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| Diary | Movies | Books | Music | Humor | Travel |
Up in the Air
What is a perfect night at the movies? A splendid dinner before! Short ticket lines! Then a surprisingly deep film with George Clooney in the lead! The words "deep" and "George Clooney" typically don't go hand in hand. But a strong novel by Walter Kirn and a director (Jason Reitman) who can bring into focus at the same time life's joys and disappointments provide a platform for Clooney to deliver a compelling performance. Clooney is Ryan Bingham who travels some 320 days a year from one American city to another to fire people on behalf of their employer. Once in a while he also gives motivational speeches that have become so popular in many American hotel conference rooms. Among the 300 odd million Americans, there may not be a single person who completely fits Bingham's profile-of being rather content although he has no family, no significant other, no close friends, and not even place to come home to.
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Candy
The first half of the film was so painful to watch that I considered turning off the DVD player. Strangely enough when words on the screen announce that we are now entering HELL (this is after the two lovers Dan (Heath Ledger) and Candy (Abbie Cornish), according to earlier words of the screen, were in HEAVEN and then came down to EARTH), moments of poetry give us reprieve from the self-destructive ways of two beautiful junkies. For the most part, it is simply depressing to see two young people throw away their lives because of drugs. Now that Heath Ledger is dead because of too many drugs found their way into his blood, the film is even more painful. Candy is worse than bitter sweet. Don't try it.
Whip It
Girl Power comes to Texas. Drew Barrymore's directorial debut is weak. But I enjoyed learning about the sport Roller Dirby. I had never seen it before. The sport is a bit rough yet fun to watch. Hey, what do you expect of Texas!
An Education
The skill of con artists is not specialized to particular types of people. The best of them such as Bernie Madoff in recent times fool almost everyone. That is what makes them so dangerous. Teenage girls falling for the bad guy is not news. But parents falling for the bad guy is an underexplored theme in the movies. If you are a parent of a teenage daughter, this film will be an educational experience. It does a very nice job in capturing the mood of 1960s Britain. We follow the journey to adulthood of a 16-year-old daughter who comes from a lower middle class family. Father and mother's only wish for their talented daughter is to attend Oxford. But suddenly a much older man appears on their doorstep and he shakes the very foundations of this socially ambitious family.
UP
It is difficult not to repeat myself in reviewing Pixar movies. Once again the studio has made a superb film. Unlike many sequel franchises that tend go downhill pretty quickly, Pixar's line of films is one wonder after another. Like all the other Pixar films, UP works for young and old. This time even the very old. See this movie with the entire family and embark on a marvelous adventure to South America.
It's Complicated
"50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce," says Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri. Sometimes I hear arguments that the divorce rate is so high because people go into marriage without sufficient commitment. I don't think that a large number of people say to themselves on the day of their wedding as if they are selecting a restaurant for evening: "If it does not taste good, I will simply go to a different restaurant after the entre." Most people I know find divorce quite unpleasant. Especially when there are children involved, one never fully get's divorced. Typically at least one of the partners is deeply disappointment that the idea of being together for the rest of the life did not work out. Not infrequently this let-down partner hopes that a miracle will happen and reunite the failed couple.
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The 40-Year-Old Virgin
The trailer was a lot funnier than the whole film that was only mildly amusing. The subject, of course, is serious. Human beings are designed to have sex but some people are extremely shy and lack social skills to hook up. The entire premise of the film that at age forty you can lose your virginity strikes me as highly unlikely. I once met a 65-year-old virgin who shared with me his philosophy of sex. I came away with the view that once he had hit forty, his chance of losing his virginity had dropped to virtually zero. That is why he was still a virgin at 65. Yes, the tagline of the film is correct: "The longer you wait, the harder it gets." The film felt too constructed because the hero gets lucky in the end. I don't think that life is that kind for most 40-year-old virgins.
Avatar
What a stunner! Turn the clock back 200 years. Not even the photograph has been invented. Here you are minding your business, strolling into your local pub. After your first beer with friends and family the room is magically transformed into a modern day 3-D theatre, and you are treated to the visual beauty of James Cameron's Avator. Grandpa and grandma would probably have a heart attack. They could not fathom that such a lifelike motion picture was possible. Are my eyes fooling me? Is the devil playing a trick on me? No, you are in a time machine, taking you 200 years into the future, and witnessing a major event in the history of motions pictures. Marrying animation with a new 3-D camera technology James Cameron has taken film-making to a whole new level. Unlike Titanic where Cameron used simply characters, this sci-fi adventure is populated by a wide range of interesting characters. Foremost of course are the avatars.
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This is it
Even by the standards of the recent fall of Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson is in a class by himself. He went from the biggest star on the planet to the erratic weirdo who could never fully shake the suspicion that his love for children went a bit too far when he routinely invited kids over for sleepovers to his ranch Neverland Unable to control is profligate spending habits, MJ stared bankruptcy in the eye. Many commentators believed that he had signed the contract to give the 50 plus live concerts in London to regain his financial solvency. In the weeks before the first concert date, rumors were flying that Michael Jackson was not healthy enough to survive the live show marathon in London. Suddenly MJ was dead even before a single concert took place. This is itchronicles the preparations for the London concert. The film confirms the theory that his doctor's negligence caused MJ death rather than the strains of preparing for the concerts.
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The Informant
The Informant (played by Matt Damon) is about a shady corporate whistle-blower. The trailer promised much more than the full product delivered. The big mistake was to try to turn the film into something of a comedy. This attempt fell flat. Thumbs down.
Atonement
My first reaction to Atonement was: I have seen this film before. Aristocratic daughter and son of servant fall in love. The differences in social class make it impossible for them to be together. The romance shatters. But before long, the film takes an unexpected turn and my second reaction became: This is a marvelous drama. The human brain is designed for people to survive. When you have done something terrible, beating yourself up for it and becoming all depressed does not have survival value. Suppression rather than atonement is a far more common reaction. Atonement, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Ian McEwan, is remarkable because the sister of the heroine commits a terrible transgression but years later is able to admit her awful dead. She sets out to atone and win back her older sister's respect and love. But then war comes and plays havoc with everyone's plans.
Bright Star
Boy, you have to be a true romantic to enjoy this film. A few weeks ago I wrote about John Keats in my diary. He is a magnificent poet. But this film about his love for Fanny Brawne is tough to sit through unless you are able to be deeply moved by true romance and require no drama: nothing much to happens except two people who are deeply in love with another. The Immortal Beloved film about Beethoven's love interest is an cliffhanger compared to Bright Star. John Keats's inner life and the poetry it allowed to emerge are much more rewarding than this film. If only Keats had not died at the tender age of 25.
Pirate Radio
This film is a like a glass of wine that you first don't like because the taste is so foreign (British dry humor). But after you continue to drink you warm up to the taste. And towards the end it becomes a quite magnificent comedy. Rock n' Roll in the eyes of the autorities had the status of gangster rap. If you are into the history of rock n' roll, even if it is fictional, Pirate Radio film has some funny moments.
Two Cars, One Night
Rarely do I see good short films. Two Cars, One Night is a sweat little film. I stumbled across it on home page of youtube. I have no idea how this film became so popular wihthin little more than a week. I guess most of us appreciated the romance of childhood once we are adults.
Watch it.
500 Days of Summer
Think back to a past relationship. If you have kept a diary, read the entry for every day for as long as the relationship lasted. At the end of each day, decide whether you felt good or bad because of the person you were with. This will allow you to do a brutally honest accounting of how much happiness or suffering a relationship has brought you. Now imagine that you assign each day in the relationship a number from 1 to the last day. Let's say it lasted 500 days. Now randomly pick out days, and reread your diary. This is exactly what 500 Days of Summer does, except in the medium of film. It is brilliant because it captures so well the ups and downs of every past relationship. After all, if it had not downs, it would not be past relationship! Don't miss this wonderful film about the 500 day relationship between Tom (boy) and Summer (girl). It breaks new ground in how to tell a story.
Recount
The film takes a look behind the scenes of how Gore and Bush fought out their electoral battle for five weeks after the election. Even for someone who read the newspaper every day during this period, the writer and director manage put on a gripping drama. Clearly, the movie is written from the Democratic (loosing) perspective. But with the exception of how James Baker and Warren Christopher are portrayed (the come across differently when they are on TV), the film is splendid.
The Proposal
The Proposal is a lot better than I had expected after seeing the trailer for it. The short preview made it look like a silly film with a lame plot and stale humor. The heroine (Sandra Bullock) starts out a bitch. She is the chief editor of a distinguished book publisher in New York City. Showing how far women have come, she successfully harasses our hero (Ryan Reynolds). In an effort to avoid deportation from the U.S. because of a visa violation, she forces him to agree to marry her. Our hero goes along with her proposal not simply because he is weak but because he able to get something in return: The heroine agrees in return to promote our hero from her mere assistant to an independent editor at her publishing house. If you are up do date on immigration law enforcement, you will know that the IRS does not like it when you marry someone just to help them stay in the country.
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Cloud 9 (Wolke 9)
The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society's predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen's drama is not about the psychological challenges of growing old: losing your partner, falling in love again, wanting physical intimacy with someone who perhaps no longer cares for it. Dresen wants to demonstrate how we can be spooked by breaking many taboos of contemporary sensibilities. Hollywood staffs sex scenes with young women; he opens the film with a long sex scene with a woman in her late sixties and a seventy-six year old man. Even more shockingly, he gives the lead female character Inge (very well-played by Ursula Werner) the psychology of a sixteen-year-old girl who is naive, emotional, reckless, and irrational.
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The Times of Harvey Milk
This documentary about the life of Harvey Milk starts at the moment of his election to the city council of San Francisco. Compared the recent motion picture Milk, the film begins a bit slow but then becomes a wonderful depiction of what made Milk a great politician. It is quite remarkable to see him organize the gay community into a political force. All in all, the documentary is more gratifying than the motion picture because Milk playing Milk is a lot more convincing then Sean Penn playing Milk. Towards the end, the director devotes considerable time trying to figure out what motivated Dan White to shoot the major of San Francisco and Harvey Milk. No good answers emerge from White's biography. The film cannot uncover any evidence of psychological instability or sublimated aggression that periodically would have erupted. I suspect that if White hadn't had a gun readily available at home the day of the crime, he would have calmed down
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Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old. He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The reason for this is simple: unlike Allen he does not write his own scripts. When Eastwood secures a good script as in the case of Gran Torino he makes great films. Gran Torino is takes place in a decaying working class neighborhood in Michigan. Whites are moving out and relatively poor immigrants move in. Putting it mildly, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is not happy about this development. But after his wife dies, his anti-foreigner sentiments are challenged by the charms of the two teenage kids of the Vietnamese family that has moved in next door to him. Now you are treated to a wonderful story. I don't want to give it away. Go see the film.
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Rebel Without A Cause
Drama about family relations. Deep insight into the human psyche. Great film. Great emotions. Great acting by James Dean. Tribute to troubled children. Love. Nathalie Wood.
Briefly Noted: 17 Again, Bride Wars & Hildegard
Zack Efron is beautiful and fun to watch. Matthew Perry is a letdown. But 17 Again has a few good lines. Bride Wars is a real chick flick. Men will not understand what the whole thing is about. Hildegard, a film about the first part of the career of post-WW II actress and singer Hildegard Knef, is not nearly is good as La Vie en Rose, the film about the life of Edid Piaff that I reviewed in an earlier entry.
Milk
Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character. Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of playing a gay man lies beyond Penn's skills. This is crystal clear at the end of film when we see a snipped of the real Harvey Milk for a mere 30 seconds: Here it becomes painfully apparent that Penn comes no where close to capturing the real Harvey Milk. Penn's failure is a stark reminder that we all may misjudge the range of our abilities. While the film does a good job in telling the basic facts about the life of Milk, it does not illuminate at all the motive that led, Dan White, a fellow member of the city council kill Milk and the Major Moscone. The ending credits refer to a documentary called the "Life and Times of Harvey Milk."
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Hollywood at its best. The film lifts a simple idea from a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into first-class entertainment that touches on deep emotions of the human condition: being in love, getting older, and dying. Hollywood works its magic by hiring great writers (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord) who take Fitzgerald's plot line of a baby boy who is born old and gets younger and put together a narrative that is much grander than the original short story. Add to this a competent director (David Fincher), two of today's biggest stars in the leading roles (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), and a team of splendid set and make-up designers. Voila, you have all the elements of a great movie. The only weakness in this production is the editor: The film could have been half an hour shorter. But the production is so good that you can even forgive this weakness.
Lawrence of Arabia
Watching one of the great films in the history of the art form always fills me both with excitement and trepidation, particularly when the film was made a long time ago. Some films are timeless; others translate very poorly from the past into the present. Gone with the Wind bored the teenage me beyond belief because I felt that it was always clear that the actors were acting rather than truly experience the emotions of their characters. I thought the love story that allegedly existed between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhed Butler was simple fake, destroying the entire film for me. Many years ago I saw segments of Lawrence of Arabia but only now have I been able watch this three-and-a-half hour movie marathon in its entirety. One feels that the film was shot a few decades ago but this does not take away from its power. The Middle East is still in a political quagmire.
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The Baader Meinhoff Complex
In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer's union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists. Breloer's Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims, as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.
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Angels and Demons
The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The last 25 minutes bring an unexpected turn of events that left me moderately satisfied with the film.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
This fairy tale reminded me of children's theatre, a visit at the circus, and a Hollywood love story and action film all mixed into one. It is fun to watch Jonny Depp play a pirate who has been deposed by his crew and now wants to regain his position as the captain of a famed pirate sailing ship. Some of the dialogues are excellent. The writers know how to put together entertainment for all ages.
The Reader
The slim book on which the film is based is a wonderful read. Knowing the book makes the film much less exciting. The first hour feels very slow, particularly because book felt brisk. In the second hour the drama receives a jumpstart and you forget that you are sitting on perhaps a not so comfortable seat in the movie house. I read the book in one evening and savored the experience. After two hours watching The Reader I felt drained. A story nourished by the background of German society's difficulty to come to terms with what Germans did between 1933 to 1945 was turned in the film into a story about how individual lives are messed up by experiences during childhood and youth. That story we have heard a million of times. Commercially the film benefitted from being made by Hollywood.
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Slumdog Millionaire
Last time I looked, India had the second largest film industry in the world. Yet very seldom a Bollywood movie reaches the eyes of a western audience. The genius behind Slumdog Millionaire is to make Western filmmakers translate a Indian based-story into a western film format. In the process, a magnificent film has arrived on American shores that will be a strong contender for the Oscars. The film is a fairy tale for adults with great dramatic and romantic force. Its wonderful story gives you a glimpse of India--with all its contradictions--that most Americans and Europeans would have never seen. The film covers a 25-year period in the life of Jamal and his slightly older brother Salim who grow up in the slums and later are pulled apart because of differences in personalities and circumstances. Emotionally the first part of the film reminded me of Cinema Paradiso, the second part of teenage delinquency epics, and the final part of modern game show
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Tarnation
In my junior or senior year I formulated this motto: I want to turn my life into a work of art. What I had in mind was something like this: Rather than turning out work that could be construed as art I wanted to make sure that my life as a whole was esthetically compelling. Given the gifts and option available to me, I wanted to mold my life into something could compete with what is widely considered a compelling work of art. Jonathan Caouette, in his stunning autobiographical documentary Tarnation, turns his life into a work of spectacular art. But watching the film I realized that when I hatched my plan I conceived it as way to live forward. Caouette looks backward at age 30 and tries to make sense of his strange family life by construction an autobiography using only photos, super 8, answering machine messages, and video snippets that he collected since he was eleven years old.
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Frost-Nixon: The TV Interview
Even if you have already seen the 1976 film All the President's Men with Dustin Hofmann and Robert Redford playing the two Washington Post journalists (Woodward and Berstein) who exposed the Watergate scandal or the 1994 BBC documentary Watergate: Third Rate Burglary, this 1977 interview of a British journalist with Richard Nixon about Watergate is a fascinating 75-minute documentary. Initially, Nixon's arguments that he did not commit a criminal act reminded me of Bill Clinton's parsing of language when he was asked in a courtroom whether he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. But later in the interview Frost pushes Nixon into the corner where Nixon let's down his guard and makes some amazing declarations.
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Doubt
A psychologically pleasing story offers you some resolution at the end. John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of Doubt, denies you this pleasure. He errs on the side of wanting to teach you too much. He wants you to be in doubt at the end of the film and this means never revealing what really happened. The film takes place in a catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. The head nun (Meryl Streep) suspects that the school's priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is abusing his position of power. She harbors no doubt and uses all her political skill to get the priest to resign. In the end, after the priest is gone, she admits to her confidant that she is in doubt but we never find out if the priest did anything wrong. If you are someone who already knows that we never can be absolutely sure, the movie will not give you much.
The Edge of Heaven
The German title of the film (Auf der anderen Seite) means something like “on the other side”. Fatih Akin, the German writer and director of Turkish background has wonderful material to work with (growing up with Turkish parents in Germany) but lacks the skill the shape the material into a first class film. He comes across like a recent film school graduate who received money to turn his school project into full feature film: the writing is unfocused and, worse, he shoots the film in such a way that you always remember that everything is an act rather than real. By not allowing the fundamental magic of movies to unfold where you loose yourself into the plot as if you were watching a real thing, Aktin is making it unnecessarily hard for the viewer. I recommend that you watch instead The Lives of Others which shows you what a good filmmaker can do with powerful material.
Twilight
Most people I know woke up to the full powers of the flesh sometimes in their second decade. Some experience this discovery as 'no big deal;' others are thrown off balance. Trying to explore this new territory with some success often proves dauntingly difficult. Many films have been made about teenage romance. A few of them are delightful to the adult mind. Twilight is one of them. It takes you to a different place: A truly dangerous love affair that every parent, for once, would have a right to oppose: Do you want your teenage daughter fall in love with a classmate who happens to be Vampire? Visually, the film takes you to stunning views and mood of the Pacific Northwest. You don't want to miss these vistas.
Good Night, and Good Luck
At the Oscars award show not long after Good Night, and Good Luck came out in 2005, the host made a joke about the long-term bachelor George Clooney who directed and starred in the film. It went something like this: “George Clooney is the sexiest man alive. He can date any women he wants. And he does. But Clooney is notorious for not wanting to commit. Recently, he went on a first date with beautiful young actress. She was all smitten. Like a true gentlemen he took her home at night and at her door he said to her: “Good night, and good luck.” This joke at Oscars was much better than the film about the journalist Edward R. Murrow who helped to bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy with CBS news program. (Murrow always ended in program with the line “Good night, and good luck.”)
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
As far as action films go, the previous episodes of the Indiana Jones franchise left me pretty unmoved. Archeological treasure hunts were never my cup of tea. For this reason, I could have easily done without Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But here I am on the airplane. What the heck, let’s see what the 60 year-old Harrison Ford is up to. It was a pretty smart move to make the 22-year old Shia LaBeouf the co-star of the film. Without LeBeouf, Harrison Ford acting like young Tarzan in the rain forest would have looked entirely ridiculous. The film starts out terrible and becomes a little better. I had the most fun watching Cate Blanchett in the role of Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, a crazy Soviet scientist. Just like in I am not there she towers over everyone else. The last James Bond movie (Casino Royal) or the Jason Bourne films are a lot better.
Wall E
If you are like me and wonder how Pixar can pull off one creative blockbuster after another, here is an interesting peek behind the scenes of the studio. In an interview the writer and director of Finding Nemo and Wall E, Andrew Stanton, intimates that Finding Nemo did not work as a film until very late in the production process when creative team figured late in the production process that they needed to change the personality of Memo of give the film its captivating dramatic force. Pixar movies, we learn, are not the superb product from day one, but gradually improve. Wall E took over a decade from the initial conception to the completed film. The finished product is yet again a masterpiece. Unlike previous Pixar films, Wall E has a dead serious subject. Planet earth is a post-apocalyptic rubble field, inhabitable by humans. The only creatures left behind is the little robot Wall-E and a cockroach that roam what appears to be the greater New York area.
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3:10 to Yuma
To test the picture quality of a Blue-Ray high definition TV video disc, I watched 3:10 to Yuma. This western, starring Russel Crow and Christian Bale, has beautiful landscape photography that is much sharper on Blue-Ray than anything I have seen on TV before. The film itself was pretty mediocre except for the last 20 minutes, when it becomes psychologically interesting. Good and evil suddenly turn and you don’t feel like you have seen this kind of movie before. I had to watch these last minutes twice because I did not understand a crucial line that unexpectedly turns the entire plot.
300
300 is different from any movie I had seen before. The closest would be Chinese films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with the magical fighting scenes. Yet these Chinese films still are far from where 300 takes you. For my eyes, the film pushes boundaries of cinema as an art form. 300 tells the story of a historical battle in which 300 Spartan battled hundreds of thousand Persians intent on subjugating all Greek city states. (I cannot tell more without giving it away). I typically don’t like brutal, bloody films. But the makers of the film based on graphic novel (never new they existed) prove that even slaughter can be made artful. Anyone who wants to see a cinematic innovation and is able to stomach some really terrifying carnage, rent 300.
Mama Mia!
I was the first one to race out of the movie hall. Mamia Mia!, this was worse than I had feared. I did not even get a great tour of the Greek islands. I was the first to leave the cinema. Now I was watching people coming out. Women smiled, men looked pained, albeit a bit proud they took their lady to the movies. Cinema, in my view, has rendered opera unnecessary. What makes a great movie is that, unlike opera or its modern incarnation--the musical--, it makes you forget that you are watching a staged reality. The best movies become lifelike. You think you are watching reality. In Mamia Mia! you never forget that you are watching a show. A good playwright like Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) could have managed to write a decent script around the songs of Abba. But Catherine Johnson lacked the skills and produced childish superficial love story. Pierce Brosnan (the former James Bond) is not able to act out his inane role. Meryl Streep does better with hers,
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Tropic Thunder
There is a reason why in most films different people take on the roles of the writer, director, and the lead actor: Rarely is one and the same person equally good at all these jobs. Tropic Thunder stars Ben Stiller, and is written and directed by Ben Stiller. That was a mistake. When I saw the trailer a few weeks ago, my hopes soared. Perhaps Tropic Thunder was going to be as funny as There is something about Mary. Far from it, the new Ben Stiller vehicle only provokes a few laughs. The story (a film crew making war movie in Vietnam comes under real attack) is rather weak, a mumble jumble of ideas that Stiller had over the years. The best part of the movie was Tom Cruise, who plays a slimy, foul-mouthed, overly hairy Hollywood producer. Cruise steals the show from Stiller, even though he only played a minor character, in a sideline of film. I am not going to see another film written and directed by Stiller any time soon.
The Dark Knight
When Heath Ledger died early this year, I was deeply disturbed by his death. I surprised myself by the strength of my sadness. What made it so difficult to accept his untimely death was my sense that this extraordinary talent could have mesmerized us for decades to come with his acting skills. The best thing about The Dark Knight is Ledger’s performance. How can a twenty-eight year old play the Joker, who has a much older persona? Having seen all few the recent spider man movies, I felt the Dark Knight breaks little new ground except for being much darker than any of the other films in this genre. Running 152 minutes, I left the theatre feeling overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending battle scenes between good and evil. The plot could have been streamlined by an hour without losing anything.
Sex and the City
The four ladies of HBO’s “Sex and the City” comedy series continue their adventure in New York. The writers infused the film with a good sense of fun. At times it is also a bit sexually daring, but for the most part it falls into the genre of a tame romantic comedy. This is not a movie that will make it into the top 250 hundred films of all time but it offers light entertainment if that is what you are seeking.
Briefly Noted Airline Movies: Married Life et al.
Flawless was better than my neighbor on a previous flight made it sound. It has an interesting psychological twist at the end. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is more fun to watch than the first Harry Potter, a flick that bored me out of my mind. Leatherheads, directed and strarring George Clooney is mediocre screwball comedy. Married Life is the best argument for staying single yet the best for the four films.
Penelope
My expectations about this airplane film were modest. A family is cursed and the fist female bay will be born with a pig’s nose. Ok. A little children’s movie. Yet to my surprise Penelope is one of the most clever films I have seen in a while. It is Cinderella, Romeo and Julia, Miss Piggy and teenage beauty obsession all mixed together in a magical realistic fairy tale reminiscent of Charles Dickens. Few movies can please both the young and adult mind. This one can.
We Own the Night
We Own the Night transports you back into the disco era. Drugs were a big part the Studio 54 scene (I visited famous disco once before it closed and marveled about Grace Jones’s rooftop haircut). One son of a family of senior police officials son a night club. Before long he has to choose between his law enforcement family and the vast opportunities given to him by the Russian owner of the club. Skip this film and instead watch the documentary of Studio 54 produced by VH1.
No Country For Good Men & There Will Be Blood
Both films have high ambitions: they want to capture the spirit driving American society. In the Coen brothers’ No Country For Good Men America is at its core only greed and violence. The writer and director of There Will Be Blood offer a more balanced and accurate depiction of America. There is violence but there is also hard work and tender feelings, especially toward children. There is greed but also wealth generation that benefits the community. There Will Be Blood is slow because it strives to portray in detail just how difficult it was to develop the American continent. Daniel Day Lewis deservedly received an Oscar for his unusual performance as the lead character.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry reminded me of an episode of the Love Boat in the 1980s. After yet another romantic disappointment, a lady decides that she had it with men. She meets a notorious womanizer on the boat. To get the woman "into the sack", the gigolo plays the role of a man who claims that he also never wants to start a new relationship. To make their commitment to abstinence even stronger, the womanizer proposes after a few encounters that they should sleep in the same bed andprove to themselves that they are capable of foregoing sex. The lady agrees, but her hand reaches over to his side of the bed before longThe next morning the love boat has a new romantic pair. Back to Chuck & Larry. Chucks wife has died and he no longer is entitled to spousal benefits from the City of New York, which would help his children in case he would also die. Chuck asks his womanizing best fried to pretend that he is his domestic partner.
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I am not there
About three years ago I acquired a collection of the best Bob Dylan records. I was surprised how many songs I knew, reminding me just how influential Dylan's music had been during the past four decades. I am not there is an artistic experiment that manages to be a total failure. Todd Haynes wants to tell the story of Bob Dylan by showing him through entirely different characters, ranging from a young black vagabond kid to middle-aged cowboy. At the end of the film I yearned to simply listening to Dylan's songs rather than seeing the collage of biographies of different people that are supposed to stand for the life of Dylan. Dylan's songs tell you more about him than this "art-film". The one saving grace is Cate Blanchet, who plays one of the characters representing Bob Dylan. She does a much better job than all of the other stars (Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger) who had signed to represent through a role Bob Dylan.
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Hancock
You have never seen a super hero movie like this one. The people who made this film re-invented the format. I admit it: I was jealous of the creativity the writers show off in this cool film. Hancock is a homeless drunk with real temper issues. Watch him as he is trying to work out his issues while is keeping LA safe.
Live Free or Die Hard
Die Hard is not the kind of title that lures me into the theatre. But one day in a hotel room somewhere around the globe I came across a TV channel that showed one of the earlier Die Hard movies. I don’t remember which one it was. It played in New York City. The film was entertaining. I heard that Die Hard 4 had a new twist. Yesterday I needed some distraction from work and decide to watch Bruce Willis back in action as John McClane. Willis’s stunts defy the laws of physics, but the drama is pretty clever. A group of terrorists is shutting the entire country down by taking control of all U.S. major computer networks that underpin the digital economy. Apparently in the past few weeks we came close to a complete meltdown of the global financial system. Against this backdrop, the film felt timely and scary. Bruce Willis saves the day. In real life, one small town cop will not save the country from a systematic failure of the federal government.
Bee Movie
Shrek 1 and 2 bored me sufficiently that I never watched the entire movie. Could the makers of the Shrek sequel come up with an animation film that could compete with Pixar creations? Yes, but only after teaming up with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Having watched a very funny trailer for the film a few months ago, I wanted to see the Bee Movie. Just like the Pixar movies, this film puts a smile on your face. Ohhh, life is good when someone as funny as skillful as Jerry Seinfeld gives a young bee the ability to talk to humans and file a class action in the New York State superior court. Enjoy!
La Vie en Rose
La Vie en Rose is the mirror image of August Rush. Telling the story Edid Piaf's exotic life, the film easily feels real and authentic. For an ear that grew up on pop and classical music, it is difficult to connect to the French style of singing in the 1920s and 1930s. I could not hear what made Edid Piaf's singing so extraordinary. By contrast, the first time August Rush touches a guitar to make music, it is apparent that this kid is a genius. You can see and hear it. I found La Vie en Rose to be in a similar league as Ray and Walk the Line. In regard to the superb acting, the most compelling scene takes place on the first date that Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) has with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Cotillard task is to show in her face that Piaf, who grew up in a whorehouse and has had a long list of lovers, is smitten with Marcel in a way she had never felt before (a "coup de foudre" as the French would say). Cotillard deserved the Oscar this year for this scene alone.
August Rush
Enjoying music seems to be hardwired into our brains. The wild success of the iPod is strong testimony that everyone loves music. I have yet to meet someone who does not like to listen to melodic sounds. August Rush is a 10-year old boy stuck in an orphanage somewhere just outside of New York City. He deciphers music in the many regular sounds of everyday life. He also believes that he can hear musical messages from his parents. His fellow orphans think that August is just a freak. One day August decides to hitchhike to Manhattan to look for his parents. Within 24 hours August morphs into a child prodigy who would have given young Mozart a run for his money. For once I can give away how the story ends: happily. Repeatedly deus ex musica comes to aid the plot. All the stars align perfectly at every single juncture to bring the story to the one conclusion that was possible in a universe ruled by a micro-managing, all-powerful, music-loving God:
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Charlie Wilson's War
Hollywood gives you an entertaining history lesson on how the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a likable congressman who is more interested in alcohol and good-looking women than passing any law. While he lacks diligence and determination on the congressional floor, he recruits what he regards a dream-team staff: all staffers are female and one is looking better than the next. Wilson has no legislative record whatsoever until he becomes aware of the plight of the Afghani people who are fighting the Soviet Army at enormous costs to their own population. After sleeping with a rich Texas Redneck (Julia Roberts), Charlie becomes serious and maneuvers Congress into providing the Afghani people with all the money they need to win the war. The most enjoyable character in the film is Philip Seymour Hofmann who plays iconoclastic CIA officer in charge of helping the Afghani effort against the evil empire.
Juno
It is difficult for me to write these lines about such a charming film. The plot has a number of unfortunate flaws. Juno, the character and the actress playing the role, are magnificent. But the story feels constructed by a writer rather than based on real lived experience. Juno is barely sixteen and seduces a nerdy classmate into having sex. She is not using any contraceptives and falls pregnant. The entire film is devoted to her struggle with figuring how to deal with her situation. What she does do in the end does not make sense to me. Her stepmother and her father were an option that she did not consider at all. It is great fun to watch Juno and her family compete with one another hurling out comic lines. You don't hear regular family dinner conversations the way they occur at Juno's house.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
The first 45 minutes of this sequel about the life of Queen Elizabeth are the most gratifying film opening I have experienced in months. It is not the plot that glues your eyes to the screen but the way the director shoots the scenes and moves quickly from one location to another. The camera is always in motion, filming from unexpected perspectives. You feel like being introduced to a whole new way of film-making. Unfortunately the director is not able to sustain this wonderful approach and the film settles into more familiar grooves. Since we know how the story will end (Elizabeth will not have children and she will triumph to make it her Golden Age), the second half of the film is merely good. Clive Owen as Mr. Releigh shows that he can also play a charming happy fellow. The historical setting is beautifully rendered, except for two computer generated scenes of a large forest and a battle on sea which seem--well--computer-generated rather than real.
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License to Wed
One of the big ironies of modern society is that we require people to obtain licenses for important and trivial tasks before we let them lose onto the world. I remember being told in my late teens. �The of two most important decisions in life about choosing the right job and the right wife.� For almost every job we need to demonstrate qualification before we can get hired. But when it comes to marriage anyone having reached the appropriate age can self-declare to be ready for the task of committing for a life-time. License to Wed thinks this to be ridiculous. The reverend Frank (Robin Williams) believes that a couple should first go through a rigorous program of examinations before they can be declared fit to marry. Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) enlists reverend Frank to help her figure out whether Ben Jones (John Krasinski) is the right one. I thought that the film�s premise was clever but the execution left much to be desired.
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Road to Perdition
This dark, prohibition era, film is a bit hard to swallow. By design it is unlike The Untouchables where good triumphs over evil. Human life does not count for much in a Mafia-ruled Midwestern town. The film has a number of technical flaws that disturb the attentive viewer. The most intriguing feature of the film is how the narrative begins and ends. The opening words run: There are many stories about Michael Sullivan. Some say he was a decent man. Some say there was no good in him at all. But I once spent 6 weeks on the road with him, in the winter of 1931. This is our story. The final words bring the narrative to a wonderful closure: I saw then that my father's only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931.
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The Invisible
High School Movie. Not long until graduation. Boy wants to become a writer in New York, escaping his controlling widow mother. Girl, after losing her mother, is angry and assumes the role of a violent troublemaker and gang leader. Girl kills boy, smacking him once too hard on the head. But there is a twist. Taking the Christian idea of an eternal soul, boy is somewhere between life and death, between a bodily and merely spiritual existence. The boy has a body that is invisible to everyone except other dead creates and us viewers. The virtually dead body of the boy is lying dying in a hole in the woods and now his invisible self tries to get in contact with the living before he cannot be brought back to life. It one point towards this film reminded me of Romeo and Juliet, only with a different ending...
Ratatouille
Brad Bird (writer, director) and Pixar have done it again. I continue to stand in awe of the dazzling imagination this team is bringing to the movies. Visually and conceptually Ratatouille is exquisitely pleasing. You don't feel that this new film is a tiny bit repetitive of their previous effort The Incredibles. Guenter Grass selected the rat as the central character in his 1980s fable about human self-destruction and an apocalypse after which only rats will survive on our planet. Bird turns Grass on his head. Bird's rat Remy does not want to live off human garbage but instead desires to eat the best human cuisine can offer. Remy's inspiration is France most famous chef Gusteau, whose book "Everyone can cook" Remy has studied extensively. Remy also watches Gusteau secretly on TV. When Remy is washed from the French countryside to Paris, an incredible culinary adventure awaits him. Join Remy in Paris!
Next
The film invents a skill that no human has ever possessed: to see for two seconds reliably into the future. Such a capability comes in handy. You can win against the Casino, you can prevent a robber from killing two people, and more.Yet our hero (Nicolas Cage) is ambivalent about his skill. It helps him with his small time magician act in Vegas and allows him to improve his income by beating the blackjack dealer. But during childhood it also subjected him to a visits with an endless number of psychologists and counselors who wanted to help this strange little kid. When the government now identifies him as someone who might be able to stop terrorist from triggering a nuclear bomb in LA, our hero is not eager to sign up. But a dedicated FBI agent (miscast by Julianne Moore) and the terrorists who learn about his skills are not willing to let him mend his own business. Meanwhile our hero has discovered that in one instance he can see
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Ocean's 13
Ocean's 11 struck me as sterile. The third episode of the George Clooney's star vehicle has considerable charm. An old friend of Ocean (Clooney) gets screwed by a ruthless Vegas casino owner (Al Pacino). Ocean rounds up his gang of thieves to rectify this injustice. I loved the final sentence when George Clooney and Matt Damon say "good-bye" to each other on the Vegas airport. Damon: "I see you when I see you."
Spiderman 3
It takes imaginative writers to stretch a story across multiple films. Spiderman 3 lacked such talent. Compared to the first two installments, the film feels uninspired, repetitive and contrived. Audiences can only stomach so much transformation in the lead character before they will turn way.
The Last Mimzy
On a previous flight this film was offered to me for lunch. I passed. Without any sound the beginning looked slow and quite lame. On this new flight I tuned in and discovered that the story has unexpected depth. Extraterrestrial creatures have come to earth to recapture what was lost in perfecting their ability to clone people: the human soul. The ET creatures have one last chance to copy that human quality before they will be too far away to reach earth. For those of us who had security blankets for many years, the film conjures up familiar feelings from childhood.
Fracture
Anthony Hopkins plays a sociopath similar to the one he portrayed in Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins' character shoots his wife when he discovers she is cheating on him with a police officer. Without any remorse, he tries to get off the hook for the murder by outsmarting the good-looking district attorney. The film is not terrible, but it also contains one basic flow: we don't know the husband well enough to understand why he would kill his wife. What propelled him remains an utter mystery, lending the whole movie an artificial character.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Isn't it interesting that people have such a soft spot for bank robbers? Forcing a grandmother to hand over all her savings and shooting her right in the head would not make a good story. But robbing a bank does not stir peoples' indignation. The impersonal bank is not perceived to be a real victim. And if clients are scared to death during the robbery, does this upset the public? Well, if no one gets hurt during the action that's just the cost of an exciting robbery. It requires some brinkmanship and the clients should be grateful for being part of such a coup! Buch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) make a living robbing trains and banks in the waning days of Wild West. The tolerance for such a line of work is clearly on the decline out West. Butch and the Kid find it harder and harder to make ends meet. The movie starts slow but it turns out to be a very special Western.
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Hairspray
This comic musical is a lot of fun! It is not the history lesson about the struggle to integrate black people into mainstream America that captured my heart. I also did not laugh much. The film is not particularly funny. But the music and dancing is so infectious that many a times I wanted to leap from my chair and start moving my entire body. The choreography is flawless. My body is still moving to the sound of this wonderfully sexy film.
The Bourne Ultimatum
How would you feel if you suddenly found out that you were a totally different person until a few years ago and if you did not remember anything about your previous life? (My fear is that I might discover out that I was George Bush. :)) For two installments Jason Bourne has been trying to recover his personal history. So far his enemies have prevented him for finding out who is really was before he lost his memory. In this third episode Bourne pulls out all the stops to discover his identity. This is the best action movie of the summer. Paul Greengrass directs the film with a sure hand, changing the pace frequently enough for the viewer to breath before the next action sequence glues you back into your seat.
Blades of Glory
This newest effort by Will Farrell is not nearly as funny as Bodega Nights. The basic idea behind the movie has some charms. Let's use the gender wars to go for a real gender bender. Two guys compete in the Olympic pair ice-skating competition. I have been told many times that the top female player on the tennis circuit would have not chance against any of the top forty players on the men's circuit. But in ice dance you imagine that female grace will make it impossible for two guys to win over the judges and win the gold medal in pair ice-skating.
Premonition
Sandra Bullocks plays a good-looking mother who is visited by the most awful kind of deja vu experiences you can imagine. She no longer knows what is real and what is simply a hallucination. I was moved by the film because it artfully highlights how we can quickly fall apart when our brains are no longer able to provide one coherent take on reality in which earlier events happen earlier and later event happen later--where we can remember things in the right order. Speaking of deja vu moments. The other day I sat next to a lady at dinner and I thought I had seen her many times. My brain is now scanning memories for her Doppelgaenger. She agreed to meet her if I can find the twin. I am curious to see their reactions when they first meet because they look eerily alike. Twins separated at birth without them knowing it? Uhhh.
Wild Hogs
This is probably the most inane movie I have seen in a long time. The characters are fake; the story is shallow. But here comes the real shocker: the viewing public made the film the bestselling DVD in month of September. Famous actors (Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta, Marisa Tomei) seem to be able to sell stupid movies!
Terms of Endearment
It is difficult to put this film into standard categories. I would call it a tragic comedy. Set in Texas and Iowa in the 1960s, the film wonderfully captures the life and transformation of middle class America. The constant bickering between the mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter (Debra Winger) reminded me of A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando. But unlike the later film, Terms of Endearment does not feel out of date. It covers about 30 years in the life of tough-minded mother and strong-willed daughter. It has moments of great beauty. Jack Nicolson plays the mother's austronaut neigbour, who not only chases young girls, but also develops a taste for the mother after she has her first grandchild.
In the Land of Women
Terrible, terrible, even for an airplane movie! The movie is lame, cheesy and uninspired. Carter gets dumped by his famous L.A. girlfriend. Next he moves in with his ailing grandmother to write a novel about his high school time he has not been able to write for the past 8 years. Confirming that location is as important for romantic success as it is in retailing, Carter's grandmother lives next door to a gorgeous mother (Meg Ryan) and her even more beautiful 16-year-old-daugther. This love triangle leads to predictable conflict. At the end grandma is dead, the mother continues her suburban life, and the daughter realizes that she loves the best friend of her former boyfriend, and not Carter. As far Carter is concerned, he returns home with a solid manuscript, but is not longer with any woman.
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Norbit
Eddie Murphy latest comic film brings Cinderella into the hood. Little Norbit grows up in an orphanage. His bliss comes to end when his buddy Kate gets adopted. Norbit is not the smartest fellow in the universe. But who says that Cinderella was a genius. This film has very funny scenes and at times is even moving. Murphy wrote, and directed the film, in addition to playing three different people, adult Norbit, his fat wife, and the Chinese owner of the orphanage.
The Namesake
Biographical films often stumble precisely because they try to cover an entire lifetime. The viewer finds it disorienting when multiple actors play one and the same person during childhood, teenage years, adulthood and old age. Just when you have gotten used to a person and learned enough to feel a connection with her, a new actor severs the emotional tie you have developed to the character. Compressing a lifetime into 120 minutes makes it difficult to cover any period in sufficient detail that you feel you learned enough about the character to understand his or her actions. The Namesake solves these challenges by only covering the first 30 years of Gogol’s life and by giving his parents, who are always played by same actors, equal standing in the film. The trailer for the film gave no hint that The Namesake is a marvelous film about the challenges of growing up in America as second generation Indian immigrants.
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Shooter
Shooter is a reaction to the shenanigans of the Bush administration. Inspired by the deeds of Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative fellow travelers, the film suggests that a few powerful officials can manipulate the entire machinery of government to pursue policies that would never be condoned if the public truly understood what is going on. In Shooter, a senator gets away with organizing the assassination a foreign leader who is sitting next to the president. Recruited to help protect the president, a former special operations soldier (the shooter, aka Mark Wallberg), is getting framed for the assassination. When justice is not available to the Shooter, he follows the West traditions and takes justice his own hands, killing the conspirators. The premise of the entire film is unrealistic. Now that the public has realized that it was duped into believing the IRAQ war was necessary, the Bush government would not succeed in getting the U.S. into an unnecessary war.
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Breach
Breach chronicles how the mot damaging traitor in the history of the FBI was caught. This film has non of action sequences that made Shooter suspenseful. Robert Hanssen, who sold very important secrets to the Soviet Union, is portrayed as deeply religious catholic man who goes to church every day. The film implicitly suggests that no direct link exists between religiosity and moral behavior. What the film cannot answer, perhaps because such a question cannot be answered at all, is why a person like Hanssen would betray his country and send American spies in the Soviet Union to their death. One is left with the realization that human behavior in some cases defies all explanation. For a culture that prizes coming up with reasons for everything this is a bit hard to swallow.
Flags of our Fathers
A few weeks ago, I sang the highest praises for Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. My expectation was that Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers would be an equally good movie, telling the story of the battle for Iwo Jima from the American side. To my great surprise, the prequel is stunningly inferior to Letters from Iwo Jima. The story of Flags of our Fathers seems historically inaccurate. The war scenes appear staged as if it had a much smaller budget than Letters from Iwo Jima. Both film want are anti-war movies but in Flags of our Fathers the anti-war message feels contrived. On all levels Letters from Iwo Jima is superior to Flags of our Fathers. It is almost impossible believe that the same director and to some extent the same screenplay writer (Paul Haggis) are responsible for both films. The fact that the same people could make films of so different quality goes to show that the original story behind the film is crucial for making a great film.
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Catch and Release
One should not be a reviewer of a film in which a colleague has a gig. Richard Roeper (who together with Roger Ebert forms the Chicago Sun-Times film critic team) said that he did not like the film based on the trailer, but came to like it quite a bit. This is chick’s film and not one that Roeper would have praised if his colleague Kevin Smith did play a role (Smith sometimes replaces Roger Ebert in the critics seat). Catch and Release has an interesting twist for a romantic comedy. It opens with a tragedy (the fiancé dies just before the wedding and the wedding is turned into the funeral.) If you are female and you are in the mood for a romantic comedy where romance often fails, you might not be disappointed. But I strongly recommend that before seeing the film you read the first chapter on America in Pamela Druckerman’s book Lust in Translation. You will have much deeper understanding why the characters in the film feel the way they do.
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Bridge to Terabithia
Many people claim that it is harder to make good friends when you are an adult. I am not sure if this is true. Adults, perhaps having been disappointed more than once, may be less open than the average child to let a new person into their lives. The film celebrates the power of friendship and the human imagination. Leslie, the daughter of two writers, has a mind so fertile with imaginary images that she can teach Jesse how to leave behind reality and create their own make-believe. The two become best friends until something tragic happens. It is a great film for children, but it also has some sad moments that might be a bit depressing for too young children.
The Painted Veil
The film starts out slow and seems predictable. But after thirty minutes it takes unexpected turns. Beautiful landscape photos of China and a novel approach to fixing relationship problems give this movie considerable charm. This is the second film version of W. Somerset Maugham novel by the same name. Naomi Watt now has the role that was played by Greta Garbo in the 1934 film.
The Holidays
Two ladies (Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) suffer romantic disappointments and feel they need to go away for the holidays. The swap their homes (LA and the British countryside) and want to chill out without men. Easier said than done… The trailer for this romantic comedy turned me off, but I was pleasantly surprised by The Holidays. Once again I realized that I am in love with Cameron Diaz and Jude Law. Both are so fun to watch and together in the same picture they present a true feast for the eyes. Jack Black is miscast in the role. He can give an Oscar quality performance in a real comedy such as School of Rock but looks weird in a dramatic role.
Heaven
The film reminded me that good art is not artificial. Good art heightens our awareness of reality. Heaven fails because it feels contrived and artificial. Cate Blanchett has one scene in which she unleashes her full acting ability. But she cannot make up for a week script written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, who I admired greatly for the “Three Colors” triology. Tom Twyker (the diretor) covered much more compellingly the idea that love may become more important than life in his splendid The Princess and the Warrior.” The only pleasing feature of the film was the magnificent Italian landscape. But if you want to see a beautiful southern Europe, watch Twyker’s recent movie The Perfume: The story of a murderer which has an amazing plot. The Perfume is a great piece of art.
Miss Potter
Miss Potter portrays the life of the best-selling British children’s book author Beatrix Potter (1866-1943). Many authors invent fantastic stories while leading relatively boring lives. Miss Potter falls into this category. A film about her life has very little drama to work with. Not much happens on the screen. This is the first time I was able to write a report on the plane while watching this film. I had much more fun with the previous collaboration of Renée Zellweger and Ewan Mcgregor in the comedy Down with Love.
Freedom Writers
The film tells the true-life story of Erin Gruwell, a magnificent teacher in Long Beach, California, who turns a class of violent teenagers into successful students, who leave their gang background behind to become published authors. The film has moments that are truly inspiring and moving. But too often banal or cheesy lines creep into the dialogues. The best part of the film is the music that is wonderfully communicates atmosphere violent American ghettos.
Happy Feet
This musical on ice cannot compete with Pixar’s animated films as far as plot is concerned. But some if its Southpole animations can rival what Pixar pulled off in Finding Nemo. The film initially covers similar territory as The March of Penguins but then turns into a fantasy about singing Penguins. One Penguin cannot sing, but he makes up for with his dance abilities. The story is thin but the animations and music keep you rocking in your chair.
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Good Bye Lenin turned the collapse of the German “Democratic” Republic into a comedy. There is not a single moment in The Lives of Others you feel like laughing. The film chronicles how an estimated 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants recruited by Ministry for State Security (Stasi) helped the communist party to keep control over society by spying on and neutralizing everyone who seemed to harbor doubts about the regime. If you have ever traveled to East Germany you will recognize immediately that the director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has captured superbly the character and ambience of this German version of a 20th century police state. The Lives of Others reminded me that it was simply bad geographic luck that stripped East German of the freedoms that enjoyed by their West German compatriots. I think the film resonates with audiences around world because of the events after September 11.
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Elizabeth
In search of one of Cate Blanchett’s great performances, I rented the historical drama Elizabeth. Blanchett received an Oscar nomination for the role, but lost out to Gweneth Paltrow who played the object of William Shakespeare’s desire in Shakespeare in Love. I suspect that Paltrow won not because she was more in love than Elizabeth. Paltrow simply had the more luck in landing a love story that is cheerful, sassy, and as far as I remember has a romantic ending. Blanchett’s Elizabeth love life starts promising (she is young, her lover is good looking and charming (Ralph Fiennes plays is the counterpart in both films), but then turns turns sour and barren. Without Blanchett’s superb acting, Elizabeth would have been rather disappointing. Although Elizabeth repeatedly says that she only wants to do what is best for her people, we never see commoners. The entire film takes place in the social sphere of the court
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Letters from Iwo Jima
War movies fall into three categories. Government-funded propaganda that is designed to rally the civilian population, summer action movies that hope to thrill youngsters with exhilarating battle scenes in which good in the end triumphs over evil, and finally critical films that want to undermine the very premise that war is something anyone should desire. Iwo Jima firmly belongs to the third genre. I cannot recall ever watching a war movie that is able make you believe you are on the battlefield, trying to duck the bullets flying a few centimeters from your nose. Steve Spielberg’s movie of the Allied landing on the coast of Normandy (Saving Private Ryan) went very far in showing show you what it must feel like to be on the battlefield. But Iwo Jima pulls you even closer to experiencing the fear of bodily injury and death that must grip a soldier who is surrounded by much stronger forces and who realizes that it is just a matter of time until he is killed.
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Notes on a Scandal
Don't! Stop! Don't! Stop! Don't... Don't stop! I thought that Notes on a Scandal was a film about one of these notorious conservative British politicians caught up in a sex scandal. Wrong! The scandal involves people from a very different social group. Not knowing anything about the plot made the film all the more suspenseful. Notes on a Scandal manages to pull off what Little Children failed to do: drive you to the edge of your seat. Call it, "Adults Playing With Fire." I was lured into the theatre by a recent profile of Cate Blanchett in the New Yorker (see below). The article celebrated her as one of the great actresses of our time. This was not on display in Babel or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. According to the article, her acting in Notes on a Scandal is excellent. Indeed, the film is very good, but not because of Blanchett. She is responsible for its only two flaws:
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The Last King of Scotland
If I could decide the Oscars all by myself, the King (Forest Whitaker) and the Queen (Helen Mirren) would receive the 2007 Oscars for best actor. (Postscript February 26: they did win the Oscars!) The two roles could not be more different. But Whitaker and Mirren individually deliver one of the best performances in the history of cinema portraying a real human being. Mirren plays the reigning Queen of England (see my review of a few weeks ago) whereas Forest Whitaker plays the Idi Amin, who brutally ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Forest Whitaker has given many fine performances, for example in The Crying Game. Playing the complicated and contradictory personality of Amin has handed Whitaker a role that I am sure will become his defining performance. The feelings you experience in The Last King of Scotland could not be more different from The Queen. The Queen satisfies one’s curiosity by seemingly offering you a look into the private life of the British Royal family.
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Little Children
Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson) meet on a playground in a suburb of Boston just as their marriage is entering a difficult period. They feel an immediate attraction. Little Children chronicles how people who are stuck in a staid, lifeless marriage struggle when they develop extra-marital romantic feelings, unexpectedly standing before a temptation they thought only other people could yield to. The interesting part of the Little Children, however, is not this main plot, but the story of the other characters that show up in the community of Sarah and Brad: a man who had been in prison for exposing himself to little children, a crazy ex-policemen who makes it his mission to protect the community from this "pervert," the mother of the "pervert" who tries to get her son's mind off children by finding him a wife through newspaper ads;
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Babel
With Babel Alejandro González Iñárritu has established himself in my eyes as one of the most innovative filmmakers of our times. For Iñárritu and his longtime writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, life is not a cakewalk. The basic sensibility running through Love is a Bitch, 21 Gramms and now Babel is deep pessimism: at any moment life can turn into a horrible tragedy. Babel tries to flesh out that heartbreak is not the special fate of one country or a people but rather the universal human condition. People are struck by tragedy independent of whether they live in the U.S., Morocco, Japan or Mexico, for example. Iñárritu keeps you on the edge of your seat because you don’t know how much tragedy will unfold before you eyes. The camera travels back and forth between these four countries and Iñárritu surprises you more than once showing you perspectives on everyday life that you have not seen before. The film is heavy, but it is a rewarding experience.
When the Levees Broke
Spike Lee is no Ken Burns. His “documentary” about the human tragedy that unfolded during and after the Hurricane “Katrina” hit the Gulf Coast is not unfair but unbalanced. Lee’s cause is a noble one. He wants to draw attention to the suffering experienced by the residents of New Orleans even a year after the catastrophe. The moviemaker Lee has a great eye for ordinary Americans who in front of his camera can act out their justified rage about the failures of the Federal government. But letting individual victims provide a oral history of their plights cannot explain exactly why the response of the Federal government was so poor and why the Federal government has not made good on its promised to rebuild New Orleans. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the chief villain in Lee’s morality tale. Yet not a single FEMA representative is interviewed to present their side.
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The Queen
The trailer for film turned me off, but friends and critics insisted that I watch The Queen. “It is a really great movie,” everyone told me. The first scene already felt much less staged and invented than the dialogue between Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth featured in the trailer. The film is not great. What it has going for itself is a spectacular performance by Helen Mirren. Her performance single-handedly carries movie forward and manages to plaster over a great deal of its fundamental flaws. The film focuses on the week after Princess Diana’s death and depicts how Tony Blair, just appointed Prime Minister, helps the Queen fix a public relations disaster that was making the Queen widely unpopular. The film portrays the private conversations of the Royal family. But the Royal family almost certainly did not tell the film makers what did said and felt during that week.
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Supersize Me!
In the tradition of pre-modern pharmacists who would test remedies on their own body, Morgan Spurlock decides to eat at McDonalds three times a day for a month and let a battery of doctors keep track of how his body would react to such a diet. I knew that McDonald’s was not good for you: A nutritionist warned me 5 years ago that one should never east fast food although it tastes often so good. But the film documents just how bad fast food is and why it is a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic that is striking the United States. After 30 days on a McDonald diet, Spurlock gained 15% body weight and his organs were showing clear signs of sickness. The doctors who are monitoring his health during the 30-day period counsel him to immediately stop the experiment. The movie is a bit slow, but anyone with children should see this film.
Casino Royale
My teenage self loved James Bond. Part of becoming an adult was letting go of 007. I remember walking out of a movie theatre in the early 1990s, saying to myself: “Bond has lost any resemblance to a real human being. This cartoon-like character is just plain old silly. I am never going to watch a Bond movie again!” Two Bond movies later I was part of a captured audience on a transatlantic flight to London. I had to admit to myself that the new Bond movie in which a German media mogul tried to control the world was pretty good. But until last night I kept my vow not to buy a ticket for a new James Bond movie. The publicity surrounding Casino Royale suggested that the producers tried to change Bond from the cartoon character to someone with real human emotions. As connoisseur of the first twenty Bond movies, I wanted to see this happening.
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The Passion of the Christ
The Passion of the Christ should more appropriately be called Mel Gibson’s Passion for Violence. Anyone who sets out to make a movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life has the artistic responsibility to provide a context of what Jesus was all about. Mel Gibson message is that Jesus died the most brutal violent death that one can imagine, instead of relating what is at the core of Jesus’ teaching, namely the love for every human being. The film has strong anti-Semitic undertones. It portrays the Jewish religious leaders as the despicable, bloodthirsty people one can imagine instead of typical bureaucrats who are trying to maintain their own positions by getting rid of the new kid on the block, who was challenging their teachings and developing a following. Mel Gibson’s desire to bring out the violence committed against Jesus goes so far that he turns Jesus into a masochistic and suicidal fellow.
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