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Film
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John DeSando is our film reviewer.
He teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE's "It's
Movie Time," which can be heard streaming at www.wcbe.org
Fridays at 3:01 pm and 8:01 pm. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com
Wanted
Hellboy
II: The Golden Armynnnnnnn 
Then She Found Me
Wall*Emmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Mongol
Hancocknnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Happy Feet
Casino Royalemmmmmmmmmmm
Apocalypto
Marie-Antoinettemmmmmmmmmm
The quiet
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Manmmm 
Quinceañera
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
An Inconvenient Truth
Superman mmmmmmm
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Watertttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
Don’t
Come Knocking
X-Men:
The Last Stand
The Da Vinci Codetttttttttttttttttttttttt
Akeelah and the Bee
Tsotsi mmmmmmmmmm
V for Vendetta
Tristram Shandy:
A Cock and Bull Story
Find Me Guilty mmmmms
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
A Good Woman mmmmm
Ask the Dust
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The White Countessmmm
The Libertine
The World’s
Fastest Indian 
Freedomland
Final Destination 3mmmm
Tristan & Isolde
The New World mmmmmtt
The Best of Youth
Glory Road mmmmmmmm
Match Point
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
First Descent
mmmmmmnmmmmmmi 
King Kong
Munich
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
The Family Stone
Paradise Nowmmmmmmmt
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is magic
The Squid and the Whale mm
Ice Harvest
Rent mmmmmmmmmmmtttt
Zathura
Elizabethtownmmmmmmmmmmmmms
Good
Night and Good Luck
A history of violencemmmmmmmmm
Capote
The Exorcism of Emily Rose mt
Yes
Proof mmmmmmmmmmmmms
Serenity
The Greatest Game Ever Played
Lord of war
Just like Heaven mmFlightplan 
Flightplan
An Unfinished Lifetmttttttmmm
Grizzly Man
The Dukes of Hazzardmmmmm
Red Eye
The 40 Year-Old Virginmmmms
Last Days
Broken Flowersmmmmmmmm
Sound of Thunder
Transporter 2mmmmmmmmmt
Murderball
Charlie and the Chocolatemmm
Dark Water
mmmm Factory
March of the Penguinsmmmmmmms
Must Love Dogs
Batman beginssmmmmmmmm
Howl's moving castle
Cinderella Man mmmmmmmm
Layer Cake
Kingdom of heaven mmmmms
Mad Hot Ballroom
Rock School mmmmmmmmms
The Adventures of mmmmmm
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmsShark
Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
Wanted
Grade: B
Director: Timur Bekmambetov (Escape from Afghanistan)
Screenplay: Michael Brandt (3:10 to Yuma), Derek Haas (3:10 to Yuma)
, Chris Morgan (Cellular), from Mark Millar and J.G. Jones comic novels
Cast: James McAvoy (Atonement), Morgan Freeman (The Bucket List), Angelina
Jolie (A Mighty Heart)
Rating: R
"Welcome... to the Fraternity.
This gun you're holding belonged to your father; he could conduct a
symphony orchestra with it."  Sloan
(Morgan Freeman) It's never comfortable to find out your estranged father
was a great assassin, nor is it comforting to know that his ancient
"Fraternity" of assassins needs you to avenge your father's
death. A little Hamlet, a bit of Matrix, and a tad of Da Vinci Code,
Wanted tells of Wesley Gibson's (James McAvoy) change from a "pussy"
account manager to a world-class assassin under the guidance of Fraternity
teachers Fox (Angelina Jolie ) and Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Wanted doesn't
lack for imagination in its magical realism of bullets bending in flight
and wounds miraculously disappearing, nor does it lack for clichés
and stereotypes of the thriller genre, including car chases as good
as any others in contemporary cinema. After all, that CGI stuff is what
American films do best, often at the expense of crisp dialogue or deep
characterization. Even the actors are their own stereotypes: Jolie's
Fox (now that's truth in advertising) plays a dangerous operative who
can shoot a giant firearm as if she were Lara Croft; Freeman's voice
once again soothes the savages; James McAvoy does the Toby Maguire innocence
just right. And although Jolie has the least dialogue, and probably
th e
biggest salary, the shot of her backside may be the most memorable image
outside of the spectacular train wreck high over a gorge. As in so many
action-packed, hero-driven movies today, the hunt is not just for bad
guys but also for who the hero is as a person, a quest saving these
summer sellouts from shameless superficiality. Fox: I knew your father.
Wesley: My father died, [pause] Wesley: the week I was born. Fox: Your
father died yesterday in the rooftop of the Metropolitan Building. He
was one of the greatest assassins who ever lived. And the other one
is behind you [shoots].
Hellboy
II: The Golden Army
Grade: B
Director: Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth)
Screenplay: del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth)
Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (The Fog)
Rating: PG-13
Prince Nuada: [to Hellboy] That's your weapon of choice? Hellboy: [flexing
his stone hand] Five fingered Mary!
 Hellboy
II: The Golden Army is a hoot, a complement to and departure from the
spate of superhero films this summer such as Iron Man, Hancock, Incredible
Hulk, and Indiana Jones. The complementing part is obvious: super powers,
super problems, super egos, super genre revisioning. The departure is
the entrance into the parodic genre stage, where satire dominates.
Hellboy (Ron Perlman’s voice) and his rag-tag comrades from the
special Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense include the fiery
Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and the delicate Aquaman (Abe Sapien). They
must quell a rebellion by a mythical world of creatures that have held
back by treaty from fighting humans until the re-emergence of their
bellicose Prince Nuada (Luke Goss). Ironic it is that the hellspawn
Red has been rejected by both worlds.
The laughs are constant, as the opening dialogue here indicates, and
usually from Perlman’s Hellboy, such as when he calls his new
boss, Germanic Johann Krauss (John Alexander and James Dodd), who is
a protoplasmic bureaucrat with a window-like pate, a “glasshole,”
and then moves on to smoke his Cuban cigar. The days of upright, uptight
Superman are gone.
What remains is a combination of Will Smith’s hung-over, bad-boy
Hancock and Robert Downey’s self-indulgent but emerging community-mindedness.
Both of these traits are superimposed with an incessant wisecracking
that endears Red to the audience and encourages it to forget perfection
and enjoy the child-like fun of breaking the rules and poking fun at
authority.
 Allusions
to many sci-fi and fantasy classics abound, most assuredly the market
scenes from Star Wars are easily recognized and the ravenous tooth-faerie
like creatures could be straight from Lord of the Rings. Drunken Red
and Abe singing along to sappy Barry Manilow’s “Can’t
Smile Without You” is a classic moment of pop-cult satire.
Blazing Saddles defined this parodic stage of the genre cycle, using
the Western’s many clichés and poking fun at its conventions
(the flatulent campfire is most notable). Director Guillermo del Toro
takes his own classic Pan’s Labyrinth, mixes it with Mike Mignola’s
comic book Hellboy, and does it all better. It’s a helluva show.
Then
She Found Me
Grade: A
Director: Helen Hunt
Screenplay: Alice Arlen (Silkwood), Victor Levin (The Successor)
Cast: Helen Hunt (As Good as It Gets), Colin Firth (Girl with a Pearl
Earring)
Rating: R
 "Don't
do anything until you've slept. Don't let anybody try to set you up
with anyone." Frank (Colin Firth) That advice for a recently separated
30-something is wise, given that recently Baby Mama and Knocked Up,
among others, have treated the challenges of an older woman wanting
a baby, usually after life-changing events such as divorce or separation.
First-time helmer Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me adds not much to the
biological-urgency canon. It does, however, add a humanity heretofore
not seen, a balance between the despotism of time and the humor necessary
to survive. Hunt mines that humor deftly with dialogue crisp and rapid,
evoking screwball comedy while not diminishing the gravity of the situation
("Why are you talking so fast?" one character asks). Along
the way the film gets to comment on child abandonment (an American variation
of Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies) with a divine Bette Midler as talk
show host Bernice (alleged mother to Hunt's April) on ly
recently revealing herself ("I'm very verbal during sex")
to April, an over-burdened, recently separated school teacher. The dialogue
between the two is full of humor, putdowns, and downright deadening
truth; the actresses are a delight to watch wrestling reality. As I
am reading David Gilmour's Film Club, I am reminded of the importance
of little moments in films that signal emerging talent, sometimes for
both actors and directors. Such a moment comes for me in this film when
April rests next to emerging boyfriend Frank's (Colin Firth) small child,
and they exchange gifts. Hunt's direction of the child is startlingly
authentic, and April's response to the child is precisely in character.
Find Then She Found Me, and you may then find truths emerging from recent
cinema's discourses on the biological time clock.
Wall*E
Grade: A
Director: Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo)
Screenplay: Stanton (Finding Nemo), Jim Capobianco (Ratatouille original
screenplay)
Cast: Voices of Ben Burtt (Star Wars), Elissa Knight (Cars)
Rating: G
“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do, that dares
love attempt.”
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
 Forget
making love (I can’t). The new erogenous zone is the hand, specifically
holding hands as featured in the new Pixar animation, Wall*E. A futuristic
love story between the titular trash collecting robot (Waste Allocation
Load Lifter Earth-Class), doing his thing for hundreds of fruitless
years, and a beautiful search robot, Eve (appropriately named), who
discovers he has collected the answer humans floating in space have
hoped for, evidence that they can return to their garbage suffocated
planet.
Like all love affairs, it’s difficult to figure out their attraction,
but love it is, and it propels this little gem of a film right into
the endearing space of Nemo, Toy Story, and my fav—Ratatouille.
Pixar and writer/director Andrew Stanton have the gift of displaying
humanity in its flaws and its glories while chastising its destructive
side, in this case the neglected environment.
While the love story, hand holding and all, is worth the admission,
the satire of an indolent, wasteful population accurately disturbs as
our population continues to get fatter and more environmentally careless,
to the point where we vacate the premises.
The animators have drawn heavily and artfully from Star Wars, 2001,
Hello Dolly, Seurat, and E.T., among others, but most of all the wizards
have revived the simple love story—it shouldn’t take animation,
science fiction, and post- apocalyptic stories to do so, but heck, I’ve
been looking for love since my second failed marriage s long time ago.
Who would have thought? Handholding! Now that’s simple and provocative,
environmentally safe, and my 3rd grade nun’s criticism of me (holding
a little girl’s hand: “You dirty thing”). You can
imagine how I loved tormenting her and being in love at the same time.
And we were the promise of the future (to which I complied with six
children—such a good boy).
Wall*E is the most satisfying love story of the year.
Mongol
Grade: A
Director: Sergei Bodrov (Bear’s Kiss)
Screenplay: Arif Aliyev, Bodrov
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Khulan Chuluun
Rating: R
 To
have conquered half the world would be an epic feat—Genghis Khan
did just that. Mongol, the award-winning film from Russia's Sergei Bodrov,
depicts the early life of Temudgin from 9 in 1172 to the decisive battle
in 1206 that made him the supreme Khan and a legend matched only by
Alexander the Great. For all the dazzling cinematography of Kazakhstan
and Inner Mongolia, for all the jaw-dropping battle scenes with thousands
of barbarian horsemen and their charismatic leaders, nothing quite surpasses
the intimate scenes between the benevolent leader and his "brothers"
and more impressively between the husband and his aggressive wife, Borte,
who was his closest friend and peerless advisor. The sweep is epic,
but the emphasis is on character. Only Gladiator's Maximus (Russell
Crowe) comes to mind for recent depictions of complicated warriors (and
maybe William Wallace—Mel Gibson—from Braveheart). As he
did in the mystical Bear's Kiss, Bodrov succeeds in having it both ways:
humanity on display through the arcs of dynamic characters and inhumanity
exposed with a backdrop of life's big issues and the tyranny of fate
and death. Peppered the mystical paganiswithm such as the fear of thunder
as a manifestation of God, Mongol seems to treat almost ever y
important part of 12th-13th century barbarian life. The quotidian is
just as interesting as the sublime—witness the importance of securing
a wife with strong legs both for following a husband and making love.
Although misogynistic, the society protects and reveres its wives as
precious commodities. From costumes to climate, Bodrov catches the visual
beauty of Central Asia, its unforgiving terrain, and the fierce warrior
Mongols, who could at any time choose whom to follow, and did. Despite
the epic nature of the film, I was just as moved by the young nine-year
old selecting his bride with the wisdom (and her help) of a world-class
leader. Bodrov doesn't overplay the potential greatness; he just accentuates
the lad's common sense and reservoir of love. Bodrov doesn't so much
create an oversized hero as he depicts a gifted man with a vision of
how Mongols should act according to laws, simple ones, that he could
create. And did.
Hancock
Grade: B
Director: Peter Berg (The Kingdom)
Screenplay: Vincent Ngo (Beat the Devil), Vince Gilligan (Home Fries)
Cast: Will Smith (Legend), Charlize Theron (Battle in Seattle)
Rating: PG-13
Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman): People don't like you, Hancock. ?Hancock
(Will Smith): Do I look like I care what people think?
“Put your John Hancock on this.” How many times has someone
used the signature figure of speech this way? Peter Berg’s Hancock
is also the real deal, a signature comic sci fi, super hero summer blockbuster
unlike any other except Iron Man. Even Iron Man doesn’t go far
enough exploring the downside of heroism with the weaknesses of being
human interfering with an ordered heroic world.
 Will
Smith as Hancock turns in a much more nuanced performance than his I
am Legend loner because here he must turn around a public that sees
Hancock as an “asshole” hero who saves people but destroys
property and endangers civilians as a result of his drinking and a bruised
amnesiac brain that can’t remember his early life. As Hancock
he must confront human beings today, not barren post apocalypse as in
Legend. He rehabilitates his public profile, sobers up, and contends
with his attraction to his “publicist” Raymond’s (Jason
Bateman) wife, Mary (Charlize Theron).
In other words, Hancock is not your garden variety super hero although
he can fly and destroy with the best of them. He is conflicted about
his weaknesses, his feelings toward Mary, and his forgotten past as
a hero who may span thousands of human history years.
In addition, the allegorical implications about The USA as flawed heroic
nation imposing its will on small countries such as  Vietnam
and Iraq seems to lie underneath this commentary on pop-cult heroism.
Even if you don’t buy that aesthetic, consider the Star Trek theme
of the gods envying humans even with all their emotional messes.
Hancock weakens when it plays for laughs the heavy-duty existential
attitudes of personal responsibility and at the same time looks for
philosophical ballast. Star Trek did a better job of contrasting the
lonely perfection of the gods’ world with the robust, loving,
but terminal world of humans. Hancock does a credible job showing how
immortality without love is bound to lose to the glorious imperfection
of mortality.
“Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
Than He who made them!” Tennyson’s “Caliban Upon Setebos”
Happy
Feet
Grade: A
Director: George Miller (Babe)
Screenplay: Miller, John Collee (Master and Commander) Judy Morris (Babe),
Warren Coleman
Cast: Voices of Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings), Robin Williams (Man
of the Year)
Rating: PG
Tap-dancing penguins could never have been pitched if the mega-hit doc
Marching Penguins (2005)
had not caught the imagination of every breathing human. Only this time
around Happy Feet is not a doc but a high-class animation (from the
director of the very humane Babe) and much more anthropomorphic than
Marching Penguins because these are tap-dancing penguins.
Besides the themes of individualism and environmental destruction, Happy
Feet’s special effects take animation as close to 3-D as could
be possible in a 2-D medium. One scene with frolicking penguins careening
down a mountain has the sight and sound of rapid descent so authentic
as to make me cringe at each turn for fear of flying off the snow into
the sky. The colors are luminous and the long and helicopter-like shots
stunning enough to make you feel you’re watching IMAX.
Mumble (voice of Elijah Wood) has no singing voice, so he can’t
sing a “heartsong,” the signature croon of a male to attract
a female for life. But as Nature frequently compensates, that boy can
dance. A hard-to-accept-it dad (Hugh Jackman) laments, “It just
ain’t penguin.” The adventures of this hippity-hop outcast
bring him to a band of diminutive Latinos headed by a savvy Ramon (Robin
Williams), who helps him to find his inner heartsong in his feet and
eventually the source of fish depletion (the “aliens” are
a familiar race of buccaneers—us).
Along the way Mumble finds soulful love with Gloria (Brittney Murphy),
a young lady strong in song and belief in Mumble. Speaking of song,
much of the score, while replete with pop standards from the likes of
the Beach Boys and Sinatra, adapts several gospel tunes to accentuate
the theme of a savior being rejected by his own kind.
Happy Feet is a happy film that features cutting-edge CG while it teaches
young and old about tolerance and talent. This is the season for the
tuxedo crowd—shaken and stirred.
Apocalypto
Grade: C
Director: Mel Gibson (Passion of the Christ)
Screenplay: Gibson, Farhad Safinia
Cast: Rudy Youngblood, Mayra Serbulo (Mezcal)
Rating: R
 Gibson
loves gore. No, that's not a new political eccentricity for the mercurial
director Mel Gibson, but an inference I am drawing from his two recent
films, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. In Passion, he gives
us about an hour of Christ being beaten by Romans, far too much for
me, favoring minimalism in film violence and sex, where less is more
powerful.
In Apocalypto, Gibson’s fictional Mayan hero, a Braveheart of
the jungle, experiences torture at an unprecedented scale, but not improbable
for those of us who have seen Passion of the Christ or traveled in the
Yucatan and farther south to see the murals depicting throat slicing
and decapitation as regular occurrences at Mayan athletic contests and
deity offerings. For me this realism works if it’s in small doses:
I can imagine the severity. Gibson just seems to revel in it, as if
his art is defined by how realistic pain and suffering is presented.
Apocalypto is the story of a jungle village being pillaged to bring
prisoners for Mayan sacrifices atop the tall temples with the numerous
narrow steps, just right for tumbling heads and detached bodies to tumble
down. The young hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), is destined to lead
his people from this slavery, in the spirit of Aeneas and Odysseus.
I find, however, scant attention paid to the details of character and
theme development but ample superior camera work, some of it the very
best of tracking running warriors in the jungle ever photographed. Gibson's
camera nev er
falters in allowing us to run with the warrior or feel the pain of watching
a dear one have his heart lifted from his live stomach. His tracking
of warrior and black jaguar, eventually merging the two, is breathtaking
imagery. Simply stated, these jungle action sequences are worth suffering
through the rest of the bloody raids, chases, and sacrifices. So too
I just saw a decidedly inferior jungle thriller, Turistas, in which
organs are lifted from live young things to supply the needs of the
poor Brazilians. Gringos suffer there; Indians suffer here. Everybody
is in pain and the directors, Gibson at the forefront, are bent on making
the torture graphic and unforgettable.
The allegorical implications of fear and slavery such as in Iraq are
unavoidable, but if you're going to bash Bush and the neocons responsible
for world xenophobia aimed at America, then do it without resorting
to the daily doses of carnage so much a part of that horror itself.
Read Maureen Dowd's column with a side of Tom Friedman and you'll have
a darn good idea of the world's insane blood lust. Apocalypto is as
much an explanation for the film as it is a descriptor for the ends
our current misguided colonialism. In the last sequence, Gibson references
a tour de force scene from Terrence Malick’s New World, but Malick
had much more to say about apocalypse.
Casino
Royale
Grade: B
Director: Martin Campbell (Goldeneye)
Screenplay: Neal Purvis (Die Another Day), Robert Wade (Die Another
Day), Paul Haggis (Flags of Our Fathers)
Cast: Daniel Craig (Infamous), Eva Green (Kingdom of Heaven)
Rating: PG-13
What was James Bond like at the beginning of his career? Casino Royale
(remake from the mediocre 1967 original, w hich
shows an aging Bond, played by David Niven) depicts a younger, tensile,
inchoate 007 (Daniel Craig) with darting intelligence and hard body,
doing what Bond does mostly but with less success: He awkwardly pursues
an arch villain, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson), who bleeds in one eye,
to the tune of considerable Bond bashing by Chiffre’s thugs, and
he dangerously falls in love with a complicated babe, Vesper Lynd (Eva
Green).
Except with Diana Rigg’s Tracy Draco (On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service), Bond does not stumble like this again in his long career (Can
you blame him with the wildly intelligent and attractive Rigg?), but
Craig makes him a believable candidate for the 00 license to kill (which
he gains after 2 relatively easy assassinations) because he’s
very bright and physically agile. Yet he shows corners of emotion and
vulnerability foreign to the more elegant and remote Sean Connery.
The cell phones and lap tops top even the vintage Astin Martin as signs
of the times that update Bond and compromise the old-fashioned self
reliance a sleek gun and  sleeker
talk got him through the toughest villains and tougher women. The locations,
from the casinos of Montenegro to the waters of Venice, are as sumptuous
as ever; Judi Dench is a powerful M; and although I miss Moneypenny’s
sexual innuendos and the older Q’s fussy precision technology,
this Bond version is divertingly enjoyable, albeit at 144 minutes too
long even for such a seductive franchise.
How does a second-tier director such as Martin Campbell command an amount
of time that serves only to inflate cost and reduce the number of showings
per day? I don’t understand, but like the high-stakes poker game
at the center of the film, this business of filmmaking is a gamble.
Casino Royale risks losing the affection of an attention-deficited younger
generation that won’t sit long, much less for a story of a flawed
hero in a gorgeously superficial world.
Marie
Antoinette
Grade: D
Director: Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation)
Screenplay: Coppola)
Cast: Kirsten Dunst (Elizabethtown), Jason Schwartzman (Shopgirl)
Rating: PG-13
“Ennui”—For a French-based film by a most promising
writer/director, I can think of only the word for BORING. How is it
possible to spend millions of dollars on one of the most sumptuous-looking
films in years and yet create a story so devoid of character and drama
as to make Dangerous Liaisons an energetic masterpiece?
 Based
on Antonia Fraser's book about the archduchess of Austria and later
queen of France, Marie Antoinette is about a 14 year old girl imported
for breeding purposes to be Louis XVI’s wife. That the French
revolutionaries see her as the symbol of French decadence is as well
known as his her lovely neck.
Surely Sofia Coppola can do better with the story of Marie Antoinette,
one of the most fascinating characters out of history, whose famous
line, “Let them eat cake,” probably wasn’t even hers.
The subject cries out for an informed, vital discovery of her real place
in the French Revolution. What we get is distance and dreariness as
almost an entire film is dedicated to sumptuous costuming and slacker
inaction in the bed of a future king and queen.
As overly long as the many interminable long shots, but beautiful in
composition and lighting (How can you really go wrong with Versailles?),
the lack of drama is surprising for a director whose strength is understatement
and sub-textual significance. Her Oscar winning Lost in Translation
is a triumph of underplaying-- two people (Bill Murray and Scarlett
Johansson) drawn to each other in a culture, Japan, which accentuated
their loneliness, longing, and civility. And all of this subtlety is
conveyed with a minimum of dialogue but a maximum of feeling from two
consummate actors, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
 Now
Kirsten Dunst is unquestionably lovely as Marie, but when she talks
her voice has a teenage tone that makes me wonder if the director had
her sound as immature as Marie actually was or that Dunst is just not
the actress Johansson is. In any case, no one in the film is given lines
to be proud of, and no one gives a performance that could be characterized
as nuanced or imaginative.
Visit Versailles if you want to understand why the poor and hungry of
18th century France eventually has her head. This film will only confirm
the prevailing notion that Marie was misunderstood; that she was profligate
as a teenager makes for an unsatisfying 2 hour drama.
The
Quiet
Grade: C
Director: Jamie Babbit (A Memoir of My Former Self)
Screenplay: Abdi Nazamien, Micah Schraft
Cast: Edie Falco, Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Deer
Rating: R
“So buxom, blithe, and
full of face,
As heaven had lent her all his grace;
With whom the father liking took,
And her to incest did provoke:
Bad child; worse father!” Shakespeare, Pericles
 “Quiet”
is not an adjective usually associated with teenagers. The Quiet fulfills
the odd expectations of usage by treating at length the abnormally quiet
deaf/mute teen as a possible imposter and the abnormally incestuous
relationship between a father and daughter as metaphor.
The deaf/mute repeats the mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine: Both
teens are rebelling against adults and life cycles they can’t
control such as a father’s death and a family’s dysfunction.
If you thought Little Miss Sunshine was funny, then you will think The
Quiet is downright depressing.
In The Quiet, Dot’s (Camilla Belle) deaf/muteness alters the world
around her from a devilish cheerleader sister Nina (Elisha Cuthbert),
who terrorizes her, to high schoolers who ignore or taunt her. The title
as noun best defines the eerie world of Dot’s mind, seemingly
oblivious to whatever is happening but actually sensing the environment
with astonishing clarity.
 Director
Jamie Babbit succeeds in creating an ironic title in which chaos and
clamor are subtext. Unlike Dwayne (Paul Dano) as voluntary mute in Sunshine,
surrounded by loveable eccentrics, Dot is a trauma victim whose adoptive
family is neither humorous nor eccentric: a crazed mom (Edie Falco),
incestuous dad (Martin Donovan), and angry sis. Certainly the incest
scenes are uncomfortable at best and at the least figurative for a warped
suburban world of longing and loss.
What stands out as a superior act of kindness, adopting the orphan Dot,
turns into an ugly life that aims eventually at excising all tumors
from the family. Along the way the filmmakers have failed to establish
The Quiet as a tragedy, horror film, or teen melodrama. It is a messy
mélange of familial dislocations too numerous to deconstruct
as film can so easily succeed in doing (Ordinary People and Ice Storm
come immediately to mind).
Quinceanera
Grade: B
Director: Richard Glatzer (The Fluffer), Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer)
Screenplay: Glatzer, Westmoreland
Cast: Emily Rios, Jesse Garcia
Rating: NR
“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the
dominant factor in society today.” Isaac Asimov
There isn’t much more that could happen to a 14 year-old Latino
girl than occurs in Quinceanera, a stew simmered in the Echo-Park section
of Los Angeles. Change is the dominant motif as it affects every major
and sub-plot point to the point that nothing is explored in depth while
much happens.
 Before
the celebration of her Quinceanera (15th birthday, when a girl becomes
a woman, Magdalena (Emily Rios) is pregnant although the circumstances
are questionable if not downright miraculous; bad boy brother Carlos
(Jesse Garcia) is gay; they and their old uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez),
who has kindly sheltered the two after they are shunned by the family,
face eviction as the area is going to gentrification faster than you
can say the film’s title. The change also visits her dad, who
struggles to accept his shameful daughter despite the cultural negativity.
Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland drive their camera through
and around the streets of Echo Park and the yards and living rooms to
fulfill the promise of the production company, Kitchen Sink. The kitchen-sink
movement in the 50’s and 60’s especially in England showed
basic working class family life, such as Mike Leigh currently does,
and still allowed the old higher-class staples of irony, tragedy, and
comedy take their rightful place. In Quinceanera, however, the  topics
are subsumed under the change idiom, allowing the directors to use the
gays-smartly-investing-in real-estate motif without much to say other
than rents become very high.
Although Magdalena’s pregnancy seems to be the center of the tale,
the film also touches on the changing fortunes of minorities, the emergence
of gays as both owners and landlords, the challenges of adolescence,
and the power of family. For those subjects, I applaud these directors.
Leonard
Cohen: I’m Your Man
Grade: B
Director: Lian Lunson
Cast: Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Kate & Anna
McGarrigle, Bert Orton, Linda Thompson, Teddy Thompson, Jarvis Cocker,
The Handsome Family, Antony, Julie Christensen, Perla Battala, Leonard
Cohen, and U2
I once succeeded with an attractive older woman because we shared a
poetry lovers’ delight in Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne.
A singer/composer who doesn’t need U2 for background deserves
a tribute by with singers who do. Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
is an entertaining tribute documentary that took place in January 2006
at the Sydney Opera House. Album genius producer Hal Willner has arranged
13 performances in the "Came So Far for Beauty" concert. Although
Nick Cave and the Wainrights among others could hold their own in concert,
when they successfully cover Cohen’s songs in Leonard Cohen: I’m
Your Man, there’s a slight disappointment that the basso gravel
voice himself is not singing.
 After
all, he composed the poetry and melodies, in a distinctively soulful,
weary signature style that says, “I did this. Let me tell you
about it.” So, you can anticipate both my praise and criticism:
Cohen’s songs transfer remarkably well to other singers, especially
Cave (Even with a Vegas attitude his Suzanne is effective) and Rufus
Wainright (His oft-performed rendition of Hallelujah reveals a song
that can endure even Rufus’s emendations). The singers carry an
experience and innocence respectively, as Cohen does.
Cohen’s conversations with director Lian Lunson are the most interesting
parts of the documentary: his being a poet in Montreal, a hipster in
New York, and a monk in a Mt. Baldy Zen monastery. All the time, however,
he is cool enough to avoid revealing too much about himself, but then,
that’s the mystery of his songs as well. He just makes you long
to know why he left his art and came back to it. He doesn’t tell.
When Cohen finally sings Tower of Song, I knew why he was being feted,
albeit too unctuously by Bono, and why he sings his compositions better
than anyone else. Because he sometimes takes up to a year on one, the
care and feeling show in his weathered voice and heavily-lidded eyes.
His smirk is not smug either: It mirrors a translucent soul that loves
humanity in all its weaknesses, as he loves himself in all his. Deservedly.
Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Grade: C
Director: Gore Verbinski (The Weather Man)
Screenplay: Ted Elliott (Legend of Zorro), Terry Rossio (Shrek)
Cast: Johnny Depp (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Orlando Bloom
(Elizabethtown), Keira Knightly (Pride and Prejudice)
Rating: PG 13
“They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are: being men
rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss to gether
. . . them that had sailed with the pirates and seen things it would
be a shame even to speak of . . . .” R.L Stevenson
Swishbuckling Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the
Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest reprises a role that in its maiden
voyage looked like a great vehicle for Depp to show his many mugging
and voice talents. Now he is a caricature of himself endlessly repeating
the ticks that once tocked.
The pirates are looking for too many treasures, gold and human, so the
film ends up being a stew of concepts looking for a rest. Thank goodness
for easy-to-look-at Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann, a damsel
hopelessly caught between her need to save virtuous fiancé Will
Turner and her passion for the reprobate Sparrow. The special effects
are the sam e
old quick cuts and malleable cosmetics, crafting a crafty Davy Jones
(Bill Nighy) with moving worms on his face and a kraken with tentacles
worthy of Jules Verne but far more believable. Depp is the Errol Flynn
of our time but with much deeper talent and narrower taste in women
(Vanessa Paradis as a wife is enough for any man in a lifetime).
I have little else to say. The original Pirates of the Caribbean was
an original and Depp a most creative Sparrow. The second time around
it’s more of the same, not a stretch or a necessity for an actor
of Depp’s considerable talent. As for Orlando Bloom, a sizable
paycheck for no challenge is a bit like a pirate finding a chest of
gold—he doesn’t deserve it, but it still gets the girls
and the audience.
An Inconvenient
Truth
Grade: B
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Cast: Al Gore
Rating: PG
Al Gore is not waffling these days: He believes deeply in humanity’s
acceleration of global warming through wasteful practices. His documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth, is also 100 minutes of mildly engaging Gore,
a much improved model over the failed campaigner for president in 2000.
 The
waffling comes now from the general population, almost evenly divided
on the causes and remedies. On the liberal side, film critic Roger Ebert
speaks plainly about being an advocate for Gore’s warming campaign
and this documentary:
“In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review,
but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do
not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you
decided not to.”
On the other side is The New York Post’s Kyle Smith:
“But there is wide disagreement about whether humans are causing
global warming (climate change preceded the invention of the Escalade)
and about whether we should be worried about the trends. Look carefully
at Gore's charts and you'll see that the worst horrors take place in
the future of his imagination.”
Gore does have convincing moments despite this skepticism. He says:
"There is no controversy about these facts. Out of 925  recent
articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there
was no disagreement. Zero." This almost irrefutable statement is
substantiated by photos of earth before and after showing retreating
shorelines and shrinking glaciers among other depressing images so well
known they are almost certainly untouched.
The subtext of this smartly-crafted doc is whether or not Al Gore can
be a viable candidate in 2008. The more salient question is whether
the planet will survive that long to let him try to do what he couldn’t
in 8 years as vice president: Halt the relentless warming of the planet.
Mrs.
Palfrey at the Claremont
Grade: B
Director: Dan Ireland (Passionada)
Screenplay: Ruth Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor (novel)
Cast: Joan Plowright (Surviving Picasso), Rupert Friend (Pride and Prejudice)
“The time is past, /And all its aching joys are now no more.”
Wordsworth
The idea of an elderly lady moving to an old London residential hotel
grieving the loss of her late husband an d
seeking to be near her grandson demands a supply of tissues. Mrs. Palfrey
at the Claremont makes that demand with fewer tears than you might expect.
Joan Plowright carries enough dignity and understatement to override
the clichés and make an endearing if not terribly compelling
titular character.
Usually the eccentrics around her would pick up the humor slack, but
the old denizens of that old hotel are mostly caricatures with not much
natural wit: For example, the wispy, bug-eyed dinner neighbor is inquisitive
and ready to die; the slightly distinguished, over-eating and drinking
older man asks her to marry him for mutual self-preservation. There
are other characters but none memorable and all obviously injected to
make this film qualify as a comedy, hoping some of the ‘50’s
Ealing Studios magic could be this film’s.
Mrs. Palfrey’s accidental friendship with a hunky, struggling
writer Ludovic (Rupert Friend) provides the requisite sweet philosophizing
and naughty hint of Harold and Maude. Alas, no intergenerational sex,
just growing respect and support. The inattention of her real grandson
Desmond allows her  peering
neighbors to believe that Ludovic is Desmond. But don’t think
for a minute the film is in Oscar Wilde territory, for it has none of
the playwright’s wit. The closest allusion would be one Ludovic
makes about the characters in the hotel being out of a Terrence Rattigan
play.
At a cost of $750K, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is yet a bargain.
The production values may not be first-rate, some takes may need to
be redone, but the spirit of an older woman still valuable and loveable
serves a nice counterpoint to our youth-celebrated century. However,
no one can ignore the sentimentality and forced romanticism of lines
such as this: “We were weeping so shamelessly there was nothing
else to do but fall in love.”
Superman
Returns
Grade: A
Director: Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects)
Screenplay: Michael Dougherty (X2), Dan Harris (X2)
Cast: Brandon Routh (Karla), Kevin Spacey (Beyond the Sea)
Rating: PG 13
“Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the
plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.”
H.L. Mencken
I’ve always thought of myself like Superman: heroic, above the
crowd, strong, selfless. The new film Superman Returns reveals that
HE is just like ME: weak, self absorbed, righteous, mortal, and wobbly
about women .
The numerous spot-on insights in this latest installment are testimony
that this film may even eclipse the best of Spiderman in exploring the
effect being human has on the best of us.
At a recent Hollywood party, I lost my hand for a second in a shake
with Mike Tyson, the flawed former heavyweight champion of the world.
I did speculate, however, that I had never before met someone who was
once the best in the world. Superman (Brandon Routh), unarguably the
best of us all, is the polar opposite to Tyson, but both are reduced
from their lofty cultural thrones because they are not above acting
foolish like the rest of us.
Although not of our planet, Superman exhibits human vulnerability when
he faces Lois’s (Kate Bosworth) having a child (This kid is unworldly
strong. Could the Man of Steel have acted like a real man that night?),
and boyfriend but not husband (Hmm, what’s she waiting for? a
cape?). All happened when and, maybe because, Superman left for five
years to find what was left of Krypton, the source of his only physical
weakness, kryptonite.
Director Bryan Singer brilliantly bandies about Superman’s struggles
with Lois and his combat with nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who
has kryptonite and cave crystals from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude
to neutralize Superman and start a new continent on earth. Superman’s
skirmish with death at Luthor’s hand has to be tough on an audience
that sees its savior as immortal.
 The
difference in special effects alone between this version and the first
in 1978 (expertly directed by Richard Donner) is dramatic: Superman
now flies like Baryshnikov, and the universe, from the titles on, looks
as real as a night at the Palomar Observatory.
But it is in the human struggle that Superman Returns soars over all
other versions. It makes me think again about the messianic Christ motif
and the notion that men, such as Lois’s boyfriend, struggle with
the idealized superman in the sub consciences of the women they love.
Even Lex Luthor loses that battle.
X-Men:
The Last Stand
Grade: B
Director: Bret Ratner (Rush Hour)
Screenplay: Zak Penn (Fantastic Four), Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith)
Cast: Hugh Jackman (X-Men), Patrick Stewart (Star Trek), Ian McKellen
(Da Vinci Code)
Rating: PG-13
By the government’s finding the cure for the mutant strain in
X-Men: The Last Stand, the death knell has rung for the tripartite series
inspired by the comic book series. What more can I say? Society might
be considered better if, for instance, there were no “mutant”
gays or power hungry politicians, or at least that’s what some
would say about the mixed blessing. Thus there is no future for this
franchise, or not?
 Director
Bryan Singer, going to Superman Returns for later this summer, gave
the final franchise installment to Bret Ratner, whose action sequences
are first-rate but whose subtlety is less sure. Set in the near future,
X-Men III brings the mutants together, from the benign Professor Charles
Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the nefarious Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen)
to the edgy Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and atmospherically beautiful Storm
(Halle Barry) to decide if a cure is a good or bad thing. Having fire
or ice come out of your hands isn’t bad, but when you are so powerful
that you kill your boyfriend with a touch, reconsideration of the benefits
is badly needed.
The newer X-Men comic books reflect Joss Whedon's genius by relying
heavily on the allegorical elements that make alternative life styles
and George Bush come to mind without much work. As successful as the
multiple-approaches are for literary sleuths like me, they are not dealt
with deeply enough because the American  obsession
with graphics almost always trumps the themes. In this case, some interaction
between mutants and the general populace on a daily basis might have
created a better sense of the complicated, ambivalent conundrum facing
those who give and take the cure.
But this is summer, and X-Men: The Last Stand stands tall with MI-3
and right behind Da Vinci Code for highly entertaining, light fare that
occasionally rips itself from special effects to entertain philosophies
European cinema takes for granted.
But do be uncharacteristically American and sit through the very last
shot and the credits to see if the future of X-Men can be finally predicted,
The Last Stand notwithstanding.
Don’t
Come Knocking
Grade: B
Director: Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas)
Screenplay: Sam Shepard
Cast: Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange
Rating: R
Searching for parents is a frustrating business, whether they have been
truly lost or figuratively so. In the past few years Big Fish and Barbarian
Invasions, to name two of many, depicted the painful longing of sons
to understand, in a sense to find, their brilliant, eccentric, and rambling
dads. Writer Sam Shepard is no stranger to familial disaffection and
discovery, as his play Buried Child and film Paris, Texas can attest.
His newest screenplay, Don’t Come Knocking, comes as close to
Paris, Texas, as possible without plagiarizing itself.
 At
the heart of Knocking is a lonely, aging cowboy movie star, Howard Spence
(Shepard), who leaves the set of his $30 million movie in Moab, Utah,
on horseback to seek out the family he left behind decades ago. As he
shucks his movie costume for more authentic cowboy duds, he descends
into a maelstrom of recrimination and wonder, from a family, including
his ex-girlfriend Doreen (Shepard’s real-life love, Jessica Lange)
and a son and daughter he never knew or “knew about” would
be more accurate. Howard has been a coward about his responsibilities,
emphasized by his leaving the set and before that his pregnant lovers.
And it appears he now wants to face those demons.
Shepard’s dialogue is spare enough to make Harold Pinter’s
seem overwrought, and it is colloquial and laconic enough to make you
wonder if you yourself couldn’t have written it. Don’t be
fooled; Shepard’s dialogue draws us into the real world of simple
 people
like ourselves, who speak simply, but whose subtexts are filled with
the agony of living everyday with departed dads and half-demented kids.
Shepard’s terse language is aided by the sensibility of director
Wim Wenders, who directed Paris, Texas with the same laconic absurdity
with which Shepard infuses his texts and performances. This film is
not exactly Godot, but it is close, messes of a situation made messier
by the lack of communication we all bring to the big issues. But then,
that’s the stuff of great theater and film, messes a playwright
cleans up with screenplay that washes over the human stain leaving barely
a trace. As Howard’s mother (Eva Marie Saint) asks him, “How
did you get to be such a mess, Howard?” Ain’t it the truth
for all of us?
Water
Grade: B
Director: Deepa Mehta ( Bandit Queen)
Screenplay: Mehta
Cast: Seema Biswas (Bandit Queen), Lisa Rey (Bollywood, Hollywood)
“Was never widow had so dear a loss!” Shakespeare, King
Richard III
 Bollywood
and Hollywood with a dash of serious cinema: That’s Water, Deepa
Mehta’s last of a trilogy that includes Earth (lesbian love) and
Fire (forbidden love). In this installment, widows are an oppressed
class, relegated to an existence without meaning because their usually
older husbands had the temerity to die while some of the girls were
too young to have even seen the old men. During these 1930’s remained
a tradition that put the widows in an isolated home, forbidden to love
again, despite recent legislation that allowed such activity.
Water is Mehta’s statement about the crushing power of tradition
and the sacrifices necessary to stem the tide of caste and custom. Kalyani
(Lisa Ray), uncommonly beautiful, is such a widow pimped out to meet
the rent for all the other widows living in the same compound. The Bollywood
aspect is her beauty and her buddy, a young and pesky/perky Chuyia (Ronica
Sainana Sarala), who both buck the system to succeed with a welcome
amount of reality. The original upbeat music and upbeat scenes with
t he
two remind me of the glossy feel-good sequences endemic to feel-good
Bollywood musicals and Harlequin novels.
The cute meeting between Kalyani and Brahmin Narayana (Jonathan Abraham)
and subsequent love affair are strictly Hollywood with principals too
beautiful even by reputed Asian standards of extreme beauty. Although
I believe that to identify with a love affair on stage or screen, I
need to see physically fit principals, these two are beyond any requirements
I have for disbelief suspension,
Mehta saves the film from the maudlin by presenting a denouement that
reflects the exhilaration of idealism over pragmatism and the reality
of payments due for each humanistic advance. So I gave into the sentimental
ending because Mehta made me see the cost of such an advance.
The
Da Vinci Code
Grade: A
Director: Ron Howard (Cinderella Man)
Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man) from the Dan Brown novel.
Cast: Tom Hanks (Cast Away), Audrey Tautou (Amelie)
Rating: PG 13
“The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” secularly head for the
coast as I remember American Pie reporting. The Sisters of Saint Joseph
had a decidedly different take for this Catholic boy, one that brooked
no argument against the divinity of the Son, Jesus Christ.
 So
with what glee have I read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and seen
the faithful film version directed by Ron Howard. Anyone who would dare
compromise the nun’s version to posit Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene
is an instant hero for this critically thinking, subsequently Jesuit-trained
professor and film critic, whose skepticism the well-wimpled ones punished
mercilessly and regularly.
The film, with Tom Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon,
who helps unravel a centuries-old mystery about the Holy Grail and the
uncelibate Christ, is a lengthy debate about the truth of the myth and
the places of Opus Dei and the Knights Templar in the history of the
church’s violent past. Regardless of where you stand on the possibility
that Christ was not divine, this film makes you interested in the debate
and immediately suspicious of the Catholic Church’s goodness.
But that skepticism is healthy in many ways, not dangerous at all to
the doctrinaire leadership in real life, yet in this film the conservative
church groups fear it enough to murder in the name of the Lord. So the
laity joins
the priests in beating the devil at his own game. Mel Gibson’s
Passion of the Christ dwells overly long on the physical suffering of
Christ; Howard and Brown dwell too much on the thrills if the chase.
As Jimmy Durante quipped, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”
The film is so faithful to the novel that the slowest part of the film,
the chase after the intellectual exposition of the theory by the mesmerizing
Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabling, is just as weak and it is in the
novel.
The Da Vinci Code may turn out to be the best movie this summer: It's
faithful to the novel, intelligent in exposition, and an easy 2 1/2
hrs of intrigue. The faithful translation of Brown's provocative theories
alone should please the highbrows; the thriller component should satisfy
the summer sunbathers.
Akeelah
and the Bee
Grade: B
Director: Doug Atchison (Pornography)
Screenplay: Atchison
Cast: Keke Palmer (The Wool Cap), Laurence Fishburne (Matrix), Angela
Bassett (Sunshine State)
Rating: PG
“ The
old saying . . . that style is the man himself is as near the truth
as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as
they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
Samuel Butler
Orthography is the new pornography of the tear-jerking, get-off-your
butt-by-your-boot-straps film that, regardless of whether or not it
is fiction, is meant to uplift. Akeelah and the Bee is one of the best
and most sentimental of the spelling bee genre (recently Spellbound
and Bee Season), a fiction about Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer), an
underachieving eleven year old in largely black South Los Angeles’
Crenshaw district.
Enter a kindly white principal who wants her to join the spelling bee
contest and crusty professor Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), who was a
champ and now will coach her for the national bee. Need I say more,
or will you just fill in the plot points without disappointment because
all the strings and stops are pulled from her initial resistance to
a slight twist on a tired formulaic ending?
 But
what, you may ask, is the saving feature of this feel gooder? It’s
the big issues it touches on ever so lightly such as cooperation and
love, dreams and hard work. Along the way witness the importance of
studying etymology and even using mnemonic devices. Learn to love community
as the little celebrity unifies otherwise fractious urban enclaves.
Learn to despise a silly subplot involving the professor’s family,
a distraction meant to parallel the main plot but ending up sapping
vital dignity from the professor and trivializing the real issues.
Feeling good about children who achieve through the help of adults is
not a bad thing; it’s just that originality should prevail for
a genre that needs to show the sports film genre what intellectual competition
can do to spark community and maybe change lives. The audience loved
Akeelah and the Bee at our screening; that’s winning in anyone’s
lexicon.
V for
Vendetta
Grade: A
Director: James McTeigue
Screenplay: Andy Wachowski, adapted from graphic novel by Alan Moore
(as in Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame)
Cast: Natalie Portman (Closer), Hugo Weaving (The Matrix Revolutions),
Stephen Rea (Crying Game)
Rating: R
“Who was that masked man?”
 From
Zorro to Batman, and all other masked marvels in between, our fascination
with disguised do-gooders doesn’t die. Add a worthy entrant into
that pantheon: comic book genius Alan Moore’s futuristic avenger,
V, who roams London purging it of criminals common and famous, all of
whom suffer his rage at having been abused in a government experiment
years ago.
V for Vendetta is a superior adaptation, whose major virtue for me is
the lack of quick cuts and computer graphics, the exception to the latter
being the spectacular destruction of a few London institutions. V’s
mask has a smile that sears with irony and humanity, plain and simple,
and his brand of mayhem has much more to do with brains that technology.
Natalie Portman’s Evey is an uncomplicated vessel of uncertainty
with a strong genetic inclination toward idealism, a perfect companion
for the masked vigilante, who has saved her from harm and awakened a
woman of substance. Portman headlines the film, finally showing she
has the class to act like an intelligent heroine and the beauty to satisfy
an audience’s penchant for extremes in sci-fi.
 Much
will be made about the allegorical relevance to Bush/Blair conservatism.
Andy Wachowski’s screenplay and James McTeigue’s direction
show hooded prisoners who resemble those at Abu Ghraib, and a neo-fascist
chancellor intimidating his citizens with fear of fear. Even his second
in command has a resemblance to Dick Cheney, and an ultraconservative
TV host looks like Silvio Berlusconi.
With the entrance of Stephen Rea’s chief inspector Finch, I knew
this would be a complete cinematic success, for I am always haunted
by his world-weary Fergus from Crying Game, an actor whose very hang-dog
visage suggests a growing awareness of the world’s danger and
his inability to stop its eventual destruction. But not before V and
his league of masked gentlemen have given the neocons a run for the
souls of a dystopia only George Orwell could love and Edgar Allen Poe
could depict.
“Utopia’s quite another land;
In her enterprising movements,
She is England—with Improvements.” Sir William Schwenck
Gilbert
Tsotsi
Grade: A
Director: Gavin Hood
Screenplay: Hood, Athol Fugard (Novel)
Cast: Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto
Rating: R
“Hell is yourself [and the only redemption is] when a person puts
himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” Tennessee Williams
 An
inadvertently abducted child during a carjacking? Yes, Julianne Moore’s
child in Freedomland a few weeks ago suffered this situation, but we
were uncertain if Moore was telling the truth. In Tsotsi (Thug), the
South African entry for best foreign-language Oscar, the “abduction”
is played for real, and Presley Chweneyagae as the titular anti-hero
is so movingly ambivalent about the crime, I wonder why he is not nominated
for an Oscar.
Tsotsi heads a vicious gang preying on commuters in a Johannesburg train
station. The abduction scenario brings him face to face with innocence
in the form of the baby  and
the surrogate mother he arranges for the baby. While murder is still
a part of the gang’s act, the child changes things into a struggle
between Tsotsi’s gang and his redemption.
First-time director Gavin Hood contrasts powerfully the difference between
the gated, Mercedes-populated homes and the squalor of the shack city,
from which no one, not even a would-be teacher, can hope to escape.
City of God had the same trapped feeling and similarly somber look to
enhance the underworld ambience.
In the end this crime film is a morality play about sin and love. Although
it is open for criticism for its sentimentality and common arc of redemption,
it is a powerful statement about the transforming nature of guilt.
Tsotsi’s a worthy Oscar contender morphing morality play simplicity
into the sublime.
Tristram
Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Grade: B
Director: Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People)
Screenplay: Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People)
Laurence Stern novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Cast: Steve Coogan (Around the World in 80 Days), Rob Brydon (24 Hour
Party People)
Rating: R
“People sometimes say
that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s
the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal.” Andy
Warhol
 As
much as I write about the appreciation of movies, have a screenwriter
daughter and talent agent son, the actual making of a movie remains
a mystery except through such famous insider films as Day for Night
and the recent Adaptation and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Michael Winterbottom’s
Tristram Shandy, a film about the making of a film about an unfilmable
17th century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence
Stern, brings a levity to the genre, a sense that filming is an imperfect
science replete with last minute accommodations, intrigues, distress,
and mirth—a world unto its own for the time it takes to wrap it
up and put it in the can, or computer, as it might be today.
Steve Coogan as Shandy and his father is perfect for the role, a comedian
just low key enough to spring ironies and sarcasm gently on us voyeurs
and delicate enough to make us applaud his character named Steve Coogan
remaining faithful to his wife while beset by his own wandering eye
and a most attractive p.a. Like the novel itself, these intrigues come
to nothing because Winterbottom keeps us all grooving through a sumptuous
old Brit estate as if hounded by the inevitably hungry creditors.
Central to the enjoyment of the chaos is the friendly rivalry between
lead Coogan and his “co-lead” Rob Brydon, a real life comedian.
Rob is well aware of his second banana status and open with Coogan about
his insecurities, who good-naturedly indulges Rob’s prattling
about his adulation of Pacino and Streisand and his downright fear of
playing opposite Gillian Anderson, who joins the enterprise only to
be shocked to see how little of her survives the editing. She is responsible
for leading him into the  funniest
line of the film when she asks Rob’s character where he was wounded
in the battle scene eventually cut: “Just beyond the asparagus,”
he responds pointing to the spot on the model.
After reminding Coogan that he, Rob, is a “featured co-lead,”
Coogan dryly responds, “Well, we’ll see after the edit.”
The banter between Coogan and Brydon continues even during the credits
as Brydon frets about his bald spot and the excellence of his movie
star imitations.
It’s as delightful a romp through filmmaking as you could hope
for given the ungainly glamour of the process, the uncertainty of the
outcome, and the surfeit of talent so necessary for its success or failure.
Neil
Young: Heart of Gold
Grade: A
Director: Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense)
Cast: Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas,
Karl T. Himmel, Chad Cromwell and Wayne Jackson.
Rating: PG
 When
Neil Young breaks from singing his own lyrical compositions in Neil
Young: Heart of Gold to sing what he calls the most beautiful song ever
composed, I knew exactly which Canadian piece it would be, for it was
mine too. I listened as a young man to Ian Tyson’s “Four
Strong Winds” for an entire evening, over and over, as Young did
emptying his pockets for a juke box at 16 years old in Calgary. Young
had my heart for this performance and a lifetime.
At this point in director Jonathan Demme’s two days of filming
Young and friends at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, weeks before
his operation for a brain aneurism, I also knew this was the best concert
film I had seen in my recent memory.
Young’s singing Tyson’s song symbolized the real heart of
gold he so obviously has calling someone else’s work the best.
In this film, however, no one could be better than Young. His voice
seems to have lost none of its resonance and feeling since his searching
for a heart of gold song made him almost  iconic.
His stories, such as one about his guitar coming from Hank Williams
and then set to song in The Old Guitar, make the only bridges necessary
among songs in a concert of songs. When he sings a duet with Emmylou
Harris, her delivery seems consciously stoic in order to let Young’s
understated performance be the gold standard that night.
Demme, who has successes with Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock,
concentrates most of his shots on close-ups of Young, whose low-key
style demands the audience get as close as possible. The backgrounds
change on the theme of his new album, Prairie Wind, so that a new mural
of the southwest is brought across as the songs change. Concert gold.
Find Me Guilty
Grade: A
Director: Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon)
Screenplay: Lumet, T.J. Mancini, Robert J. McCrea
Cast: Vin Diesel (xXx), Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent)
Rating: R
"When they f--- with me,"
Jackie DiNorscio says, "they wake a sleeping giant."
I find Find Me Guilty guilty of being one of the best courtroom melodramas
in the last 50 years, with 12 Angry Men and The Verdict among them.
Of course, these three films are Sidney Lumet’s, a brainy director
whose book “Making Movies” is a definitive analysis of the
art and production process seen through a director’s eyes. It
doesn’t hurt either that his Dog Day Afternoon is a gritty urban
bank heist story headed by a young actor of promise, Al Pacino.
 So
how can Vin Diesel, playing the real Jackie DiNorscio, compete with
Pacino? He’s within range underplaying a playful gangster who
prefers the jury think of him as a “gagster.” Think of a
bit slimmer Tony Soprano with less smarts but a better sense of humor,
which Jackie uses to disorient the longest mobster trial in American
history involving 20 hoods at the same time as he represents himself
against racketeering charges. And I hope the Academy doesn’t forget
Peter Dinklage’s unforgettable lead attorney either next year
at this time.
Both sides in any trial have known this by cliché probably from
the time of Hammurabi: “They say a laughing jury is not a hanging
jury.”
Because the trial actually happened, and all twenty went free in no
small part because of Jackie’s connection with the jury, Find |
