~~~~
Queued!
The Best and Worst of Netflix
in 101 Independent Reviews,
Vol. 1
By Christopher Smith
~~~~
For Sandy Phippen, who got me into this.
Thank you.
~~~~
"Queued: The Best and Worst of Netflix in 101 Independent Reviews"
By Christopher Smith
Published by WeekinRewind.com at Smashwords.
Copyright 2010 by Christopher Smith
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
All rights reserved worldwide.
~~~~
Contents
Movies:
Gone with the Wind (Restored Version)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
~~~~
Introduction
In my 14 years as a film critic for a major daily newspaper in the Northeast, at which I’ve written more than 4,000 movie reviews, the question I’m now asked most is this: “What should I add to my Netflix queue?”
It’s not a surprising question.
Netflix, Blockbuster, Wal-Mart and any number of other online DVD rental stores is the way many are receiving their DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And why not? It’s inexpensive, and they make it ridiculously easy to order what you want. No reason to leave home. Just bring up their website, scan the tens of thousands of offerings, choose something that looks promising, in the mail it comes. And then you hope for the best.
It’s that last part that I want to remove from the equation. It’s also the sheer number of offerings that led me to write this book, which takes a sampling of the thousands of reviews I’ve written over the years, and gives you a solid idea of what movies you absolutely should add to your queue, and what movies you absolutely should leave queueless.
Several major films are reviewed here, but what I set out to accomplish with the first volume of the “Queued!” series is to suggest films you might have heard of only in passing, or perhaps not at all.
There are gems out there that receive little attention because, frankly, they lack the massive marketing campaigns enjoyed by most blockbusters. In all the noise those movies make, you might have missed such terrific films as “Aimee and Jaguar,” “The Kite Runner,” “The Opposite of Sex,” “Let the Right One In” and “East-West,” to name a few.
These movies are richly drawn and worth your time. Have you heard of them? Seen them? Maybe, maybe not. But if you haven’t, Netflix at the very least has them, and by adding them to your queue, they can offer you a swell night with a movie you might never have given a chance.
Mixed into this group of reviews are some less-favorable choices, movies that receive such a massive financial push from the studios, the very idea that they’ve become part of the landscape suggests they might be worth viewing.
And so you rent them. And a sour feeling overcomes you when you realize you’ve been had. While this book focuses mainly on what you should add to your queue, a handful of some well-known yet terrible films have been selected to help save you time and disappointment.
As a bonus, these particular reviews tend to be the most fun to read.
The second volume of “Queued!” will be coming shortly. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this first volume and use it to find movies that offer escape, insight and entertainment.
Christopher Smith
July 29, 2010
~~~~
The Pianist
Perhaps only Roman Polanski could have pulled off "The Pianist," 2002's best film, a blunt, unflinching masterwork from the director of "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby" that exposes a harrowing corner of the Holocaust, strips it bare of sentiment and offers an unnerving meditation on the horror of war and on one man's fight for survival.
As our own troops are deployed for the possibility of another war, the film stands as a gift and a timely reminder from the 69-year-old Polanski, a Polish Jew who experienced the Holocaust firsthand as a 7-year-old boy in the Krakow ghetto.
Indeed, it was there that Polanski's parents were ripped from him by the Germans, divided and taken to separate concentration camps (his father survived but his mother was gassed at Auschwitz), and where Polanski himself learned the terror of dodging German gunfire as he made his own daring escape through a barbed-wire fence and into a ruined world he no longer knew.
If surviving that experience gave Polanski the crucial insight necessary to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), one of Poland's premiere composers and pianists who died in 2000 at the age of 89, then it's the unique worldview and human perspective he culled from that experience that makes "The Pianist" so utterly personal and, at the same time, so coldly detached.
Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, the film is based on Szpilman's 1946 memoirs, which were published only two years after his ordeal and--not unlike some of the poetry, music and literature written in the weeks and months following the events of Sept. 11--have a rawness that the passing of time may have muted.
Using that edge--but not seduced or distracted by it--Polanski bears witness to the five most defining years of Szpilman's life, recounting atrocities the director himself likely endured while never once losing his unshakable focus.
Shot in Polanski's native Poland, a location the director has avoided using in a movie since his first film, 1962's "Knife in the Water," "The Pianist" opens in 1939 with the 27-year-old Szpilman playing a Chopin nocturne for a Polish radio station when Nazi bombs blow the hell out of the studio at which he's performing.
Around him, chaos unfolds as the Nazis dig in for the long haul. But Szpilman, innocently believing that all of this will soon pass, initially seems less interested in the threat of war and more interested in the pretty blond cellist (Emilia Fox) he meets on the stairwell during his flight from the building.
His family also believes the Germans will fail, particularly when it's announced via radio that France and Britain have declared war on Hitler. The collective sigh of relief that rises up from the tight-knit Szpilmans is eventually strangled from each as the Jews of Warsaw are herded from their homes by the hundreds of thousands and the film's real horrors begin.
Horror has always been Polanski’s forte, a major thread that carries through much of his work. And so, for the rest of the movie, he holds back nothing, letting loose with a wrenching, often brutal series of images delivered with a matter-of-fact frankness that gives the film such power, it's often humbling and difficult to watch.
Through all the rubble, death, senseless murder and devastation, Polanski never loses sight of Szpilman's journey, which is at once physical as he fights for survival in a world where finding some crumbs or a can of pickles can mean the difference between life or death, and also spiritual as his faith--tested time and again by the Nazis--is sustained by the beauty and truth he finds in music.
In the film's best scene--an instant classic that comes near the end of the movie--all of Szpilman's rage, exhaustion, frustration and long-repressed passion are sprung free when a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) asks him to play the piano at the house in which Szpilman is hiding.
It is the most poignant, life-affirming moment I’ve seen at the movies in years and Brody, whose genius performance stands as the best of 2002, stumbles a bit before giving it his all, throwing himself into the sublime release of music and allowing us into the internal life of the artist as the artist himself hurls everything he has—everything that’s right with the world and everything that’s left in his soul--straight into the face of madness.
(Originally published 2002)
(Contents)
~~~~
Hanging Up
Dear Diane Keaton:
I recently saw your movie, “Hanging Up,” and feel well enough now to pass along my deepest sympathy and most heart-felt regrets.
I have to believe this erring bit of madness isn’t just your fault. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion a big part of your film’s cheap shots at women and rampant, muddled sentiment has less to do with your own surprising streak of misogyny, than it does with those harbingers of bad taste, those film hooligans of fluff, the Ephron sisters, Delia and Nora.
Certainly it was they who cajoled you into making a film about three hateful, troubled, selfish, self-involved, self-serving, rich, unlikable women who are such harried emotional wrecks, such cold climbers in their respective fields, they can’t possibly deal with themselves or with their dying father--and so they don’t. Not once.
And isn’t that what this film is supposed to be about? Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow and you dealing with Walter Matthau as a difficult, dying parent? Maybe it’s just me, but throughout, I couldn’t help noticing you never dealt with that issue. Certainly you kept brushing up against it the way a cat brushes up against a litter box, but in so doing, you essentially left your characters and your audience in an emotional lurch.
Forgive me for being blunt, but the experience of watching your film was trite.
This movie of yours, which the Ephrons adapted from Delia’s boring autobiographical book, has nothing to do with any tangible sort of human existence. It’s meant for rich, emotionally detached women who want nothing more than to have it all, but you and the Ephrons are boldly saying that women can’t have it all without first being a shrill mess of jumpy nerves. And even then, they fail.
It’s funny...and a little odd. Looking back at your career choices (I’ve been a fan since “Lovers and Other Strangers”), you never struck me as a traditionalist, but here you are stating just that in your fourth effort as a director.
What really perplexed me in “Hanging Up” isn’t just the fact that it’s being marketed as a comedy when it’s clearly a drama, but that it’s also being marketed for mainstream audiences when it only addresses a tiny percentage of that audience. Tell me, how do you expect anyone in the real world to identify with these women?
Meg Ryan’s co-dependent Eve drives a $70,000 Land Rover, lives in a great house and has a successful party planning business; Lisa Kudrow’s Maddy is a famous soap opera actress who couldn’t count to three even if somebody walked her through it; and your own character Georgia, the least likable of the bunch, is a super-rich, power hungry witch who has her own magazine empire (modestly named “Georgia”) and, apparently, no heart or conscience.
You might argue that audiences will identify with the dying-parent angle, which some certainly might, but what good is a dying, grumpy old man, or the knowledge that he was an abusive alcoholic who put his three daughters through hell, when you and the Ephrons choose to hastily resolve all their hurt and pain with a misty-eyed hug and a ridiculous, “feel-good” food fight at film’s end?
Your audience deserved better, Diane. They deserved some insight.
I don’t have to ask whose idea it was for Meg Ryan to behave like a manic squid. I’m sure that came from her. But couldn’t you have asked her to tone down her flailing arms and legs, hands and feet? Throughout, her fevered impersonation of herself isn’t just cliché, but as cloying as your insistence to keep these three on the telephone at all times, a device that interrupts any bit of flow and energy your film otherwise might have had.
Look--I’m sure right now you’re as exhausted as I was when I left your movie, so I’ll end with this: Don’t you think it’s curious that, for all the endless talking and chatter that goes on in “Hanging Up,” no one ever says anything meaningful? They just talk and talk and talk to shut out the world, to shut out their problems, and, naturally, to hear themselves talk. I’ve been thinking about that since I saw the movie.
(Originally published 2000)
(Contents)
~~~~
The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke’s terrific film, “The White Ribbon,” is unshakably good, particularly at the end, when the disease destroying the core of the story (that would be humanity at its lowest depths of depravity) has gone on to fully reveal its dysfunction, its divisiveness, its backhanded brutality and its overall rotten awfulness.
The film observes the collapse of a small town on the eve of World War I. We’re in Germany. The film is shot in black and white. The images are bleak, cruel and stunning, not unlike the movie itself. Haneke (“Cache”) wrote the script, and just as his fans expect, he works by evasion, leading audiences to a well the reflects nothing back. Instead, we’re offered a deep sink into a bottomless darkness.
“The White Ribbon” is satisfying in its complexity, rich in its ambiguity. It’s a movie that demands you walk around it, circle it, trying to figure out exactly what’s going because there’s no way that Haneke is going to tell you. For those who like their movies spelled out for them, this isn’t for you, in spite of the subtitles. For those who appreciate the grace of a director who employs narrative discretion, this absolutely is for you.
The film opens with a man on a horse racing toward his house. Since the movie is told in flashback by way of the village’s now-elderly schoolteacher (Ernst Jacobi), we know the man is a doctor and that he breaks his arm when his horse trips over a hidden wire somebody strung between two trees. But who strung the wire? And why do they have it in for the doctor? Men show up in an effort to understand what happened, but there are no clues, no answers, and the doctor is taken away to a hospital far away so he can mend. Could somebody have benefited from his absence? Maybe. Maybe not.
To Haneke, it doesn’t matter. Braced against his own coldness, he presses on--there are others to undo in this village of grim-looking people. Look, for instance, at the dead woman ground up at the mill. What happened to her? Or look at young boy with Down’s syndrome who is savagely beaten and left to hang in a forest with a bag on his head. Why? Or the barn that is set ablaze in the middle of the night. Or the pet bird whose throat is slit. Or the doctor’s midwife, housekeeper, receptionist and mistress (Susanne Lothar), who is told by the doctor (Rainer Bock) while she’s masturbating him to stop. Finished with her, he delivers one of the most cutting rebukes caught on film this year.
“Why do you want me to stop?” she asks.
“To be truthful, you disgust me,” he says. “You’re ugly, messy, flabby and have bad breath. Don’t sit there looking like death warmed over. I can’t go on with this. I’ve really tried to think of another woman while making love to you--one who smells good, who’s young, less decrepit than you--buy my imagination can’t manage it. In the end, it’s you again, and then I feel like puking, and am embarrassed at myself. At the hospital, I forgot how tiresome you are. One grows sentimental when in pain.” He glares at her. “Why don’t you just die?”
Death is, in fact, everywhere in this movie--it’s alive and well and swallowing the living whole. People are ridiculed and reduced to nothing. Children are beaten and scorned, particularly the children of the village’s pastor (Burghart Klaussner), two of whom provide the film its title in that they are forced to wear white ribbons of purity until he believes that he can trust them again (just why we’ll leave for the screen). Those children are Klara and Martin (Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf, each outstanding), and you’ve never seen such a mean-mouthed duo, the lot of which reflects their father’s own rage, which he repeatedly takes out on them.
And what about that? What does such abuse do to a child? Does it carry over to them? In this movie, the children move in marching groups; you’d swear they were a gang if they weren’t so polite to the adults they come upon in town. And yet there’s something about them the film only brushes against--are they the cause for the village’s atrocities? Could children be capable of such violent acts?
As a young man, the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) questions Klara and Martin when something else happens to the boy with Down’s syndrome. Klara is older and smart and direct--she’s a force. Martin is younger and cagey. The schoolteacher’s questions are relentless, and soon they leach over to the children’s father, the pastor, who preaches God’s word and sips from his cup, but who is one of the most ruthless, unkind people in the movie.
He’s so defensive when the schoolteacher laces him with the same questions that he threatens to have him thrown out of his house and into prison. Could the pastor be responsible for all that has happened, or is he just protecting his children? And how about the doctor, who suddenly has rushed out of town? Why did he run off?
Who knows?
Shot superbly by cinematographer Christian Berger, “The White Ribbon” is stark and haunting, expertly acted and directed, morally corrupt and memorable for all of it. It’s framed as a mystery, but really, Heneke’s sights are on his characters, the evil inherent in people, and how that evil, when organized, has the potential to grow into something more repellent if left uncapped, as it is here. The white ribbons in this movie are meant to signify purity, but what we don’t see in this film is the power of another color--red--and how, years later, it would come to define another generation of Germans in another war waiting to bloom on another horizon.
(Originally published 2010)
(Contents)
~~~~
A Very Long Engagement
The World War I drama "A Very Long Engagement" could only come from French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose 2001 film - the quirky, Academy Award-nominated "Amelie" - at last gave the director the right showcase for his unmistakable style and unusual worldview. It was a marriage that worked.
Jeunet has been directing since the late 1970s, taking his share of awards for a handful of short films and features but never really making a splash on the international scene because his early films were likely too remote and unwieldy for Hollywood to embrace.
In 1997, he had a shot to broaden his reach with his first Hollywood film - the rotten "Alien: Resurrection." But with that little space bomb exploding in a vacuum, Jeunet took a five-year hiatus to work on "Amelie," a movie set in his own Montmartre neighborhood in Paris - a place he knew, with characters he loved.
It all came together. What Jeunet found in "Amelie" wasn't just a plucky story suited for his bold visual taste and his dark sense of humor, but an actress with the sort of screen presence that allowed him to hover in the ether he favors, while also keeping his story grounded in the reality it needed to succeed: Audrey Tautou.
Now, in "A Very Long Engagement," director and star come together again with fine, sometimes funny, and often moving results.
As loosely adapted by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant from Sebastien Japrisot's novel, "Engagement" is about a young woman named Mathilde (Tautou) who knows in her heart that her fiance, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), is still alive in spite of fighting in the trenches against the Germans and new reports that he's dead.
Word has it that Manech, along with four other men, self-mutilated himself in an effort to be released from the war so he could go home. Banished by his superior officer to No Man's Land - the area between French and German lines - the five men were naturally considered doomed when the Germans opened fire on them.
Through the help of strangers and one peerless detective, Mathilde learns that Manech might not be dead after all. And so rises a mission that burns in her soul and through the movie, with Mathilde cutting through a complicated plot filled with twists, clever touches, the wet, muddy horror of the first world war and characters just colorful enough not to be overwhelmed by any of it.
Of particular note is Jodie Foster as a soldier's wife. At first, her appearance is startling, particularly since she's on a tear, speaking fluent French and having the sort of sex that tends to raise eyebrows. But then you realize how right she is for the role and the movie is lifted a notch.
Tautou, as usual, fills the screen with the eyes of a silent-era star. She uses them like one, too--and she's marvelous.
With "Amelie" and "Engagement," Jeunet joins a select group of directors - most significantly Truffaut - whose work is immediately recognizable.
With the exception of "Resurrection," there is nothing canned about his movies, nothing generic. And while "Engagement" is unquestionably his largest production to date, he still holds true to what defines him - the sly bit characters given to the unexpected, the little human flourishes that place the film in real life, a dense, complex story line that somehow comes together at the end.
And
what an end.
(Originally published 2004)
(Contents)
~~~~
A Single Man
Tom Ford's Academy Award-nominated “A Single Man” is his first film and, in spite of taking place in 1962, it’s timely as hell, particularly in the ongoing debate of equal rights for gay men and women, which have yet to be achieved.
The film is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, and it stars Colin Firth as George, a gay, middle-aged man who loses his long-time partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), after a horrific car accident.
A professor of humanities, George suddenly finds himself caught in an inhumane world. Since nothing legally binds him to Jim, he is banned from Jim’s funeral when Jim’s family states that they don’t want him there, thank you very much, so please stay away. When he learns about Jim’s death, it’s only via a brief telephone call. Humane? Hardly--especially since he and Jim were together 16 years.
What that kind of cruelty does to a person--and how the loss of a significant other can profoundly affect a person, whether straight or gay--is what “A Single Man” is about.
In the wake of Jim’s death, George is aloft, rootless, caught in a haze of mourning. The passing of days don’t fulfill that old cliché that states that time heals all wounds--for George, that’s something of a joke. His loneliness and heartbreak thrums onscreen. Grief is etched into his face. In his eyes are a hollowness and a hurt that Firth, in one of his finest performances, captures with haunting ease.
Essentially, he plays a dead man walking, with suicide viewed as potentially the only way out of the pain and the injustice he feels.
And yet through all this, another young man at George’s university tries to edge into George’s life. At another point, a James Dean knockoff also closes in. But George is grieving, and while there is part of him that is curious about this attention, another part of him is repelled by it. His love for Jim is deep. It’s not replaceable. For a reprieve from the ache he feels, he turns to Charley (Julianne Moore), a beautiful drunk who likes her gin almost as much as she likes her eyeliner. There’s love between them, but you sense it’s a different kind of love for Charley than it is for George.
Ford and David Scearce wrote the script, and the film’s presence on the scene punctuates the ongoing issues surrounding the move toward equality for gay couples. The movie doesn’t define the debate so much as it adds to it. Who’s to say who we are to love? Why does the minority lack the equality of the majority? Are George’s emotions second-rate? He was with Jim for 16 years. Does that mean nothing? To the law, it does.
As a director, Ford is very good at holding back and letting his excellent cast do their jobs, which they do well. Occasionally, he lapses into such tricks as sucking the color from the film in an effort to capture George’s increasingly colorless world, but that gimmick doesn’t work against the movie. The leads are too strong, the writing is too solid, and the ethics at hand are too dire to ignore to let a few lapses in judgment get in the way of George’s unfortunately realistic story.
(Originally published 2010)
(Contents)
~~~~
Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray’s great camp movie, “Johnny Guitar," stars Joan Crawford as Vienna, a swanky saloon-casino owner in the Old West who knows the value of cutting cards, employing men to spin her roulette wheel, and who at one point is called “a railroad tramp not fit to live among decent people.”
Sounds harsh, but Vienna can take it.
Crawford plays Vienna as nobody’s fool. Back straight, hair pulled into a vice grip of brown curls, lips as red as a stop sign, gun at the ready, she’s a force, this one. As one of her employees remarks, “Never seen a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not one.” And yet Vienna has a softer, more feminine side, such as when she closes the bar, puts on an elaborate white gown, and plays the piano with festive pluck.
Philip Yordan wrote the script (under the influence?) and what he conceived is a story that involves how a mean, ferocious woman named Emma (Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable) is determined to see Vienna hang because she believes that Vienna was involved in her brother’s murder.
When Vienna’s long-ago lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), rides back into her life, the movie heaves and sighs as the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady) and his gang (including Ernest Borgnine) also storm the saloon and start to cause trouble. Were they also involved in the death of Emma’s brother? Since Emma is certain of it--and because she wields absolute control over the men in this movie--soon the kid gloves are off, guns are drawn, and accusations are hurled.
About those accusations--the dialogue in this movie is beyond comprehension. Consider, for example, this exchange between a gun-wielding Vienna, the law men who have come to get her, and Emma, who wants her dead.
Vienna: “Get out! Get out all of you!”
Emma, in a low voice: “That’s big talk for a little gun. You can’t shoot all of us.”
Vienna, bemused: “Two of you will do.”
Emma, challenging: “You don’t have the nerve.”
Vienna: “Try me.”
The men around them: “Put down that gun, Vienna. Put down the gun.”
Vienna: “Down there I sell whiskey and cards. All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head.” She swaggers. She smirks. “Now…which do you want?”
As the men scramble away, Emma approaches like a pint-sized version of the Black Death in a green elf’s uniform: “I’m going to kill you.”
Vienna, towering over her: “I know--if I don’t kill you first.”
Here’s what’s certain--the movie will kill audiences, but in the best way. Just watching the sparring between Crawford and McCambridge is enough to send you over the moon. As for the movie, it’s an absurdist’s dream--in one scene in which guns are drawn and tensions are high, the strapping Hayden enters the bar with a delicate tea cup in his hand. You watch the scene thinking, “Oh, no he didn’t.” But he did. And that’s just the start of it in what’s easily a must film for your Netflix queue.
(Originally published 2009)
(Contents)
~~~~
King Kong (2005)
The first 45 minutes of Peter Jackson's "King Kong" are among the most boring to hit theaters this year. They are pure padding--dull and meandering--with the characters allegedly being fleshed out when it turns out that really, there isn't much to them at all.
At least not in Jackson's hands.
Turn to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 original film, however, on which this "Kong" is based, and you have a great B-movie on your hands, filled with snappy characters, real drama, heart and action, and an iconic performance by Fay Wray that has become cinematic legend.
Unfortunately, on its way to theaters, Jackson's $200 million version slipped on a rather big, gaudy banana peel. We'll call it self-oneupmanship.
The director shows no restraint here, just computer-generated overkill. His movie is a disappointment peppered with flashes of what it could have been had Jackson not felt pressed to top his Academy Award-winning "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which is an altogether different beast. For one thing, the "Rings" series wasn't a love story, which "Kong" is, though you'd be hard pressed to know it until Jackson finally achieves a level of intimacy in key scenes that come well past the film's midpoint.
Co-written by Jackson and his longtime collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the movie inflates the original's running time from 95 minutes to more than three hours, which is absurd. The only reason this " Kong" should have been three hours is if it featured Jane Goodall in the sack with the ape. At least that would have made for an interesting show. You can just imagine the canoodling and the conversations.
But no. Instead, we get Naomi Watts as Ann, the out-of-work vaudeville performer with the tough life and the bum luck who is trying to make a buck in New York during the Depression. Hard times, for sure, particularly when your only prospect for work turns out to be removing your clothes at a strip club and slinking naked around a cold pole.
Ann is contemplating that shaky career move when along comes shady filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black, awful), who needs an actress fast so he can skip town and make his jungle movie before his longtime studio tells him he's through.
Spotting Ann outside the aforementioned strip joint (which, it should be noted, kindly wasn’t an option for her in the original film), he follows her, woos her, and then convinces her to take the lead in his movie. For hesitant Ann, the deal is clinched when Denham drops a key name. The person writing the script is Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), with whom Ann has always wanted to work.
She gets her chance. Soon, all are on a boat and off to Skull Island, where danger awaits thanks to the zombie-like locals, who soon make off with a shrieking Ann so they can string her up and offer her to the beast.
It's here that the movie doesn't disappoint. With a few exceptions, the worst of which involves a fake-looking chase scene in which several brontosauruses run amok amid humans, trampling them while the actors digitally dart between their legs, the special effects throughout "Kong" are mostly polished.
Occasionally, masterful technical flourishes are achieved, such as when Kong comes up against three T. rexes, which has energy in spite of recalling Spielberg's "Jurassic Park"; the scene in Central Park in which Kong and Ann play nice on the ice, which is unabashedly corny and romantic, but which nevertheless works in its tenderness; and especially the end of the film, in which Kong takes to the Empire State Building for the final showdown between man and beast.
The irony about Jackson's "Kong" is that in spite of being a movie in which size matters, the script and the actors struggle to rise up and do their part; they shrink against the technical chaos, becoming almost secondary to the work being done by the computers.
Black is wholly miscast in the role, playing Denham like a moustache twirling villain rather than the flawed opportunist he was in the original. Brody fails to make a connection; there is no heat between he and Ann, no spark, though there should have been if we're meant to feel anything for them at the end.
As Ann, Watts isn't the doll Wray was--she doesn't have her delicacy--but she does best Jessica Lang's attempt in the 1976 remake and she does connect with Kong in spite of the carnival show Jackson unleashes around them. Indeed, the best parts of this "Kong" are when it just stops, when beauty and the beast can--oh, I don't know--share some down time together and appreciate a sunset. At least during these moments you feel the weight of their odd bond, which is crucial if Jackson is going to bring audiences to their knees during Kong's climactic fight.
If it's spectacle you want, ignore this review--the movie succeeds in being the year's biggest spectacle. But if it's something that recalls the original film that you're seeking, Jackson's movie might be too much. In the end, for me, 'twas overkill killed the beast.
(Originally published 2005)
(Contents)
~~~~
The Last Samurai
The new Tom Cruise movie, “The Last Samurai,” is a film at war with itself.
It’s torn between what it wants to be—a big, sweeping epic hoping to cut a swath to the Academy Awards--and what it can’t be because of the dramatic limitations of its star.
As such, the movie has its moments, some of which are bold, ripsnorting fun, nicely recalling the hypnotic greatness of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Rashomon,” while other moments are just plain dumb, heavy-handed and awful.
As directed by Edward Zwick from a screenplay he co-wrote with John Logan and Marshall Herkovitz, the movie finds Cruise trying so hard to express the depth of his character’s emotion, there are times when you fear he’ll have a stroke doing so.
That’s no joke. At one point, toward the end of this uneven, 2 1/2-hour romp in Japan, Cruise trembles with such grief, rage, injustice and despair, his eyes literally begin to cross and you sense that this is it. The man really is going to be the first actor ever to pass out onscreen from overacting.
They should give him an Academy Award just for the effort.
As an actor, Cruise has always been self-aware to the point of distraction and he never has fully lost himself in a role. But this time out, unlike his turns in “Top Gun,” the “Mission: Impossible” movies and the recent “Minority Report,” which benefited from his mechanical brand of cocky intensity, that isn’t a virtue.
What he needed to bring to “The Last Samurai” was something less showy, less obvious, less Cruisy. He does score when he’s called upon to fight in the film’s rousing action sequences, which are beautifully filmed by cinematographer John Toll. But when he’s asked to act, you’re always aware that he’s acting, which robs the film of the dramatic undercurrent it needed to succeed.
In the film, Cruise is Capt. Nathan Algren, an alcohol-soaked, Civil War wreck who survived Little Bighorn and is now prostituting himself at traveling sideshows as a posterchild for patriotic honor and courage. It’s 1876 and Algren has reached the end of the line; thanks to the bloodshed he created and witnessed on the battlefield, he’s a ruined man questioning his existence.
When he’s recruited by a Japanese railroad magnate and sent to Yokohama to train the imperial Army to lose their Eastern ways and fight with a Western sensibility—you know, lose the arrows and swords in favor of guns, canons and ammo—he unwittingly steps into the next chapter of his life, which turns out to be an open book filled with far more possibilities than he ever expected.
Indeed, after killing a samurai warrior, he finds himself captured by Lord Kasumoto (Ken Watanabe), a commanding presence who senses in Algren a strong-willed man who might benefit from his conversation and tutelage.
Their relationship is born. Algren moves in with the wife and family of the samurai warrior he slaughtered, and is disappointed not to find an open bar. One of the film’s more curious spectacles is watching Algren go through detox, with Cruise writhing nearly naked on the floor and screaming for rounds of sake, which he hungrily gulps before his host family, led by the beautiful widow, Taka (supermodel Koyuki), shuts him off completely. Some who see the movie will want to hug her for it.
Since a good deal of the film relies on its superlative action scenes--the very sort in which Cruise excels—“The Last Samurai” is far from a wash. The final battle between a divided Japan, for instance, is enormously satisfying and raw, and the movie actually improves as it unfolds--it allows for more skirmishes and fewer moments for Cruise to narrow his eyes and look meaningfully just offscreen.
Supporting performances from Billy Connolly and Timothy Spall give the film a comedic lift while Tony Goldwyn and Hiroyuki Sanada are allowed to snake around the edges, raising the film’s elements of evil. All are fine, but nobody here, not even Cruise, matches the solid work of Watanabe, a huge star in Japan who is destined to become one here.
In the end, “The Last Samurai” is a mixed bag of carefully packaged entertainment, with little room for spontaneity or surprise. As for the ending (and stop reading now if you don’t want it spoiled), which dives recklessly and shamelessly into mythmaking, it turns out that Japan’s last samurai wasn’t a native of that country, but an American war vet renewed with Eastern customs and a crisp outlook on life.
I wonder how the Japanese feel about that.
(Originally published 2003)
(Contents)
~~~~
Let the Right One In
The comparisons between Catherine Hardwicke’s “Twilight” and Tom Alfredson’s “Let the Right One In” come so swiftly and easily, it would be an oversight not to compare them for a specific reason--one movie courts an American sensibility driven by box-office greed, the other a foreign sensibility driven by artistry and the quest to tell a story well.
Guess which is the better movie?
Obviously, the weak link is “Twilight,” an overheated potboiler about the potentially undeadly physical attraction that ignites between two hot-and-bothered teens, one a male vampire fresh from an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, the other a pouty mortal female trying to stuff down one mother of a hormonal rampage.
At its core, “Twilight” uses its vampire angle to promote abstinence, an interesting twist for tweens that’s unfortunately suffocated by too much action-movie clutter, purple romantic pining and blue dialogue. In other words, the movie is filled with the very rainbow of qualities that make for the blockbuster “Twilight” has become. Abstinence never will sell a movie, but kisses, randy teens and explosions do, so that’s what audiences got upon the movie’s release.
“Let the Right One In,” on the other hand, is a quiet, more intense vampire thriller from Sweden that features a similar storyline, though one which goes deeper and darker than “Twilight” ever could imagine. It’s the story of a pale, bullied 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), and how his budding relationship with a pale, 12-year-old girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson), who is a vampire, leads each to a dangerous precipice that must not be crossed.
Unlike Bella from “Twilight,” who would happily die for her stud vamp if it meant spending an eternity marveling at his fright wig and killer cheekbones, Oskar has more substance. He comes to love Eli, but in spite of suffering a cruel life that also includes divorced parents (just as it does with Bella), he doesn’t want to end it.
From the start, there is a wariness between them that draws you into the movie, which is set in the snowy chills of winter (Hoyte Van Hoytema’s stark cinematography is one of the movie’s chief pleasures). Each child is lonely. Each needs a friend. Given that Oskar is on the cusp of adolescence--and all that entails--his conflicted feelings for Eli are charged with a sexual undercurrent he doesn’t fully understand.
But she does. Eli might exist within a 12-year-old’s body, but she’s been 12 for some time. And so, as they grow closer, she becomes his protector, feasting gruesomely when she must (the poor thing never remembers to wipe her bloody mouth), but remaining as true to Oskar as he is to her.
Unlike “Twilight,” suspense and spareness are the motivators here, not violence. That isn’t to suggest that the movie isn’t violent--it is, sometimes wickedly so--but those moments are few. Alfredson understands the power of subtlety. He knows precisely the right moment to shock, but more important, he does so in ways that you’ve never seen on a movie screen. That he does so in a genre nearly as old as the movies themselves lifts “Let the Right One In” into the coveted realm of one of the year’s more memorable films.
(Originally published 2008)
(Contents)
~~~~
The Asphalt Jungle
Nominated for four Academy Awards, John Huston’s 1950 noir-caper “The Asphalt Jungle" is high-end noir in a low-end world.
It’s among the most urban and hard-boiled of the genre. Tough and menacing, its lack of humor deepening the dysfunction, the film has an air of urgency that consumes it.
Everyone here is on the make, desperately muscling their cut of the action so they can have the means to break free from their lives of crime.
In this case, the action involves a heist devised by ex-con, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), a mousy man recently sprung from prison who has an ingenious plan to steal $1 million worth of jewels from a swank jeweler. To do so, Riedenschneider enlists the help of several men necessary to pull the job.
Chief among them is Emmerich (Louis Calhern), the bankrupt lawyer financing the deal while trying to keep his middle-aged wife (Dorothy Tree) happy, and his demanding young mistress (Marilyn Monroe, brilliant in her first screen role) a wee bit happier. If he looks exhausted, there’s good reason--these two keep him running.
Doing the grunt work are Louis (Anthony Caruso), a family man and gifted safe-cracker caring for an ill child; Gus (James Whitmore), who knows how to drive a car with the sort of nimble swiftness needed in a getaway; and Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the film’s emotional center, who smolders as the enforcer of the heist.
Dix is in love with Doll (Jean Hagen), though he never shows it. Ruined by a life’s worth of disappointment, he’s soured by the sort of self-loathing that tends to turn good men into crooks. When the heist goes wrong, Dix and the others find themselves in a fix, with the cops suddenly “crawlin’ all over,” as the ever-worried Doll succinctly puts it.
As written by Huston and Ben Maddow from W.R. Burnett’s novel, “The Asphalt Jungle” differs from other film noirs in that Huston (“The Maltese Falcon,” “Key Largo,” “The African Queen”) doesn’t demonize his criminal characters or their behavior.
The film is essentially an American tragedy, with Huston trying to understand his characters and their choices, knowing that most are conflicted men waging interior wars with their morality and their conscience. They may lose, but Huston doesn’t exploit any of them. He allows them their mistakes, then quietly, without malice, takes the world away from them when they go too far.
“The Asphalt Jungle" begins on the mean streets of some unnamed, grimy, mid-western city, but when it ends, it ends in the plush countryside. There, hope stretches deep into a field where life is meant to begin. It’s a haunting finish to a terrific film.
(Originally published 2007)
(Contents)
~~~~
Memoirs of a Geisha
On one level, the new Rob Marshall movie, "Memoirs of a Geisha," isn't so far removed from his Academy Award-winning 2002 film, “Chicago.” Each is extravagantly produced, each is beautiful to look at, each features storylines that court their share of drama. And yet there is a crucial difference between them that Marshall either overlooked or ignored on his way to directing his sophomore effort.
"Chicago" is intended to be a spectacle. It's meant to be robustly American. Marshall's overblown sensibility not only suited the movie, it would have died without it. The film worked because of the high camp it courted, the melodrama it served so well, the razzle-dazzle that winked and blinked from every corner of the screen.
Watching "Geisha," a rather different story about Japanese girls sold on the open market, enslaved for work and sex, and then humiliated when their virginity is sold to the highest bidder (provided there is one), you have to wonder how a similar sensibility works for this movie. The quick answer depends on what brings you to it.
If you're only interested in the pretty painted faces and the intricate kimonos, or the tense intrigue, savage gameplay and tug of romance you might find in a novel by, say, Jackie Collins by way of James Clavell, then the style suits this blockbuster hopeful well.
But if you know something about the geisha, whose illusion of serene beauty belied a difficult life beyond which most could comprehend, one could argue that a more restrained approach would have been more effective, with the melodramatic moments pared to a minimum in favor of allowing room for depth and subtlety.
As written by Robin Swicord from Arthur Golden's best-selling book, "Memoirs of a Geisha" could have been terrific if it didn't feel as if it were serving a sizable budget.
Taken for what it is--soap opera, nothing more--it can be entertaining, particularly after the awkward first third, in which Marshall overplays every emotion to the point of laying it bare onscreen. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is that his story is set in the East, which handles its emotions a bit differently than we in the West. Still, since his movie is designed for Westerners, who demand an onslaught of emotion from a film like this, the clanging of cultures can nevertheless be oddly fun, regardless of whether that was Marshall's intent.
For instance, when the main character, a geisha-in-training named Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), finally rises up against her hateful nemesis geisha Hatsumomo (Gong Li)--a teahouse tramp who has been trying to undo Sayuri for years, ever since she was a child dropped at the okiya--the hair pulling, slapping, shrieking and shoving that ensues zips with energy.
Grounding the movie is Sayuri's geisha trainer, Mameha, who is played with reserve and grace by the Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh (Zhang and Li also are Chinese, which has created something of a controversy). Even when she must talk to Sayuri in sexual metaphors about eels finding their way into caves, she does it with tact, gleaning over the dialogue without a trace of humor.
"We don't become a geisha to pursue our own destinies," Mameha says. "We become geisha because we have no choice. Agony and beauty for us live side by side. Geisha paints her face to hide her face. It is not for geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings, she entertains you--whatever you want. The rest is shadows. The rest is secret."
Well, not quite secret--at least not in this movie, where every secret is revealed.
Sending the film over the moon is Mother (Kaori Momoi), who bought Sayuri from her destitute parents when Sayuri was still a child named Chiyo, and who can do things with a pipe that border on the obscene. There's Pumpkin (Zoe Weizenbaum in youth, Youki Kudoh as an adult), Sayuri's one-time friend, who becomes so colorful as she ages, she could decorate a Blue Hawaii better than any old paper umbrella.
For pining Sayuri, her love interest is Chairman (Ken Watanabe), who was kind to her as a child and who has had her heart ever since. The question to which "Geisha" builds is whether Sayuri will somehow find a way to be with Chairman. Will her childhood crush be realized, perhaps even consummated? As the movie blasts into the throes of World War II, Sayuri is separated from the Chairman and then brought back to him by circumstance. Filled with self doubt, covered with dirt and nearly ruined by war, she realizes that she must become a geisha again if she is to see him.
"Mother had reopened the okiya," she says, "but my powder box was empty, my charcoal had turned to dust. And yet it was my one chance to see the Chairman again. Would he notice my weathered hands, the threadbare silk? The world had changed completely--had he? And would I finally find the strength to tell him all I felt?"
In this very commercial of movies, where the seams show and the plot becomes threadbare in spite of the Academy Award-worthy costume design, that question is beside the point. It doesn't exactly take some tossed tea leaves to figure out how it will end.
(Originally published 2005)
(Contents)
~~~~
Paparazzi
This shameless camp thriller comes from first-time director Paul Abascal, a former celebrity hairdresser who apparently heard one too many paparazzi horror stories from his privileged clientele while teasing and bleaching their locks.
As such, “Paparazzi” has a predictable mean streak—it’s the work of a man who likely wants to keep that clientele happy should this directing thing of his not work out.
That turns out to be the brightest move in an otherwise dumb movie. Deadly serious yet unintentionally funny, “Paparazzi” is a self-conscious, fired-up revenge fantasy that some will find difficult to sit through without offering up the occasional snort and giggle.
Written by first-time screenwriter Forrest Smith, the film exists to humiliate, taunt and then destroy the legion of photographers whose job it is to photograph celebrities. You know, those folks who must keep themselves in the public eye even though there are moments when they’d rather not be photographed, such as when they’ve put on a few pounds, go out for a night of partying, or when they’re cheating on their spouse.
Since the filmmakers have no interest in fair play or in examining the complexities of celebrity privacy, this is adolescent, tit-for-tat moviemaking, the equivalent of hair pulling. Producer Mel Gibson bankrolled this beauty, and wouldn’t you know that it follows the life of an action superstar not unlike Gibson himself.
Studly yet wholly naïve, Cole Hauser’s Bo Laramie is a family man who inexplicably becomes the hottest celebrity in Hollywood on the basis of one movie--a slim-looking action flick called “Adrenaline Force.”
At the start, Bo has a dream life that includes a beautiful wife (Robin Tunney), a cute 6-year-old son, and now sudden wealth and fame. When he gets his first taste of the paparazzi, it’s at the premiere for his latest movie, with the cameras snapping blindingly around him. Sleazeball photographer Rex Harper (Tom Sizemore) enjoys Bo’s discomfort so much, he decides to focus solely on this newcomer, thus forgoing the dozens of other, bigger Hollywood stars that could earn him more money.
When Rex and his photog cronies chase Bo and his family one evening through the streets of Hollywood, the flash of their cameras blind Bo, thus leaving him in a massive car accident reminiscent of the one that killed Diana, Princes of Wales. It’s a cheap shot and, when it happens, you can’t believe the filmmakers went there. But there you have it. That all of them near death in the car—and the paparazzi are taking photos of all of it.
What ensues is Bo’s revenge, with Bo himself realizing the great star perk. Apparently, in spite of being dogged by a detective (Dennis Farina) who thinks he is Columbo, you can kill the paparazzi without being held accountable for their deaths.
When it’s at its mincing best, the movie treats us to this sort of dialogue: “I’ve got two dead paparazzis on my hands.”
Can I get them wholesale? Probably not. Washing his own hands of this middling effort would have been a shrewd move by Abascal, whose own roots obviously have been fried a few too many times.
(Originally published 2004)
(Contents)
~~~~
Australia
Since there isn’t enough space in this book--let alone in the land of Oz--to fully explore the new Baz Luhrmann epic, “Australia,” let’s just cut to the chase, visit the circus he offers, and hope for the best.
Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”) based his movie on a script he co-wrote with Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan, and what he mines from it is one massive film, the first third of which is pure camp (not in a good way), and the last two-thirds of which manage to settle into something reasonably engrossing.
Set in 1939 and extending through to 1942, when Australia was attacked by the Japanese as World War II rolled over that continent, the film stars Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, whose pale, parasol-shielded skin belies the metal that rests beneath.
At first, Sarah comes off as a rigid cartoon--her tight-fisted gate, popping eyes and unyielding pluck might leave some wondering whether there’s a tightly wound key stuck in her back, particularly since the performance Kidman delivers in the film’s first 90 minutes suggests that this lady is something of a wind-up doll let loose in the Outback.
When Sarah is forced to travel to the Northern Territory to take over her husband’s cattle ranch before an evil cattle baron (Bryan Brown) can claim it all, she does so with the reluctant help of a cattle driver named Drover, who is played by Hugh Jackman in a performance that underscores why we need fewer celebrities and more movie stars.
Jackman is the latter--he commands the screen with a physical presence that isn’t really mortal, which is part of what being a movie star is all about. Given Kidman’s own beauty, she assists to that end, with each helping “Australia” in at least being a good-looking film even if structurally, it’s kind of a mess.
For drama, the movie goes beyond the death of Sarah’s husband, the corrupt cattle baron angle and the love growing between Drover and Sarah to offer something more significant. This also is the story of Nullah (Brandon Walters), a half-Aboriginal boy ridiculed for his mixed-race status.
Sarah and Drover come to love him as their own, but when he’s torn away from them by the government, Luhrmann finds the real meat of his tale, stakes his claim to it, and the movie lifts in spite of its ongoing run of predictability. The emotions suddenly become real, with Kidman and Jackman rising to the challenge of their larger-than-life roles just as the bombs start to drop and their lives are put on the line.
To say the least, this is one of the year’s most aggressively mounted films--you admire it for its chutzpah. Its ambition isn’t just impressive, it’s staggering, with Mandy Walker’s excellent cinematography and David Hirschfelder’s heated score assisting the film in its quest to burst beyond the limitations of a mere movie screen.
Armed
with a motherlode of cinematic references--from “The Wizard of Oz,”
“Gone with the Wind,” “The African Queen” and beyond (and
beyond, and beyond)--its unflagging energy and its ridiculous scope,
this is a movie that doesn’t just want to take over the
cineplex--it wants to own it. For better and worse, it has a hell of
a time doing so, though not without belching and hiccupping along the
way.
(Originally published 2007)
(Contents)
~~~~
Precious
Lee Daniels’ “Precious” is about as ugly and as disturbing as any movie in recent memory. It’s unflinching in its violence. Its power comes from its mix of horror, hatred and hope. And while you know this isn’t the case, there nevertheless is the sense that everyone involved in the production has lived through the sort of hell presented here.
This is a slice of the American nightmare, where dreams are seemingly so impossible to achieve, they get pushed into sequences of gleaming, far-reaching fantasy, where real life can’t get close enough to foster them.
Geoffrey Fletcher based his script on the novel “PUSH” by Sapphire, and what he and Daniels created is one of 2009’s most controversial films, with rap star Mo’Nique and newcomer Gabourey “Gabbie” Sidibe delivering two of the year’s best performances.
In the film, Sidibe is Claireece “Precious” Jones, a 16-year-old girl who in 1987 Harlem was as much a victim of her own morbid obesity as she was of the cruelty surrounding her. Most of the violence takes place at home, where her father repeatedly raped her--giving her one child, leaving her with another on the way--and where her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), carries such a festering resent of Precious (“You stole my man! It’s because of you he left!”), she’s willing to kill her daughter with meaty swings of a cast-iron pan, or by dropping a television set on her.