Runners World

By some evil twist of fate, Spirit of the Marathon showed up in the mailbox and Tribeca 2008 veteran Run for Your Life had a one-week engagement at the Village East the same time I was on crutches and had to give up running a half-marathon after screwing up my left calf muscle. Still, I watched both movies: I am your dedicated film critic, after all. I write my brief thoughts several weeks later, having returned to training too soon and straining my right calf muscle. The world is unfair sometimes.

In time for the fall racing season, two running-themed documentaries, Spirit of the Marathon and Run for Your Life, arrived on DVD. Both are likely to hold more interest for those who lace up their sneakers on a regular basis, although non-athletic New Yorkers also may enjoy the latter, a look at adopted son Fred Lebow.

As a newbie runner, I prefer Spirit of the Marathon, which tracks (no pun intended) six people preparing for the 2005 Chicago Marathon. Director Jon Dunham could’ve composed his film better: The focus is heavier on some non-famous faces (father and longtime runner Jerry, hard-luck Leah) than others (Jerry’s daughter, rookie Rona), and timelines don’t always compute. I also wish I learned more about the course beyond that it’s flat and fast, which any casual marathon follower knows, and additional background about training would help non-track stars. When Dunham shows the runners discussing diet, pace groups and mileage plans, though, my own (curtailed) training plans were awakened. And as cheesy as it may sound, it’s inspiring to see anyone complete 26.2 miles of running.

As a critic, I like Run for Your Life better because director Judd Ehrlich really captures his subject’s 1970s heyday with archival footage (short shorts!), disco-style fonts and funky music. Lebow was one of those colorful, only-in-New-York stories, a Romanian immigrant and garment worker who grew the city’s marathon from laps around Central Park in 1970 to today’s five-borough behemoth. Lebow was quite the showman, getting Playboy Bunnies to run the first women’s mini-marathon and creating races for every occasion. Ehrlich doesn’t incorporate the non-running parts of Lebow’s biography as smoothly as the marathon ones; the talking heads babble more than bring their man into focus. Fortunately, Run for Your Life rebounds in its final laps with Lebow’s own poignant race journey after his cancer diagnosis.

Second Chances

My friends Cori and Michelle are big fans of Kristin Scott Thomas, but I always found her icy and brittle. Tell No One began to change my mind - I had no idea she could be overtly sexy - and I've Loved You So Long made me appreciate her in a way I hadn't before. I'd really like to see her receive an Academy Award nomination for this performance. It's less likely, but I'd also like to see her co-star, Elsa Zylberstein, get a Supporting Actress nod.

I've Loved You So Long would make a worthy companion piece with Rachel Getting Married: difficult, well-acted stories of redemption featuring multiple fantastic female performances.

Instead of making a woman-in-prison drama, writer/director Philippe Claudel examines a return to life on the outside in I’ve Loved You So Long. With his debut feature, Claudel employs Kristin Scott Thomas’ misused reserve to stunning effect and introduces many Americans to a talented French actress, Elsa Zylberstein. Nothing happens easily in this French film; rather, Claudel and his actors subtly edge forward.

Scott Thomas turns prior criticisms of being distant and remote (see Random Hearts, The Horse Whisperer) to her benefit here. Juliette Fontaine is understandably reticent: She just got out of prison after 15 years for killing her 6-year-old son. Being blunt horrifies people; keeping quiet causes folks to think her aloof. A social worker pries, and well-meaning professor sister Lea (Zylberstein), who’s taken Juliette in, jabbers on. Why shouldn’t Juliette want to hang around the house in a drab overcoat, smoking?

Watch Scott Thomas as Juliette learns to feel. When Juliette first smiles it’s awkward, as if someone’s instructing her muscles to move. As Juliette becomes more comfortable with her nieces and potential suitor Michel (Laurent Grevil), her body relaxes; grinning becomes second nature. Throughout the movie, we wonder how Juliette could murder her child. The climactic explanation falls short, moving but too easy. Still, Scott Thomas is wrenching when Juliette explores long-buried anguish.

I’ve Loved You So Long isn’t just Juliette’s story. Lea first seems to reside in Paris Disneyland, trying to create the perfect family. Really, she’s that genuine and warm, yet slowly, her own layers reveal themselves. We sense her loss over missed connections when Juliette was jailed during Lea’s adolescence. We hear a quick but biting exchange about why Lea and husband Luc chose adoption. Lea’s angry breakdown while discussing Crime and Punishment with her students therefore carries added potency, thanks to the slowly building emotions we’ve seen from Zylberstein. It’s a cathartic moment.

Between I’ve Loved You So Long and the summer mystery Tell No One, Scott Thomas never has been more alive on screen. Funny it took performing in French to tap into previously unexplored depths of the British actress’ range.

Love Story

Where WALL-E has been out for six months and now appears on every other 10-best list, I couldn't write a traditional review of the film. I found that when I rewatched it two weeks ago, the same things jumped out at me as they did on the August viewing. At the very least, that made my thoughts a little easier to compile.

And yes, I teared up both times at the end.

The cutest couple of 2008 is … a robot duo.

Cinema love stories often begin with a “meet cute.” Lonely, binocular-eyed Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class meets his iPod-smooth love, Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, when she comes to an I Am Legend-like Earth with a directive to seek sustainable life. Our trash-compacting collector – he likes a ring box, tosses the jewelry – is the last thing standing, except a cockroach – and a single plant.

WALL-E, Pixar’s latest offering, has much to say: satire about consumer culture, environmental warning, Easter Egg hunt for film geeks. (Aliens’ Sigourney Weaver is the voice of a computer! It’s a 2001 parody!) After two viewings of this movie, what I remember most is the tenderness between WALL-E and EVE, whose vocal portrayers (Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight) convey so much mostly with chirps and blips.

Director Andrew Stanton uses Hello, Dolly – a worn-out VHS tape serves as WALL-E’s only human companion – to telegraph emotions, but the film reference I think of most is City Lights. WALL-E and EVE have a Chaplin-esque quality to their interactions and a physical connection as sweetly romantic as those found in great Jane Austen adaptations.

WALL-E becomes more ordinary once the action shifts to the spaceship Axiom and Stanton enforces parables about a machine-driven world making humans fat and lazy. Even there, th0ugh, we have moments of beauty: Movie magic occurs with WALL-E, EVE and a fire extinguisher, accented by Thomas Newman’s lovely score. Despite its second-half flaws, love conquers all in WALL-E.

A Guest Review Or Two

My friend Mark asked whether his analysis of the cult film The Room would make it to my blog. Well, Mark, not only will your review of that, but so will your comments on Wanted. :)

The Room was more than I had hoped for. I did develop a conspiracy theory about The Room before i saw it and the film confirmed my suspicions.

Tommy Wiseau is a naive fella with a decent heart, but some inner craziness. A woman used him for a long time and tried to dump him several times but he completely missed the cues, etc so she just cheated on him with his best friend... more than once. In his despair, Tommy worked tirelessly to secure funding to make a film to show the world what an evil whore she is.

And the movie was born.

Seriously, the movie confirmed all of this for me.

I saw a truly awful movie this weekend. Wanted with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman (why, Morgan, why?). I did enjoy the action sequences (except for the ones where bullets went through brains). But the dialogue and plot were aimed towards losers who think they are God's gift to bad-asses. It was so bad that I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth to enjoy the visually stunning action sequences.

For additional information, the Entertainment Weekly article on the phenomenon that is The Room:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20246031,00.html

Why Did I Do This to Myself?

I don't like Baz Luhrmann. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is on my hypothetical list of the 10 worst movies ever. (Sorry, Sandra and Cori.) I didn't care for Moulin Rouge beyond the costumes and cinematography. Nicole Kidman hasn't impressed me in years. Epics aren't my thing.

And yet I said I wanted to see Australia. I wanted to see it on the big screen, figuring such grandeur needed largesse.

Shame on me.

Listen, dear readers: I shall tell you of a magical land called Oz.

No, not that Oz. I wish it were that Oz.

In this Oz, we have a fish out of water, the plight of the Aboriginals, a cattle drive, rival ranchers, mismatched lovers, World War II and an oft-referenced Judy Garland ditty - all in two hours and 45 minutes. Sounds like a laundry list? Then welcome to Australia, an epic that endures for all the wrong reasons.

Baz Luhrmann seems to want to direct 1940s-style grandeur as if he made Australia in the 1940s. This means obvious soundstage sequences, bad CGI, awkward cutaways and a Nicole Kidman performance that wants to evoke Katharine Hepburn but plays as scattered or cold. Kidman can't register emotion on her face: Sad, concern and compassionate all read as "constipated," while her vocal mannerisms during the early Outback scenes make her sound hysterical. Luhrmann directed Kidman to an Oscar nomination in 2001's Moulin Rouge. What happened here?

The Sexiest Man Alive shows up in the Clark Gable/Rhett Butler role as the Drover. Even after Kidman's Lady Sarah Ashley gets together with our independent-minded cattle man, he's still "the Drover," "Mr. Drover" or just "Drover." Apparently, Australia's four screenwriters couldn't be bothered to provide a first name for Hugh Jackman's character. He's nice to look at, though, whether clean-shaven in a dinner jacket or rugged and unkempt.

Luhrmann tries to inject a history lesson/apology by weaving in the abysmal account of the Stolen Generations, where mixed-race Aboriginal children were removed forcibly from their families and integrated into white society. Meet Nullah (non-pro Brandon Walters), a young boy orphaned after his Aboriginal mother dies and his white father (Ashley rival Neil Fletcher, played by David Wenham) never acknowledges him. Nullah serves as narrator, parenting link to barren Lady Sarah and widowed Drover, cute child, etc. The Aboriginal past is a woeful subject worth learning, but one better covered in 2002's Rabbit-Proof Fence. Nullah's narration also eventually becomes precocious.

I haven't even touched on the Wizard of Oz/"Over the Rainbow" motif - sweet initially, beaten down by the fifth reference. Or the fact that Australia feels like at least two movies. It could have ended at an hour and 40 minutes in as an OK adventure saga. But no, we had to involve the war, separate our lovers after a quarrel and further illustrate the plight of the Aboriginals. (All right, that last part was compelling.) This section has the look and feel of a Pearl Harbor sequel, something no one was clamoring for.

Did I like anything? The orangey light at Faraway Downs was lovely, the cattle drive suspenseful and scary. (You'll worry about being trampled.) I could stare at Jackman for hours. None of this is enough to sustain two hours and 45 minutes.

What did I learn from Australia? Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion are the only ones who should transport anyone to any Oz.

My Hometown, My Profession

In a serendipitous turn of events, the last two movies I saw had personal meaning. I'll always seek out a Boston-set indie, and I'll usually watch flicks with editors (and, by extension, reporters). That I found two films in a 24-hour period that covered both topics - it was like a Christmas present from Hollywood.

Does the quality of a print affect your film experience? At What Doesn't Kill You, a thin, vertical yellow-green line split the screen in two for the final third of the film. The dialogue also came across as muffled, although I'm not sure whether that was the print, a sound-adjustment issue at the Village East, or a filmmaker flaw. They were a distraction when I was watching the movie.

My screening at Nothing but the Truth was uneventful, except that I really missed my friends Sandra (in Syracuse) and Cori (in Maryland) and wished I'd invited my friend Michelle (who lives here) along. I'm yearning for some good discussion and debate with my intelligent, journalist girlfriends.

By the way, I will not see a movie just because it's set in my hood. As much as I like Anne Hathaway, I really don't want to see Bride Wars. It looks AWFUL, and my friend who has a thing for her concurs. (Then again, I can't picture Kirk at a romantic comedy to begin with.)

The Yari Film Group recently released two Hollywood-pedigreed films with connections to my life: the Boston-based crime drama What Doesn’t Kill You and the journalism/motherhood polemic Nothing but the Truth. While the former rang more true, the latter grabbed me far more - proof of the value of a good yarn.


Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke join Matt, Ben, Casey and even Paul Newman in the triple deckers of cinema South Boston in What Doesn’t Kill You. Writer/director Brian Goodman bases the film on the years he (Ruffalo) and best friend Paulie (Hawke) did odd jobs for Irish mob bosses before striking out on their own, Brian battled drugs, and the two landed in prison. Goodman, a first-time director, produces some of his stars’ best work: wiry, shaved Hawke scaring and scheming; Ruffalo ravaged by addiction but yearning to regain his family’s respect; Amanda Peet, as Brian’s wife, tired and repeatedly disappointed. Much of What Doesn’t Kill You recalled home: the comment about yuppies converting Southie to condos, the winter palate of gray and sharp white. Still, the film feels “done,” coming soon after Gone Baby Gone. Do filmmakers think Boston is good only for booze-laden crime dramas or plastic rom-coms?

With stories of a female vice-presidential candidate (The Contender) and the first female president (Commander-in-Chief) on his resume, Rod Lurie demonstrates welcome appreciation for powerful women. His latest writing/directing effort, Nothing but the Truth, examines what journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) does to protect sources who outed CIA agent Erica van Doren (Vera Farmiga), even at the expense of her family and the threat of jail. The film uses Judith Miller and Valerie Plame as a jumping-off point; then Lurie enhances the conversation with discussions about sexism and women’s decisions in balancing job and motherhood. Truth could skew melodramatic; fortunately, Lurie, Beckinsale and Farmiga present Rachel and Erica as complex women rather than martyrs, people whose ambitions shape them as much as their parenting skills. The final twist provoked sputtering in my editor self, and the plot flourishes can be a bit much, yet overall, Truth’s intelligence grips and refreshes.

Harvard Beats Itself Into My Good Graces - For Once

My dislike of Harvard is almost as old as my dislike of football. Why, then, would I see a documentary about a sport I don't care for where my least-favorite college besides Duke is depicted in a positive light? Answer: The Film Forum description and a Wall Street Journal column.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a hoot, just a lot of fun even for the documentary-averse. It's still playing in one podunk NYC theater, Cinema Village. Catch it there, or be sure to track down the DVD early next year.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 tells a tale likely never seen on celluloid: the big, bad Crimson as underdog.

And it's a true story.

Director Kevin Rafferty's documentary appears simply made: 60-year-old men reminiscing around tables about a pigskin matchup 40 years ago, interlaced with grainy game footage and Don Gillis’ broadcast. Actually, it only looks simple - in fact, Harvard grad Rafferty builds suspense and humor into a movie whose outcome is known all along.

On Nov. 23, 1968, Harvard and hated rival Yale headed into the final game of the season, both undefeated for the first time since 1909.

The Bulldogs possessed glamour: higher ranking; quarterback who hadn't lost since junior high; running back who would land in the NFL Hall of Fame (Calvin Hill). We haven’t even touched on Garry Trudeau and Meryl Streep.

Meanwhile, Harvard had a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, an unsettled quarterback situation and a local paper that seemed shocked by victory. (Harvard also featured an offensive guard who went on to other fame: Tommy Lee Jones, very droll here.)

With 42 seconds left in the game, Yale was up 29-13. Then, somehow … (The film’s title comes from the Crimson headline.)

Harvard Beats Yale entertains as Yale students chant “You‘re Number Two!” and charms with player interviews, which feature anecdotes about the war, campus life and the game. Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren personifies Rafferty’s storyline building: First coming off as the ultimate privileged snob (“douchebag,” one theatergoer muttered), he proves to be more than a man who liked making cheap tackles.

Jones’ contribution? Let’s just say that after this movie, you'll never view a telephone keypad the same way again.

Sing It Out

I've done some research since I saw Cadillac Records two weeks ago, and I'm learning that it's taken some considerable liberties with the time and the story. If I were a blues aficionado, this probably would bother me more. Since I'm not, I'm sticking with my initial reaction to the film, which was ...

I really, really liked Cadillac Records; it was an unexpected, underrated treat. Josee suggested it at the last minute for my birthday celebration, and it was a far better (and shorter) fit than our initial plan to see Australia. Cadillac Records made me miss my father, too: We saw Ray together a few years ago on one of our father/daughter outings. He'd really like this, but he doesn't go to movies by himself. Come on, Dad - get Mom to take you then.

Like the most manic concert, Cadillac Records swoops and soars; hips will swivel during the tale of a Chicago blues label’s rise and fall. Although the film hits some bum notes in its storytelling and fidelity to history, it has a dynamism few flicks have matched this year.

First - the brilliance that is Jeffrey Wright. He played Colin Powell this fall, in W; his career includes turns as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Martin Luther King Jr., the villain in the Shaft remake and Felix in the last two Bond movies. Here, as Muddy Waters, Wright does some of the best work of his career. Where is his Oscar buzz?

It's not that Wright looks or sounds like the blues great, the first major discovery for Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody). Rather, it's how he embodies Waters as the man goes from sharecropper to success, pleased with the Cadillacs bestowed on him but wary about the missing profits. (Writer/director Darnell Martin glosses more than she should here.) He's a lousy husband to Geneva (Gabrielle Union), but a combustible pull links them. Even while wearing a do-rag best saved for a day at the beauty shop, Wright is the “cat men want to be and women want to be with.”

Joining Wright in the fierce and fiery department: surprisingly, Beyonce Knowles. Previously, in such work as Dreamgirls and The Fighting Temptations, the singer/actress just posed before the camera. As Etta James, Knowles doesn't just break free from her glass box - she incinerates her self-imposed prison. She's ballsy, she delivers searing interpretations of James' hits (feel the rage in “All I Could Do Was Cry”) - she's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore. Knowles especially conveys James' bitter heartbreak after a long-awaited meeting with her biological father goes awry. Knowles has adopted the persona "Sasha Fierce" in her day job; now we see its origins.

In fact, Cadillac Records contains an album's worth of acting hits: Columbus Short as troubled harmonica great Little Walter, Eamonn Walker as powerful blues man Howlin' Wolf, Mos Def as Chuck Berry, Cedric the Entertainer as Willie Dixon (who also “narrates,” in a way bordering on cutesy-folksy).

The problem with this abundance of riches is that Martin doesn't know how to harness everything, and she sacrifices story streamlining for simply more story. The entire Berry segment feels shoehorned, despite Def’s playful, Gumby-like antics. Walker mesmerizes - he has a smoldering, scary come-hither nod - but his screen time feels shortchanged, and we don’t really have a true sense of the relationship between Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Martin also ignores the role of Leonard Chess’ still-living brother in the creation of the record label. Perhaps his story wasn’t dramatic enough.

Music biopics are a genre cliché (Ray, Walk the Line, La Bamba ...), so films of this subject must find ways to distinguish themselves. Cadillac Records does so with its platinum lead actor, Wright, and its gold-standard ensemble. Flaws and all, this movie sings.

Nuns and Nazis

Confession Number Whatever: I think the hype surrounding Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet is a bit much. Sure, they're good actresses, but the be all and end all of film? No, I don't think so.

In other words, when I saw their latest prestige projects on the same day, I had to do a joint review.

The calendar has turned to December, which means Oscar talk and chatter about two of today’s most lauded actresses, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet. The 14- and five-time Academy-Award nominees make their seemingly annual cases for the gold statue: Meryl and her latest accent as a nun in Doubt, Kate as a woman in emotional hiding (but certainly not physical) in The Reader. The films, literary adaptations both, present troubling scenarios and to their credit don’t always provide solutions. They’re also flawed productions, with less-than-perfect work from their leading ladies.

(Yes, Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood Foreign Press and Academy: Winslet’s role is a lead performance, not a supporting one. Let her compete against herself in Revolutionary Road and have voters decide where she’s better.)

With Streep and Doubt, the issue is overreaching and, subsequently, staginess. John Patrick Shanley brings his Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play to the screen, a gripping tale of possible pedophilia at a Bronx parish. It’s 1964, and the winds of change - oh, those winds - are rustling. Is the attention Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) shows the school’s first black student (Joseph Foster) compassionate [Donald has no friends but a keen interest in religion] or something more sinister [this is Flynn’s third parish in five years]? Did the young Sister James (Amy Adams, whose naivete borders on dense) misconstrue matters, or were her suspicions to Sister Aloysius (Streep) correct? “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and as sustaining as certainty” - but how certain are the thoughts motivating Sister Aloysius?

Shanley, who directs as well as writes, uses cinema’s more visual nature to play up Doubt’s metaphors. This becomes a liability. It’s not enough to hear Aloysius say, “It’s my job to outshine the fox in cleverness.” We have to see a cat going after a mouse and the leaves falling from the trees, and we have to hear the breezes over and over again, like a sound machine on the fritz. The text is strong enough on its own; Shanley should have trusted his words. He also doesn’t seem to realize actors don’t speak on film the way they do in a theater. The long-building confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn comes across more as a screaming fest, with Hoffman and especially Streep forgetting it’s about emotion, not projection.

Hoffman said in a Wall Street Journal interview that he had to decide about his character’s guilt or innocence before he began filming, although he hoped the audience couldn’t tell what his choice was. I certainly couldn’t; I changed my mind about Flynn’s motivations a half-dozen times. Excluding the Big Blowup, Hoffman acts with subtlety, unlike Ms. Meryl. She can’t help the existence of the pilgrim-like costume, but she also doesn’t help us see past it. The ruler, the broad inflection, the dour expression - it’s practically a parody of a nun. Viola Davis, in one 10-minute scene with Streep as Donald’s mother, modulates and conveys more feeling that her more-famous co-star.

As for Generation X’s kudos queen, Winslet strips down again, this time as a 30-something woman in 1958 having a fling with a boy she always calls “kid.” She discovers him sick in an alley, and she likes to be read to. The affair ends abruptly, and then it’s seven years later. The “kid,” Michael (David Kross), is 22, a law student and observing the trial of several female Nazi prison guards - one of whom happens to be Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), his summer lovin’.

At one point, The Reader might as well have been The Hours, Part 2: best-selling book (this one by Bernhard Schlink) adapted by David Hare for a film directed by Stephen Daldry starring Nicole Kidman. Substitute Winslet for Kidman, who dropped out due to pregnancy, but otherwise The Reader resembles of one of those cold, arty Kidman flicks such as Birth, Fur and, yes, The Hours. Even Winslet’s German-accented English sounds like Kidman’s speech. Winslet gets Hanna’s stern, disconnected nature right, yet when we’re supposed to connect to Hanna reading later, the actress appears to be smothered by her old-lady makeup.

Then again, the hardest part of The Reader is how distasteful so much of it is. The link between literature and lust could be luscious - if only the surrounding circumstances weren’t so lewd. Kross, the “kid” who plays Michael, displays maturity and none of the precocious fumbling seen in “I lost my virginity” stories. Still, he was 17 when filming began; Daldry had to shut down production until the actor was 18 to film the sex scenes. No matter how one looks at it, this is discomforting: If the gender roles were reversed, women’s groups would be protesting this a la Lolita. Where’s the outcry here? Furthermore, the music swells most romantically when Ralph Fiennes (the grown-up Michael) is reading novels into a tape recorder for a jailed, guilty Nazi prison guard. Hanna never expresses remorse for what she’s done - she even asks a judge whether she should have not taken a job at Siemens - yet we’re supposed to be captivated by the pull this love of a sort still has on Michael after all these years? I’d recommend a good therapist.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

No, not the holidays - it's time for critics' awards.

The lede on Richard Corliss' article was written for someone like me. When theaters have a glut of good product, as those in New York do now, I need help narrowing down the list. Now I know I should start with Milk and Doubt (both only $6 if I go to an AMC theater this weekend before noon), and then I should catch up with Happy-Go-Lucky. (Alas, that's only at the Sunshine, a Landmark Theatre, and it will be at least double that.)

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1866046,00.html

By the way, it now costs $12.50 to see a movie in New York City for full price, and that's only a regular feature. Tack on more for IMAX or even, now, 3-D. Price gouging, I tell you.

One Year and One Day Ago ...

I started this blog.

The Secret Life of Bees, which I saw just before Thanksgiving, was the quintessential Sunday-morning matinee experience: decent, entertaining, a solid B. I liked it.

“I killed my mother when I was 4 years old. She was all I ever wanted, and I took her away.” Those damning words, which open The Secret Life of Bees, come from 14-year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) and hold juicy, mysterious promise. Alas, Bees morphs into a better-than-average Lifetime movie, although its exemplary cast disguises the script’s soft center well.

In 1964 Georgia, Lily lives with her abusive father (Paul Bettany) and black nanny (Jennifer Hudson). Lily’s trip to help Rosaleen register to vote turns violent, so they disappear to Tiburon, South Carolina, guided only by a black Mary picture. That leads them to the Boatwright sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo); lessons of love and racial awareness commence.

When writer/director Gina Prince-Blythewood (Love and Basketball) sticks to the framework of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, Bees flowers, despite Kidd’s sometimes-florid prose. (Prince-Blythewood can’t fix the underdeveloped Rosaleen arc, though.) The more she deviates - Lily wouldn’t have been able to sit in a “colored” section at the movies - the more the film loses its sting. And musical montages should banned unless your aim is to reside in the chick-flick ghetto.

The performances, especially from Fanning and Latifah, make it easier to overlook Bees’ flaws. Fanning, whose early work bordered on preternaturally adult, has matured into her talent. At one point, Lily has no dialogue for almost 10 minutes as she watches the drama around her. Fanning grabs us just by observing and absorbing. As she often does, Latifah provides a steady hand, this time as beekeeper/head of household August. While she’s played variations of Mother Hen in everything from Chicago to Beauty Shop, Latifah’s presence always welcomes and reassures.

Bees isn’t quite as sweet as honey, but the strength of its women make for a pleasant cinematic experience.

Two More from Tribeca

Actually, I saw these in August, days apart. Yes, I still have August reviews to write. Boy A is on DVD now; In Search of a Midnight Kiss doesn't have a date, but it is in the Netflix system. That was at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Oh, I have two movies left from August I'll review one of these days. (Maybe by the end of the year?) I also have another Tribeca movie, Run for Your Life, but I plan to incorporate that with a look at another running documentary I saw recently.

1) Boy A (seen Aug. 13, fifth movie seen in August)
Recalling James Bulger, the British toddler murdered by two 10-year-olds in 1993, the fictional drama Boy A raises questions about forgiveness. After several years in prison for a similar crime, Jack (Andrew Garfield) - known in the tabloids as “Boy A” - has been released into a world he doesn’t know, given an identity, job and social worker (Peter Mullan). Director John Crowley, working from Mark O’Rowe’s adaptation, carefully parcels out the specifics of the transgression as we see Jack make his way in society, find a girlfriend (Katie Lyons) but still struggle with his past. Alternately horrifying and heartbreaking, Boy A features of a portrait of vulnerability in Garfield, whose omnipresent hoodie says so much. Not an easy film, but certainly a thought-provoking one.

2) In Search of a Midnight Kiss (seen Aug. 15, sixth movie seen in August)
The latest branch from the Manhattan tree, In Search of a Midnight Kiss wants to be this decade’s Before Sunrise, but the characters aren’t as captivating. It’s the morning of New Year’s Eve in black-and-white Los Angeles, and failed writer Wilson (Scoot McNairy) places an ad on Craigslist, seeking a date for the big night. Along comes Vivian (a Joey Lauren Adams-like Sara Simmonds), one of those sarcastic, neurotic women often found in indie date movies. Writer/director Alex Holdridge takes us, and his sometimes obnoxious, something funny characters, on a talky night before introducing a jolting secret the next morning. Of course, I liked Before Sunset better than its predecessor, so perhaps Wilson and Vivian will be more appealing in 10 years.

Tribeca Trio

Each year at the end of the Tribeca Film Festival, I go through the movie guide again, this time to mark down buzzed-about titles or flicks to seek out if they ever get a release. Fortunately, a half-dozen or so made it to theaters in the past year, even if just for a week. With a 125-word and/or five-sentence limit, I've taken to writing blurb-like reviews.
P.S. Thanks to my Tribeca supervisor Kelly for the second recommendation.

Before the Rains: Before the Rains is an average addition to the Merchant-Ivory canon, boosted by Nandita Das’ performance as lovestruck housekeeper Sajani. As Sajani asks her master and married lover, plantation-owning spice baron Moores (Linus Roache), if he loves her, Das’ body quivers, her eyes a mix of panic and fury. Before the Rains lacks passion when the actress is offscreen, and director Santosh Sivan’s lush cinematography cannot compensate for his deliberate pace. The script, based on a sequence in a 2001 Israeli film, contains a meaty, albeit predictable, tale of adultery, 1930s British/Indian culture clashes, the danger of loaded pistols and issues of loyalty for Moores’ manservant, T.K. (Rahul Bose). In the end, Before the Rains merely echoes another, better Merchant-Ivory production, A Passage to India. (seen on DVD on Nov. 22)

Let the Right One In: The winner for Best Feature at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, Sweden’s Let the Right One In is an original surprise: a touching story about acceptance and vampires with two 12-year-old leads. (Well, she's "more or less" 12.) Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is a social outcast, an awkward target of bullies; Eli (Lena Leandersson) is also a loner, a wide-eyed waif - who happens to be a vampire. Director Tomas Alfredson gives Let the Right One In moody atmosphere, with swirling snowflakes and a lot of darkness that makes shots of red even more vivid, and elicits natural performances from his child actors. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, this isn’t a movie for children because of the graphic blood, but it’s a sweet fable adults can enjoy. (seen on Nov. 21 at the Angelika with vampire lover Brooklyn Jen)

War Child: War Child shares a framework with fellow Tribeca documentary Kassim the Dream - former child soldier, now a success abroad, returns home - only its charismatic center is hip-hop artist Emmanuel Jal. Forced to fight in Sudan’s civil war in the late 1980s, Emmanuel was rescued by a young British woman and taken to Kenya, where he thrived. Director C. Karim Chrobog artfully intersperses talking heads, dynamic concerts, images of genocide, footage of a young Emmanuel in a refugee camp, and Emmanuel today. Chrobog shows Emmanuel’s first trip home in 18 years in a straightforward fashion, marred only by a rush of outside voices at the end. Emmanel himself, his words and his music, make War Child a deserving Audience Award winner at Tribeca. (seen on Nov. 19 at the Village East Cinemas, with Ben in mind)

Disappointment, Part 3

My 100th post of the year!

My mother really liked Changeling. I really did not. (For the record, my father fell closer to my camp.) I so wanted to like it: Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are two of the best movies I've seen this decade, and I've said more than once that Angelina Jolie was robbed of an Oscar nomination for A Mighty Heart. The storyline grabbed me, the trailers excited me. And yet ... Changeling was the biggest disappointment I've had at the cinema this year.

“Manipulative Oscar bait.”

Those were my first words after seeing Changeling, the kidnapping-turned-psych-ward-turned-serial-killer mystery starring Angelina Jolie in Mother Martyr mode. Changeling has the elements to succeed: director Clint Eastwood on a roll since 2003’s Mystic River, a compelling true story, Jolie coming from a triumphant turn in A Mighty Heart. Perhaps burdened by the weight of expectation, Changeling doesn’t connect.

(“Changeling” means “a child surreptitiously or unintentionally substituted for another.”)

In 1928 Los Angeles, single mother Christine Collins (Jolie) comes home from work one day to discover her young son, Walter, missing. She badgers the police, who basically ignore her until they find her boy several months later - only Christine says it’s not him. The LAPD, fed up with her building accusations, throws her in a psychiatric ward; fortunately, Christine has an ally in radio preacher Brigeleb (John Malkovich, who sounds creepy but is really a good guy). Meanwhile, chilling activities are taking place at a ranch north of town.

Jolie has many scenarios to play and emotions to telegraph, yet she operates in only two modes: hysterical and beatific. She wails and screams “I want my son back” more than a dozen times, often in front of the “new” Walter, which seems cruel. Part of this problem lies with screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski’s repetitive dialogue, but Jolie should’ve varied her line deliveries more. Compare this with her performance in A Mighty Heart, where she found shading and nuance in Mariane Pearl, or with the work of Changeling co-star Amy Ryan in a small but effective role as Christine’s fellow patient.

With Changeling, Eastwood tries to make a Chinatown or an L.A. Confidential for our times. Where the cops were conflicted in L.A. Confidential, here they’re bad-boy caricatures personified by Jeffrey Donovan’s ever-present sneer. Eastwood signals “period” more with his star’s dolled-up face and fashionably cute hat than with the neat archival footage of L.A. streets and scenes of the roller-skating telephone girls. Eastwood, who also scored the film, uses the same three or four mournful piano notes to personify Christine, a very soap-opera move.

About an hour into Changeling, we stop watching the Angelina Jolie Show in favor of another storyline, that of a rancher (a leering Jason Butler Harner) luring young boys to his home and doing awful things. That reveal, more than any Christine moment, rivets one’s attention, thanks to Michael Kelly as the cop who stumbles upon the horror and Eddie Alderson as the teenager who opens the curtains to that vileness. Straczynski and Eastwood spend the second half of
Changeling bringing these tales together, with mixed success. The film goes on about 20 minutes too long, with ending after tacked-on ending.

Changeling declares itself “a true story,” not just “based on a true story;” despite Straczynski’s research and legal vetting, so much of the movie just rings hollow. It’s as if all the principals forgot a crucial part of moviemaking: subtlety.

Where to see a movie

This Jersey City palace is where the awesome All about Eve lovefest took place in April. The New York Times ran this feature Sunday. Glorious. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/realestate/19scap.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=loew%27s&st=nyt

Disappointment, Part 2

How did I know all was not right with the world at my screening of Zach and Miri Make a Porno? I did not find one line worth writing down in my notebook.

I think most of my friends and family would say my love of Dogma and Chasing Amy remains a mystery to them, even though I posted a 1,000-word opus about the former in April. Maybe it's a Jersey thing (the only one I seem to have adopted), maybe it's the fact almost every guy I've liked and/or dated has been obsessed with Kevin Smith, but I am a Smith cultist. When the reviews for Zach and Miri said Smith was moving into Judd Apatow territory, I cringed but plunked down $8 anyway.

I miss the filth. I think it's time to watch Chasing Amy again.

Kevin Smith has left New Jersey! Unfortunately, that move, to Pittsburgh, produces in an uneasy marriage of f-bombs and generic rom-com in his latest writing/directing effort, Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play Zack (a schlub) and Miri (naturally, a hottie), broke best friends who make a skin flick for rent money and of course fall in love. Banks charms in her meatiest part to date, a dazzling smile delivering filth as easily as a Smith veteran; Rogen mostly revisits his Knocked Up role. The greatest guffaws come courtesy of Craig Robinson, Zach’s coffee-shop co-worker and “producer” - his awe during “casting” is one of the film’s few downright hysterical moments.

At his best (Chasing Amy, Dogma), Smith delivers a message even at his characters’ mouthiest. Here, as he tries to balance smut and heart, Smith creates an audition tape for the next Kate Hudson flick.

Disappointment, Part 1

I saw three movies in the past seven days and came away frustrated from all of them. Therefore, the next set of reviews, over the next few days, will focus on that trio: Changeling, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Death Defying Acts. This critique is about the last one.

I couldn't understand how a movie starring A-lister and Academy Award-winner Catherine Zeta Jones, well-liked Aussie star Guy Pearce and rising newcomer Saoirse Ronan could receive no publicity and slip in and out of a New York City theater in just one week this summer. The plot sounded really interesting, and The Illusionist and The Prestige two years earlier indicated a market exists for magician films.

It took me two days to get through a 1-hour-and-40-minute movie. That should tell me something.

Death Defying Acts fails to cast a spell, despite its acclaimed pedigree and intriguing setup. In 1926, Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) offers $10,000 to anyone who can channel his mother’s last words. Enter (fictional) Scottish con woman Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta Jones), who claims psychic powers, and her ragamuffin daughter (Saoirse Ronan). Director Gillian Armstrong unsuccessfully balances mystery and romance and hampers herself with a dull pace. Woeful miscasting of the leads - she’s too glam, he’s inappropriately Noo Yawk brash - only magnifies the movie’s flaws and makes one yearn for a more enchanting magic film, 2006’s The Illusionist.

Fiery Female In Fancy Frocks Can Mean Only One Thing ...

I love British costume dramas, historical reads and Keira Knightley - in other words, The Duchess was tailor-made for me. Alas, life conspired to prevent me from seeing the Sept. 19 release until Nov. 1, when my parents came to take care of me as I was recuperating from my calf injury. I could see The Duchess' shortcomings (I felt as if I received a tasting menu, not a full-course meal, of Georgiana's life), yet I really liked the movie.

Then I read the book on which The Duchess is based. It's great. For better or worse, it also made me realize how much the flick missed. I still recommend the film, thanks in part to my girl Keira, but my passion is a little dented.

Although The Duchess may seem like a biopic of Princess Diana, it is in fact about her great-great-great-great aunt, Georgiana (Keira Knightley). Diana and Georgiana each married remote men they had to share, adored their children, committed themselves to fashion and politics, and received excessive press coverage. The Duchess features an absorbing story and the highlights of British costume drama (clothes, wigs, manors); it works best, though, as an acting showcase for Knightley and Ralph Fiennes as the Duke of Cavendish.

Director Saul Dibb uses Amanda Foreman’s 1998 biography of Georgiana to depict a world of sumptuous costumes and scenery, fiery government affairs and romantic entanglements, which means leaving too much of his subject’s life on the cutting-room floor. In 1774, Cavendish chooses 17-year-old Georgiana as his bride, hoping she quickly will produce a male heir. Instead, she has miscarriages and two daughters, she overshadows him in public, and bitter feelings arise. Both move on to other partners: him to her best friend Bess (Hayley Atwell), her years later to future prime minister (and tea namesake) Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). The former pairing leads to an unusual arrangement (Georgiana refers to the Duke as “our husband” around Bess), the latter a heartbreaking decision.

Knightley excels at conveying Georgiana’s move from mirth to maudlin. Early on, she’s all divine merriment, recalling the giddiness of Pride and Prejudice as she frolics and flirts. Such early liveliness makes the screams of a woman raped by her husband more disturbing, and circumstances align to snuff the joy out of Georgiana, muting Knightley’s usual vivacity.

Fiennes finds humanity in his monstrous Duke. Thanks to Fiennes’ gawky movements and stiff intonations, we come to view the Duke as an awkward creature, incapable of affection for anything besides his dogs. Perhaps it’s the pressure of duty that makes him so; he gazes enviously on children at play and relaxes only when he’s showing Bess’ sons how to shoot. Fiennes has made villain types compelling in the past (Schindler’s List), and that background aids him in creating shading in the Duke.

Dibb touches upon some of Georgiana’s drinking and betting foibles, depicting her reaching for wine at parties and playing games of chance more than one would expect from a proper lady. Alas, the script, which Dibb co-wrote, truncates Georgiana’s life in favor of a love and lust focus: We never learn the depth of her gambling addiction, nor of her talents as a writer or scientist. It manipulates the facts for dramatic effect, aging the Duke (the real age difference was nine years; 23 separate Knightley and Fiennes), making Grey younger (Georgiana was seven years older than him, not his contemporary), and all but ignoring the American and French revolutions.

That Knightley and Fiennes manage to bring multiple dimensions to their characters despite The Duchess’ shortcomings as a film adaptation is a tribute to their performances. Read the book or see the movie? In the case of The Duchess, do both.

What Cooped Up in the ER Does For You

I spent more than three hours at Christ Hospital tonight in the emergency room. (Diagnosis: ruptured tendon. Bad, very bad.) What else is a girl to do while waiting except work on a review?

My voice feels different, a little more thoughtful, a little more New York Times-ish. Maybe it was the forced contemplation time. Maybe it was the movie itself. Maybe it was a combination.

Kym Buchman isn’t exactly the most welcome guest at her sister’s nuptials. She’s on weekend sabbatical from her umpteenth stay in rehab. Her list of offenses includes a mattress fire, driving off a bridge, and the usual cycle of lying/stealing/sneaking. She’s incredibly self-absorbed, even managing to make the rehearsal-dinner toast about her 12 steps. As Anne Hathaway plays her, though, Kym is also an open sore of raw vulnerability.

Although the title of Jonathan Demme’s latest film is Rachel Getting Married, it is Kym on whom the majority of attention first settles. From the time father Paul (Bill Irwin) and stepmother Carol (Anna Deavere Smith) pick her up for the drive to their Connecticut home, jittery Kym lights cigarettes and speaks in jagged bursts. Dad seems to placate his daughter to keep the peace, even at the expense of others. That includes the titular Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), a psychology student who’s marrying her musician fiance, Sidney (Television on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe), in a multicultural ceremony. The sisters reunite giddily as Rachel’s best friend, Emma (Anisa George), stands guard, but old resentments soon fester.

Demme works from a script from first-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney. Demme and Lumet, aided by Declan Quinn’s “you are there” cinematography, capture the intimacy and dynamic of a family crippled by a tragedy at Kym’s hand years earlier. Paul keeps calling it “an accident,” almost downplaying the heinous situation. Rachel plays the older sister/student card, analyzing matters. Mother Abby (Debra Winger) isn’t here for much, seemingly having cut herself away years ago to cope, to the point where Carol handles the “mom” duties for the wedding. Most remain willing to forgive - except Kym herself. Hathaway’s monologues reveal deep self-hatred that no amount of drugs can help her escape. Even in Kym’s furtive, manic smoking, Hathaway’s eyes convey pain and loss.

While spending time with the Buchman dysfunction borders on unpleasant, Demme and Lumet mostly justify the excursion. Only Abby remains a cypher, whether on purpose or because the character needs additional development. We see Winger so rarely on screen. We want more.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t all bittersweet melancholy: After all, it is called Rachel Getting Married. Even with Kym’s awkward speech, the rehearsal dinner brings joy: Paul welcomes Sidney’s family into his (teasing the older brother with the video camera is a nice, genuine touch), as friends and family who so love Rachel and Sidney blend. The wedding itself is very personal; the cake-cutting ceremony, with its array of hands, may contain the most moving moment of the movie. Only the omnipresent music becomes too much, an undercurrent but a lingering one. When Kym yells for the musicians to stop, she’s likely echoing many moviegoers’ thoughts.

Rachel Getting Married ends with a lovely image of the bride the morning after. Our final shot of Kym isn’t as idyllic: She’s returning to rehab. Still, Hathaway paints her own lovely picture, one of a woman learning to consider others and love herself.

Bringing Sexy Back

I was more hot and bothered at Vicky Cristina Barcelona than I have been at a movie in years, and it had nothing to do with the five-second overhyped kiss between Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson.

I'd laugh too if I weren't so stunned. Yes, a Woody Allen film provoked this feeling in me. Yes, the same Woody Allen I usually cannot stand. I can't put into words exactly why Vicky Cristina Barcelona made me feel this way. The music? The cinematography? The very European look at love? Javier Bardem looking normal again after the Coen brothers made him into a serial killer?

I try not to dwell on celebrity gossip in my reviews. I will say this, though: Unlike many real-life lovers onscreen, Cruz and Bardem have tremendous chemistry.

“Woody Allen” and “sexy” are two of the least likely words one might pair together, yet “sexy” is the way to describe Allen’s latest movie, the Spain-set travelogue comedic romance Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A movie where painter Javier Bardem (free of his No Country for Old Men hair) proposes a weekend of wine, sightseeing and love-making to American tourists Rebecca Hall (the sensible Vicky) and Scarlett Johansson (the adventurous Cristina), whom he’s just met; where Bardem’s Juan Antonio still has a tempestuous relationship with his artist ex Maria Elena (dynamic Penelope Cruz); where Spanish guitar can cause tears and lust - yes, all this would cue a sultry vibe. Vicky Cristina is so much more, though; Allen explores love, longing and passion in ways both neurotic and erotic, anchored by Hall’s awakening as both an actress and as a rules-abiding engaged student whose thoughts on romance become tossed about. Only banal, unnecessary narration by an offscreen Christopher Evan Welch (we can see that the women enjoy Miro’s work, thanks) takes away from the film’s fresh appeal. As winter approaches and the economy worsens, take a trip to sun-drenched Barcelona with Vicky and Cristina: It’s a cinematic turn-on.

Well - Is It the Last Great Intellectual Frontier?

I wanted to like Religulous. I wanted to laugh, to be outraged at the outrageous, the way I feel when I see Chris Rock. Unfortunately, that didn't happen here nearly as much as I wanted it to.

Religulous didn’t offend me - it disappointed me.

At times, comedian Bill Maher and director Larry Charles (Borat) offer a side-splittingly funny documentary doubting and mocking organized religion. Too often, though, they visit the Michael Moore school of smug, “I’m the smartest person in the room” filmmaking.

(I feel a personal-faith disclaimer is necessary here. I’m Catholic, attended Holy Name for six years and CCD for four. I confess that struggles with some doctrine and an inability to find a parish I like have led me to stop going to church. I pray nightly, I thank God for blessings, and I try to live an ethically proper life. Now, back to your regularly scheduled review.)

Maher, son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother, said in Being Catholic Now, “[T]he last great intellectual frontier is to debunk religion.” He attacks several groups: Christian, Jew, Mormon, Muslim, Scientology (in a scathingly hysterical bit, disguised as a proselytizer in London’s Hyde Park).

When Religulous sticks to observations and arguments, one can laugh and learn simultaneously. As someone who questioned the Garden of Eden story as a child, I appreciated Maher saying, “It worries me that there are people running my country who believe in a talking snake.” (To which Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., replies, “People in the Senate don’t have IQs.”) Maher also questions the similarities between Christ and the gods Mithra, Horus and Krishna - they’re thousands of years older, yet we’re taught Christ came first.

It’s when Maher and Charles cross the line into condescending that Religulous let me down. They barely disguise their desire to ridicule at a religious “amusement park” (for lack of a better phrase), even though the actor playing Jesus seems open to discussing their very divergent views. Maher touches on the hypocrisy of fighting wars in God’s/Allah’s name but doesn’t delve into this nearly as much as he should. Instead, he opts for easy shots at tired targets.

Religulous probably will appear to Maher’s disciples. As for gaining converts to his cause? Not so likely.

Roger, You're Great, But ...

Earlier this month, Roger Ebert reviewed a film called Tru Loved. He panned it, giving it only one star - but he based his review on just eight minutes and five seconds, at which point he stopped watching. He acknowledged this in his review. He explained why in one blog posting. After 500 responses, he apologized, watched the movie in full, reviewed it again, and wrote a second blog posting.

(I'm posting the link to the second post here, which will bring you back to everything else.)
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/definitely_read_me_second.html

Based on the title of this post, I think you know where I'm going with this. I may hate a story I'm editing in my real-world job, but I don't stop reading it. When I'm writing for the blogosphere, I'll sit through every minute of a film I'm reviewing. I feel responsibility, particularly if I'm being paid.

Heck, I've walked out of only two movies in my life (Secret Window, Semi-Pro), and in both cases, I had such a bad migraine I was throw-up-level sick. I won't even eject DVDs early - gosh darn it, I'll watch those suckers to the end, no matter how bad they are.

What do you think? Have you lost respect for Ebert? Have you ever walked out of a movie?

Haven't I Seen This Somewhere Before?

When I took my film class last year - and I can't believe it ended a year ago this week! - Josh told us to think about a movie for two hours after we see it. What's the first thing that sticks with us? That's what we write about. A week after watching Body of Lies, the main thing that came to mind was how much it reminded me of a lot of other movies. (Still, I think my father and brother would like this, and I believe Alan wants to see it.)

In 2005, Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, directed a flick called Deja Vu. Perhaps the Scotts should have saved that title for Ridley’s latest, the diverting but derivative Mideast spy thriller Body of Lies.

While the source material technically is David Ignatius’ 2007 novel, the real basis feels like 2006’s The Departed - fitting, as William Monahan handled both screenplays. Leonardo DiCaprio in a baseball cap on a cellphone? Check. Our whippersnapper - here a CIA operative - torn between bosses (Russell Crowe’s Ed Hoffman in D.C., Mark Strong as Hani Salaam in Jordan)? Yup. Multilayered storyline that takes time to click? Yes, although Monahan was more successful with The Departed than with Body of Lies. Globe hopping to nine locations, from Dubai to Virginia, makes it difficult to establish a rhythm. It’s about an hour before the cat-and-mouse plot (invent a second terrorist group to tempt an Osama bin Laden-like leader out of hiding) gels.

As for Crowe, whom Scott directed to Oscar in Gladiator, he does most of his acting with devices, and the lack of human interplay emphasizes his performance’s caricature quality. Broad paunch, thick grayish-white hair, slightly sleazy/slightly Southern accent - it’s reminiscent of a Bill Clinton sketch on Saturday Night Live.

The two hours watching Body of Lies pass quickly; the film's a total “popcorn flick.” With the pedigree attached, though, one expects more originality. The Bourne movies showed how to make an old genre fresh. With Body of Lies, it’s a case of … déjà vu.

The Making of a President (thanks to Theodore White for the headline)

Even more than the concept of the high-school election, the setting for this documentary enticed me: my academic rival, Stuyvesant High School. I went to Boston Latin School, another place filled with hyper-smart, college-obsessed students. In fact, my favorite part of Frontrunners had nothing to do with the voting process. Instead, it was the girl who talked about memorizing ranking lists and feeling bad that being No. 36 would get her "only" into Dickinson College, as opposed to an Ivy. Yup, been there. (Well, except that I was No. 18, and Syracuse was my top choice.)

Clinton/Obama goes classroom in Frontrunners, director Caroline Suh’s documentary about the 2006 senior class presidential elections at New York’s ultra-competitive Stuyvesant High. (It accepts only 3% of the 25,000 teens who apply annually.) The veteran politician: George, astute enough to campaign with music atop a bridge because students will be tired from climbing stairs and will have no choice but to look at him. The “change” candidate: Hannah, an outsider known more for her theatrical and cheerleading leadership, possessing personality but not necessarily substance. Frontrunners engages when looking at a political world where debates and endorsements matter yet skimps on the profiles: It would be nice to see Hannah balance campaigning with extracurriculars, or hear what George’s parents think of his quirky, obsessive drive.

A Movie with a View

It seems that almost every fall, I find myself championing a film almost no one else likes. In 2006, it was Keeping Mum; last year, it was Things We Lost in the Fire. This time, it's Blindness. Is this a difficult movie? Yes. Would I watch it again. No time soon. It sat with me for hours, though, in a way nothing has in some time, and it showed me yet another facet of the awesome Julianne Moore.

As the sole sighted person in a quarantined area for the blind, Julianne Moore embodies the true woman warrior in Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, based on the allegorical novel by Jose Saramago. She doesn’t play a Xena or a G.I. Jane; rather, she fights for a sense of decency and kinship in the midst of depravity. Her character, a doctor’s wife, helps everyone, including the audience, survive this challenging but ultimately rewarding movie.

An epidemic of blindness breaks out in an unidentified city (a digital composite of locations in Ontario, Uruguay and Brazil), its beginnings described by its first victim (Yusuke Iseya) as “light shining through a sea of white … like I’m swimming in milk.” An ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) unwittingly spreads it, though – for reasons unexplained by the characters and the filmmakers – not to his wife (Moore). The blind are sent to government hospitals that resemble barracks, Moore’s character feigns a loss of sight to be with her husband, and order breaks down. For the doctor’s wife, bearing witness to the atrocities may be worse than having no vision at all.

Meirelles previously directed the Brazilian slum drama City of God and the Kenyan-set socially tinged thriller The Constant Gardener, so he knows how to illustrate the worst of the human condition. In Blindness, the wards evoke a bleached-out Third World bomb shelter, with feces and waste piling up and unkempt residents slumped on beds. (Kudos to Tule Peake’s production-design team.) The guards outside provide no aid, their vocals muffled to emphasize the physical and emotional distance. Saramago wrote Blindness a decade ago, yet it’s impossible not to watch the adaptation and think of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

While Meirelles relies too much on white-flash and blurry techniques of filming, he does capture one of the overlooked effects of blindness: a sharper sense of sound. The noises are very acute, very crystallized, because a blind person would be hyperaware of voices, as the King of Ward 3 (Gael Garcia Bernal) proves.

That “king” and his companions lead to one of Blindness’ most vile sequences, the orgy rape of the women in Ward One in exchange for food. (Here, the soldier atrocities of the wars in the former Yugoslavia come to mind.) Meirelles shoots this as a darkened tangle of bodies, as tastefully as one possibly can film such an event. That doesn’t diminish from the disgusting nature of the act.

The women could remain victims, mute and broken, and this would be an understandable reaction. Instead, the doctor’s wife sees this as a time to take action, to break the cycle, and she rallies her community and the film. Moore’s simple, dignified performance carries Blindness even through its darkest, most uncomfortable moments.

Thanks to the power of a woman, Blindness ends at a most unexpected place: hope.

A Charlize Theron Double Feature

I hadn't intended to watch two movies starring my beauty icon (that garbage-bag and Dallas-hair Oscar look notwithstanding) two days in a row, but it just happened that way. So from mid-September, we have quick looks at Sleepwalking (seen Sept. 18 on DVD) and Battle in Seattle (seen Sept. 19 at the Angelika, with a Q&A afterward featuring Stuart Townsend, Martin Henderson and Charlize herself).

Is it sad that I'll be caught up with September reviews - I have one left to write - before August ones?

Charlize Theron takes on mommyhood in two indie flicks, relentlessly bleak Sleepwalking and earnest docudrama Battle in Seattle.

In the former, Theron’s selfish Joleen abandons her 11-year-old daughter (AnnaSophia Robb) with her brother, James (Nick Stahl), and then disappears for much of the movie. While Theron’s character certainly won’t win any Mother of the Year awards, Sleepwalking needs the actress’ natural spark to keep us from sleepily stumbling away. Otherwise, we’re left with a road trip across a landscape drained of color, filled with lengthy silences that director William Maher and screenwriter Zac Stanford want to imbue with significance. Instead, they contribute to Sleepwalking’s already-glacial nature. Dennis Hopper, as James and Joleen’s father, burns volcanic, in a Daddy Dearest kind of way.

Theron joins an ensemble in boyfriend Stuart Townsend’s writing and directing debut, Battle in Seattle, which re-creates the riots surrounding the 1999 World Trade Organization talks. Theron said she believes her Ella - first-time mom-to-be, cop’s wife (to Woody Harrelson), shopping blindly before tragedy - represents those who were unaware, and this arc clicks thanks to Theron’s and Harrelson’s performances. Otherwise, the protestors intrigue when they discuss organization and motivation, bore when Townsend pushes an affair between leader Jay (Martin Henderson) and rebel Lou (Michelle Rodriguez), and the awakened-journalist (Connie Nielsen) angle lacks development. Townsend said recently that while he knew his film wasn’t perfect, he wanted to enlighten people unfamiliar with the riots. In that respect, protestor Django (Andre Benjamin) sums up Battle in Seattle best: “People still may not know exactly what the WTO is, but they know that it’s bad.”

In evaluating Theron’s recent flicks, the “good mother” movie wins.

Tightrope Thriller

Despite several attempts, my fellow New York lover and I were unable to coordinate to see Man on Wire. (It was also the one Tribeca movie I couldn't get into when I was working press and industry screenings, so I was extra excited to track it down when it opened in theaters in July.) I hope he sees it soon - it's still at the Sunshine - or perhaps when it comes out on DVD later this year. Even if you aren't a city person, Man on Wire is worth seeing simply for its quality.

For 94 minutes, the Twin Towers represent a thing of marvel rather than mourning in James Marsh’s exhilarating documentary, Man on Wire. On Aug. 7, 1974, wire walker Philippe Petit moved effortlessly on a steel cable, thousands of feet above ground, between the Towers for almost an hour. Marsh films mostly in suspense/heist style (think fake IDs, hiding under tarps for hours to avoid police detection), complemented by Michael Nyman’s score and actual footage of Petit’s feats. Marsh also features a lively collection of voices, from French companions to New Yorkers who liked to stir up trouble to, most notably, Petit himself, still elfin and charismatic at 59. Marsh never mentions 9/11, and he doesn’t have to: In Man on Wire, the folklore wins out.

The Things We Do For Like

I enjoy Diane Lane. I will tolerate schlock if she's in it. I knew what I was in for when I decided to see Nights in Rodanthe, although I was willing to pay only $6 for the "privilege." I expected to mock the usual romance-drama trappings, and I did. However, something else was even more ridiculous : the weather. (She, on the other, was her usual lovely self.)

What’s more implausible: a 43-year-old lady who looks naturally beautiful in Hollywood, or a hurricane with no category designation in 2008? The woman in question is Diane Lane, so the answer is the tempest that doesn’t cause beach erosion in the romance Nights in Rodanthe, the latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks best-seller (The Notebook, Message in a Bottle).

Lane and three-time co-star Richard Gere (they also worked together in The Cotton Club and Unfaithful) play Adrienne and Paul in what’s essentially a two-character drama - fitting, given that it’s directed by theater veteran Ge0rge C. Wolfe. Adrienne and Paul weather crises familial (both) and professional (him) as they fall in love while staying in a multistory North Carolina shore house - a vacation spot that somehow sustains no damage from the ‘cane with no name. Lane portrays Adrienne’s reawakening with her usual grounded earthiness, and she almost makes those clichéd voiceovers of letters tolerable. Gere is tasteful, albeit bland.

I’ve always wanted to retire to the Carolinas but fear living in a magnet for the likes of Hugos and Hannas. Maybe I should move to Rodanthe, as this movie implies even the worst gusts will leave my home pristine.

A Five-Sentence Valentine to Robert Downey Jr.

It's my 100th post!

To me, personal movie hell would be The Cable Guy, with Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller. I can't stand There's Something about Mary (the movie that sent Stiller to the A-List) or Zoolander (Ben's 2001 directorial follow-up to The Cable Guy). What, then, possessed me to see Tropic Thunder? See the title of my post.

(By the way, it's 10:23 p.m. EDT. I'm being a good American; I'm watching the debate on my computer.)

Tropic Thunder (seen Aug. 19, eighth movie of August)

Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr., triumphs as Self-Important Serious Thespian Russ-- Kirk Lazarus (“five-time Academy-Award winner,” one of those solemn movie voices tells us) in Tropic Thunder, the Ben Stiller-written and -directed Hollywood satire.

The mocking ad and trailers that open Tropic Thunder are hilarious, especially the pairing of secretly gay monks Downey and “MTV Movie Award Winner for Best Kiss Tobey Maguire,” scored to Enigma (“Sade, Dit Moi”). The plot itself, spoiled actors encounter real bad guys while making a Vietnam War flick, has a decent hits-to-misses ratio and connects most with Lazarus as an African-American platoon leader - you see, he’s dyed his skin black. The actor rarely breaks form, even when consoling his “fellow soldiers” with a speech that’s really the theme to The Jeffersons - and when he does “slip,” all-American Downey uses a Mel Gibson accent.

Downey’s sharpest, most hysterical moment comes when Lazarus pontificates to Stiller’s action hero on how to win an Oscar: Think a throwdown between Forrest Gump and I Am Sam.

Still Catching up on August

For the current reviews, I'm using my "regular" writing style, alternating among 100-, 250- and 500-word critiques. For those summer musings, I'll continue to follow the five-sentence format.

I went to see Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer mainly because it had played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007. I wasn't crazy about the film as a piece of art. As an advertisement for her music, though, it's fantastic: I rushed to iTunes that night to hear more.

Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (seen Aug. 22, ninth movie of August)

The documentary Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, well, sings when it showcases its subject, delighting us with several uncut performances that highlight her perfect timing and silky vocals. In talking-head mode, the film flounders, sketchy with its timeline and enamored with presenting its dizzying array of voices in 1950s graphics. The last living artist of the Billie/Sarah/Ella era, the “Jezebel of Jazz” survived a 15-year heroin addiction, multiple marriages, a rape, arrests and poor health to perform into her 80s. O’Day should be filmed in a style fitting of her vivacity, so it’s ironic that the footage from her then manager, Robbie Cavolina, and co-director Ian McCrudden shot just before her 2006 death (which isn’t mentioned) has such a bleached-out quality. Fortunately, hearing a doped-up O’Day scat for her life on “Sing, Sing, Sing” or linger over “Sweet Georgia Brown” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival carries enough of an impact to overcome most of these flaws.

Play On?

Brooklyn Jen knows her music. The tour guide in me appreciates a well-presented New York. We're both fans of the teen movie. In other words, our expectations for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist were high.

Maybe too high?

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist meanders and sputters more than a 90-minute comedy should. An After Hours for Millennials, Peter Sollett’s flick drives audiences through a Friday night mainly on the Lower East Side as our eponymous characters, their friends and frenemies come together over - what else? - songs. Sollett films a valentine to New York nightlife; Lorene Scafaria’s script, based on a young-adult novel, contains witty barbs; yet Nick and Norah isn’t consistently in tune.

Michael Cera plays Nick, the latest entry in the awkward-cute pantheon of Cera characters (Juno, Superbad). The mixtape artist and sole straight member of a queercore band recently was dumped by pouty flirt Tris (Alexis Dziena). Kat Dennings is Norah, smart, musically connected and in an unhappy “friends with benefits” situation with Tal (Jay Baruchel). Of course, Nick and Norah are meant to be. (The Thin Man comedies aren’t referenced - no hip indie rock in those.) Naturally, bumps and wrong turns, literal and figurative, occur before the music of like flows.

Norah poignantly explains her relationship to Tal: “You’re ignored long enough, sometimes you just want to feel special.” The Nick/Tris link, though, confounds. One can see why doubt-laden Nick would want Tris, but her interest in him makes far less sense. She certainly doesn’t know where Fluffy is (a running plot in the film).


One storyline that is infinite: a gross gum gag. I’ll say only this - Norah’s drunk best friend (Ari Graynor) and a Port Authority toilet are involved.

Go West, Young Woman?

I'm not much for Westerns, so I wasn't as up for Appaloosa as my former class cohort Patricia. Then she reminded me of a major selling point: Viggo. Ah, Viggo. Man who helped me survive the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Man who was so awesome in Eastern Promises. We also have Ed Harris, a man's man. With Paul Newman's recent passing, Harris may have the steeliest (is that a word?) pair of baby blues out there. OK, I'm more game.

Slightly weathered but still rugged, mesmerizing shades of blue and tan that captivate immediately - I’m describing the manly forms of Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen in Appaloosa, although Dean Semler’s cinematography of Texas and New Mexico landscapes looks gorgeous, too!

Harris does just about everything except pick out curtains in this Western (and his character also has a chance to do that). He plays marshal-for-hire Virgil Cole, directs, produces, co-writes the screenplay adaptation of a Robert B. Parker novel and even sings a Johnny Cash-like ditty over the closing credits. Appaloosa has much to recommend, until a pesky woman mars the day.

Cole and his partner/best friend of 12 years, Everett Hitch (Mortensen), ride into Appaloosa, N.M., to clean up the town. Their main target: another colorfully named character, rancher Randall Bragg (oddly accented Jeremy Irons). Cole is the alpha male, Hitch the all-seeing, quietly correcting No. 2. (Virgil reads Emerson but trips on pronouncing such words as “sequestered” and “degrading.”) As zingy as Appaloosa’s dialogue is, Mortensen doesn’t speak much of it. Most of his acting comes from listening and observing, a performance of unexpected vitality. You can detect shades of the Russian gangster he played in last year’s Eastern Promises in this taciturn Western lawman.

A woman comes along, the widow Allison French (Renee Zellweger). Virgil rapidly becomes enamored of this Allie, who is not like the “whores and squaws” he is used to - “She likes to take a bath at night” - and they set up house. Despite her organ playing and high necklines, Allie isn’t exactly the simple frontier woman. Everett soon grasps this. So does Bragg.

Watching Harris and Mortensen interact in Appaloosa, doing something as simple as sitting on a bench, one recalls the easy connection between fellow blue-eyed wonder Paul Newman (who played Harris’ father in the 2005 miniseries Empire Falls) and his two-time co-star Robert Redford. Sometimes, the rich words don’t sound right for the time period - did men really discuss their feelings in 1882 as if on Oprah? Harris and Mortensen’s chemistry sells it anyway.

If only the male/female dynamic were even half as interesting. Allie first appears to be a rare multidimensional female part in a Western, until she devolves into the stereotype that women ultimately are power-hungry and, well, kind of easy. A miscast Zellweger (in Cold Mountain mode) doesn’t provide any shading that could have added nuance. From the start, Allie comes across as immature, her motives obvious.

Harris also may have taken on one task too many when he chose to make Appaloosa his directorial follow-up to 2000’s Pollock. Particularly during the latter half, the pacing lags, as storylines continue after their natural resolutions. The town scenes also have a soundstage feel; they need more soot and grit.

Let’s circle back to the central relationship in Appaloosa. “Allie, you’re with Virgil. So am I,” Everett explains when his best friend’s girl kisses him. Ed and Viggo - now that’s a love story to savor.

Burn, Baby, Burn

When I first became a more serious cinema student, I loathed the Coen brothers, especially their comedies. I softened in recent years, and like many other critics, I thought No Country for Old Men was the best movie of 2007. Alas, the next Joel/Ethan work has brought back old feelings.

“What did we learn from this?” a CIA supervisor says to an agent at the end of Burn After Reading, the latest screen adventure for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. “Uh …,” the agent replies. “Not to do it again,” the superior answers.

That exchange also sums up my feelings for this so-called comedy.

The plot - in which goofy gym clerks Chad and Linda (Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand) stumble upon a CD they think includes secrets belonging to disgraced agent Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) - has the potential for madcap, dizzy, screwball, a la the Coens’ 2003 Intolerable Cruelty. Instead, the brothers layer on an unpleasant divorcing couple (Malkovich and Tilda Swinton), a womanizing Treasury employee (George Clooney, on Round 3 with Joel and Ethan), a plastic-surgery-obsessed online dater (McDormand), and the exercise geek (Pitt); they draw some ludicrous connections; and they expect us to laugh. Nice try.

Oddly, the one person who offers consistent chuckles is Pitt, better known for ponderousness (Babel, Seven Years in Tibet) than popcorn. He understands what the role of Chad needs: gaping mouth, eyes that pop like a cartoon character’s, vigorous sucking of a Jamba Juice smoothie. Meanwhile, old Coen hands such as McDormand and Clooney come across as strident (her) or slimy (him).

I’d scorch this movie memory were it not for two things: Angelina’s other half and the promise of improved cinema. You see, before Burn After Reading began, I saw the trailers for Frost/Nixon and Doubt. Better days are ahead.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves (Thanks, Annie Lennox)

I find that the characters in the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants series inspire definite feelings, and they don't always match up from book to movie. For example, my friend Amy is a fan of the Bridget storyline, but I don't think it does as much for my mother. I lose my patience easily with Carmen, yet she's many reviewers' favorite. As a result, more than usual, this review reflects MY opinion.

P.S. While I don't say it below, the best part of my viewing experience was watching this with my Jersey "sisters," Brooklyn Jen and the aforementioned Amy.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (seen Aug. 22; 10th movie watched in August)

Three years after the first Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie adapted the initial novel of the four-part series, Carmen, Tibby, Lena, Bridget, and that pair of magical jeans return to charm us. Alas, in truncating books two through four into one sequel, director Sanaa Hamri and screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler cut back and forth more than a videogame, and the friendships don't linger as sweetly as in 2005.

While teenagers naturally grow apart as they age, Bridget (Blake Lively) seems to be in a different movie altogether than Carmen (America Ferrera), Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) and Lena (Alexis Bledel). Where the other three tackle boy problems of varying degrees of triteness (although Carmen also has a parallel Shakespeare camp story), Bridget searches for identities old (Turkish archeological dig) and personal (Southern grandmother), giving the film a needed level of maturity.

Our girls reunite in Greece for the last 15 minutes of Pants 2, providing us with the satisfying conclusion we desire - but not the overall blissful experience we so want.

This Is Supposedly My Little Sister's Life?

Between The Wackness and now American Teen, I felt very old this summer, even though I could pass for the older sister of some of these teenagers. (Seriously. Twice in the past week, and four times in the past month, I've been asked what school I go to. Am I reverse aging?) The more I think about American Teen, the more disgruntled I become. Rarely do I agree with anything my partners at the New York Post have to say, but like them, I took pleasure in this documentary's poor performance at the box office.

American Teen (seen Aug. 10, third movie of August)

From the Breakfast Club-evoking poster to the Juno-esque soundtrack, American Teen director Nanette Burstein manipulates and blatantly edits her “characters” in this year-in-the-life high school documentary. Yes, I know the kids of Warsaw, Ind., are real, not screenwriter creations, but they seem scripted. Hannah’s ideas of “punk” and “rebel” feel as if they come out of 1990s grunge primer, and only Colin the basketball player transcends the “jock” storyline stereotype set up for him. A sense of adult irresponsibility pervades American Teen, from the lack of early intervention when breakup depression leads Hannah to miss weeks of school to Burstein seemingly standing by and shooting as Queen Bee Megan paints hateful graffiti on a student’s house. Watching American Teen is like viewing a marathon of MTV reality shows, and we all know how “authentic” those are.

A Lot Better Than Three-Buck Chuck

It's time to get back to reviewing August movies (even though I have three more from September - ack!). The flick I'm about to talk up was the one that made me want to start writing again. It's not that Bottle Shock was the greatest thing I've ever seen. However, it may have been the most fun I've had in some time.

Props to Brooklyn Jen for help with the lede.

Bottle Shock (seen Aug. 9; second movie I saw in August)

Like a glass of summer white, Bottle Shock refreshes the moviegoer’s palate after a season of Hulks and Dark Knights. Randall Miller directs and co-writes this messily engaging, shaggy dog of a flick, a delightful true story of a Napa Valley winery stunning the Parisian oenophiles in a blind taste test in 1976. The plot has problems (unbalanced screen time, characters introduced then dropped), the acting is uneven (Alan Rickman and an underused Freddy Rodriguez are great, the clichéd father/son Bill Pullman and Chris Pine less so), yet the film’s overall charm ultimately takes over. Rickman’s U.K. snob is as droll as you might expect (“You think I'm an asshole. [pause] “I'm just British and, well, you're not.”), yet he also takes pleasure in discovering that odd green concoction known as guacamole. In much the same way, allow yourself to accept Bottle Shock’s flaws and instead drink in the glorious California and French landscapes, the complementary 1970s rock soundtrack, and the joy of a little movie that could.

Ladies First (And Second And Third And ...)

The first classic movie I saw when I moved to New York 11 years ago was the original version of The Women. It was fun, but I didn't think it was fabulous, nor did it cry out for the already-percolating remake. After more than a decade, that remake arrived last week.

For the record, I was the youngest person in the theater, and I think my 55-year-old mother also may have been on the youthful side of the audience.

Almost 60 years after Anita Loos uncollared the cattiness of The Women (based on a Clare Boothe Luce play), Murphy Brown creator Diane English brings a declawed remake to multiplexes. The basic framework remains: Banker’s wife Mary (Meg Ryan in the Norma Shearer role) learns her husband is cheating on her with a perfume girl at Saks (Eva Mendes, a poor Joan Crawford substitute). Instead of the 1930s biting and backstabbing, here Mary receives support from a flock of fellow femmes as she reclaims herself. Otherwise, we still see no men, not even among the extras on Fifth Avenue. While toned down, snarky comments remain, this time about looks and aging. (Meanwhile, we engage in our own plastic-surgery voyeurism.)

English may have moved the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to New York, yet she never explains how earth mother Edie (an exaggerated Debra Messing) and sassy lesbian author Alex (funny, underused Jada Pinkett Smith) fit with Mary and college pal Sylvie (Annette Bening). Perhaps as a result, English waters down Crystal Allen (Mendes) until she’s nothing more than a cubic zirconia sexpot, not someone to fear.

Then we arrive at the hypocritical fashion storyline. Mary’s preteen daughter has obvious body-image issues, calling herself “fat” when she’s slender, and already smokes. Magazine editor Sylvie tells Molly no one looks that glamorous, not even the models. Meanwhile, Mom becomes a clothing designer for stick-skinny women, and Molly thinks the whole scene rocks. In fact, it’s a breeding ground for her angst, but English long ago dropped this thread, unresolved.

In the midst of my griping comes the radiant, adult Annette Bening. She alone elevates The Women at least a half-grade. Her relatable character, a true lady, struggles with tradeoffs in a high-power career and nearly loses her friends for it. Sylvie thinks she’s non-maternal, yet the discussion about beauty and sex she and Molly share can come only from a place of love and warmth. “I’m the man I want to marry,” Sylvie says at one point. That's a positive, strong-female message to cheer.