient laws of physics can be flouted at will — allows Mr. Folman to blend grimly literal images with surreal flights of fantasy, humor and horror. At one point a soldier, passed out on the deck of a transport boat, dreams of a giant naked woman who climbs out of the water and cradles him in her arms. At other times rough, cynical pop songs (with lyrics like “Good Morning Lebanon” and “Today I Bombed Beirut”) play out over montages of chaos and destruction. Mr. Folman is haunted by a weird recollection of naked soldiers walking onto the beach in Beirut as the city’s bombed-out skyline is illuminated by flares. These are highly personal images, culled from admittedly unreliable memories, but it is precisely their subjectivity that makes them so vivid and authentic. “Waltz With Bashir” is not, and could not be, the definitive account of the Lebanon war or the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Instead it’s a collage and an inquiry. “Can’t a film be therapeutic?” one of Mr. Folman’s friends asks him early in the movie, and in a way everything that follows is an attempt to answer that question and interrogate its premise. It depends on what is meant by therapy, and on who is undergoing it. The complicity of the Israeli command in the atrocities at Sabra and Shatila was established by an Israeli government report by the Kahan Commission in 1983, which found the military indirectly responsible for the actions of the Phalangists. What no commission of inquiry can precisely define is the responsibility of the ordinary soldiers who were nearby, witnessing the slaughter and allowing it to continue. And this ethical question becomes more and more urgent as Mr. Folman’s patient probing brings him closer to the awful facts his mind had suppressed for so long. Since it was shown in Cannes last year, “Waltz With Bashir” has attracted a lot of attention and a measure of controversy, some of it surrounding the very last moments of the film, in which the animation stops and the audience is confronted with graphic, horrifying images of real dead bodies. This ending shows just how far Mr. Folman is prepared to go, not in the service of shock for its own sake, but rather in his pursuit of clarity and truth. The Israelis who were witnesses and (mostly inadvertent) accomplices to the killing, and who came home from the war to lives of relative normalcy and tranquility, have the time and the means to reflect, to explore, to engage in therapy. The victims are beyond any of that, and the blunt literalness of this film’s denouement is a reminder of that unbridgeable gap between the living and the dead. It is also Mr. Folman’s way of acknowledging that imagination has its limits, and that even the most ambitious and serious work of art will come up short against the brutal facts of life. Review by A.O. Scott, nytimes.com
Wendy and Lucy - Rated R - 80 minutes - Flat
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I know so much about Wendy, although this movie tells me so little. I know almost nothing about where she came from, what her life was like, how realistic she is about the world, where her ambition lies. But I know, or feel, everything about Wendy at this moment: stranded in an Oregon town, broke, her dog lost, her car a write-off, hungry, friendless, quiet, filled with desperate resolve. Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy" is another illustration of how absorbing a film can be when the plot doesn't stand between us and a character. There is no timetable here. Nowhere Wendy came from, nowhere she's going to, no plan except to get her car fixed and feed her dog. Played by Michelle Williams, she has a gaze focused inward, on her determination. We pick up a few scraps: Her sister in Indiana is wary of her, and she thinks she might be able to find a job in a fish cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska. But Alaska seems a long way to drive from Indiana just to get a job in a cannery, and this movie isn't about the unemployment rate. Alaska perhaps appeals to Wendy because it is as far away she can drive where they still speak English. She parks on side streets and sleeps in her car, she has very limited cash, her golden retriever Lucy is her loving companion. She wakes up one morning somewhere in Oregon, her car won't start and she's out of dog food, and that begins a chain of events that leads to wandering around a place she doesn't know for her only friend in the world.
When I say I know all about Wendy, that's a tribute to Michelle Williams' acting, Kelly Reichardt's direction and the cinematography of Sam Levy. They use Williams' expressive face, often forlorn, always hopeful, to show someone who embarked on an unplanned journey, has gone too far to turn back. And right now, she doesn't care about anything but getting her friend back. Her world is seen as the flat everyday world of shopping malls and storefronts, rail tracks and not much traffic, skies that the weatherman calls "overcast." You know those days when you walk around, and the weather makes you feel in your stomach that something is not right? Cinematography can make you feel like that. She walks. She walks all the way to the dog pound and back. All the way to an auto shop and back. And back to what? She sleeps in a park. The movie isn't about people molesting her, although she has one unpleasant encounter. Most people are nice, like a mechanic (Will Patton), and especially a security guard of retirement age (Wally Dalton) whose job is to stand and look at a mostly empty parking lot for 12 hours and guard against a nonexistent threat to its empty spaces. Early in the film, the teenage supermarket employee (John Robinson) who busts Wendy for shoplifting won't give her a break. He's a little suckup who possibly wants to impress his boss with an unbending adherence to "store policy." Store policy also probably denies him health benefits and overtime, and if he takes a good look at Wendy, he may be seeing himself, minus the uniform with the logo and the nametag on it. The people in the film haven't dropped out of life; they've been dropped by life. It has no real use for them, and not much interest. They're on hold. At least searching for your lost dog is a consuming passion; it gives Wendy a purpose and the hope of joy at the end. That's what this movie has to observe, and it's more than enough. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
The Class - Rated PG-13 - 128 minutes - Scope
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"The Class" might have been set in any classroom in the Western world, and I believe most teachers would recognize it. It is about the power struggle between a teacher who wants to do good and students who disagree about what "good" is. The film is so fair that neither side is seen as right, and both seem trapped by futility. In a lower-income, melting-pot neighborhood in Paris, Francois, the teacher, begins a school year with high hopes and a desire to be liked by his students. They are a multiethnic group of 15- and 16-year-olds, few of them prepared by the educational system to be promising candidates for Francois' hopes. None of them seem stupid, and indeed intelligence may be one of their problems: They can see clearly that the purpose of the class is to make them model citizens in a society that has little use for them. The movie is bursting with life, energy, fears, frustrations and the quick laughter of a classroom hungry for relief. It avoids lockstep plotting and plunges into the middle of the fray, helping us become familiar with the students, suggesting more than it tells, allowing us to identify with many points of view. It is uncannily convincing. The reason for that, I learn, involves the method of the director, Laurent Cantet, one of the most gifted new French directors. He began with a best-selling autobiographical novel by a teacher, Francois Begaudeau. He cast Begaudeau as the teacher. He worked for a year with a group of students, improvising and filming scenes. So convincing is the film that it seems documentary, but all of the students, I learn, are playing roles and not themselves. There is a resentful Arab girl, who feels she is being undervalued by the teacher. A high-spirited African boy, very intelligent, but prone to anger. An Asian boy, also smart, who has learned (from his family's culture, perhaps) to keep a low profile and not reveal himself. Others who are confederates, pals, co-conspirators. A lot of grief in the classroom has to do with the rote teaching of French. As the students puzzle their way through, I don't know, the passive pluperfect subjunctive or whatever, I must say I sided with them. Despite the best efforts of dedicated and gifted nuns, I never learned to diagram a sentence, something they believed was of paramount importance. Yet I have made my living by writing and speaking. You learn a language by listening and speaking. You learn how to write by reading. It's not an abstraction. Do you think the people who first used the imperfect tense felt the need to name it? The title of the original novel translates as "Between the Walls," and indeed the film stays for the most part within the classroom. We know from Jack London that the members of a dog pack intensely observe one another. There can only be one top dog, and there are always candidates for the job. A school year begins with the teacher as top dog. Whether it ends that way is the test of a good teacher. Do you stay on top by strict discipline? With humor? By becoming the students' friend? Through psychology? Will they sense your strategy? Sometimes I think the old British public school system was best: Teachers were eccentric cranks, famous for their idiosyncrasy, and baffled their students. In French w/ subtitles. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
The Great Buck Howard - Rated PG - 90 minutes - Flat
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Is there anyone better than John Malkovich at barely containing his temper? He gravitates toward characters who do not suffer fools lightly, and that would include the Great Buck Howard, who once was Johnny Carson's favorite guest. Buck was dropped from Johnny's guest list and now tours the provinces, taking his magic act from small stages to smaller ones, but he still has his dignity. "I love this town!" he shouts with outstretched arms in Akron, and Akron still loves him. He is famous for his "signature effect," in which his evening's fee is given to an audience member, and he uses his psychic powers to find it. He has never failed, and no one has ever discovered how he does it. Buck was named "The Great" by Carson and still maintains a facade of Greatness, even in front of Troy (Colin Hanks, Tom's son), his newly hired road manager. Malkovich invests him with self-importance and yet slyly suggests it's not all an act; you believe at some level Buck really does love that town, and also when he says, as he always does, "I love you people!"
"The Great Buck Howard" is told from Troy's point of view. His father (Tom Hanks) fervently wants him to enter law school, but he wants to test show biz, and this is his first contact with any degree of fame. He never penetrates the Great Buck Howard's facade (and never do we), but he sure does learn a lot about show biz, some of it intimately from Valerie (Emily Blunt), a new PR person hired for Buck's spectacular new illusion in Cincinnati. Troy learns to carry bags, open doors, deal with local reps and supply mineral water, not distilled ("I'm not an iron," Buck crisply tells Troy's eventual replacement).
We see Buck as Troy does, as an impenetrable mystery. Buck is far from forgotten (he guests on shows hosted by Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa, Jon Stewart and Martha Stewart, all playing themselves). He can still fill a room, even if it's a smaller room. His manager, Gil (Ricky Jay, who always seems to know the inside odds), even gets him a Las Vegas booking. What happens there, and how it happens, is perceptive about show biz and even more perceptive about Buck and his "signature effect." Well, how does he find the person in the room holding the money -- every time? Rumors are common that he uses a hidden spotter, whispering into a mike hidden in his ear. When Troy tells him this, Buck invites two doctors onstage to peer into his ears, then turns his back to the room and covers his head with a black cloth. Does he still find the money? If he does, it can't because of psychic powers, can it? I firmly believe such illusions are never the result of psychic powers, but I am fascinated by them, anyway. The wisdom of this film, directed and written by Sean McGinly, is to never say. Troy practically lives with the man and doesn't have a clue. He's asked if Buck is gay, and he replies truthfully, "I don't know. I've never seen him with anybody." Colin Hanks is affecting as a man young enough and naive enough to be fascinated by whatever it is Buck represents. Emily Blunt is sweetly kind to him. No one else could have played Buck better than Malkovich. I love this guy. I've read one review of this film that complains we never meet the real Buck Howard. Of course we don't. There may be no real Buck Howard. But the film is funny and perceptive in the way it shows the humiliations for a man with Buck's tender vanity: The ladies singing onstage. The many who have no idea who he is. Being bumped off the news by Jerry Springer. Being bumped off Jay Leno for Tom Arnold. Distilled water.
Incidentally: McGinly's screenplay is based on his observations as road manager for the Amazing Kreskin, to whom the film is dedicated. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Gomorrah - Rated R - 135 minutes
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What the hell is left to say about the Mafia after The Godfather Goodfellas, and The Sopranos? You'd be surprised. Gomorrah,, arriving in the U.S. after stirring up a shit storm in Italy, is out to rip the mob a new one. Based on a bestseller by journalist Roberto Saviano, who has required police protection 24/7 since the book came out in 2006, Gomorrah examines not the biblical sin city of Gomorrah and its evil twin, Sodom, but modern Naples under the rule of the Camorra crime syndicate. What does this have to do with little old us sitting pretty in the U.S. of A? Plenty. The Camorra's tentacles are spreading on a global scale into drugs, weapons, banking, fashion, you name it. The organization isn't even above going legal to spruce up its image, having poured cash into the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. So fasten your seat belts for Gomorrah, just snubbed in the wussy Oscar race for Best Foreign Film (so you know it's dynamite). Director Matteo Garrone, who collaborated on the script with Saviano and others, takes a docudrama approach that is shockingly immediate. From the opening shootout in a tanning salon to a closing image of toxic waste that literally and figuratively spreads cancer, Gomorrah hits you like a punch in the gut. The five interlocking stories introduce us to Camorra bigwig Franco (the superb Toni Servillo) dealing in sanitation in ways that would shame Tony Soprano; tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) counterfeiting haute couture in sweatshops; bagman Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) spreading the wealth; and Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), a 13-year-old who gets sucked into the crime swamp before he even knows it will drown him. Two teens, Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor), have delved so deeply into the ethos of Scarface, starring Al Pacino and his leetle friend, that they think they're above Camorra law. The sequence where the boys steal mob guns, strip to their skivvies and fire at will on a beach is blood-freezing. But so is all of Gomorrah. It's brilliant filmmaking, a wake-up call that means to shake you, and does. Review by PETER TRAVERS, rollingstone.com
The Soloist - Rated PG-13 - 117 minutes - Scope
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Some of the lost souls in “The Soloist,” a big studio movie about a one-man rescue mission, look as thin as the crack pipes clamped between their lips. These are a few of the ghosts who haunt Los Angeles, that Mecca of Fabulousness where you can go for weeks (and invariably by car) without smelling the reek of other people’s desperation. That helps explain why Hollywood types tend not to set their camera sights on homeless men, women and children, unless they’re good for a little uplift (as in the Will Smith vehicle “The Pursuit of Happyness”). Homeless people are generally, pardon the pun, bummers —they also can’t afford tickets. Based on a book by the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, “The Soloist” recounts what happened when one of the city’s more privileged denizens (Robert Downey Jr. as the newsman) met one of its least fortunate (Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers). A Juilliard dropout, Mr. Ayers ended up on the streets, where he pushed a shopping cart filled with trash and bedded down next to rats. This isn’t a milieu in which you might expect to find the British director Joe Wright, last seen exploring class and other catastrophes in “Atonement.” Yet he fits fine with “The Soloist,” perhaps because he brings an outsider’s perspective to the material or is just accustomed to navigating the divide between the haves and have-nots. Polished to a high gleam by Mr. Wright and written by Susannah Grant (whose credits include “In Her Shoes”), the film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving. It works hard to make you feel good, as is to be expected, even as it maintains a strong sense of moral indignation that comes close to an assertion of real politics. Outrage would be too much for a mainstream entertainment like this one to manage. Like its muckraking journalist guide, it exploits its subjects for its own purposes. But its commitment to the material feels honest, nowhere more so than in Mr. Downey’s darkly shaded, nuanced performance, one that deepens this film with its insistence on the fundamental mysteries of human character. It’s no surprise when Lopez, taking a break from the newsroom roar, stops to listen to a disheveled man playing a two-stringed violin. In journalistic fashion, wonderment morphs into curiosity and then dogged pursuit as he quickly grasps that he’s discovered the makings of a great story. Although Lopez cooks up a column soon after they meet, the full account of how Ayers went from a happy childhood in Cleveland to bright promise in New York and then to his Los Angeles hell emerges through seamlessly interspersed, economical flashbacks. Lightly tinted, as is often customary in movies that return to the past (it’s as if happy childhoods were bathed in honey), the flashbacks are pieces of a puzzle that Lopez becomes increasingly hesitant to solve. It is, he discovers, difficult to deal with people in pain. Although they meet cute in the shadow of a looming statue of Beethoven (dedicated to the founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra), the journalist and his story don’t settle into predictability, largely because Ayers is intrinsically volatile. Given to verbose bursts and abrupt silences, he doesn’t so much talk to Lopez (he doesn’t always make eye contact either) as just talk and talk, the words pouring out like water until something (rage? fear? chemistry?) stops the flow. Mr. Foxx often seems uncomfortable in his role, wavering between pathos and something harder and truer, but his scatlike delivery of some of Ayers’s twisting ropes of words can be mesmerizing. In Los Angeles homeless people are more likely to get sunburns than die freezing in the streets. Because of the city’s sprawl and dependence on automobiles, they also tend to be less visible than they are in more geographically compressed urban areas like Manhattan. In 2005, the year Mr. Lopez wrote his first column about Mr. Ayers, an estimated 8,000 to 11,000 were living in a 50-block skid row downtown, not far from the Los Angeles Times building, City Hall and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Frank Gehry-designed music center that sits on a hill like an enormous silvery flower far from the reach of the Nathaniel Ayerses of this world. Over the course of “The Soloist,” Lopez helps Ayers reconnect with his music and, in tentative fashion, a more dignified way of living in the world. There are triumphs and setbacks, but these arrive fairly quietly, with none of the 101 weeping strings that often come with stories as emotionally fraught as this one (though Beethoven does shake the speakers). Helping someone off the streets is no small thing, but the story of one man is just that: the story of a single individual, a point that Mr. Wright underscores repeatedly. Again and again the film plunges into the streets, diving into a brackish humanity only to then drift amid the lost and forgotten. In the restrained voice-over that wends through the film, Lopez gives witness to what he has seen. “The Soloist” wouldn’t work half as well without Mr. Downey’s astringent, bristly take on a man whose best intentions eventually collide with difficult truths. The actor is a wonder, but he has solid support from Catherine Keener as Lopez’s former wife and editor and Nelsan Ellis as a counselor working in the skid row trenches. Both characters exist mostly to push back at Lopez: they wag an occasional finger and dole out tough love and advice. Mr. Wright might be tempted to indulge in lofty symbolism (there are some unfortunately high-flying pigeons), but these three actors, along with the homeless people who worked as extras, help keep him tethered closer to the ground. It’s amazing what you can see when you get out of your car and walk: other people, for starters. Review by Manohla Dargis, movies.nytimes.com
Throw Down Your Heart - Rated G - 97 minutes - DVD
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The gentle, upbeat documentary “Throw Down Your Heart” chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument, which he sheepishly admits is “associated with a white Southern stereotype.” At every stop on a journey that takes him from Uganda to Tanzania to Gambia and finally to Mali, Mr. Fleck plays and records with gifted local musicians. Early in the film, a Ugandan villager insists that the common perception of Africa as a continent ravaged by war and disease is “just a very small bit of what Africa is,” and “Throw Down Your Heart” sets out to prove him right. While traveling, Mr. Fleck encounters reminders of the slave trade. At a seaside port in what used to be German East Africa, he is told that an enslaved African, upon seeing the sea and the ship, understood that there would be no returning and was advised to “throw down your heart.” Mr. Fleck, a gentle, curious man of few words and formidable talents, is a benign presence. In a Ugandan village his banjo accompanies several local musicians playing a 12-foot xylophone. In Tanzania he collaborates with Anania Ngoliga, a master of the African thumb piano, an instrument consisting of metal tines of varying length attached to a wooden board. It is in Gambia that Mr. Fleck encounters the akonting, a primitive three-string forerunner of the banjo whose preservation is the mission of a troupe known as the Jatta Family. In Mali he meets and plays with the great guitarist Djelimady Tounkara and the diva Oumou Sangare, a national idol and phenomenally gifted composer and singer. When Ms. Sangare sings a heartbreaking lament of “a worried songbird” searching for her father, you don’t need to know the language to be gripped by the force of her cry.
Fighting - Rated PG-13 - 91 minutes - Flat
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I like the way the personalities are allowed to upstage the plot in "Fighting," a routine three-act fight story that creates uncommonly interesting characters. Set in the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, involving a naive kid from Alabama and a mild-mannered hustler from Chicago, it takes place in a secret world of street fighting for high cash stakes. Do rich guys really bet hundreds of thousands on a closed-door, bare-knuckle brawl? I dunno, but it's cheaper than filming a prizefight arena.
Channing Tatum is Shawn, whose dad was a wrestling coach near Birmingham. Terrence Howard plays Harvey, who everybody seems to know. Shawn is a hot-tempered kid not doing very well at selling shoddy merchandise on the sidewalks. Howard is soft-spoken, with a gentle voice and an almost passive personal style, even though he works as an illegal fight promoter. He sees Shawn in a fight, recruits him and lines up fights with $5,000, $10,000 and finally $100,000 purses.
He does this with stunning speed, even though at the first fight no one has ever seen Shawn before. The movie offers that and other problems of plausibility and logic, but I don't care about them because director Dito Montiel doesn't. Possibly hired to make a genre film, he provides the outline and requirements, and then focuses on his characters.Terrence Howard's Harvey is the most intriguing: He's too laid back to be in the profession, so philosophical that he even faces what seems to be his own inevitable murder with calm resignation. He knows his world, is known in it, moves through it, yet seems aloof from it.
Tatum, convincing as a former school athlete (which he was) quickly agrees to the fights, even against terrifying opponents. But "Fighting" invests much more feeling in his tentative relationship with Zulay (Zulay Henao), a single mom who works as a waitress in a private club where the private fight world hangs out. He approaches her like a well-raised Southern boy would, politely, respectfully.
This arouses greater interest because of the screen presence of Zulay Henao, who sidesteps countless hazards suggested by her character and makes her sweet, sensuous and perceptive. And then look at Altagracia Guzman as Alba, playing Zulay's elder relative (grandmother?), who was a great audience favorite as she guarded her beloved from the threat of a male predator. The way her talent is employed in the film is an ideal use of a supporting actress.
Listen also to the dialogue by Robert Munic and Montiel, which is far above formula boilerplate and creates the illusion that the characters might actually be saying it in the moment. An extended flirtation between Zulay and Shawn isn't hurried through for a bedroom payoff, but grows sweeter and more tender as it continues. This scene illustrates my theory that it is more exciting to wonder if you are about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.
"Fighting" is not a cinematic breakthrough. But it is much more involving than I thought it would be. The ads foreground the action, no doubt because that's what sells. The film transcends the worldview that produced the ad campaign and gives audiences a well-crafted, touching experience. Sometimes you can feel it when an audience is a little surprised by how deeply they've become involved. Roger Ebert Chicago Sun Times
Everlasting Moments - NR - 131 minutes - Flat
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Rarely is there a film that evokes our sympathy more deeply than "Everlasting Moments." It is a great story of love and hope, told tenderly and without any great striving for effect. It begins in Sweden in 1911, and involves a woman, her daughter, her husband, a camera and the kindness of a stranger. It has been made by Jan Troell, a filmmaker whose care for these characters is instinctive.
The woman is named Maria Larsson. She lives with her husband Sigfrid in Malmo, a port city at the southern tip of Sweden. They eventually have seven children. "Sigge" is a laborer on the docks, who takes the pledge time and again at the Temperance Society but falls back into alcoholism. He is a loving and jovial man when sober, but violent when he is drunk, and the children await his homecomings with apprehension.
The movie is not really about Sigge. It is about Maria, who is a strong woman, resilient, complex. She raises the children, works as a house cleaner, copes with the family's poverty. Once, when newly married, she won a camera in a lottery. Now she finds it and takes it to a photo shop to pawn it and buy food. There she meets Sebastian Pedersen, and he finds an undeveloped plate still in the camera. He develops it and something about the photograph or Maria causes her to say he will buy the camera, but she must hold it for him and continue to take pictures.
Maria is not sophisticated and may have little education, but she is a deep and creative woman and an instinctively gifted photographer. She has no theory, but her choices of subjects and compositions are inspired. And perhaps Mr. Pedersen inspires her, too. He is much older, and always polite and proper with her, but over a time it becomes clear that they have fallen in love.
No, the film is not about how she leaves her drunken husband and becomes a famous photographer. It is about how her inner life is transformed by discovering that she has an artistic talent. She continues to be committed to Sigge by a bond deeper than marriage or obligation. But she tentatively takes steps toward personal independence that were rare in that time. When Sigge goes to fight in the war, she supports the family by taking marriage photos.
Maria Heiskanen, who plays Maria, makes her a shy woman who is almost frightened to take a larger view of herself. She is strong when she needs to be, but unaccustomed to men like Mr. Pedersen, who treat her as something more than she conceives herself. One of the film's mysteries is how clearly she defines her marriage to Sigge, which endures, even though she fully feels the possibilities which Sebastian never quite offers. Mikael Persbrandt makes Sigge not a bad man but powerless over alcohol. His labor is back-breaking. And look at the tact of Sebastian (Jesper Christensen), who loves Maria from the moment he sees her, but wants to protect her from the problems that he could bring. The movie is intensely observant about these gradations of love.
The film reflects the great self-assurance by Jan Troell, whose work includes such masterpieces as "," "The New Land" and "Hamsun." All of his films are about lives striving toward greater fullness. He respects work, values and feelings. He stands apart from the frantic hunger for fashionable success. After I saw this film, I looked through a few early reviews and found critics almost startled by its humanism. Here is Todd McCarthy of Variety: "Beholding Troell's exquisite images is like having your eyes washed, the better to behold moving pictures of uncorrupted purity and clarity."
The story comes from the heart. Troell, who showed "Everlasting Moments" at Telluride 2008, adapted it from a novel by his wife Agneta, who based it on one of her own family members, Maria Larsson. Maria lived this life and took some of the photographs we see. The film is narrated by her daughter, Maja Larsson (Callin Ohrvall), and in my imagination I hear Maja telling the story to Agneta, for Jan was born in Malmo, and the dates work out that they might both have well known her. And always thought hers was a story worth telling.
The Brothers Bloom - Rated PG-13 - 114 minutes - Scope
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"The Brothers Bloom" is a magic trick of a movie, done close-up by a magician who has not only shown that there is nothing up his sleeves, but who is in fact only wearing a vest so as to make the whole question moot. It brazenly informs the audience how it will end just as it's getting started, and happily declares that everything that’s to follow will be slight-of-hand and trickery, but manages to amuse and delight for all that. Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody) are con artists, and have been for a quarter-century, when they were (respectively) thirteen and ten; a delightful prelude with Max Records and Zachary Gordon playing the brothers as children shows Stephen discovering his skill at planning an intricate con using Bloom as the leading man. Now, though, Bloom is wondering whether he has been playing parts so long as to no longer know who he is, and quits. Stephen tracks him down and asks him to help scam one more mark: Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a pretty heiress from New Jersey who, due to her unusual upbringing, is something of a hermit in her castle-like mansion. As usual, their assistant Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi) is along to assist with logistics; they also run into a couple other con artists, a Belgian calling himself The Curator (Robbie Coltrane) and their one-time mentor, Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell). The script for The Brothers Bloom is self-referential enough to not just wink at the audience, but to wink at itself winking at the audience. Early on, it sets up a clever in-joke that is likely to sail right past much of the audience, except that writer/director Rian Johnson has a character pick up on it and blurt it out, and then ends the scene on a perfectly in-character joke rather than by patting himself on the back about how clever it is. The movie proper starts by showing us the end of one of Stephen's novelistic plots, not just foreshadowing how the next one will play out but reminding us how reference in movies and literature plays on the audience's expectations. The opening scene is narrated by famed con artistry expert/magician Ricky Jay, a fitting choice for that sort of fairy tale. All of the characters are constantly fiddling with playing cards, whether it be practicing card tricks or playing a variation of solitaire where all the cards are face-up. For all the cleverness, structure, and self-reference Johnson presents us with, the film is never anything close to dry. Everything is brightly-colored, taking place on beautiful sets and locations, and crisply edited: Sometimes, Johnson will zip through a montage at a speed that is right on the border of too quickly, barely giving the audience time to start laughing at a bit before building on it; other times, he'll linger on a shot long enough to call attention to what is happening in the background. Of course, when he does that, it's not really in the background, is it, since that's where our attention is being focused? There's something funny going on almost constantly, running the gamut from rapid-fire banter to silent comedy. The silent comedy is mostly supplied by Rinko Kikuchi, who is little-known in the west but has been in a whole bunch of fun Japanese films in the last few years. She somehow manages to catch the absolute perfect vibe for Bang Bang, cool and apparently detached at some points but playful (if not audibly giggly) at others. It's a brilliant comic performance, no matter who she is tasked with playing off. Most of the time, it's Mark Ruffalo, who is pretty much brilliant here. Stephen is equal parts devil-may-care and hard-core planner, so quick-witted, manipulative, and aware of his own genius that we should, by rights, think he's a smarmy prick, but instead he's somehow charming. He manages to convince us with relatively few words of just how much Stephen loves his brother, even in scenes that superficially read as selfish. It's a great, standout performance which will probably get overlooked when awards and lists get made because it's so funny. You can probably say the same thing about Rachel Weisz, for that matter, although she gets a few more showily dramatic moments and plays a character who is more obviously strange. She's still a delight to watch, making Penelope outright burst from her shell. Weisz is great at physical comedy, and does a wonderful job of making us believe both that she doesn't have much experience with the outside world and that discovering it is the Greatest. Thing. Ever! She's the perfect match for an balance to Adrien Brody's Bloom, who is dour and jaded and, in his own way, is just as inexperienced with real life as Penelope. There's an upbeat score from Nathan Johnson, and I love the costuming (not enough people wear hats in this day and age). What makes the film a true delight is that even when it goes to darker places, it's often to show just how much the characters like one another. It's plain fun to watch Penelope and Bang Bang together, while Bloom genuinely seems like a perfect fit both with Stephen and Penelope. For all the tricks in the story, and as disreputable as these sorts of characters often are, the charm and good feeling is genuine. Review by by Jay Seaver, efilmcritic.com
Hunger - Rated R - 96 minutes - Scope
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It was a desperate business, and "Hunger" is a desperate film. It concerns the fierce battle between the Irish Republican Army and the British state, which in 1981 led to a hunger strike in which 10 IRA prisoners died. The first of them was Bobby Sands, whose agonizing death is seen with an implacable level gaze in the closing act of the film. If you do not hold a position on the Irish Republican cause, you will not find one here. "Hunger" is not about the rights and wrongs of the British in Northern Ireland, but about inhumane prison conditions, the steeled determination of IRA members like Bobby Sands, and a rock and a hard place. There is hardly a sentence in the film about Irish history or politics, and only two extended dialogue passages: one a long debate between Sands and a priest about the utility or futility of a hunger strike, the other a doctor's detailed description to Sands' parents about the effect of starvation on the human body. There is not a conventional plot to draw us from beginning to end. Instead, director Steve McQueen, an artist who employs merciless realism, strikes three major chords. The first involves the daily routine of a prison guard (Stuart Graham), who is emotionally wounded by his work. The second involves two other prisoners (Brian Milligan and Liam McMahon) who participate in the IRA prisoners' refusal to wear prison clothes or bathe. The third involves the hunger strike. This is clear: Neither side will back down. Twice we hear Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher describing the inmates of the Maze prison in Belfast not as political prisoners but criminals. The IRA considers itself political to the core. The ideology involved is not even mentioned in the extraordinary long dialogue scene, mostly in one shot, between Sands and a priest (Liam Cunningham) about whether a hunger strike will have the desired effect. The priest, worldly, a realist, on very civil terms with Sands, never once mentions suicide as a sin; he discusses it entirely in terms of its usefulness. Sands thinks starvation to death will have an impact. The priest observes that if it does, Sands will by then be dead. His willingness to die reflects the bone-deep beliefs of Irish Republicans; recall the Irish song lyric, "And always remember, the longer we live, the sooner we bloody well die." Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity. It is alarming to note how much weight the actor Michael Fassbender lost; he went from 170 to 132 pounds. His dreams or visions or memories toward the end, based on a story he told the priest, would have been more effective if handled much more briefly.
Did the hunger strike succeed? After the remorseless death toll climbed to 10, Thatcher at last relented, tacitly granting the prisoners political recognition, although she refused to say so out loud. She was called the Iron Lady for a reason. Today there is peace in Northern Ireland. The island nation is still divided. Bobby Sands is dead. The priest has his conclusions; the dead man has his, or would if he were alive. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
The Lemon Tree - NR - 106 minutes - Flat
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Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass), the proud, handsome 45-year-old Palestinian woman at the center of “Lemon Tree,” an allegory of Israeli-Palestinian strife, has the misfortune of living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Widowed for 10 years, with a son in the United States, Salma earns a meager living from a lemon grove on the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The grove has been in her family for 50 years. Her solitary life suddenly turns upside down when the Israeli defense minister, Israel Navon (Doron Tavory), moves into a fancy new house that abuts the grove. Overnight a watchtower is constructed, and security guards and soldiers begin patrolling the property. No sooner have Navon and his beautiful, cultured wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), moved into the new house than Salma receives an official letter informing her that the grove poses a security threat from terrorists hiding among the trees; as a military necessity they must be uprooted. The letter, which Salma has translated because she neither speaks nor writes Hebrew, loftily offers to compensate her for her loss while mentioning that because of recent legislation, there is no legal obligation to do so. She weeps at the news. Thus begins an escalating war of words and of wills. After Salma argues her case before a military tribunal and is rebuffed, she takes her campaign to the Israeli Supreme Court. She also refuses to accept a decree that the grove is off limits and, at the risk of being shot, occasionally climbs the fence put up around it to water the trees and gather lemons. Some of the trees are already beginning to die. As word of her campaign to keep the grove spreads, her case becomes a news media cause célèbre that threatens to embarrass Navon. “Lemon Tree,” directed by the Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, whose 2004 movie, “The Syrian Bride,” explored Israeli-Arab border tensions, is also a wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one. As such, its details are not to be taken too literally. The screenplay by Mr. Riklis and Suha Arraf, the Palestinian-Israeli woman who wrote “The Syrian Bride” with Mr. Riklis, finds a deep commonality between Salma and Mira. Victimized by patriarchal attitudes toward war and sex, both begin to break the rules. Mira, whose marriage to Navon has withered, strongly suspects that he is philandering and begins acting like a prisoner in her own home. Addressing the issue of the grove, Navon speaks the same evasive double talk that he does with Mira in discussing their marriage. When, out of frustration, she gives an interview expressing her sympathy with Salma, Navon is so infuriated that he pressures her to sign a paper taking back her words. Salma is even more defiant. She develops an increasingly intense relationship with Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman), the handsome, divorced 34-year-old Palestinian lawyer who pleads her cause. Their bond is public enough to incur the wrath of a boorish neighbor, Abu Camal (Makram J. Khoury), who sternly admonishes Salma for desecrating the memory and honor of her husband, whose portrait still hangs on the wall. Sexually the film is very circumspect. As Mira and Salma study each other through the fence separating their properties, the film implies that the combined strength of two principled women is still no match for the powers that be. Ms. Abbass’s Salma is particularly impressive. With this movie and “The Visitor,” for which Richard Jenkins received an Oscar nomination, she has emerged as a formidable international presence with the magnetism of a Middle Eastern Lena Olin. Although “Lemon Tree” doesn’t overtly take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it portrays the Israelis, who wield more military power, as abusive and arrogant in the way that any country with superior weapons and armies inevitably appears. The security guards on Navon’s property behave like strutting goons — only too eager to turn their guns on the first thing that moves — or clowns, like the watchtower guard nicknamed Quickie, who dozes off while on duty. For as long as these war games go on, this movie suggests, the strife will continue.(In Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English w/ subtitles) Review by Stephen Holden, nytimes.com
Harvard Beats Yale 29/29 - NR - 104 minutes - DVD
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For most of the world, I suspect, the year 1968 signifies upheaval, revolution, power to the people, Vietnam and My Lai, Paris in flames, Martin and Bobby, Nixon versus Humphrey. Another great rivalry played out that year in the form of a college football game. And while it seems absurd to include such a picayune event in the annals, the filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29,” preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament. True gridiron believers doubtless know every unlikely, heart-skipping minute of this showdown. (The schools, like some others, honor their football rivalry with vainglorious capitalization, calling each matchup The Game.) On Nov. 23, 1968, the undefeated Yale team and its two glittering stars — the quarterback Brian Dowling and the running back Calvin Hill — went helmet to helmet against its longtime rival, Harvard, also undefeated. Mr. Dowling, a legendary figure whom grown men still call god (and the inspiration for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury character B. D.), had not lost a game he started since the sixth grade, a record that well into the fourth quarter, with Yale leading by 16 points, seemed safe. Everything changed in the final 42 seconds as all the forces of the universe, or so it seemed, shifted and one player after another either rose to the occasion or stumbled with agonizing frailty. Gods became men as the ball was lost and found and one improbable pass after another was completed. In front of the increasingly raucous packed stadium, each play became an epic battle in miniature with every second stretching into an eternity. As in film, time in football doesn’t tick, it races and oozes, a fact that Mr. Rafferty, working as his own editor and using the simplest visual material — talking-head interviews and game footage — exploits for a narrative that pulses with the artful, exciting beats of a thriller. What’s most surprising about this consistently surprising movie is how forcefully those beats resonate, even though you know how the story ends from the start. (Take another look at the coyly, cleverly enigmatic title, borrowed from the famous headline in The Harvard Crimson.) One reason for the excitement is the game, of course, which remains a nail-biter despite the visual quality of the footage, which is so unadorned and so humble — and almost entirely in long shot — it looks like a dispatch from a foreign land. And in some ways it was: Football fans still wore raccoon coats to games and the women in the stands cheering for Yale could not attend the college. The same month, Yale announced it was (finally) opening that door. This history helps explain why there are no women here, at least in close-up. “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is very much about men, triumphant, regretful, defiant, sentimental, touchingly vulnerable men who are made all the more poignant with each image of them as young players. For some, the game was and remains the greatest moment of their lives — even better than sex, one volunteers, prompting Mr. Rafferty to ask off-camera if the man had then been a virgin (no). Mr. Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, films his subjects (Tommy Lee Jones, a Harvard lineman, included) with a lack of fuss in plain kitchens and cluttered offices. He lets them roam around their memories and, for a time, gives them back sweet youth. Review by Manohla Dargis, nytimes.com
Food, Inc. - Rated PG - 93 minutes - Flat
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The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That's true even if you're eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers. The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They're grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They're fattened so fast they can't stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying. All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor's fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields. Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy. The family farm is largely a thing of the past. When farmland comes on the market, corporations outbid local buyers. Your best hope of finding real food grown by real farmers is at a local farmers' market. It's not entirely a matter of "organic" produce, although usually it is. It's a matter of food grown nearby, within the last week. Remember how years ago you didn't hear much about E. coli? Now it seems to be in the news once a month. People are even getting E. coli poisoning from spinach and lettuce, for heaven's sake. Why are Americans getting fatter? A lot of it has to do with corn syrup, which is the predominant sweetener. When New Coke failed and Coke Classic returned, it wasn't to the classic recipe; Coke replaced sugar with corn sweeteners. Cattle have been trained to eat corn instead of grass, their natural food. The Marlboro Cowboys should be riding through cornfields. Corn, in fact, is an ingredient in 80 percent of supermarket products, including batteries and Splenda. Processing concentrates it. You couldn't eat enough corn kernels in a day to equal the number of calories in a bag of corn chips. Corn syrup can be addictive. And then there's fat and salt. A fast-food meal is a heart attack in a paper bag. Poor families can't afford to buy real food to compete with the cost of $1 burgers and $1.98 "meals." If this offends you, try to do something about it. The Texas beef growers sued Oprah. She won in court because she had the money to fight teams of corporate lawyers. You don't.
Consider Carole Morrison, who refused to seal her chicken houses off from the daylight, and opened them to the makers of this documentary. Morrison's chickens are not jammed into cages, but we see chickens that are unable to stand up. A giant chicken processor canceled her contract and refused to do any more business with her. She was getting sick of how she treated chickens, anyway. Good food is not a cause limited to actresses on talk shows. Average people are getting concerned. Amazingly, Wal-Mart signed up with the eco-conscious Stonyfield Farms, due to consumer demand. When you hear commentators complaining about how the "government is paying farmers to not grow food," understand that "farmers" are corporations, and that the government is buying their surpluses to undercut local farmers around the world. The farmers who grew Bermuda onions are just about out of business because of the dumping of American onions. "Socialized agriculture" benefits megacorporations, which are committed to the goals of most corporations: maximize profits and executive salaries. This review doesn't read one thing like a movie review. But most of the stuff I discuss in it, I learned from the new documentary "Food, Inc.," directed by Robert Kenner and based on the recent book An Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I figured it wasn't important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what "Food, Inc." did to me. It's times like these I'm halfway grateful that after surgery I can't eat regular food anymore and have to live on a liquid diet out of a can. Of course, it contains soy and corn products, too, but in a healthy form. They say your total cholesterol level shouldn't exceed your age plus 100. Mine is way lower than that. And I don't have to tip. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Away We Go - Rated R - 97 minutes - Scope
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Burt and Verona are two characters rarely seen in the movies: thirtysomething, educated, healthy, self-employed, gentle, thoughtful, whimsical, not neurotic and really truly in love. Their great concern is finding the best place and way to raise their child, who is a bun still in the oven. For every character like this I’ve seen in the last 12 months, I’ve seen 20, maybe 30, mass murderers. Sam Mendes’ “Away We Go” is a film for nice people to see. Nice people also go to “Terminator Salvation,” but it doesn’t make them any nicer. “Away We Go” opened last week in New York and Los Angeles, and now rolls out after lukewarm reviews accusing Verona and Burt of being smug, superior and condescending. These are not sins if you have something to be smug about and much reason to condescend. Are the supporting characters caricatures or simply a cross-section of the kinds of grotesques we usually meet in movies? I use the term grotesque as Sherwood Anderson does in Winesburg, Ohio: a person who has one characteristic exaggerated beyond all scale with the others. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) live not far from his parents, in an underheated, shabby home with a cardboard-covered window. “We don’t live like grown-ups,” Verona observes. It’s not that they can’t afford a better home, as much that they are stalled in an impoverished student lifestyle. Now that they’re about to become parents, they can’t keep adult life on hold. “Away We Go” is about an unplanned odyssey they take around North America to visit friends and family, and essentially do some comparison shopping among lifestyles. Her parents are dead, so they begin with his: Gloria (Catherine O’Hara) and Jerry (Jeff Daniels). The parents truly are self-absorbed, and have no wish to wait around to welcome their first grandchild. They’re moving to Antwerp. Verona is of mixed race, and Gloria asks her conversationally, “Will the baby be black?” Is this insensitive? Why? Parents on both sides of an interracial couple would naturally wonder, and the film’s ability to ask the question is not racist, but matter of fact in a America slowly growing tolerant. In moments like that, the married screenwriters, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (both novelists and magazine publishers), reflect a society in which race is no longer the primary defining characteristic. After the parents vote for Belgium, Burt and Verona head for Phoenix and a visit with her onetime boss Lily (Allison Janney) and her husband Lowell (Jim Gaffigan). Lily is a monster, a daytime alcoholic whose speech is grossly offensive, and her husband and children in shock. They flee to Madison, where Burt’s childhood friend Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has changed her name to “LN” and become one of those rigid campus feminists who have banned human nature from their rule book. Then it’s off to Montreal for friends from college, Tom and Munch (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey), who are unhappily convinced they’re happy. And next down to Miami and Burt’s brother, whose wife has abandoned her family. There’s not a single example of healthy parenting in the lot of them. The almost perfect relationship of the unmarried Verona and Burt seems to survive inside a bubble of their own devising, and since they can blow that bubble anywhere, they of course find the perfect home for it, in a scene of uncommon sunniness. They have been described as implausibly ideal, but you know what? So are their authors, Eggers and Vida. They are thirtysomethings. With two children. Novelists and essayists. He publishes McSweeney’s, she edits the Believer. They are playful but also socially committed. Consider his wonderful project “826 Valencia,” a nonprofit storefront operation in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Boston and Ann Arbor, Mich. It runs free tutoring and writing workshops for young people from ages 6 to 18. The playful part can be seen in San Francisco, where the front of the ground floor is devoted to a Pirate Store. Yes. With eye patches, parrot’s perches, beard dye, peg legs, planks for walking — all your needs. I submit that Eggers and Vida are admirable people. If their characters find they are superior to many people, well, maybe they are. “This movie does not like you,” sniffs Tony Scott of the New York Times. Perhaps with good reason. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Sin Nombre - Rated R - 95 minutes - Scope
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El Norte. The North. It is a lodestar for some of those south of our border, who risk their lives to come here. "Sin Nombre," which means "without a name," is a devastating film about some of those who attempt the journey. It contains risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, but most of all, it sees what danger and heartbreak are involved. It is riveting from start to finish. The film weaves two stories. One involves Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a young woman from Honduras who joins her father and uncle in an odyssey through Guatemala and Mexico intended to take them to relatives in New Jersey. The other involves Willy, nicknamed Casper (Edgar Flores), a young gang member from southern Mexico, who joins with his leader and a 12-year-old gang recruit to rob those riding north on the tops of freight cars. Their paths cross. This is an extraordinary debut film by Cary Fukunaga, only 31, who shows a mastery of image and story. He knows the material. He spent time riding on the tops of northward trains; hundreds of hopeful immigrants materialize at a siding and scramble onboard, and the railroad apparently makes little attempt to stop them. He is also convincing about the inner workings of the terrifying real-life gang named Mara Salvatrucha. Before turning to the story, I want to say something about the look and feel of the film. It was photographed by Adriano Goldman, who used, not hi-def video as you might suspect, but 35mm film, which has a special richness. Fukunaga's direction expresses a desire that seems growing in many young directors, to return to classical composition and editing. Those norms establish a strong foundation for storytelling; there's no queasy-cam for Fukunaga. Ramin Bahrani, director of "Goodbye Solo," is another member of the same generation whose shots call attention to their subject, not themselves. The story of Sayra, her father and her uncle is straightforward: They are driven to improve their lives, think they have a safe haven in New Jersey and want to go there. Some elements of their journey reminded me of Gregory Nava's great indie epic "El Norte" (1983). The journey in that film was brutal; in this one, it is forged in hell. That hell is introduced by Fukunaga in the club rooms of the gang, whose members are fiercely tattooed, none more than Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), the leader, whose face is covered like a war mask. Casper is a member of the gang, more or less by force; he brings 12-year-old Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) to a meeting, and the kid is entranced by the macho BS. The three board one of the northbound trains to rob the riders, and that's when Casper meets Sayra and their fates are sealed. Smiley, so young, with a winning smile, is perhaps the most frightening character, because he demonstrates how powerful an effect, even hypnotic, gang culture can have on unshielded kids. In his eyes, Lil' Mago looms as a god, the gang provides peer status and any values Smiley might have had evaporate. The initiation process includes being savagely beaten and kicked by gang members, and then proving himself by killing someone. Smiley is ready and willing. There are shots here of great beauty. As the countryside rolls past, and the riders sit in the sun and protect their small supplies of food and water, there is sometimes the rhythm of weary camaraderie. I was reminded of Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory." Kids along the tracks are happy to see the riders getting away with something, and at one place, they throw them oranges. At stations, the riders jump off and detour around the guards and then board the train again as it leaves town."Sin Nombre" is a remarkable film, showing the incredible hardships people will endure in order to reach El Norte. Yes, the issue of illegal immigration is a difficult one. When we encounter an undocumented alien, we should not be too quick with our easy assumptions. That person may have put his life on the line for weeks or months to come here, searching for what we so easily describe as the American dream. What inspired Fukunaga, an American, to make this film, I learned, was a 2003 story about 80 illegals found locked in a truck and abandoned in Texas. Nineteen died.
"Sin Nombre" won the awards for best direction and cinematography at Sundance 2009. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Sugar - Rated R - 95 minutes - Scope
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"Sugar" approaches with tender care the story of a kid from the Dominican Republic who has a strong pitching arm and a good heart. Miguel Santos, known as "Sugar" because of his sweet personality, is recruited from the fields of dreams in his homeland by Major League baseball, and assigned to an Iowa farm club that is very, very far from home. I thought I could guess the story. But I couldn't. There isn't a single scene in this film where it really matters which side wins a game, and it doesn't end with a no-hitter. It looks with care at Sugar, and there are a thousand Sugars for every Sammy Sosa. Probably more. Baseball players have become an important export for the Dominican Republic, and poor families like Miguel's dream of the day when sons will be sending home paychecks. A minor league salary represents wealth. The film is knowledgeable about how the system works. American teams maintain elaborate Dominican training facilities, send talent scouts to local leagues and keep recruits under close watch: Room and board is provided, there are security guards to enforce discipline, the kids get a few days off once in a while. This is heaven for them. For years, their dreams have been filled with visions of big-time baseball. "Sugar" isn't filled with melodramatic developments and a hard landing on U.S. soil. Baseball seems, in fact, a friendly if realistic destination, an income where there was none before. If very few players ever make it into a Major League starting lineup, well, they know that going in. What's special about the film -- and this is a very special film -- is how closely it observes the emotional uncertainties of a stranger in a strange land, not speaking the language, not knowing the customs, beset with homesickness and the dread of disappointing his family. Algenis Perez Soto, a young baseball player in his acting debut, embodies Sugar with a natural sincerity. The movie regards him with sympathy. Sugar isn't "torn with conflict," as movie ads like to say, but weighed with worry. He finds himself boarding in the friendly Iowa farm home of Helen and Earl Higgins (Ann Whitney and Richard Bull), who have taken in a generation of new players for the local farm club. They know their baseball. ("You've been dropping your arm," Helen tells him, and Sugar doesn't disagree.) There is also the presence of their granddaughter Anne (Ellary Porterfield), who sends out mixed messages; she's obviously attracted to him and invites him to meet her friends, evangelicals who would like to get him on board. On the team, he bonds with Jorge (Rayniel Rufino), a more seasoned player from the Dominican Republic, and Brad Johnson (Andre Holland), who is the same color but from a different world; if baseball doesn't pan out, he'll go back for an advanced degree from Stanford. For Sugar, who mumbles he's had "a little" high school, everything depends on baseball panning out. On their regular phone calls, his mother fears she can sense something troubling in his voice. He finds the farm system is supportive, and he gets help from coaches who care, but there is always another player waiting behind him in line. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who wrote and directed "Sugar," are serious filmmakers who have no desire to make a "sports movie." They've obviously done their research on the Major League farm system and the men who pass through it; at some level, this entire tryout process is for the benefit of a fan in the grandstands with a wise-ass opinion about the "new kid." Remembering a day when Sammy Sosa was booed at Wrigley Field, I see it now in a wholly new light. The true subject of "Sugar" is the immigrant experience in America. Boden and Fleck are interested in newcomers to this country, doing what they can to make a living and succeed. Whether this happens for Sugar, or how it might happen, you will see for yourself. The filmmakers are too observant to settle for a quick, conventional payoff. For them this film is a chapter in the more interesting story of the lifetime Sugar has ahead of him. Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.
Note: The R rating is for relatively inconsequential reasons. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Art and Copy - NR - 90 minutes - DVD
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SCREENED AT INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL BOSTON 2009: If there's high art and low art, advertising must be considered the lowest of¬ them, with perhaps only grudging admission that any part of it can be considered art at all. Advertising is creative work, though, and for better or worse, a good ad probably has a much larger impact than a good piece of non-commercial artwork. Director Doug Pray's Art & Copy focuses on the good ads, whether you measure that by artistic merit or commercial success. Those looking for an examination of the rightness and wrongness of pervasive advertising as a phenomenon should look elsewhere; this is an overview of how the medium works combined with a look at some of its more noteworthy practitioners. A key example of both comes early, as we're told about Bill Bernbach, who changed the face of advertising by putting the art director and copywriter in the same room. Before this, ads were very text-heavy, a far cry form the punchy, slickly-designed ads of today. We get insight on some of the simpler, and most pervasive, advertising campaigns of recent years. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, who describe their job as "entertaining society using clients' products" talk about their "got milk?" campaign, pointing out how the much-imitated catchphrase was originally the punchline to a very elaborate commercial, while also breaking down how it evolved from the client's specific needs. Pray also talks to Dan Wieden, who came up with "Just Do It". His stories are less about how they built the campaign (although the inspiration for the phrase is amusing), and more about how it took on a life of its own. Some of the more intriguing segments, though, are as much about the individuals as process. George Lois, for instance, is always an entertaining interview at the very least. He's most notable for the brash advertising campaigns that introduced MTV and Tommy Hilfiger to the world, and his personality is a match for them, not yelling but gleefully swearing away or calling things stupid while everybody else is being very polite. Then there's Hal Riley, kind of standoffish and near retirement, whose work tends to have a nostalgic or sentimental component. His best-known work is probably the "Morning In America" ad he did for Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign.
Pray gives us plenty of examples, although the film does not become a Clio awards reel. He frames the film with a look at the way advertising affects the economy beyond just getting people to buy things, with a fourth-generation billboard rotater and an Ariane satellite launch. The interviews are generally very friendly, and though Pray's subjects are slanted toward the creative people with the ideal work environments, there is plenty of discussion, at least, of bad environments and bad practices to give the audience some perspective. There's also something a little unnerving about some later aspects of the film, where we see how the tail can sometimes wind up wagging the dog as these advertising firms can wind up with a large voice in setting a company's policy. Even with those ideas, the film may seem something like a puff piece, an ad for the advertising industry. I think the film comes just short of crossing that line - it doesn't try to sell us on advertising being a noble endeavor, but instead demonstrates that, whether we like the idea of advertising or not, it often come from creative people doing work worthy of study and understanding. It's also a somewhat intriguing look into the creative process - there are plenty of documentaries that do that, of course, but they tend to focus on art for art's sake. Here, even when the film's subjects talk of using advertising as a means of self-expression, there's always a clear purpose to it. By the end, I had come to maybe appreciate advertising a little more - not enough to stop using my DVR's Advance 30 Seconds button or growling in frustration when a magazine's table of contents doesn't appear until thirty pages in, granted, but enough to differentiate good from bad, and maybe get a handle on why some ads work (on me or in general) and others don't. After all, it's worth at least trying to understand something that pervades our lives so much. Review by Jay Seaver, efilmcritic.com
Whatever Works - Rated PG-13 - 92 minutes - Flat
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Woody Allen said in “Manhattan” that Groucho Marx was first on his list of reasons to keep on living. His new film, “Whatever Works,” opens with Groucho singing “Hello, I Must Be Going” from “Animal Crackers.” It serves as the movie’s theme song, summarizing in five words the world view of his hero, Boris Yellnikoff. Yellnikoff, played with perfect pitch by Larry David, is a nuclear physicist who was once almost nominated for a Nobel Prize, a statement so many of us could make. His field was quantum mechanics, where string theory can be described in the same five words. He’s retired now, divorced from a rich wife who was so perfect for him he couldn’t stand it. He lives in a walk-up in Chinatown and works part-time as a chess instructor to little “inchworms,” who he hits over their heads with the board. Mostly what he does is hang out at a table in a coffee shop and kvetch with old pals. These scenes seemed perfectly familiar to me because of my long honorary membership in a group centering around Dusty Cohl at the Coffee Mill in Toronto. Boris doesn’t talk with his friends, he lectures them. His speeches spring from the Jewish love of paradox; essentially, life is so fascinating, he can’t take it any longer. Midway in his remarkable opening monologue, David starts speaking directly to the camera. His friends think he’s crazy. He asks them if they can’t see the people out there — us. Allen developed as a standup comic, and the idea of an actual audience often hovers in his work, most literally in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), where a character climbs down from the screen and joins it. Boris gets up from the table and walks down the sidewalk, continuing to hector the camera about his own brilliance and the general stupidity that confronts him. It is too great a burden for him to exist in a world of such morons and cretins. He hates everyone and everything — in a theoretical way, as befits a physicist. Later that night, he is implored by a homeless waif to give her something to eat, tells her to be about her business, and then relents and invites her in. This is Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a fresh-faced innocent from the town in the South, who still believes in the world she conquered in beauty pageants. I’ve seen Wood in a lot of performances, but nothing prepared me for this one. She’s naivete on wheels, cheerful, optimistic, trusting, infectious. Reader, she wins the old man’s heart — and wants it! She proposes marriage, and not for cynical or needy reasons. She believes everything he says and is perhaps the first person he has ever met who subscribes fully to the theory of his greatness. This sets in rotation a wheel of characters who all discover for themselves that in life we must accept whatever works to make us happy. Boris and Melody accept each other. Then her parents separately find their way to New York in search of her, and they accept what they discover. They are Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), who is Melody made middle-aged and church-going, and John (Ed Begley Jr.), to whom the National Rifle Association ranks just a smidgin higher than the Supreme Court. They are appalled at this human wreckage their daughter has taken to her side. But ... whatever works. Both Melody and John are transformed by the free spirits of New York, as so many have been, although not, it must be noted, Boris Yellnikoff. The New Yorker and the Southerners have never met anyone remotely like one another, but the Southerners are open to new experiences. More that that I cannot explain. It might be complained that everything works out for everyone a little too neatly. So it does, because this is not a realistic story but a Moral Tale, like one of Eric Rohmer’s. Allen seeks not psychological insight but the demonstration of how lives can be redeemed. To do this, he uses Clarkson’s innate exuberance and Begley’s congenital probity to get them to where they’re going. Once they are free to do so, Marietta indulges her feelings and John reasons it out. Larry David is the mind of the enterprise, and Evan Rachel Wood is the heart. David is a verbal virtuoso, playing the “Woody Allen role” but with his personal shtick. He would be lonely if he couldn’t confide in his invisible listeners. His opening monologue would be remarkable from any actor, let alone one without training or stage experience. Wood prevents the plot from descending into logic and reason with her character’s blind faith that everything is for the better. “Whatever Works” charts a journey for Allen, one from the words of Groucho to the wisdom of Pascal, who informs us, as Allen once reminded us, that the heart has its reasons. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
The Hurt Locker - Rated R - 131 minutes - Flat
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“The Hurt Locker,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a script by Mark Boal, is the best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq. This may sound like faint praise and also like a commercial death sentence, since movies about that war have not exactly galvanized audiences or risen to the level of art. The squad of well-meaning topical dramas that trudged across the screens in the fall of 2007 were at once hysterical and noncommittal, registering an anxious, high-minded ambivalence that was neither illuminating nor especially entertaining. And the public, perhaps sufficiently enervated and confused by reality, was not eager to see it recreated on screen. So let me put it another way, at the risk of a certain cognitive dissonance. If “The Hurt Locker” is not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car. The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. Ms. Bigelow, whose body of work (including “Point Break,” “Blue Steel,” “Strange Days” and “K-19: The Widowmaker”) has been uneven but never uninteresting, has an almost uncanny understanding of the circuitry that connects eyes, ears, nerves and brain. She is one of the few directors for whom action-movie-making and the cinema of ideas are synonymous. You may emerge from “The Hurt Locker” shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking. Not necessarily about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war, mind you. The filmmakers’ insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well. “The Hurt Locker,” which takes place in 2004 (it was filmed mostly in Jordan), depicts men who risk their lives every day on the streets of Baghdad and in the desert beyond, and who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there. The filmmakers, perhaps out of loyalty to their characters, are similarly reticent. But within those limits, “The Hurt Locker” is a remarkable accomplishment. Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces. Her focus is on Delta Company, an Army unit whose job is to detect and defuse — or carefully detonate, if all else fails — the I.E.D.’s that seem to pop up everywhere, like mushrooms in the rain. Some of the devices are brutishly simple, others fiendishly elaborate, but each one lays the groundwork for a cruel and revealing test of character. And much as Ms. Bigelow excels at setting up and cutting together these live-wire moments of danger, they are not feats of technique-for-its-own-sake as much as highly concentrated, intimate human dramas. The engagements between Delta Company and its shadowy adversaries contain an element of theater. The bomb-makers mingle with Iraqi bystanders to observe and assess their work, standing on balconies and at windows watching impassively as the Americans shout, sweat and gesticulate, actors in a show whose script they are fighting to control. Not that the soldiers are all on the same page. “The Hurt Locker” focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a bundle of nerves and confused impulses, eager to please, ashamed of his own fear and almost dismayingly vulnerable. Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a careful, uncomplaining professional who sticks to protocols and procedures in the hope that his prudence will get him home alive, away from an assignment he has come to loathe. The wild card is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who joins Delta after its leader is killed and who approaches his work more like a jazz musician or an abstract expressionist painter than like a sober technician. A smoker and a heavy metal fan with an irreverent, profane sense of humor and a relaxed sense of military discipline, he approaches each new bomb or skirmish not with dread but with a kind of inspired, improvisational zeal. As he gropes for the wires that will ignite a massive car bomb or traces a spider-weblike cluster of shells buried under a street, he looks like a man having the time of his life. Not that he is frivolous, though to Sanborn he seems insanely reckless. Rather, to quote a Robert Frost poem, James is a man whose work is play for mortal stakes. And Mr. Renner’s performance — feverish, witty, headlong and precise — is as thrilling as anything else in the movie. In each scene a different facet of James’s personality emerges. He can be callous, even mean at times, but there is a fundamental tenderness to him as well, manifest in his affection for an Iraqi boy who sells pirated DVDs and his patient solicitude when Eldridge, under fire and surrounded by dead bodies, has an understandable bout of panic. There is more friction between James and Sanborn: competition, incomprehension, but also a brand of masculine love similar to the passion between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in “Point Break.” In one scene Mr. Mackie and Mr. Renner trade stomach punches in a ritualistic display of affectionate aggression that looks as if it will end in either sex or murder, and Ms. Bigelow’s insight is that the tense comradeship of soldiers rests, often tenuously, on barely suppressed erotic and homicidal impulses. “The Hurt Locker” opens with a quote from Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent for The New York Times, declaring that “war is a drug.” And it is certainly possible to see Will James as a hopeless war addict, a danger junkie sacrificing good sense and other people’s safety to his habit. But his collection of mechanisms from bombs that nearly killed him and the blend of serenity and exhilaration that plays over his blunt, boyish features when he finds a new one suggest otherwise. Eldridge is a decent guy, dangerously out of his element but making the best of a bad situation. Sanborn is a professional, doing a job conscientiously and well. But James is something else, someone we recognize instantly even if we have never seen anyone quite like him before. He is a connoisseur, a genius, an artist. No wonder Ms. Bigelow understands him so perfectly. Review by A.O. Scott, nytimes.com
Paper Heart - Rated PG-13 - 88 minutes - Flat
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Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love. But it’s not because of past heartbreak. It’s because she’s never felt it before. So she embarks on a project with her best friend, Nick, to meet real couples and hear their stories - all in an attempt to define love and determine whether or not it truly exists or if some people are doomed to remain unloved. Part documentary, part improvisational narrative, “Paper Heart” is an atypical yet authentic romantic comedy for people who normally find such things insufferable. For the record, I am one of those people. And “Paper Heart” charmed the jaded pants off of me. Charlyne and Nick travel around the country interviewing anyone and everyone about love and relationships. They meet young couples and couples married 50 years. They talk to Elvis impersonators at Vegas wedding chapels and academics at universities. Meanwhile, Charlyne tries to make sense of (and resist) her budding relationship with actor Michael Cera. They both play alternate universe versions of themselves, which makes for a pretty bizarre, and totally compelling, love story. Plus, Charlyne is not your typical leading lady. In fact, she’s a character we rarely see in any film, let alone a rom-com; the boyish woman-child. She’s not one of those fake, sexpot tomboys (i.e. Megan Fox) who wear dirty jeans and pigtails but still know how to give a smoldering sidelong glance. Charlyne is the genuine article; a girl who loves video games and fireworks, doesn’t bathe much and wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do with an eyelash curler. She has huge glasses and a Pee Wee Herman laugh. You get the impression that you could have a great time hanging out with her and she would never ever try to steal your boyfriend. But she starts the film as a somewhat tragic figure. She’s never had any romantic feelings toward anyone and it’s led her to believe that true love is a myth. She claims that this doesn’t bother her. That she’s mainly curious about love from an academic standpoint. However, it’s clear that the real issue is that she’s never opened herself up to anyone for fear of getting hurt. As a result, her reluctant romance with Cera is as bungling as it is cute. The true documentary vignettes are just as enjoyable as the driving plot line. They employ puppets and two-dimensional backdrops to illustrate some of the stories that couples tell her about their courtship. Many of the interview locations are quirky and amusing such as a biker bar and a room full of mounted animal heads. These interviews also serve to mirror and foreshadow the fictional story. A romance novelist tells Charlyne that the formula for a love story is always “Romance – conflict – resolution.” It all fits together so perfectly that it’s necessary to remind yourself you aren’t actually watching Yi and Cera fall in love. Actually, they do a little of the reminding for you. Some of the most hilarious parts involve purposeful breakage of the fourth wall. After their first date, there is an awkward goodbye at Charlyne’s car and then Michael asks “Should I give back my microphone now?” When Charlyne and Michael kiss for the first time, the camera pans around to reveal reaction shots from the crew. There are also several really sweet moments that let the audience know Charlyne might not be as immune to love as she thinks. The song she writes for Michael (but isn’t sure if she’s going to give to him) is totally heart-rending. At that point, she’s pretty much the only one who can’t see what’s happening. The question is whether or not she will recognize it in time. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Cera once again does his “Michael Cera thing.” Personally, I love his "thing" but know it’s not for everyone, and I agree that it doesn’t always work contextually. But trust me, here it really works. Review by Jessica Baxter, filmthreat.com
Taking Woodstock - Rated R - 121 minutes - Flat
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Don’t be misled by the title of Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock.” This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event that took place on Aug. 15 through 18, 1969, on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., and has since been exalted ad nauseam for its good vibes. Most of the concert takes place out of sight of the camera. The movie’s primary focus is El Monaco, a shabby Catskills motel in White Lake, N.Y., not far from the site on which 32 acts, including Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Who and Jimi Hendrix, made rock music history. The little bit of the concert that is shown is a glowing, golden circle glimpsed in the far distance amid a throbbing acid haze outside the van of a gentle hippie couple. The music heard during the trip scene, “The Red Telephone” by the Los Angeles band Love, emanates not from the stage but from speakers inside the van, where the couple initiates a shy young stranger into the mysteries of LSD. Like Mr. Lee’s 1999 Civil War drama, “Ride With the Devil,” which was set on the war’s western fringe, “Taking Woodstock” operates on the principle that contemplation of historic events from the margins can be more revealing than from the hot center. Although it shows an immense traffic jam, fields littered with trash and hippies gleefully sliding through mud, “Taking Woodstock” pointedly shies away from spectacle, the better to focus on how the lives of individuals caught up by history are transformed. Structurally, the film resembles the event it remembers. The screenplay by Mr. Lee’s longtime collaborator James Schamus (he also wrote the script for “Ride With the Devil”) is open-ended and episodic. No one predicted the scale of the horde, estimated at half a million, that would descend on Bethel with limited supplies of food and water in unsettled weather. Any number of disasters could have turned what was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition” promising “3 Days of Peace & Music” into a massive bummer. The main character, Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), from whose memoir, “Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life” (written with Tom Monte) the film was adapted, is a mild-mannered, semicloseted gay interior decorator who has been living in Greenwich Village. As played by Mr. Martin, he suggests an earnest, sad-sack cousin of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate.” For all its believability, Mr. Martin’s performance lacks the star magnetism that emanated from Mr. Hoffman playing an even more reticent character. Elliot has returned to the Catskills to help his parents, Jake (Henry Goodman) and Sonia (Imelda Staunton), Jews who immigrated from Russia, keep afloat their financially failing motel. As the head of Bethel’s Chamber of Commerce, Elliot offers the motel as a home base for the promoters of Woodstock Ventures after the company loses its permit for an arts festival in the nearby town of Wallkill. He also smoothes the way for Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), the dairy farm’s owner, and Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), the festival’s prime mover, to make a deal. Mr. Groff’s Lang is presented as a suave hippie capitalist with a streak of grandiosity; he appears, knightlike, atop a horse near the end of the movie. “Taking Woodstock” is a gentle, meandering celebration of personal liberation at a moment when rigid social barriers were becoming more permeable, at least among the young. Elliot and his parents lead the list of those experiencing pangs of enlightenment amid the hippie swarm. In a relationship that is made much more emphatically in Mr. Tiber’s memoir, the movie explicitly connects Woodstock to the gay-liberation movement and the Stonewall riots, which took place two months earlier that summer. A friend of Elliot’s even brings to the motel a record by Judy Garland, who had died a few days before the Stonewall uprising; some have theorized that grief over her death was a precipitating factor in the riots. During his LSD initiation by the hippie couple, Elliot is cuddled and caressed by both the girl and the boy. The trip sequence is one of the most benign to be shown in any movie peddling period psychedelia. Elliot also takes inspiration from Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a ferociously masculine, kindhearted, cross-dressing Marine who appears at the motel and provides its security. In their own moment of enlightenment, Jake and the grim, penny-pinching Sonia surrender their inhibitions after ingesting some hash brownies and suffer a major case of the giggles. The healing also extends to Elliot’s high school friend Billy (Emile Hirsch), a paranoid Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The film’s wittiest nostalgic current is the presence of the Earthlight Players (who really existed), a visiting avant-garde theater troupe whose members use any excuse to disrobe collectively. The movie’s laugh-out-loud moment is their unrecognizable staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” as a nude “happening,” in which they confront the audience and denounce “indecent legions of decency, fascist pornographers and racist warmongers.” For all its sincerity, “Taking Woodstock” lacks the passion of Mr. Lee’s finest films, “Brokeback Mountain,” “Lust, Caution,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “The Ice Storm.” I would add, however, that given a subject that has become synonymous with overblown mythmaking, its modesty becomes it. Review by Stephen Holden, nytimes.com
Moon - Rated R - 99 minutes - Scope
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Is "Moon" evoking "2001," or does its mining outpost on the far side of the moon simply happen to date back to the "2001" era (which was of course eight years ago)? I lean toward the second theory. After the mission carrying Dave Bowman disappeared beyond Jupiter, mankind decided to focus on the moon, where we were already, you will recall, conducting operations. In "Moon," the interior design of the new lunar station was influenced by the "2001" ship, and the station itself is supervised by Gerty, sort of a scaled-down HAL 9000 that scoots around. At some point in the future (we can't nail down the story's time frame), this station on the far side is manned by a single crew member, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). He's working out the final days of a three-year contract and is close to cracking from loneliness. Talking to loved ones via video link doesn't satisfy. The station is largely automated; it processes lunar rock to extract Helium-3, used to provide Earth with pollution-free power from nuclear fusion. My guess is, the station is on the far side because you don't want to go gazing at the Man in the Moon some night and see a big zit on his nose. The station is large and well-appointed, has entertainment resources and adequate supplies. Sam communicates frequently with the home office ... and so does Gerty. Sam doesn't do any actual mining, but his human hands and brain are needed for repairs, maintenance and inspection. One day he's outside checking up on something, and his lunar rover smashes up. He's injured and awakens in the station's medical facility. And that, I think, is all I need to say. A spoiler warning would mean secrets are revealed -- and you'd look, wouldn't you, no matter what you say? I want to take a step back and discuss some underlying matters in the film. In an age when our space and distance boundaries are being pushed way beyond the human comfort zone, how do we deal with the challenges of space in real time? In lower gravity, how do our bodies deal with loss of bone and muscle mass? How do our minds deal with long periods of isolation? The "2001" vessel dealt with the physical challenges with its centrifuge. Dave and Frank had each other -- and HAL. Sam is all on his own, except for Gerty, whose voice by Kevin Spacey suggests he was programmed by the same voice synthesizers used for HAL. Gerty seems harmless and friendly, but you never know with these digital devils. All Sam knows is that he's past his shelf date, and ready to be recycled back to Earth. Space is a cold and lonely place, pitiless and indifferent, as Bruce Dern's character grimly realized in Douglas Trumbull's classic "Silent Running." At least he had the consolation that he was living with Earth's last vegetation. Sam has no consolations at all. It even appears that a new guy may have entered the orbits of his wife and daughter. What kind of a man would volunteer for this duty? What kind of a corporation would ask him to? We, and he, find out. "Moon" is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital. John W. Campbell Jr., the godfather of this genre, would have approved. The movie is really all about ideas. It only seems to be about emotions. How real are our emotions, anyway? How real are we? Someday I will die. This laptop I'm using is patient and can wait. Note: The film's capable director, Duncan Jones, was born Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones. Easy to understand if you know his father is David Bowie, which rhymes with Zoe, not Howie. He's a successful U.K. commercial director; this is his debut feature. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
The Cove - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Flat
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Flipper was smiling on the outside but crying on the inside. That's what Richard O'Barry thinks. He's the man who trained five dolphins for use on the "Flipper" TV show, and then began to question the way dolphins were used in captivity. In the years since, he has become an activist in the defense of captive dolphins exploited in places like Sea World. The dolphins who are captured are luckier than the thousands harpooned to death. In a hidden cove near the Japanese coastal village of Taiji, sonar is used to confuse dolphins and lead them into a cul-de-sac where they're trapped and killed. Since their flesh has such a high concentration of mercury that it's dangerous to eat, why slaughter them? To mislabel them as whale meat, that's why. Having long ignored global attempts to protect whales from being fished to extinction, the Japanese have found dolphins easier to find. But who would eat the meat? Japanese children, whose school lunches incredibly include mislabeled dolphin. Is it necessary to mention that dolphins are not fish, but mammals? Indeed, they're among the most intelligent of mammals and seem naturally friendly toward man. They're even tool users, employing sponges to protect their snouts in some situations, and teaching that learned behavior to their offspring. "The Cove," a heartbreaking documentary, describes how Richard O'Barry, director Louie Psihoyos and a team of adventurers penetrated the tight security around the Taiji cove and obtained forbidden footage of the mass slaughter of dolphins. Divers were used to sneak cameras into the secret area; the cameras, designed by Industrial Light and Magic, were hidden inside fake rocks that blended with the landscape. The logistics of their operation, captured by night-vision cameras at times, has the danger and ingenuity of a caper film. The stakes are high: perhaps a year in prison. The footage will temper the enjoyment of your next visit to see performing dolphins. It is an accident of evolution that dolphins seem to be smiling, the film informs us. They just happen to look that way. Their hearing is incredibly more acute than a human's, and the sounds of loudspeakers and recorded music, rebounding off the walls of their enclosures, can cause them anxiety and pain. O'Barry believes one of the dolphins he trained for "Flipper" literally died of depression in his arms. There are many documentaries angry about the human destruction of the planetary peace. This is one of the very best — a certain Oscar nominee. It includes a great many facts about the craven International Whaling Commission and many insights into the mistreatment of dolphins; Simon Hutchins, who has specialized in the subject for the London Telegraph, is especially helpful. But when all of the facts have been marshaled and the cases made, one element of the film stands out above all, and that is the remorse of Richard O'Barry. He became rich and famous because of the TV series, which popularized and sanitized the image of captive dolphins. He has been trying for 25 years to make amends. But why, you may ask, are performing dolphins so willing to perform on cue? Well, you see, because they have to, if they want to eat. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Every Little Step - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Flat
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Watching “Every Little Step,” a new documentary by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, is a bit like walking through a hall of mirrors. Life imitates art, art reflects life, and after a while the distinctions threaten, quite pleasantly, to blur altogether. The film follows a group of mostly young dancers and singers auditioning for parts in the recent Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” a musical which is itself built around the auditions of 17 mostly young Broadway-besotted dancers and singers. The premise of “Every Little Step” is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born. The theater director Michael Bennett had an equally inspired, equally simple idea when he tape-recorded the confessions, dreams and fears of gypsy hoofers and chirpers and turned their reflections on show business life into the basis of a show that ran for 15 years and collected just about every prize there is. (It also collected hard feelings from some of the people whose voices and lives Mr. Bennett used, but that’s another story.) “A Chorus Line,” with brilliant music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban, and a canny book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, gives voice to deep, widely shared anxieties and aspirations, but its big themes are grounded in the lives, voices and bodies of individuals. And so the thousands of auditioners who show up, at the start of “Every Little Step,” for the first casting call — and who over the following months are winnowed down to scores, then dozens and finally a few singular sensations — are hardly faceless or interchangeable. Still, there is only time to become acquainted with a few of them, and the filmmakers, concentrating on the moment-to-moment drama of the casting process rather than on back stories or personalities, introduce us to the performers by way of the characters they are hoping to play. We learn some names and a bit of biography — one woman is the daughter of a retired ballet dancer; another arrives by bus from New Jersey — but most of what we glean about the potential cast members comes from their closeness to the archetypes represented by Kristine, Mike, Cassie and the others Mr. Bennett and his collaborators delivered from anonymity. Cassie — a role originated by Donna McKechnie, who is interviewed in “Every Little Step” — is a step away from has-been status and desperate to keep working. Others sing and speak about their childhood love of dancing and one, Paul, delivers a heart-wrenching soliloquy about coming out as a gay man and an artist. The casting of this part is one of the most touching and least suspenseful moments in the film, thanks to Jason Tam’s tour de force audition. As a general rule, if you reduce an entire casting committee to tears, you’ll probably get the part. Not that every decision is so easy. Among those casting the new production are Bob Avian, who choreographed the earlier show along with Mr. Bennett, and Baayork Lee, a fellow choreographer who originated the role of Connie, a tiny dancer with big desires. They and their colleagues survey the contenders with a mixture of compassion and rigor that quietly underscores the wised-up romanticism of “A Chorus Line.” The musical, whose rich history is recalled between auditions for the revival, has become such a touchstone because it perfectly captures both the cruelty and the marvelousness of life in the theater. Mr. Bennett, who died in 1987, appears in archival clips looking like a slightly jaded elf, combining a weary knowingness with an ardent and undiminished capacity for wonder. There is a superficial resemblance between “Every Little Step” (and, for that matter, “A Chorus Line” itself) and television reality shows in which ordinary people use their talents to scramble for the spotlight. But those programs are spectacles of amateurism chasing after celebrity, an impulse that could not be further from what Mr. Stern and Mr. Del Deo, taking their cues from Mr. Bennett, set out to honor. The 17 members of that chorus line — and the thousands like them, including those who dream of playing them — are professionals, and one of the names they give to the glory they seek is work. The other is love. Review by A.O.Scott, nytimes.com
It Might Get Loud - Rated PG - 98 minutes - Flat
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"Rock and Roll will never die" goes the chorus of a famous Neil Young song, but judging from the sales charts and radio play, it has been on life support for quite a while. Thankfully, Academy Award-winning documentarian is here to resurrect the musical art form with "It Might Get Loud," the greatest film about rock and roll... nay, about music, ever. The idea behind IMGL is so beautiful and simple, it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it before. Get three iconic guitarists from different generations (Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, The Edge from U2 and Jack White from The White Stripes), interview them individually about their lives and influences, and then put them in a room together and just see what happens. The results are more than just a summit between musical legends but the entire history of rock and roll summed up in 97 minutes. While Page and the Edge are fascinating subjects who each would be deserving of their own biographical documentary, this film belongs to the continuing cipher that is Jack White, the eccentric prankster who has constantly contracted himself about his life and upbringing in interviews over the years. But perhaps because he is talking about music, his own and the music that defined him that we finally get to know White. Having him introduce audiences to lesser-known or mostly-forgotten artists like Son House and Blind Willie McTell and Flat Duo Jets, or watch him create a new song on the spot for the cameras, should be smiles to the faces and ears of rock fans, as should the little moments like watching Jimmy Page rock out air guitar-style to Link Wray or having the Edge rediscover old four-track demos from the Joshua Tree sessions. The biggest treats, however, are when the three come together on a sound stage to play together. To watch Page teach the Edge and White “In My Time of Dying,” or the Edge showing them “I Will Follow” or White giving the old pros a lesson on “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” is nothing short of musical and cinematic magic that will hopefully help return rock and roll back to the forefront of popular music. I apologize this is more a mash note than critical analysis. I love this music, I love the bands of these three guitarists and I was so endlessly enraptured learning about them and watching them play that I had to see it again a second time not a few weeks later, to experience the magic all over again. My only complaint after seeing it twice? It was never loud enough! Come on, theatre operators. Turn this movie up to 11! Make those digital processors and subwoofers work these delightful sounds to their fullest effect. The next time I see “It Might Get Loud,” I want to feel like I am in the room with Page and the Edge and White. I want to feel the music against my skin and bones. I want to walk out of the theatre with my senses feeling like they’ve been assaulted. That’s what rock and roll is, and that’s how you can help save it. Review By Edward Havens, filmjerk.com
Adam - Rated PG-13 - 99 minutes - Scope
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As if romantic love isn’t hard enough, along comes Adam, a very different kind of love story. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. But boy suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, and so suffers from a lack of the social and emotional skills necessary to make a romantic connection. But Asperger’s serves as a metaphor for the bumbling way in which most of us fall into (and out of) relationships. This credible and moving portrayal of a man with Asperger's Syndrome, whose passion for science and his love for a woman help him in his struggle to achieve a meaningful relationship, should find an appreciative audience. With Fox Searchlight distributing, Adam--although less flamboyant than the distributor’s runaway hits (Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Slumdog Millionaire)--will supply the necessary fanfare for a significant launch. The film cleverly sets up an early ambiguity: we know that Adam, fascinated by all things astronomical, is a bit odd, but the film suggests that he (like characters in Man Facing Southeast, K-PAX and Starman) may be an extra-terrestrial. Hugh Dancy inhabits Adam, a 30-year-old engineer who lives alone in the Manhattan apartment he’s always shared with his father and protector, until the latter’s recent death. Enter the beautiful Beth (Rose Byrne), a new tenant in his building, an elementary school teacher and aspiring children’s book author, whose heart was recently broken by a dastardly investment banker. She’s drawn to Adam’s alternately childlike wonder at the stars and nature, and his ability to brilliantly, if obsessively, explain the machinations of the universe. He first wins Beth over with an elaborate outer-space light show and a magical night walk in Central Park to observe the antics of a raccoon family. Delighted by the worlds that Adam invites her into, the wounded Beth quickly softens toward him and soon falls in love. It’s Beth who teaches him how to look into the eyes of whomever he’s speaking with, the protocol of confidently applying for a new job and the basics of conversation. But it’s not long before his quirks--and a more serious emotional outburst--affect their relationship. In a sub-plot, Beth’s father Marty (Peter Gallagher), an accountant, goes on trial for allegedly “cooking the books” of a client. His wife Becky (Amy Irving’s reprisal of her long-suffering wife role in Traffic) serves as the bedrock of support for both her husband and Beth. Her fundamental understanding that “finding love is very important, but loving is the necessity,” supplies Adam’s subtext. Director Max Meyer (who received this year’s Sundance Film Festival Alfred P. Sloan Prize--presented for an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character) has created a film that explores the intricacies of living with Asperger’s Syndrome as it simultaneously addresses the complexities we all face when we try to love intimately and live with each other’s foibles and peculiarities. Review by Cathleen Rountree, boxoffice.com/reviews
The Informant - Rated R - 108 minutes - Flat
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Mark Whitacre was the highest-ranking executive in U.S. history to blow the whistle in a case of corporate fraud. He ended up with a prison sentence three times longer than any of the criminal executives he exposed. To be sure, there was the detail of the $9 million that he embezzled along the way for his personal use. What we discover toward the end of “The Informant!” may help explain that theft, although he apparently didn't want that used in his defense. Whitacre, persuasively played by Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh's new thriller, was a top vice president of Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, one of the 50 largest corporations in America. Sprawling at the edge of the small central Illinois city, it is surrounded by miles of soybean fields, and if you buy Japanese tofu at Whole Foods, it probably passed through ADM on its way to Japan. It's also involved in several other crops, produces sweeteners, sells ethanol. Whitacre knew that ADM and its competitors were engaged in global price-fixing that cost consumers billions. This largess was passed on invisibly to executives and stockholders, yet created a surprisingly small footprint in central Illinois, Yes, executives lived in very nice houses (Soderbergh shot in Whitacre's mansion in tiny Moweaqua, Ill.) but they were low-profile, compared to Manhattan high-rollers, and ate at the local restaurants just like ordinary folks. The story unfolds as Whitacre is put under pressure to discover the source of contamination, possibly industrial sabotage, in one of ADM's operations. He engages in unofficial conversations with key competitors overseas and thinks he may be onto something. Then FBI agents from Decatur swoop down as part of an espionage probe. He clears himself, but as the agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) are leaving, he calls after them. He has something he wants to say. They're blindsided. He tells them ADM has been fixing prices for years, that he has been involved, that he has details and wants to clear his conscience. His wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) helped him arrive at the decision to do the right thing. The FBI recruits him as an informant, taps phones, teaches him to wear a wire and even videotapes price-fixing meetings, building an airtight case. Eventually three officials, including vice chairman Michael Andreas, son of the founder, were found guilty; the company was fined $100 million and paid another $400 million in a class action lawsuit. If only it were that simple, “The Informant!” might have been a corporate thriller like Michael Mann's “The Insider” (1999), with Russell Crowe as a whistle blower in the tobacco industry. But during the investigation, Whitacre reveals himself as a man of bewildering contradictions. Who would think to attempt an embezzlement and phony check-cashing scheme while literally working under the noses and at the side of FBI accountants? What was the full story of the industrial espionage he halted? Did he really expect that by exposing those above him, it would clear the way for him, one of the key price-fixers, to take command of the company? What did Whitacre think about anything? Not even his wife was sure. All is explained, sort of, in “The Informant!,” and as Soderbergh lovingly peels away veil after veil of deception, the film develops into an unexpected human comedy. Not that any of the characters are laughing. “The Informant!” is fascinating in the way it reveals two levels of events, not always visible to each other or to the audience. A second viewing would be rewarding, knowing what we find out. Matt Damon's performance is deceptively bland. Whitacre comes from a world of true-blue Downstate people, without affectations, surrounded by some of the richest farmland in the world. His determination to wear the wire leads to situations where discovery seems inevitable, but he's seemingly so feckless that suspicion seems misplaced. What he's up to, is in some ways, so very simple. Even if it has the FBI guys banging their heads against the wall. Mark Whitacre, released a little early after FBI agents called him “an American hero,” is now an executive in a high-tech start-up in California and still married to Ginger. Looking back on his adventure, he recently told his hometown paper, the Decatur Herald and Review, “It's like I was two people. I assume that's why they chose Matt Damon for the movie, because he plays those roles that have such psychological intensity. In the ‘Bourne' movies, he doesn't even know who he is.” Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Capitalism: A Love Story - Rated R - 127 minutes - Flat
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The loudest voice in Michael Moore's latest film speaks to us from the grave. It belongs to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, less than a year before his death, calling for a Second Bill of Rights for Americans. He says citizens have a right to homes, jobs, education and health care. In measured, judicious words, he speaks gravely to the camera. Until a researcher for Moore uncovered this footage, it had never before been seen publicly. Too ill to deliver his State of the Union address to Congress in person, Roosevelt delivered it on the radio, and then invited in Movietone News cameras to film additional footage in which he advocates for the Second Bill of Rights. It was included in no newsreels of the time. Today, eerily, it still seems relevant, and the improvements he calls for are still unachieved. In moments like that, Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" speaks eloquently. At other times, his message is a little unclear. He believes that capitalism is a system which claims to reward free enterprise but in fact rewards greed. He says it is responsible for accumulation of wealth at the top: The richest 1 percent of Americans have more than the bottom 95 percent combined. At a time when America debates legalized gambling, it has long been practiced on Wall Street. But what must we do to repair our economy? Moore doesn't recommend socialism. He has faith in the ballot box, but believes Obama has been too quick to placate the rich and has not brought about substantial reforms. The primary weapon that Moore employs is shame. That corporations and financial institutions continue to exploit the majority of Americans, including tea baggers and Town Hall demonstrators, is a story that hasn't been told. Here are two shocking revelations Moore makes. The first involves something that is actually called "dead peasant insurance." Did you know that companies can take out life insurance policies on their workers, so that they collect the benefits when we die? This is one form of employee insurance they don't have a problem with. Companies don't usually inform a surviving spouse of the money they've made from a death. The second is the reckless, immoral gambling referred to as "derivatives." I've read that derivatives are so complex they're created by computers and not even the software authors really understand them. Moore asks three experts to explain them to him. All three fail. Essentially, they involve bets placed on the expectation that we will default on our mortgages, for example. If we do, the bets pay off. What if we don't? Investors can hedge their bets, by betting that they will fail. They hope to win both ways. Our mortgages are the collateral for these bets. Moore says they are sliced and diced and rebundled and scattered hither and yon. He has an interview with Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who advises her constituents: If a bank forecloses, don't move, and demand they produce a copy of your mortgage. In many cases, they can't. You may have seen that weirdo screaming on the financial cable show about shiftless homeowners who obtained mortgages they couldn't afford. Moore says that in fact two-thirds of all American personal bankruptcies are caused by the cost of health care. Few people can afford an extended illness in this country. Moore mentions his film "Sicko" (*cough*). The film is most effective when it explains or reveals these outrages. It is less effective,but perhaps more entertaining, when it shows Michael being Michael. He likes to grandstand. On Wall Street, he uses a bullhorn to demand our money back. He uses bright yellow police crime scene tape to block off the Stock Exchange. He's a classic rabble rouser. Love him or hate him, you gotta give him credit. He centers our attention as no other documentarian ever has. He is also a working-class kid, no college education, still with the baseball cap and saggy pants, who feels sympathy for victims. Watch him speaking with a man who discovered his wife's employer collected "dead peasant insurance." Listen to him speak with a family who is losing a farm after four generations. The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Coco Before Chanel - Rated PG-13 - 110 minutes - Scope
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We talk about people "inventing themselves." That assumes they know who they want to invent. "Coco Before Chanel" begins with an abandoned orphan girl named Gabrielle, watches her grow into a music hall chanteuse, who then sidesteps prostitution by becoming a mistress. All the while from behind the clouds of her cigarettes she regards the world with unforgiving realism and stubborn ambition. She doesn't set out to become the most influential fashion icon of the 20th century. She begins by designing a hat, making a little money and striving to better herself. She wants money and independence. One suspects she would have been similarly driven if she had invented a better mousetrap and founded a home-appliance empire.The naturalism of Anne Fontaine's film would be at home in a novel by Dreiser. Her star, Audrey Tautou, who could make lovability into a career, avoids any effort to make Coco Chanel nice, soft or particularly sympathetic. Her fashions may have liberated women from the hideous excesses of the late 19th century, but she creates them not out of idealism but because they directly reflect her inalterable personality. She didn't put women in sailor shirts out of conviction. She liked to wear them. Perhaps because of its unsentimental approach to Chanel's life, "Coco Before Chanel" strikes me as less of a biopic, more of a drama. It's not about rags to riches but about survival of the fittest. Is Coco, young and poor, used by the rich playboy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde)? Perhaps he thought so early in their relationship, but she uses him as well. She likes him, but she signed aboard for money, status and entry, not merely sex and romance. She sees this as a reasonable transaction. She isn't a brazen temptress but a capitalist, who collects on her investment. Through Balsan, she meets the bold actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos) and Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola), an Englishman. It's clear that to Chanel, love with a man or a woman is pretty much the same, but Boy truly does love her, and this is a unique experience for Coco. Things might have proceeded quite differently in her life if that relationship had survived. Baron Balsan, not blinded by love, sees Boy as exactly what he is -- something Coco, for once, hasn't done. Tautou isn't stereotypically beautiful but more uniquely fetching. It's her spirit as much as her face, and the tilt of her upper lip more than her curves. She is above all a disciplinarian of herself; at the film's end, we learn Chanel died in 1971 -- "on a Sunday," at work, just as she worked every day of her life. She had an original vision of fashion, yes, but we get the feeling she didn't depend on it for her success. She worked hard, dealt with people realistically, drove hard bargains and saw fashion as a job, not a career or a vocation. By underlining that, the movie becomes more absorbing. We've seen enough films about heroines carried along by the momentum of their blessed fates. That's not how it works. To the winner belongs the spoils, even if in life, you started pretty far back from the starting line. In the case of little Gabrielle and her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain), the orphanage probably gave them better chances in life than the parents they missed. They got an education, and it's possible Chanel's fashion sense was influenced by the unadorned, severe lines of the black and white habits of the nuns. Did she start identifying simplicity in dress with women in power? The young teenage girls break into the lowest rungs of music halls, performing songs in a duet of which it must be said their youth is more appealing than their talent. Music halls attract sugar daddies; they both size up the situation and make their choices. The film loses some of its fascination when Coco is unmistakably launched on her career path. But that's when the story ends; this is titled "Coco Before Chanel" for a reason. FYI: Her story continues in an entirely different film, "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky," which opens later this year Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
They Came to Play - NR - 91 minutes - DVD
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They Came to Play is a multi-award-winning, uplifting feature-length documentary chronicling the International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs, hosted by The Van Cliburn Foundation. Top amateur pianists from all over the world, ranging from self-taught to classically-trained, aged thirty-five to almost eighty, convene in Fort Worth, Texas for a week of competition, music and camaraderie. Entertaining and above all, inspiring, the film provides an intimate look into the lives of these colorful, multi-faceted competitors as they strive to balance the demands of work and family with their love of music. Years of dedicated preparation culminate in top-level performances before a professional jury and discerning audience during three nerve-wracking elimination rounds. All of the film's heroes have made their careers outside of music in fields ranging from medicine to business, and professional tennis to education. For competitors who have faced such extraordinary challenges as drug addiction, AIDS, or political asylum, the competition is also a triumph over adversity. For all, it represents an overwhelming desire to express a deeper side of themselves, musically and otherwise. Commentary from noted American pianist Van Cliburn and gold medalists from the Foundation’s professional competition, along with outstanding performances of great classical masterworks—from Beethoven to Alkan and from Rachmaninoff to Barber—complement the action in a film that celebrates the creator and the competitor in each of us. They Came to Play is an 88 Films production directed by Alex Rotaru, produced by Lori Miller, and executive produced by Ronnie Planalp. It features amateur pianists including Esfir Ross, Dr. Drew Mays, Clark Griffith, and Annette Dimedio.
Amelia - Rated PG - 111 minutes - Scope
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I am drawn to every news story about the attempts, which still continue, to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance on July 2, 1937. It's pretty clear she ditched at sea, but you just never know. Those clues found on a Pacific atoll are tantalizing. It is not her disappearance but her life that fascinates me.
She was strong, brave and true, and she looked fabulous in a flight suit. No ladylike decorum for her; before she wed publisher George Putnam, she wrote him their marriage would have "dual controls," and said neither one should feel bound to "a medieval code of faithfulness." Maybe she was keeping a loophole for Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), the founder of TWA and father of Gore, who told his son he loved her but didn't marry her "because I didn't want to marry a boy."
Hilary Swank uncannily embodies my ideas about Earhart in Mira Nair's "Amelia." She looks like her, smiles like here, evokes her. Swank is an actress who doesn't fit in many roles, but when she's right, she's right. The tousled hair, the freckles, the slim figure, the fitness, the physical carriage that says, "I know precisely who I am and I like it -- and if you don't, bail out." Not only was she the first person after Lindbergh to fly solo across the Atlantic, she even looked like him.
"Amelia" tells this story with sound performances and impeccable period detail. It deals with her final flight so accurately that many of the radio transmissions between her and the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed off Howland Island, are repeated verbatim. (They could hear her but she couldn't hear them.) It ends on exactly the correct note. As Red River Dave sang in the lyrics of the first song ever broadcast on U.S. television:
Half an hour later, her SOS was heard,
Her signals weak, but still her voice was brave.
In shark-infested waters, her aeroplane went down that night
In the blue Pacific to a watery grave.
She was an early feminist role model, an American hero not tainted like Lindbergh by chumminess with the Nazis. A few years after her death, U.S women would be asked to hang up their aprons, put on overalls and work on the production lines of the war. She was the real thing. Yes, she signed contracts to endorse chewing gum, soap and a fashion line, but she needed the money to finance her flights, and she always chewed the gum, used the soap, wore the clothes.
I suppose I vaguely knew she married the famous New York publisher G.P. Putnam (Richard Gere). It never registered. The film reports, correctly, that Putnam was instrumental -- promoting her, booking her lectures, publishing her book, raising money for flights. The movie doesn't much deal with how a rural Kansas tomboy got along with the famous New York socialite who published Lindbergh's We. It was love at first sight for George, and forever after for both of them.
That's the trouble with Amelia Earhart's life, seen strictly as movie material. What we already know is what we get. To repeat: She was strong, brave and true, she gained recognition for woman flyers, and she looked fabulous in a flight suit. She flew the Atlantic solo, she disappeared in the Pacific, she died too young, and there was no scandal or even an indiscretion. She didn't even smoke, although Luckys wanted her for an endorsement.
I'm not suggesting that Mira Nair and her writers, Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, should have invented anything for "Amelia." It is right that they resisted any temptation. It's just that there's a certain lack of drama in a generally happy life. At least by treating her big flights as chapters in a longer life, they sidestepped the dilemma that defeated Billy Wilder when he starred Jimmy Stewart in "The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957). Lindbergh's life offered such promising details as a 1930s decoration by the Nazis and the kidnapping of his baby, but Wilder focused on the long flight itself, during which the most exciting event is the appearance of a fly in the cockpit.
"Amelia" is a perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage -- not only in flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of her time for well-behaved females. The next generation of American women grew up in her slipstream.
Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
An Education - Rated PG-13 - 95 minutes - Scope
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"An Education" tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who is the target of a sophisticated seduction by a 35-year-old man. This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were a great deal less knowing than they are now. Yet the movie isn't shabby or painful, but romantic and wonderfully entertaining. It depends on a British actress named Carey Mulligan, who in her first major feature role is being compared by everyone with Audrey Hepburn. When you see her, you can't think of anyone else to compare her with. She makes the role luminous when it could have been sad or awkward. She has such lightness and grace, you're pretty sure this is the birth of a star. All very well and good, you're thinking, but how is this film a romance? Oh, it's not so much a romance between the teenager and the middle-aged man. That only advances to the level of an infatuation. It's a romance between the girl, named Jenny, and the possibilities within her, the future before her, and the joy of being alive. Yes, she sheds a few tears. But she gets better than she gives, and in hindsight, this has been a valuable experience for her. But wait? Doesn't this girl have parents? She certainly does. Jack and Marjorie (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) are proper, traditional middle-class parents in the London suburb of Twickenham, and there's nothing but love in the home. They aren't wealthy or worldly, but they wish the best for their girl and are bursting with pride that she's won a scholarship to Oxford. Then she springs David (Peter Sarsgaard) on them. This is a smooth operator. He sees her standing at a bus stop in the rain, holding her cello case. He offers her a lift in his sports car. He engages her in conversation about classical music. He "happens" to run into her again, and they have a nice chat. He wonders if she might enjoy . . . You see how it goes. He opens a door she eagerly wants to enter, to concerts, plays, restaurants, double dates with his fascinating friends, talk about the great world when the boys at school have nothing to say. At some point, it must become clear to her that he intends to sleep with her if he can, but by now she's thinking that he very possibly can.
I forgot to tell you about her parents. They dote and protect, but are very naive. David is good-looking, well-dressed, well-spoken and very, very polite. He has "taken an interest" in Jenny because, why? He is impressed by this young woman's mind and enjoys sharing his advantages. He offers implicit guarantees of her safety, and they're so proud of her, they believe a wealthy older man would be interested for purely platonic motives. They're innocents. Jenny will be safe with him for a weekend in Paris -- because he has an aunt who lives there and will be her chaperone? Paris! The city embodies Jenny's wildest dreams! And to see it with a worldly dreamboat like David, instead of going there on the boat-train with a grotty, pimply 17-year-old! Is she cynically taking advantage of David for her own motives? Well, yes. Now close your eyes and remember your teens and tell me you don't forgive her at least a little. Part of the genius of "An Education" is that it unfolds this relationship at a deliberate pace. Sarsgaard plays an attractive, intelligent companion. He is careful to keep a distance. Must be a good trout fisherman. To some degree, he's truthful: He enormously enjoys this smart, pretty girl. He loves walking along the Seine with her. He knows things about the world that she eagerly welcomes. Yes, he's also a rotter, a bounder, a cad, a dirty rotten scoundrel. But you can't get far in any of those trades if you're not also a charmer. To some degree, Jenny welcomes being deceived. The screenplay by Nick Hornby ("About a Boy" and "High Fidelity") is based on a memoir by a real person, the British journalist Lynn Barber. It became well-known in the U.K. that when she was 16, she had a two-year affair with a man named Simon in his late 30s. There are many scene-by-scene parallels between book and movie, and much closely adapted dialogue. We know that Lynn Barber is smart and that she was pretty when she was 16. But her affair wasn't such a great experience, at least not in its second year. What transforms it in "An Education" is Mulligan, who has that rare gift of enlisting us on her side and making us like her. She's so lovable that whatever happens must be somehow for Jenny's benefit. She glows. So young women, let this movie offer useful advice. When a man seems too good to be true, he probably isn't -- good, or true. We all make mistakes when we're growing up. Sometimes we learn from them. If we're lucky, we can even learn during them. And you must certainly see Paris. Do not count on meeting the aunt. Barber writes: "What did I get from Simon? An education -- the thing my parents always wanted me to have... I learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel, I learned about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, straightforward boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank." Lynn Barber's full account:
Here Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Bright Star - Rated PG - 119 minutes - Flat
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John Keats wasn't meekly posing as a Romantic poet. He was the real thing, and the last born of the group that also included Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. He died at 25 and remains forever young. The great and only love of his life was Fanny Brawne, the daughter of his landlady. He lived with his friend, Charles Brown, and she with her mother, sister and brother in the two halves of a Hampstead cottage so small, it gives meaning to the phrase "living in each other's pockets." Their love was grand and poetic and -- apart from some sweet kisses -- platonic, for he had neither the means nor the health to propose marriage, and they were not moved to violate the moral code of what was not yet quite the Victorian era. Jane Campion's beautiful, wistful film "Bright Star" shows them frozen in courtship, like the young man Keats wrote about in "Ode on a Grecian Urn": the youth who is immortalized forever in pursuit of a maid he is destined never to catch. He could have been writing about himself and Fanny:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
It is almost as if they were spiritually inflamed by their doomed love. She was not shy but she was proper, and he loved her, but perhaps he had some difficulty in thinking of her as physical. When his younger brother Tom died and his own health began to fail, he immortalized his loss of that which he had never possessed. (From his deathbed in Italy, however, he did indeed write his friend Brown that he wished he had "had her" when he had a chance.) Dr. Johnson observed to Mr. Boswell, "Marriage, sir, is a state with few pleasures. Chastity, with none." Yet Keats and Fanny seemed quite pleased enough.
I have visited Keats House many times and I can tell you it is shocking small. The dividing wall between the two households was knocked out in the mid-1880s, but propriety must have erected a stouter wall. In "Bright Star," John and Fanny court and flirt as if they live in neighboring counties. It's to Campion's credit that she doesn't heat up the story or go for easy emotional payoffs, and we're spared even the pathetic deathbed scene that another director might have felt necessary. The key figure is Fanny, played by Abbie Cornish with effervescence. "I confess I do not find your poems easy," she tells Keats (Ben Whishaw). But she studies them earnestly, with a touching faith that they must contain clues to the stirrings in her heart. He requires her as a muse. For a reader, he has the bearded, gruff Brown (Paul Schneider), possessive, demanding, a taskmaster. Brown is hostile to Fanny's appeal to his friend and resents it when she interrupts them "working," which seems to consist of him scowling morosely at a manuscript while Keats idly dreams. Brown is a poet himself, but to his credit, he recognizes the better craftsman and behaves like a coach or an agent. There might be some question whether Brown felt sexual stirrings of his own involving Keats, but I think he is oblivious to such a possibility. He knows the real thing, he wonders if Keats would daydream his career away, as always at his back, he hears time's winged chariot hurrying near. When Keats leaves for Italy, it is Brown who accompanies him -- not Fanny, of course, who waits forlornly for the postman to approach down the little lane beneath the tree where Keats perhaps heard the nightingale sing. (The tree now growing on the spot is not the same one, but don't tell everyone.) What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats' verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description. Hampstead in those days was a village on the slopes north of London, almost rural, where shepherds could graze their flocks on the public land of Hampstead Heath. Coleridge lived not far way in Highgate, and the two met during their rambles on the heath. To support oneself seems to have been relatively possible, despite Dickens' portraits of poverty at the time. Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) observes to her daughter that he has "no living and no income," the volumes of verse brought in only a few pounds, but when it is time for Keats to live in Italy, he finds the means. It appears that an English gentleman could support himself on air and credit.
It is famously impossible for the act of writing to be made cinematic. How long can we watch someone staring at a blank sheet of paper? It is equally unenlightening to show the writer seeing something and dashing off to scribble down impassioned words while we hear him reading them in his mind. Campion knows all this, and knows, too, that without the poetry, John Keats is only a moonstruck young man. How she works in the words is one of the subtle beauties of the film. And over the end credits, Whishaw reads the ode, and you will want to stay. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Paris - NR - 129 minutes - Scope
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At the end of "Paris," a character whose future is uncertain rides in a taxi through the city and glimpses some of the film's other characters going about their lives. He does not know them, but we do, and seeing them so briefly is enough to make the film's point: We are here, we strive, we love, we laugh, we fail, we are sad, sometimes we look at the world and smile for no particular reason. Here is a film about a group of Parisians. It opens with a sweeping shot of Paris from the atop the Eiffel Tower. The characters don't have interlocking lives; it's not that kind of film. They have parallel lives. The purpose of Cedric Klapisch, the writer-director, is to make a symphonic tribute to the city he loves, and use each character as a movement. That said, every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.
The central character is Pierre (Romain Duris), who is a dancer in his 30s told that he has little time left. Only a heart transplant can save him. His sister Elise (Juliette Binoche) brings her two daughters and comes to live with him, and they try to cheer each other. He spends much time standing on his balcony, observing life in the street. She's rebounding from a bad marriage and considers herself finished with men. We also meet a famous Parisian historian named Roland (Fabrice Luchini), whose lectures are so literate and certain, he seems to be reading from a Teleprompter scrolling in his mind. He is very alone. Well into his 50s, he becomes obsessed with a pretty student and anonymously sends her florid romantic compliments by text. Then he lurks nearby to watch her reading them, Creepy. Meanwhile, he's starring in a TV documentary series about the city.
His younger brother is Philippe, played by Francois Cluzet, the Dustin Hoffman-ish star of "Tell No One" (2006). Phillipe is an architect, a father in waiting, an encourager who senses Roland's discontent. Elise finds herself attracted to Jean (Albert Dupontel), a vendor in one of the many Paris street food markets. Jean is divorced from Caroline (Julie Ferrier), but they're still friendly. Still, they don't seem to have a future. There are several smaller characters, including a bakery owner (Karin Viard) who has outspoken prejudices about people from any part of France that is not Paris, and yet is open-minded enough to praise a young employee from North Africa who is a reliable worker. I've meet French people like that: not racist, but tactlessly opinionated -- or particular, as they might prefer.
All of these stories are told against the backdrop of Paris, a city Klapisch loves with a passion. He hasn't made a travelogue with beauty shots, however, but set his story in very specific places: streets, a university, cafes, restaurants, dawn at the vast Rungis, the wholesale food market that replaced Les Halles. There is even a scene set in the catacombs, with the bones and skulls of Parisians past neatly stacked behind the professor. The characters have love, fear it or seek it. Only one has a desperate problem. No one is satisfied.
They have a daily reprieve from illness or death, but never think in those terms -- except for Pierre, who is forced to. They go to work, home again, to their spouses or lovers or empty flats. They move easily through the city, and we are reminded that in Paris, traditionally a city of tiny apartments, the cafes served as living rooms. You're not buying a coffee, you're renting a table, and it's yours for as long as you sit there. I love Paris in the same way Klapisch does, for the concentration and intensity of its daily life and street theater. A modern place like downtown Houston seems to me an unlovely prospect, all concrete, no shadows. Why do modern corporations envision their headquarters as free-standing tombstones instead of friendly neighbors? Viewing the film's love affair with the city, I was reminded of another film, "The Cat's Away" (1996). That's the one about the young woman who leaves town and entrusts her cat with a neighboring cat lady. When she returns, this old lady is heartbroken: The cat has run away. The entire neighborhood gets caught up in the search, including a simple-minded fellow who risks his life on rooftops, usually in search of the wrong cat. I looked up the film, and discovered it was by Cedric Klapisch. There you go. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Whip It - Rated PG13 - 111 minutes - Scope
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"Whip It" is an unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women's Roller Derby, assuming you have any. The movie is a coming-together of two free spirits, Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page, and while it may not reflect the kind of female empowerment Gloria Steinem had in mind, it has guts, charm, and a black-and-blue sweetness. Yes, it faithfully follows the age-old structure of the sports movie, but what a sport, and how much the Derby girls love it. Page plays Bliss Cavendar, a small-town Texas girl who shares the rebelliousness of Juno but not the steam-of-consciousness verbal pyrotechnics. She's being coached by her smothering mother (Marcia Gay Harden) to compete in a Miss Bluebonnet beauty pageant that squeezes Texas girls into a ghastly caricature of Southern womanhood. Bliss despises it. One day she sees an ad for the Roller Derby in Austin, the nearest town of consequence, and with a friend, sneaks off to see a game. She is electrified. She was born to be a Derby girl. She begins a series of secret bus trips to Austin which last for an entire season -- much too long for her parents not to notice, but never mind. She auditions in her pink Barbie clamp-ons for the Hurl Scouts team. Lying about her age, and against all odds, she's allowed by the coach, known as Razor (Andrew Wilson), to give it a try. The team veterans are dubious, but she has pluck and speed and doesn't mind getting knocked around. It's worth noting that Page and the other actresses, some of them real Derby stars, do almost all their own skating. She takes the name Babe Ruthless. Other competitors are known as Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Smashley Simpson (Barrymore herself), Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), Rosa Sparks (Eve) and Eva Destruction (Ari Graynor). Juliette Lewis is fiercely competitive as Iron Maven, the leader of another team. Such stage names, or track names, are common in Roller Derby, and one real-life Derby girl is known as Sandra Day O'Clobber. The screenplay is by a Los Angeles Derby Dolls star named Shauna Cross, the original Maggie Mayhem; it's based on her novel Derby Girl. It neatly balances Bliss' derby career and her situation at home, where her dad (Daniel Stern) escapes to pro sports on TV to escape his insufferable wife. Well, OK, she's not insufferable, simply an extreme type of a stage mother whose values, as her daughter informs her, are based on a 1950s idea of womanhood. Probably Bliss' poor mom was dominated by her own overbearing mother. Bliss is at a hormonal age when she really likes cute boys and is drawn to a young rock band member named Oliver (Landon Pigg). She experiences this relationship in admirable PG-13 terms, and during her season with the Hurl Scouts, learns much about her physical and personality strengths. Odd as it may seem, her Roller Derby experience is a coming-of-age process. Ellen Page, still only 22, is the real thing. To see her in this, "Juno" and "Hard Candy" (2005) is to realize she's fearless, completely in command of her gifts and will be around for a long time. To learn that she will play the lead in a BBC Films production of "Jane Eyre," being produced by Alison Owen ("Elizabeth"), seems only natural. Yes, the movie has clichés. Yes, it all leads up to a big game. Yes, there is a character's validating appearance near the end. Yes, and so what? The movie is miles more intelligent than most of the cream-of-wheat marketed to teenage girls. Funnier, more exciting, even liberating. In her debut as a director, Barrymore shows she must have been paying attention ever since Spielberg cast her when she was 5. She and her team do an especially effective job in staging the derby showdowns. There are rules to Roller Derby, but the movie doesn't linger over the details. Basically, you go around as fast as you can, try to stay on your feet, protect your teammates and clobber your opponents. In the last decade, the optional form of the sport has morphed into a sort of gothic-punk-warrior woman hybrid, with much invention going into the outrageous costumes. Which doesn't mean you don't get hurt when you're slammed. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
A Serious Man - Rated R - 105 minutes - Flat
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We learn from the Book of Job: Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. Such a man is Larry Gopnik. He lectures on physics in front of a blackboard filled with bewildering equations that are mathematical proofs approaching certainty, and in his own life, what can be sure of? Nothing, that's what. His wife is leaving him for his best friend. His son is listening to rock 'n' roll in Hebrew school. His daughter is stealing money for a nose job. His brother-in-law is sleeping on the sofa and lurking in unsavory bars. His gun-nut neighbor frightens him. A student tries to bribe him and blackmail him at the same time. The tenure committee is getting unsigned libelous letters about him. The wife of his other neighbor is sex-crazy. God forbid this man should see a doctor. "This is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar," writes Todd McCarthy in Variety. I cannot improve on that. After the seriously great "No Country for Old Men," the Coen brothers have made the not greatly serious "A Serious Man," which bears every mark of a labor of love. It is set in what I assume to be a Minneapolis suburb of their childhood, a prairie populated by split-level homes with big garages but not enough trees around them. In this world, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) earnestly desires to be taken as a serious man and do the right thing, but does God take him seriously? "I read the book of Job last night," Virginia Woolf said. "I don't think God comes out well in it." Someone up there doesn't like Larry Gopnik.
Beginning with a darkly comic prologue in Yiddish, "A Serious Man" inhabits a Jewish community where the rational (physics) is rendered irrelevant by the mystical (fate). Gopnik can fill all the blackboards he wants, and it won't do him any good. Maybe because an ancestor invited a dybbuk to cross his threshold, Larry is cursed. A dybbuk is the wandering soul of a dead person. You don't want to make the mistake of inviting one into your home. You don't have to be Jewish to figure that out. Much of the success of "A Serious Man" comes from the way Michael Stuhlbarg plays the role. He doesn't play Gopnik as a sad-sack or a loser, a whiner or a depressive, but as a hopeful man who can't believe what's happening to him. What else can go wrong? Where can he find happiness? Who can he please? In the sex department, why are even his wet dreams, starring his brazen neighbor (Amy Landecker), frightening? Why does Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his so-called best friend who is taking away his wife, speak to him in terms of such sadness, sympathy and understanding? Does Fred know Larry is doomed? Why do his children dismiss him? Why is his no-account brother-in-law (Richard Kind) such a shiftless leech? Why can no rabbi provide him with encouragement or useful advice? Why would a student (David Kang) clearly fail an exam, leave bribe money on his desk and then act to destroy him? Why, why, why? I'm sure you've heard the old joke where Job asks the Lord why everything in his life is going wrong. Remember what the Lord replies? If you don't remember the joke, ask anyone. I can't prove it but I'm absolutely certain more than half of everyone on Earth has heard some version of that joke. Have I mentioned "A Serious Man" is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny, too. The Coens have found mostly unfamiliar actors, or those like Stuhlbarg, Kind and Melamed you've seen before, but you're not quite sure where. I imagine (but do not know) that Joel and Ethan have been kicking this story around for years, passing time by reminding each other of possible characters, seeing an actor and observing, "There's our Mrs. Samsky." Their actors weren't cast, they were preordained. In some ways my favorite is Melamed as Sy Ableman. It's not a big role but he's so good, he establishes a full presence in his first scene, when he's only a voice on the telephone. This is the traitor who has stolen away Gopnik's wife, and he believes it will be good if they have a long, helpful talk. Ableman is not only the grief, but the grief counselor. Such chutzpah, you have to admire. Amy Landecker, too, is perfect as Mrs. Samsky. She makes the character sexy in a strictly logical sense, but any prudent man would know on first sight to stay clear. Judith Gopnik, as Larry's wife, is able to suggest in only a few scenes that she's leaving him not for passion or out of anger, but because she senses his ship going down and Sy Ableman is a lifeboat. There is a story told in "A Serious Man" that may seem out of place. I believe it acts as a parable reflecting the film, Gopnik's life, and indeed the Book of Job. It's the one about the Jewish dentist who discovers the words "help me" naturally occurring in Hebrew on the back of a gentile's lower front teeth. Remember that many parables contain their message in their last lines. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
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