Woman on Film

The Return of Tribeca - And Me

2009-04-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've been a terrible blogger the past two months, I know. I promised I'd write a Watchmen review - and didn't. I wanted to sing the praises of Sugar and Duplicity - never got around to it. I wanted to rave about how Amy Adams finally played something beyond charming (in Sunshine Cleaning) - so much for that idea.

Now we're at my favorite time of the cinema year, the Tribeca Film Festival. Once again, I'm volunteering in the Industry department. Alas, this year we don't have formal press and industry screenings, so I have no fun buzz to pass along. All the flicks I see will be as an audience member. I sprung for a fancy ticket package that allowed me early access to my purchases, and it was worth every bit of that $225. The only thing I couldn't get between that and my American Express card was the fancy, talking-heads screening of The Girlfriend Experience. I'll have to "settle" for the world premiere instead.

Here's what I'll be seeing in the coming weeks. I'll be filing dispatches as I did in 2008.

1) Lost Son of Havana, a Luis Tiant documentary.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/The_Lost_Son_of_Havana.html

2) Black Dynamite, a blaxsploitation sendup. If it's even half as good as Undercover Brother, I'll be gleeful. P.S. This sold out faster than anything else at the festival. Thank goodness for the Harrison Package.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Black_Dynamite.html?c=y&3301=170131&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

3) Soundtrack for a Revolution, a documentary combining history and soul music. All it would need to be a perfect blend for me: sports. I guess I'm getting that fix three days earlier. I'm also excited my friend Carrie K. came down from Boston for the weekend for, among other things, the festival.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Soundtrack_for_a_Revolution.html?c=y&page=2&&sortBy=title&curView=browseDetail&searchStartDate=04-18-2009&3301=170216&pageSize=15

4) Burning down the House: The Story of CBGB. More music documentary, more friends from out of town - this time Amy from Kansas.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Burning_Down_the_House_The_Story_of_CBGB.html?c=y&3301=170131&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

5) Playground. Michelle's and my trifecta of tough women's documentaries begins. Amy, who's in the NYC area for the entire festival, joins us. http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Playground.html?c=y&3301=170201&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

6) The Girlfriend Experience. The aforementioned world premiere.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/The_Girlfriend_Experience.html?c=y&3301=170156&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

7) Easy Virtue. I know the film has a distributor and a release date, but I am such a sucker for British costume productions based on literary works. How can I resist?
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Easy_Virtue.html

8) Rachel. Part 2 of my documentary tour with Michelle.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Rachel.html?c=y&3301=170211&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

9) Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Nagshbandi. The last of the tough-issues collection with Michelle. The flick has received great buzz in several publications, including New York magazine. Of course, as a good journalist, I find this intriguing.
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/Fixer_The_Taking_of_Ajmal_Naqshbandi.html?c=y&3301=170151&curView=browseDetail&sortBy=title

More Oscar Thoughts (fashion and show)

2009-02-24T06:44:00.000-08:00

A long-lost Oscar buddy chose to reply to my last blog post over email, the form of communication I used when I wrote back to her. I'm copying and pasting the majority of that email over here as my show review.

How could I forget to mention Goldie Hawn??? My mother and I were aghast when we saw her. Meryl Streep was a beautifully dressed mature woman; in fact, it was the best we'd ever seen her look at an awards show. The dove gray is not my favorite color in the world, but at least Ms. Streep looked age-appropriate. Hawn, on the other hand, continues to think she's her daughter. I don't want to see that much of my own cleavage in the shower, never mind the cleavage of a woman twice my age on the Academy stage.

Brad Pitt also had distracting jewelry. Did he show up in his class ring?

The commentators on the E! fashion-show recap last night said Tilda Swinton was fashion-forward. Eh? I thought it was better than the Hefty bag, but that's not saying much.

THE SHOW:

I've found reaction to Hugh Jackman interesting. Most TV critics have been "meh," but message-board posters have been a lot more positive. I'm with the on-the-couch crowd. I really enjoyed the opening number and him in general. The Steve Martin/Tina Fey patter was awesome, but most comedy stuff doesn't work for hours on end. I'm so glad the Academy decided to go non-comedian for a year.

I thought the grouping of similar awards was a great idea: It sped the show along, and it kept us from suffering through minor stars cluttering up my time. On the other hand, this means we had to sit through killer yearbook filler. Why? Sure, the Judd Apatow short was funny - stoner James Franco watching Milk James Franco was hysterical - and my mother enjoyed the musical sequence (I found it too slapped together), but why were they there?

Also a mess: The presentation of the best-song numbers (again, five songs could've been nominated this year) and the bizarre pan-and-scan during the dead-people montage. I didn't mind Queen Latifah singing - her jazz albums are great - but I didn't know where to focus. It didn't help that I couldn't read the names of some of the people who died.

I really enjoyed the way the acting awards were presented, and it allowed us to see stars we haven't in some time. (Eva Marie Saint: another classily dressed older woman. Goldie? Whoopi? Are you taking notes?) Some of the patter bugged me - see Nicole Kidman introducing Angelina Jolie - but for the most part, the presenters seemed so excited to be introducing their peers' work. I especially enjoyed Swinton on Marisa Tomei, Shirley MacLaine on Anne Hathaway (and Hathaway's reaction), and Robert DeNiro (!!!) on Sean Penn.

As for the winners ... I like Slumdog, but it's overhyped. (I support Best Director for Danny Boyle, though.) I favored Frost/Nixon or Milk. I was thrilled for Sean Penn, although a teeny part of me hoped against hope for Richard Jenkins. I know this is an unpopular sentiment, but I was not rooting for Kate Winslet. I didn't like her in The Reader at all. Had she been nominated for Revolutionary Road, I would have been all over that. (My pick was Hathaway.) Heath Ledger's family handled his award acceptance very well. As for Penelope Cruz: I normally don't like her or Woody Allen. That I enjoyed her and Vicky Cristina Barcelona as much as I did means that was one justly deserved award.

White-Out

2009-02-23T05:15:00.000-08:00

A review of the show will come later. I'm including a link to USA Today's photo gallery and numbers in parentheses so you can judge some shots for yourself. See the fashions link about a third of the way down on the left.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/default.htm

Boston is experiencing yet another snow and ice storm today. That doesn't mean I needed to have Hollywood fashionistas create a homage to it on the red carpet last night.

Yes, Oscar fashion was one big yawn and miss. We didn't see black, black, black - or, as we did at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, red, red, red - so I suppose that left us with the last remaining generic neutral: white, or something really close to it. A couple of people did this well, namely Penelope Cruz (2). My mother and I simultaneously said her Balmain dress looked bridal (we did this with the same vocal inflections; clearly, we are related), but it was pretty nevertheless, and it fit. My father liked it, too. Unlike Anne Hathaway (4) and Evan Rachel Wood (27), Cruz's neckline didn't aim for artistic: With Hathaway and Wood, their structured tops made them look as if they weren't filling out their strapless dresses enough. Unlike Sarah Jessica Parker (6) and her "barely mint," Marisa Tomei (5), and Miley Cyrus (17), Cruz had a dress that was poufy without being over-the-top busy. Unlike Jennifer Aniston (16), Cruz mixed up her usual looks. (Note to Aniston: Beach hair, tan skin, black or off-white dress are overdone. I feel as if I saw that look in 1999 ... and 2003 ... and...)

Oh, Annie and SJP! I adore you both. Ms. Hathaway, you're someone I've eagerly awaited on the carpet for years, and your style is one I admire in my real life. This time, though ... I like the Armani Prive dress more in photos than I did on TV. I can see that it's more silver than white, and it has some nice pleating. It's just that a column dress disappoints me, and the severe updo/pale face/dark lip look has become fallback makeup for you at the Oscars. (I did enjoy you on stage with Hugh Jackman. Shirley MacLaine is right: You should keep singing.) As for SJP, I know you frequently take style risks and make over-the-top choices. This Dior haute couture dress, though, seemed like a reject from the Sex and the City movie. Oh, Miley? You're much, much too young for a dress than big. It's pretty, but it does weigh more than you.

Another white dress I mostly liked: Taraji P. Henson's (3), by Cavali. She had to keep picking up her train, which I found distracting, but she owned her look. The ruffles were subtle and made the column dress more interesting, she went for one mega piece of bling, and she sported short, shiny, healthy hair. That last part alone made her a carpet standout.

Nothing was worse than Jessica Biel (7), in Prada. "Her face looks tired," I said to my mother when Biel first appeared on screen. "She looks like she rolled out of bed and tied a sheet around her," my mother complained. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Someone who wore white who worked: Mickey Rourke (8). Seriously. At this point, he has a style all his own, as Diane Keaton does, and we might as well accept it. He accessorized his outfit with a sparkly vest, sharp eyewear, and a pendant of his recently deceased dog, Loki, who died six days earlier.

She didn't wear white, but Freida Pinto (15) also disappointed me. Her choices during awards season have been fantastic, and I told my father before the show that I'd been looking forward to her more than just about anyone else on the carpet. The color of the Galliano dress: vibrant. That sleeve, on the other hand: vicious. It reminded me of a heavily tattooed man. This isn't the image one wants to evoke for the most glamorous night on the Hollywood calendar.

Angelina Jolie (1) - another black dress. Ho hum. The Elie Saab was a little less of a sack than usual, but it remainded flowy and drapy and ... By the way, something in her face looks off, and it's distracting. Will she be able to smile and emote in five years?

With Beyonce Knowles (24), a clean, fresh face and a swingy ponytail meet some crazy gold embroidery (although I think it looks more painted on) and an unusual hem. Most people hated it. I don't mind it so much on her because she's Beyonce. Put that on, say, Tomei, and I would have gone screaming to the Cher Hall of Shame.

Kate Winslet (9) looked too severe, and the structured hairstyle was way too distracting: I kept wondering how much gel went into that look. At 33, Winslet is just a year older than I am, but last night I thought she could pass for my aunt rather than my sister. It reminded me of the year Reese Witherspoon won: another woman my age, looking way too old. (Speaking of Witherspoon (43), she didn't walk the carpet, but she was on the telecast. I'm not sure what that neckline was. It made the dress look cheap.)

The reds didn't have it. Heidi Klum (13) in Mouret, also with bordering-on-greasy hair; Amanda Seyfried (23) and a ginormous bow in Valentino; Amy Adams (12) in Carolina Herrera. I liked the shade of red on Adams, but it blended exactly into the red carpet. Not good. I also HATED the necklace. Beer-bottle shards strung together?

So, did I fully embrace anyone? Yes. One person. When I first saw her on the Oscar preshow, I sighed and said, "She looks just lovely." Natalie Portman (10) and your pink Rodarte, thank you. You picked a color no one else did - Alicia Keys' dress, also very nice, is similar but lilac - and you didn't make yourself older than you are. You recognized that you were a presenter, not an attendant or a nominee, so you didn't go over the top. It was just a heavenly concoction.

I Miss Siskel, Too

2009-02-19T16:10:00.001-08:00

I remember when Gene Siskel died. It was 10 years ago tomorrow, and I was on my first trip to Hollywood. I was on my then-boyfriend's couch, and we were stunned into silence for a good five minutes.

At the Movies hasn't been the same since, and the current incarnation is just awful. Look, I'm young, too, but I think I'm smarter and more critical than at least one of those hosts.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/02/i_remember_gene.html

Buttoning Down the Hatches to Write

2009-02-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

I can picture parts of a Slumdog Millionaire review, but not a beginning or an end. However, I made myself sit at the computer while doing laundry this afternoon, and somehow a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button came to be.

I dragged my feet on seeing this and finally went more than a week after Oscar nominations were announced. I can't remember the last time I hadn't seen all the Best Picture nominees before the reveal of the final five - pathetic for me. I wish the wait had been worth it. I wish I liked Button as much as Sandra, my cousin Tom, and later my parents did. Nope.

I'll say this much: It's the better Brangelina film of 2008.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button represents a case of grand moviemaking gone curiously stillborn.

About an hour and a half into this Oscar-nominated epic, I wrote, “This is supposed to be a big, great, sweeping, magical film, and yet … this movie is inert.” That I could compose that coherent a sentence while watching this time-traveling drama proves how unengaged I felt. When Cate Blanchett and her Australian counterpart, Tilda Swinton, were on screen, I found Button involving (as long as Blanchett wasn’t slathered in makeup). Otherwise, David Fincher’s direction needed more vigor to keep boredom from pervading my thoughts.

That’s right. This is David Fincher, the same Fincher who made Fight Club and Zodiac. While those films mesmerize and energize, Button is, all too often, sluggish and remote. For every well-shot, suspenseful torpedo tugboat scene, we have dialogue overwhelmed by Alexandre Desplat’s score and Brad Pitt looking as if he’s auditioning for a remake of The Way We Were. We also have a movie where pancake and powder are the order of the day, characters in their own distracting way. “Pretty” usually wins out over “substance” in Button.

The screenwriter of Forrest Gump, Eric Roth, is adapting again, this time his own 1994 movie ... I mean, an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man (Pitt) aging backward. (The adaptation is very, very loose.) A babe is born, looking eightysomething, in 1918 New Orleans and abandoned by his father on the steps of an old folks’ home run by a Gone with the Wind-esque mammy (Taraji P. Henson). As time advances, our boy, played by Pitt in various layers of makeup and computer manipulation, becomes physically younger, and he connects with one resident’s granddaughter (Blanchett; Elle Fanning as a child). At points, we break from the flashbacks for wheezy dying sequences in August 2005 in a Southern hospital.

In Gump, history pivoted around Tom Hanks’ character. In Button, the characters aren’t connected to the outside world, minus the badly shoehorned Hurricane Katrina framing. We didn’t need Benjamin to, say, overhear Truman planning the use of the atomic bomb, but Button uses history the way lazy filmmakers employ the Empire State Building as an establishing New York shot. It’s throwaway at best, Symbolism 101 at worst.

Surprisingly, the love story between Benjamin and Daisy captivated this grouchy cynic. “Sleep with me,” she moans when they’re finally in an age-appropriate relationship. “Absolutely,” he replies, eagerly. It’s the sexiest thing People’s two-time Sexiest Man Alive has ever said, and it catapults Button in a way none of the special effects do.

In a long black jersey dress and flowing red hair, ballet dancer Blanchett isn’t the siren one expects but instead a lovely evoker of wistful melancholy. Swinton plays an earlier Benjamin lover, an older, dissatisfied woman whose arc comes to a delightful, quirky conclusion. As for Pitt, it’s hard to say how what he’s doing for much of Button is acting. He’s mostly posing and reacting, often deficient in emotion. Brad, give your nomination to Leo.

Good, Not Great

2009-02-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

This was supposed to be the intro to my Slumdog Millionaire review. It became so long I decided it merited its own post. The Slumdog review will appear later Thursday, under separate cover.

I've seen Slumdog Millionaire twice. The first time was day before Thanksgiving, the week after the movie opened in Boston. I liked the structure, and I enjoyed it as a director's movie (which is odd - I'm more a written than visual kind of gal), although even then I remarked to my mother that I found Slumdog slightly overhyped.

Ten weeks later, Slumdog had won just about every award out there, and it seems to be on its way to an Oscar trouncing Sunday. My movie buddy Patricia had yet to see the film; meanwhile, I wondered if I'd missed a sprinkling of the fairy dust that would result in me salivating as much as many other critics.

My second viewing only enforced the feelings I had the first time around.

Will I be OK with the inevitable Slumdog victories Sunday, namely Best Picture? Yeah, I guess. I'm rooting for Danny Boyle to win Best Director. Slumdog is much better than The Reader and the endless inertia known as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (That review is coming Friday.) It isn't Frost/Nixon or Milk, though. Patricia's one-word description hits upon many of my Slumdog gripings: "contrived."

Today's Highway-Robbery Reminder

2009-02-19T03:14:00.000-08:00

I know I live in the most expensive place around to go to the movies. I know the Regal Cinemas seem to be especially pricey, even having the nerve to charge more for flicks on Fridays and Saturdays. Unlike the AMC chain, Regal doesn't offer a delightful $6-before-noon special on weekends. Still, I don't think I realized how absurd New York prices are until just now, as I was editing Regal Entertainment's earnings in my real-world job.

Please see the chart below. Note the bolded section:
Operating Data Quarter Ended
Jan. 1, Dec. 27
2009 2007
Theatres at period end 552 527
Screens at period end 6,801 6,388
Average screens 12.3 12.1
per theatre
Attendance 61,756 53,320
(in thousands)
Average ticket price $ 7.75 $ 7.58
Average concessions $ 3.13 $ 2.97
per patron

Excuse me: The average ticket price across Regal is $7.75? What??? In New York City, it costs almost $13 for a regular ticket! Where is it significantly less than $13 to give us this $7.75 average? And the average concession per patron is $3.13? I'm not kidding: I'm not even sure I can find anything for less than $3.13 at the Battery Park or Times Square concession stands!

Back to work and mulling a Slumdog Millionaire review ...

The Best Film of 2008

2009-02-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Frost/Nixon and Milk are two of the best movies of 2008. Rarely do films live up to their hype or even your own hopes. That it happened for me twice on Christmas week indicates that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

I saw Frost/Nixon on Broadway in August 2007, and I've been awaiting its screen adaptation pretty much ever since. I saw Doubt a week beforehand, though, and given how shaky a move that made to celluloid, I began to worry.

Thank goodness I didn't have to worry here. My fellow Frost/Nixon fan Patricia accompanied me. We loved it. I can't wait to see this again.

Like the recent Doubt, Frost/Nixon transitions from stage to screen. Unlike Doubt's John Patrick Shanley, Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (who also wrote the play) allow their story - British talk-show host David Frost's somewhat fictionalized 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon - to breathe and even grow.

Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their Broadway work as Frost and Nixon. Joining them onscreen: Kevin Bacon as Nixon loyalist Col. Jack Brennan, Matthew Macfayden as Frost producer John Birt, Oliver Platt as ABC journalist Bob Zelnick (looking nothing like his real-life counterpart) and Sam Rockwell as Nixon-hating professor James Reston.

It's easy to hate Nixon, yet the filmmakers and performers don't opt for this simplicity. Howard shoots the drama's opening moments, Nixon's resignation, from behind, giving the man respect and privacy; he echoes this with the film's last frame. Langella had Morgan include dialogue to illuminate Nixon's loneliness in office, and Howard features a scene of the consummate politician petting a dog - but in that uncomfortable, forced-jovial Nixon way.

When Anthony Hopkins played Nixon in Oliver Stone's 1995 biopic, it felt like a hammy imitation. Langella doesn't look like the 37th president - for one thing, he's several inches taller - but he captures the man's awkward essence. He's that socially backward soul who never learned how to make a joke, that brooder with a permanent chip on his shoulder. Morgan imagines a phone call where a drunken Nixon exposes his insecurities. It's the type of scene where an actor could chew scenery, but Langella plays it perfectly, giving us a portrait of alienation.

As Frost, Sheen shows he can play more than Tony Blair (The Deal and The Queen, other Morgan scripts), and he play this role well, too. Frost starts off a starry-eyed, "Insider"-like journalist, nowhere near as serious as he believes himself to be. Only when he's met someone more manipulative and savvy than himself in Nixon, outwardly his opposite, does the charmer slump and slouch. Like Nixon, Frost is desperate; unlike his adversary, Frost doesn't let desperation overwhelm him.

The newcomers to Frost/Nixon work wonders, too, notably Kevin Bacon, who personifies "steely gaze" and "stiff upper lip." When is this man ever going to receive recognition from the Academy?

Howard, Morgan and their cast have presented us with an engrossing cat-and-mouse game. Frost/Nixon makes for history at its most riveting.

Milking Good Acting for All It's Worth

2009-02-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

I meant to do a combo review, but time is getting away from me. Take what I have so far.

A pioneering homosexual district supervisor and a disgraced Republican president make an unlikely duo. This winter, you'll find these 1970s icons, Harvey Milk and Richard Nixon, in some of the same multiplexes in two absorbing, Oscar-nominated dramas with towering lead performances.

Sean Penn smiles! Sean Penn can be ebullient! Sean Penn's immense range includes "joy!" Milk, Gus van Sant's biopic of the rise and death of America's first openly gay politician, is a marvel in casting; just about every portrayer is a ringer for his or her real-life counterpart. Although Milk ends with death, this tale of 1970s San Francisco oozes life.

Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black do several things right. First, they present Harvey Milk not as a martyr (although they beat the death premonitions heavily) but as a funny, shrewd, distracted businessman, politician and lover.

"Politics is about theater. It isn't about winning; it's about making a statement," Harvey explains as he makes run after run before being elected supervisor of District 5. He's not a one-issue candidate: We see Harvey forging alliances with the unions over Coors and reaching out to the conservative Dan White (Josh Brolin). He's also caught up in his work, to the detriment of relationships with longtime lover Scott (James Franco) and unstable boyish Jack (Diego Luna, a love story not well-developed).

The filmmakers don't muffle Harvey's flamboyance. Three years after the chaste love scenes in Brokeback Mountain, Milk depicts Penn picking up Franco in a subway station and bringing him home the same night - within the first five minutes of the movie. Penn's speech pattern and body language are in your face, daring the Dan Whites of the audience to squirm. Yet Harvey is so charming and open it's easy to accept him.

Van Sant recreates the Castro of the 1970s and incorporates actual footage and newspaper articles of the era. Black engaged in meticulous research, speaking with 40 or so people from campaign manager Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) to Milk protege and AIDS-quilt founder Cleve Jones (a stunning Emile Hirsch). This makes Milk feel more documentary than biography.

In a stroke of good timing for distributor Focus Features, Milk parallels the Proposition 8 fight in California with the failure of Proposition 6, which would have mandated the firing of gay teachers. (Anita Bryant, who led the battle for Prop 6, is the one person Van Sant didn't cast: She appears only in television clips.) Milk also echoes the election of another minority hope-filled politician, the one occupying the White House. Harvey notes that hope can't be all one has, but "without hope, life's not worth living."

1967: In the Heat of the Night

2009-02-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

I probably should have started the 1967 project with In the Heat of the Night, as it's the big winner of the year at the Oscars, but I wanted to get the first "Revisiting" post out. Now I can do this in a more proper order.

2) In the Heat of the Night (winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay). My first viewing

Based on what I read before Pictures at a Revolution, I viewed In the Heat of the Night as the "compromise" Best Picture: more daring than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, not as edgy as Bonnie and Clyde or The Graduate. I also thought it was a typical black/white buddy movie, with saintly Sidney Poitier educating racist Rod Steiger (who won Best Actor).

My impressions were incorrect. In the Heat of the Night is a worthy winner, mostly eschewing sappy bonding moments in favor of biting dialogue - Stirling Silliphant adapted John Bell's novel - and uneasy relationships. Sometimes the words amuse: "What do you mean I have the wrong man? I have the motive which is money and the body which is dead!" Steiger's exasperated Chief Gillespie huffs. More often, the story sears, a murder mystery on the surface but at its core an honest look at racial interactions featuring an educated, “interloping” black detective, Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), and a long-established, wary white police chief (Steiger).

Poitier seethes in depicting the treatment Virgil receives in Sparta, Mississippi. "May I see the man I'm supposed to have killed?" the Philadelphia-based detective sneers at one point. When a white man, Endicott, bristles at being questioned and slaps him, Virgil slaps Endicott back. Poitier developed an ulcer during production, and it seems he decided Virgil had one, too. "They call me Mister Tibbs," Poitier hisses in his most famous line. The actor said Virgil is his favorite of his roles; it's an absurd oversight the Academy didn’t even nominate him.

Director Norman Jewison rarely lapses into stereotype, and he uses a great bluesy opening by Ray Charles and a Quincy Jones score a flavor to accompany the oppressive Southern summer heat. (The movie was shot in fall in Illinois, and the actors kept ice chips in their mouth so their breathe wouldn’t appear on camera.) Forty years later, In the Heat of the Night still crackles.

Revisiting ... The Graduate

2009-02-14T01:37:00.000-08:00

Late last year, I told my cousin Mary that I wanted to start a monthly feature for the blog in which I watched a movie I hadn't seen in years. It could be something I adored when I first saw it or a flick I didn't care for even though many others do. I even watched The English Patient and took notes on it to prepare for this project. Then, of course, life interfered.

While cleaning out my 2008 notebook, I remembered another project I wanted to start. Therefore, this entry gives me the opportunity to do that and to start "Revisiting."

The 1960s were a turbulent decade, a furious energy reflected in Hollywood and many films of 1967. Mark Harris, a longtime presence at Entertainment Weekly, traces the evolution of the five movies nominated for Best Picture, four with social leanings and one old-fashioned big-budget song-and-dance epic. Inspired by Harris' book, Pictures at a Revolution, I decided to watch or re-watch the five flicks in question, looking at their quality overall and their relevance today. It's funny how time has changed opinions - including mine.

1) The Graduate (winner of Best Director Oscar). My second viewing; first was in 1996.

When I first watched The Graduate, I was 20 years old and, like our protagonist, a soon-to-be college graduate. I related to Benjamin's (Dustin Hoffman) anxiety and disaffect (although I always had too much ambition to be like him). The script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry spoke to me, as it did to many people in their teens and 20s in the late 1960s: It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. As for Anne Bancroft, I remember thinking her Mrs. Robinson a cold, bitter shrew. Otherwise, The Graduate held a place on my all-time Top 10 list for years.

Funny what a decade or so of life experience can do for you.

Today, I notice The Graduate more as a directorial achievement - that's a well-deserved Oscar for Mike Nichols - and less for its storyline, now so often copied. Nichols uses light and shadow for great dramatic effect, e.g., staging conversations between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson in the dark. He sets up a heartbreaking moment when Robinson daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) uncovers her mother's affair with her boyfriend: As the camera pans out, she's tinier and tinier, in a corner, face wet from tears and rain. Nichols' greatest act may be the ways he employed the oft-played Simon and Garfunkel tunes: sometimes whistled, sometimes heavy on the guitar, rarely played all the way through.

I also have an empathy for Mrs. Robinson I lacked before cynicism and disappointment entered my life. Through reading Harris' book, I learned the emotion Bancroft tapped into was anger, a discovery that illuminated her performance. Conversely, I now find Benjamin spoiled and lazy, one of those tired people forever trying to find themselves. Dude, stop flitting about. Join the Peace Corps if you're bored. Be grateful you aren't going to 'Nam.

DVD Duo

2009-02-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

No, these aren't Oscar movies. I saw them in the theaters in late summer and early fall, but it took me so long to write these reviews that I decided to save them up for their DVD releases in January.

Swing Vote wants to be political satire with a dash of Frank Capra. Igor aims for the Shrek crowd as well as fans of Tim Burton animation. Neither film hits its mark, although Igor comes closer to success.

Although only two hours, Swing Vote feels as long as one of star Kevin Costner’s epic production. Director/co-writer Joshua Michael Stern tries to present Bud Johnson (Costner) as an everyday factory-working single dad whose vote really counts. Political operatives Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci reshape their respective platforms and candidates, Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper, to cater to the random comments of one Texico, New Mexico, voter. Besides these repetitive scenes, which aren’t that funny to begin with, Swing Vote’s problem is that its good ol’ boy isn’t worth rooting for. Bud’s a drunk who barely raises daughter Molly (newcomer Madeline Carroll, a find); Swing Vote wouldn’t even exist had the plucky preteen not had to sneakily cast a ballot for her hung-over father.

Igor wants to be a European Madagascar, fast-talking lines littered with pop-culture references, but it’s pitched awkwardly between young’uns (who won’t get it) and their parents (who will be bored). John Cusack leads a hip vocal crew as the title character, a little Igor who dreams of winning the Evil Science Fair; instead, he creates an Annie-loving creature voiced by Molly Shannon who’s anything but mean. Igor scores most of its points on technical merit, not artistic interpretation. The quirky, stylized look of Anthony Leondis’ film recalls The Hunchback of Notre Dame crossed with Corpse Bride. If only the message of acceptance weren’t so generically pat: It doesn’t mesh with vocal talent as varied as Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Coolidge and Eddie Izzard as Dr. Schadenfreude.

Stars in Their Eyes

2009-01-23T05:10:00.001-08:00

More on one of my pet peeves: the star system. Hey, that's my film-critic teacher (Josh) in there!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123265679206407369.html

Oscar Talk (or Musings for Amy)

2009-01-22T14:56:00.000-08:00

First - where is my 10 best list? Where are reviews of the year-end prestige picks? Why am I slacking on my blog again? It's not like summer: This time, I have quality product to view.

Answer: I had a race in Florida, and I'm working weekends. This curtails both my movie-watching time and review-writing opportunities. (I write on bus and train rides to and from Boston.) I haven't see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road or Frozen River (or, for that matter, Gran Torino or Wendy and Lucy), so I don't want to make a Best of 2008 list until I catch at least some of those. (Right now, though, Frost/Nixon is tops.) I'm pledging that I'll have reviews of all five Best Picture nominees by Oscar night, one month from today. I already published one for The Reader, and I've been working on a combined Milk and Frost/Nixon critique for a couple of weeks.

Now to the nominees ... I thought the five Best Picture pics were supposed to be a slamdunk, so I'm shocked that The Reader somehow beat out The Dark Knight ... or Wall-E ... or even Doubt ... to make it to the top 5. During the week between Christmas and New Year's, I read Top 10 movie lists from around the country, an average of 100 or so. Wall-E appeared on 81 of those lists, The Dark Knight on 63, Slumdog Millionaire on 58, Milk on 56, Frost/Nixon on 40.

The Reader was on five.

This may be the most ridiculous Best Picture nominee since Chocolat - which, come to think of it, is also a Harvey Weinstein marketing production. Groan.

Actor: This is a tough, tough category. The Richard Jenkins nomination made me squeal with delight, but I also thought Frank Langella, Sean Penn, and Mickey Rourke were masterful. They're all winners so far, with a slight edge to Penn, although I THINK it's Rourke's to lose.

Actress: Keep in mind I haven't Melissa Leo in Frozen River. I'm very disappointed, although not surprised, Kristin Scott Thomas was ignored for I've Loved You So Long (buzz peaked too early). Given that I actively loathed Angelina Jolie in Changeling and disliked the Meryl and Kate Oscar Grab, for me Anne Hathaway wins by default. Fortunately, I also liked her in Rachel Getting Married. That said, I suspect this will be the Meryl/Kate race. Ugh. At least Winslet's Reader role is in the right category.

Supporting Actor: I actually prefer Emile Hirsch from Milk over Josh Brolin or the non-nominated James Franco. Since the Oscar is supposed to be for a particular performance and not a body of work (Al Pacino, Renee Zellweger, cough, cough), I'll join the Heath Ledger/Dark Knight masses. But can't we just give Robert Downey Jr. a statue for Performer of the Year?

Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz. Unless Taraji P. Henson blows me away in Benjamin Button, this category isn't up for discussion.

Original Screenplay: Um, Rachel Getting Married? Vicky Cristina Barcelona? Gran Torino? Where are they??? I can't even remember what's nominated. ... (checking) ... Oh, gosh, I don't care, and that's sad for an editor. All of these fell apart for me at one point or another. I guess In Bruges?

Adapted Screenplay: Because I don't know the source material in most cases, I find this category tough to judge. This time, I DO know source material in two cases. Go, Frost/Nixon!

Other categories: Why do we have only three Best Song options, and where's the one from Bruce Springsteen and The Wrestler? I've seen only one Best Documentary nominee, way off from the four I watched last year pre-Oscar night. Waltz with Bashir should have been nominated for Best Animated Flick. Persepolis was last year, so it's not as if the Academy can't be bold.

That's enough babbling from me. Your turn!

The Oscars nominations, in brief

2009-01-22T05:46:00.000-08:00

Yay to Richard Jenkins!!!

Thank you, Academy, for realizing that Kate Winslet's performance in The Reader is in fact a lead one.

However ... The Reader over The Dark Knight or Wall-E for Best Picture and Best Director??? The overbearing influence of Harvey Weinstein is back, it seems.

More grousing and musing to come tonight. ...

Cary Grant

2009-01-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

Last year, when I started to make a more conscious effort to watch old movies, I decided Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn were my favorite classic actors. Check out this Washington Post tribute to my man. The subhead says it all.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/09/AR2009010901212.html

A Child and the Holocaust

2009-01-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to say about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Some critics on Metacritic gave it 100; others, such as the New York Times, despised it. The film inspired such passionate reactions that I had to see what the fuss was about. I understand both reactions. More than once, I nearly walked out in disgust, but then I reminded myself that if I sat through Life Is Beautiful twice, I could handle this Holocaust/child take for 90 or so minutes. Right? Would I recommend it, though? I think I'm in the "no" group.

I'm still vacillating about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Based on a young-adult novel, Pajamas views the Holocaust through 8-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), son of a Nazi general (David Thewlis), who befriends a boy in a concentration camp. Vera Farmiga stands out as Bruno's mother, physically and mentally unraveling after discovering her husband's work. Director Mark Herman doesn't flinch at the horrifying end, though the impact would've been greater with silence rather than James Horner's intrusive score. But several points defy logic, from the British accents to the camp's lax security to the dropped angle of Bruno’s sister’s anti-Jewish rhetoric. Mostly, Pajamas wants one to accept a lot about innocence. Bruno is 8, not 4 - is he really supposed to be that naive?

Starting Off 2009 ...

2009-01-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

with releases from 2008.

I'm a sucker for a good Brit flick and anything tinged with melancholy. I like Emma Thompson. This movie was going to be catnip for me. I knew it wasn't much, but for 10:30 a.m. on a U.K.-gray Friday, I thought it would be just right. And it was.

More deeply felt than one might expect, Last Chance Harvey pairs lonely souls Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in a slight yet tender romance. Harvey Shine (Hoffman) comes to London for his somewhat estranged daughter's wedding, only to be let go from his jingle-writing gig and shunted to the side at the nuptials. His return to New York thwarted, Harvey strikes up conversation with greeter Kate (Thompson) in an airport bar, and they progress - OK, he pushes, she relents - to a day of exploration and reconciliation. That's it, save a third-act contrivance that pads the 99-minute film.

Last Chance Harvey has the feel of an extended Love, Actually segment; several typical London sights recur in both movies. While his filming style isn't much, writer/director Joel Hopkins has given us two real grown-ups and two talented actors to play them.

Hoffman tones down recent mannered performances (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) to portray a man of desperation and yearning, sad about being an embarrassment to his family. Although Kate doesn't have the same arc, Thompson grasps her character's pain in one image: On an awkward blind date in a pub, she escapes to a bathroom stall to dab her eyes and choke back sobs. Her closest companion is her cellphone and the codependent mother (Eileen Atkins) attached to it.

On these cold, raw days, grab tea and a scone and take a chance on the sweet poignancy of Harvey.

Runners World

2008-12-28T15:10:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-28T14:17:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-28T05:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-23T07:25:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-12-22T07:47:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-17T16:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

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 ...

2008-12-11T11:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-22T18:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-17T18:13:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-14T20:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-14T19:08:00.001-08:00

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 ...

2008-11-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

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 ...

2008-10-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-07T19:20:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-04T19:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-03T20:04:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-09-23T05:11:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

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 ...)

2008-09-20T15:14:00.001-07:00

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.

Starry Nights

2008-09-20T14:31:00.001-07:00

You may notice that I don't use a star system with my reviews. Most critics do, though, including my dearly beloved Roger Ebert. (See the bookmark on the side.) I have commented that he's more generous than I am, and I especially believe that since he came back from the worst of his cancer last year. He explains himself in this fascinating blog post.

P.S. This morning, my mother read Ebert's review of Hounddog (a.k.a. the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie) to me. While I still have no interest in seeing the movie, I declared Ebert's critique was by far the best piece of writing I'd heard/read on the film.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/09/you_give_out_too_many_stars.html

Fails To Score Either Goal

2008-09-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

OK, I saw this one on ESPN, not in a movie theater. Kicking It was in and out of theaters in two weeks in July, though - that wasn't enough time! I didn't get to the documentary when it was at Tribeca, and you know I make a concerted effort to support my festival.

Kicking It (seen Sept. 9)

Jumbled composition and poorly focused direction dilute Kicking It, Susan Koch’s documentary about the 2006 Homeless World Cup. Storylines and audience attachments can’t develop with Koch still introducing critical characters almost halfway through the movie, when we don’t even have a firm grasp of the initial who’s who. Following the 48-country, multi-cup tournament becomes difficult; teams doing well in one segment are fighting to stay alive the next time we see them. The scattershot approach also muddles the heartbreaking impact of homelessness: In Russia, for example, one can’t obtain ID or work without an address. Alas, Kicking It falls short as both a gripping sports story and as an illuminating social commentary.

Cars. Blood. That British Diver.

2008-09-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

I still have about 10 reviews to write for August, but my notes for half of them are in New Jersey. In the meantime, let's move to September.

Death Race (seen Sept. 2)

Death Race flaunts its B-movie roots before the opening credits finish rolling: the sound of screeching tires over a grayed-out Universal logo; a killer crash featuring a hockey-masked driver; executive producer Roger Corman, who made Death Race: 2000 in 1975. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (the Resident Evil franchise) strives to inject social realism with a floundering economy, laid-off factory workers, and bloodthirsty viewers paying $99 a pop to watch video of prison races that lead to such pleasant fatalities as decapitation. For the record, Death Race takes place in 2012, not 2008, and stars the yummy Jason Statham (returning to the fast cars of The Italian Job and the Transporter flicks) as our wrongly convicted, single-dad hero. It’s all noisy, bloody chaos, with hard bodies more important than dialogue, yet it has a most incongruous sight – two-time Academy-Award nominee Joan Allen, as a sadistic prison warden. The Bourne veteran is all clipped tones and high heels and pencil skirts, but her presence in this glorified videogame still mystifies me.

Tell Everyone: Get Over the Subtitle Aversion

2008-09-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

When other reviews for Tell No One referenced two of my favorite films of all time, I simply had to see it. This isn't quite as good (could anything be?), but it's pretty terrific all the same.

13) Tell No One (seen Aug. 30, 13th film of August)

The language of suspense is universal, as the French thriller Tell No One ably demonstrates. The film, based on a novel by American author Harlan Coben (Guillaume Canet adapts and directs), celebrates some of the genre’s classics: the doctor wrongly accused of murdering his wife (The Fugitive), albeit eight years later; our main character on the run (North by Northwest); a magnificent chase sequence that peaks as it crosses a busy, New Jersey Turnpike-esque highway (The French Connection). And Alex (Francois Cluzet) thinks he’s seen his still-beloved spouse, suddenly rendering her not so dead – shades of Laura, anyone? Only the too-pat ending disappoints, leaving Tell No One just short of modern-day mystery marvel status. Still, this doesn’t much detract from the twisty treat of summer fun, with stellar turns from the heart-wrenching, increasingly stretched Cluzet and a sexy and stunning Kristin Scott Thomas as Alex’s best friend.

I Should Have Stayed Home to Watch The House Bunny

2008-09-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

You know how some films play better on TV than they do in theaters? The following is one of them. At least I did the mall-matinee thing, and the target audience seemed to have a grand ol' time.

The House Bunny (seen Aug. 29, 12th movie of August)

The House Bunny wants to be a cinematic cousin to Legally Blonde, using the same female writing team (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) and a likable actress (Anna Faris) seeking a breakout comedy. Instead of honoring Blonde’s canny mix of smarts and the color pink, though, Bunny settles for pedestrian dumb-blonde humor. Girl power comes in the form of makeovers and boy ogling: Evicted Playboy Bunny Shelley Darlington (Faris) must help a group of misfit sorority sisters (including Rumer Willis and American Idol wannabe Katharine McPhee!) save its house from their Plastics-like rivals. Faris plays her trademark wide-eyed, breathy-voiced naïf well, but the real surprise comes from Superbad’s Emma Stone, evoking a pre-scandal Lindsay Lohan as the most socially adept of the Zeta Alpha Zetas. Perhaps Lutz and Smith can build a franchise around the effortlessly cool Stone, one that honors Reese Witherspoon rather than the Girls Next Door.

Bus Time Leads To Writing Time

2008-09-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

I spent seven hours and 40 minutes on buses going to Framingham, MA, from New York City on Friday afternoon and evening. I wish someone could build a bridge over Connecticut. On the other hand, I had time to draft five reviews. Here we go!

Hamlet 2 (seen Aug. 23; the 11th movie of August)

Hamlet 2 represents the latest overpriced Sundance pickup (think Happy, Texas, The Spitfire Grill … yeah, I don’t remember them either) whose so-called charms evaporate once out of the thin Park City, Utah, air. Director Andrew Fleming and writer Pam Brady apparently used all their wit a decade ago (Dick and the South Park movie, respectively) as Hamlet 2 awkwardly spoofs inspirational teacher dramas and “let’s put on a show” spirit. Fleming and Brady build their comedy around an imitation Martin Short (Steve Coogan), a clueless high school drama coach with a failing program, a shrewish wife (Catherine Keener, once again brittle), an unpronounceable last name (an increasingly forced gag) and crush on Elisabeth Shue. The latter plays herself as a disgruntled actress turned satisfied fertility nurse in Tucson, Ariz., in a bit that’s an amusing trifle at first before becoming strained. The musical numbers are clever in their awfulness, but otherwise, Hamlet 2 should have stayed as dead as its titular character.

Returning Soon To A Theater Near You - Me!

2008-08-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview issue is my favorite of the entire year. I read it from cover to cover the day it arrives, categorize all the flicks into three lists, and refer back to the issue over the next four months. Most of this year's selections are "maybes;" very few have me ready to head to a theater on the first day. But after making my list, and checking it twice, here's what I have at least mild curiosity about.

1) Burn After Reading (Sept. 12, the Coen brothers' follow-up to No Country for Old Men. However, Variety hated it, and that makes me leery.)
2) The Women (Sept. 12, and Mom and I have a mother/daughter date the next day. We haven't had one of those in a long time.)
3) The Duchess (Sept. 19. Keira Knighley, costumes, and "based on a book." I am so there.)
4) Blindness (Sept. 26. The good news: the casting of Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. The bad news: bad buzz at Cannes. I'm nervous.)

5) Rachel Getting Married (Oct. 3, with Anne Hathaway already receiving critical praise. But is it too much in the "dirty up a pretty girl for an Oscar" vein?)
6) Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (Oct. 3, featuring the adorable Michael Cera and the equally charming Kat Dennings. Better-than-average teen fare?)
7) Religulous (Oct. 3, the Bill Maher religion documentary. Considering HIS views, this ought to be a hoot, and hopefully intelligent.)
8) Body of Lies (Oct. 10, reuniting Leo and the writer of The Departed, but adding Russell Crowe and HIS buddy Ridley Scott)
9) The Secret Lies of Bees (Oct. 17, as long as it isn't like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Maybe I should read the book first?)
10) Changeling (Oct. 24. Let the "Angie for Oscar" hype begin. I think she was robbed for A Mighty Heart, so campaigning is A-OK with me.)

11) The Soloist (Nov. 21. Please don't be sappy. Let the Robert Downey Jr. Is Awesome streak win out.)
12) Australia (Nov. 26. I hate everything Baz Luhrmann does, so I ought to avoid this. And yet, it has Hugh Jackman as a romantic lead, and I swoon.)

13) Frost/Nixon (Dec. 5, my No. 1 movie choice of the fall season. I saw the play, I think Michael Sheen is highly underrated, my classmate Patricia and I talk about it every time we see each other.)
14) Doubt (Dec. 12, which is No. 2 on my overall list because I never saw the play.)
15) Reservation Road (Dec. 26, a Leo/Kate reunion that I hope will not be as nausea-inducing as That Freaking Boat Movie.)

All right - your turn. What do you want to see?

Would a Big Screen Have Made a Difference?

2008-08-30T20:28:00.001-07:00

We're into August! I started going to the movies a lot this month. It will take some time to review them all.

Rolling Stones fan Tim and I talked about seeing Shine a Light at Lincoln Square in the spring, but the timing never worked out. I thus caught it on DVD about three weeks ago. I can't decide whether I'm glad I saved $15 (we would've seen it on IMAX) or whether I wish I'd seen this jumbo-sized.

1) Shine a Light (Aug. 8, on DVD)

U2:3D, a concert flick released earlier this year, prompted a “you are there” sensation, a desire to wave a lighter during “With or Without You.” Shine a Light, the latest performance documentary about the Rolling Stones, is … a nicely filmed live show. I suspect some of Mick and Keith’s impact was lost on a 13-inch television screen, but director Martin Scorsese - who has shot musical documentaries before (The Last Waltz, The Blues) and explored the Stones’ catalog in several of his feature films - doesn’t make the two nights at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2006 much more than a bonanza of moving cameras. Sure, Bill and Hillary show up (one concert is for Bill’s 60th birthday); Scorsese intersperses clips from Stones’ interviews in the 1960s and 1970s as well as pre-show chatter; and guest musicians from Jack White to Christina Aguilera enliven proceedings. It’s not enough to disguise the fact that we’re watching merely an above-average concert special.

SU Grad Done Good

2008-08-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

Vera Farmiga was in my ETS 226 class in the spring semester of my first year at Syracuse. Therefore, I'm very excited to see her in movies. Imagine, I'm now one degree closer to Matt Damon! If only she appeared in films in which she had meaty roles, or in flicks I liked.

5) Never Forever (July 30, on Netflix instant viewing. The No. 4 movie for July was the previously reviewed The Dark Knight.)

Never Forever can’t quite overcome its squeamish concept befitting a soap opera: Woman’s husband is infertile, he freaks out, she secretly pays another man to get her knocked up, she and sperm donor fall for each other. Vera Farmiga, perhaps best known as the shrink in The Departed, elevates Gina Kim’s tale of marital and maternal desperation as a tightly wound New York suburban housewife looking to placate her Korean Christian in-laws with the heir her husband (David McInnis) cannot provide. Farmiga’s cornflower blues pierce the screen with agony as Sophie tries to save her suicidal husband, with “all-business” numbness while propositioning Korean illegal immigrant Jihah (Ha Jung-woo) to father a child, and with unexpected tenderness as she and Jihah develop feelings for each other and the unborn baby. Farmiga’s intensity and heartbreak nearly save Never Forever from its more awkward moments. Alas, Kim tacks on an unrealistic, pat ending to her complicated story, as if trying to make everything more palatable to the mainstream at the last minute.

A Likely Top 10 Pick for 2008

2008-08-26T19:01:00.001-07:00

The more I think about The Visitor, the more I like it. Thanks for the recommendation, Brooklyn Jen! Bride Jen, in town for her bachelorette weekend, really enjoyed this, too.

3) The Visitor (July 4; the first July film I saw)

A decade ago, I had a film professor who abused the term “little gem” when describing cinematic character studies, but The Visitor really earns the praise. With his first feature, The Station Agent, and now this follow-up, writer/director Tom McCarthy has become the go-to guy for intimate depictions of ordinary, aloof but lonely men. Here, stunted economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) discovers the power of music and connection through an illegal immigrant couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), squatting in his New York apartment. Much of Jenkins’ performance comes from eyes and body language, with such winning moments as his bumbling, tender interactions with Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass) and his increasing integration into a drumming lifestyle. Eschewing the usual city depictions in favor of day-t0-day living in the parks, subways and later - sadly - a deportation center in Long Island City, McCarthy has filmed a delicate slice of wonder with some of the richest, deepest acting of the year.

This Is Your Brain On Drugs

2008-08-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

I graduated from high school in 1994, just like Luke and Stephanie in The Wackness. I may have grown up in Boston instead of New York, and I may have been only middle-class, but our lives shouldn't be that dissimilar.

I could not relate to these characters at all.

2) The Wackness (July 25; it's the third movie of the month, though)

A candidate for the worst movie of 2008, The Wackness is so bad that I refused to listen to mid-1990s hip-hop for a week after watching this hell. Writer/director Jonathan Levine uses full-length songs and cultural slang (Giuliani references, Forrest Gump ads, pagers) to advance the film in lieu of plot, dialogue and acting. Then again, the performances are so monotone (perpetually slack-jawed Josh Peck as dope-pushing high-school grad Luke) or absurd (Ben Kingsley, apparently Harvey Keitel's long-lost brother, as Luke's stoned shrink), and the storyline eventually so cliché (rich New Yorkers are messed up and bored!), that perhaps it's best to make Tribe Called Quest do the work. Only Olivia Thirlby, the best friend in Juno, manages to charm as the shrink's stepdaughter and Luke's forbidden-fruit love interest. She’s not reason enough for me to give up my Nas and Wu-Tang Clan boycotts, though - nor can she erase the image of Kingsley kissing flower-child Mary-Kate Olsen …

I'm Through June!

2008-08-24T14:26:00.001-07:00

Thanks to a self-imposed deadline, I had to finish this review before I left for dinner. Next goal, by the end of the week: Write the three remaining July critiques.
P.S. Sandra, before you say anything, I'd like to note that my parents saw this before I did!

3) Wanted (June 29)

A carnival ride come to life, Wanted flaunts its comic-book origins with pride, daring a critic to mock the curving bullets or Angelina Jolie in a skintight leather catsuit balancing atop a speeding train. Yes, Wanted is over the top and then some, as if director Timur Bekmambetov (the Russian films Day Watch and Night Watch) decided to mash up Fight Club and The Matrix. He’s given us a Fraternity of assassins led by a grave Morgan Freeman, a snarky American office drone turned killer (a surprisingly effective James McAvoy, definitely NOT in Narnia), and rats and grittiness (reminiscent of a prior Angie flick, The Bone Collector). While lacking the fun/quality balance of Iron Man, Wanted revels in its kinetic energy, its Tarantino-like violence. As far as amusement-park attractions go, Wanted isn’t quite an Expedtion Everest, but a Musical Express.

This Review, However, IS Irresistible

2008-08-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I love A.O. Scott of the New York Times. He tops himself here with his review of Meryl and friends. I laughed so loudly at work that people stared at me. Then I read parts of it aloud to my co-workers and made them laugh, too.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/movies/18mamm.html?ref=movies

How Can I Resist You? Well, I Did.

2008-08-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've skipped ahead to July while I try to say five articulate sentences about my last June feature, Wanted. (One might argue that this would make for more articulate sentences than the entire movie had.) Anyway, after completing my first 4-mile race - on day three of a six-day heat wave, no less - I needed the cinematic equivalent of lemon merengue as a reward. I thought Mamma Mia! would fit the bill. Key word: "thought."

1) Mamma Mia! (July 19; actually, it's the 2008 second movie I saw in July)

Mamma Mia!, based on the Broadway celebration of ABBA songs, made me feel trapped at the world’s longest, loudest slumber party. I was embarrassed as Meryl Streep dithered around like a teenager about her daughter’s (Amanda Seyfried) three possible fathers while James Bond and Mr. Darcy … er, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth … attempted to sing and modeled leather vests. I puzzled over the math in Catherine Johnson’s screenplay (Streep and her lovers are at least 15 years too old for their roles) and wondered why director Phyllida Lloyd - who staged the theatrical version of Mamma Mia! - made the celluloid choreography look so gawky. Mamma Mia! isn’t total hell: Streep turns “The Winner Takes All” into this triumphant, Helen Reddy-esque siren call I actually applauded, and those darn ABBA songs continue to take up residence in my head. Mostly, though, I’m disappointed that Mamma Mia! couldn’t follow in the mid-July musical magic footsteps of last year’s Hairspray.

Making a List, and Checking It Twice

2008-08-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm suffering writer's block while composing my Wanted review. In the meantime, I figured I'd jot down a list of what I have even a passing desire to see. Feel free to share your reviews or what you want to watch. The only rule: NO MOCKING!

1) Brideshead Revisited - Despite its English pedicree, literay background, and the existence of Emma Thompson, I haven't run out to see this, and now it's almost gone. My friend Josee said she was having difficulty getting into the book. Still, I'm curious.

2) Death Race - My classmate Patricia and I think Jason Statham is HOT. Plot is irrelevant. I'll be seeing it for free with her Sept. 2, thanks to AMC MovieWatch rewards.

3) The House Bunny - It looks like a lesser Legally Blonde, but still cute. (That makes sense, as the screenwriters are the same.) A good girls night out or an afternoon matinee.

4) Man on Wire - A huge hit at Tribeca, a New York documentary ... why haven't I seen this yet? Well, if a certain best friend of mine didn't have such a busy life (ahem, TIM) ... seriously, we're looking at Wednesday.

5) Tell No One - The Boston Herald compared this French drama to Laura (my No. 2 all-time); the New York Times name-checked North by Northwest (another of my top 10). The only thing that's stopped me from going to Lincoln Plaza, the art theater by Central Park: As I learned while watching The Seventh Seal last weekend, I can't concentrate on subtitled films after long runs.

6) Vicky Cristina Barcelona - Woody Allen and I have a very hit-and-miss relationship, overwhelmingly in the latter category. This doesn't look like typical Woody, though, giving me some hope.

A postscript to April 28

2008-08-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

2) Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot - now in theaters (June 27)

I love question-and-answer sessions.

It turns out the music rights weren’t finalized when Adam Yauch screened the basketball documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. http://womanonfilm.blogspot.com/2008/04/tribeca-dispatch-monday-april-28.html

My favorite musical sequence, “Hypnotize,” disappeared from the final cut! I asked Yauch at the Q&A on the 27th; apparently, the estate that holds the rights to the sample in the Notorious B.I.G. joint wouldn’t grant permission for use in the film. Even a Beastie Boy doesn’t have all the sway. Wow!

Moving On To June

2008-08-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

1) My Blueberry Nights (June 15)

I forgot I'd even seen this until I was going through my movie diary to write all these five-sentence reviews. It's a god thing I write down what I watch.

Norah Jones’ pop-jazz standards are creamy, gorgeous - but downright drowsy after a bit. The same applies to the languid road-trip drama in which she makes her acting debut, Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Not much happens: Heartbroken by a boyfriend, Elizabeth (Jones) leaves New York and ends up first in Memphis, then out West, where more takes place around her than to her. Jones doesn’t have the experience to give the sketchily written Elizabeth any depth, a circumstance made most glaring against a vibrant Natalie Portman as a blond Vegas con artist. As most Wong films are, My Blueberry Nights is really pretty, though: Melting desserts and honky-tonk bars never looked so seductive.

The Best Movie I've Seen This Summer

2008-08-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

4) Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (May 31)

I've decided to make an effort to see Tribeca flicks if they make it to theaters. Here's one. P.S. The tiny text after the star says "the side effects of being American."

For those who remember when Michael Moore wasn’t about his image, when he just wanted to educate and entertain, I give you Christopher Bell and his raucous steroid documentary, Bigger, Stronger, Faster*. First-time director Bell attacks the American culture of winning at any cost: Patton, Rocky, Hulk Hogan, the amphetamine-using Air Force. But Bell also comes to the world of steroids firsthand: His body-building brothers use them, influenced by their supposedly pure childhood wrestling heroes, and he’s obviously conflicted about society’s message versus his familial feelings. Bell doesn’t make direct judgments, instead using varied talking heads, statistics, and animation to illustrate the hypocrisy surrounding performance enhancers - the congressman who called the steroid hearings doesn’t even know what drugs are banned; no one’s ever done a study on steroids’ long-term effects; a cold supplement with a prohibited substance didn’t keep Carl Lewis out of the 1988 Olympics. By the end of this difficult, fascinating film, I could pay Bell the ultimate compliment: I’m willing to re-examine my views on performance enhancers.

I Can't Help But Wonder ... Do They Still Matter?

2008-08-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

3) Sex and the City: The Movie (May 30)

I was very opposed to seeing this for a long time, but marathon TV viewing parties with my co-workers changed my mind.

I didn’t think we needed a two-hour-plus feature continuing the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and company, as the series ended in 2o04 (I REALLY wish Carrie picked herself); still, my friend Michelle and I (and many bedazzled women) saw Sex and the City: The Movie on opening night.

Garnier Fructis should have created a dye to cover the film’s obvious television roots, as writer/director Michael Patrick King can’t make the flick feel like anything more than five consecutive shows. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Carrie have more balanced, complex storylines than Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and especially the shafted Charlotte (Kristin Davis); subsequently, Nixon and Parker give the movie’s most complete, nuanced performances.

In spite of my complaints (the ending, AGAIN!), I had a great time: Whatever the screen size, Sex and the City addresses love, relationships, friendships, and even New York with a directness and honesty that feel ripped from my most intimate life. Sex and the City: The Movie is like a class reunion: somewhat unnecessary, but a blast once you’re there.

Light Vs. Dark

2008-08-23T20:04:00.001-07:00

2) (or Iron Man [May 13] and The Dark Knight [July 29])

I like my superhero flicks to have quality filmmaking - but I also want them to have an element of fun. That’s why I respect The Dark Knight, but I came away from Iron Man positively alive.

The essence of Iron Man, my favorite feature of this genre since the first two Spider-Man movies, comes when Tony Stark (the treat that is Robert Downey Jr.) tries on his amped-up suit of armor for the first time. Tony may be a billionaire inventor with women and toys galore, but put him in a shiny red gadget-laden suit, and his giddiness while zooming airborne crosses all economic classes. In those moments, Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau have created pure movie magic. Iron Man isn’t just about dazzling special effects: Stark has a definable arc, going from a pro-military, Bush-like weapons designer to a world savior of a different model, and Downey Jr.’s wit and smarts complement his character. Only the climactic battle with Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) disappoints, two robots clanking together clumsily like some outtake from a Star Wars movie.

While Iron Man proves you can make a summer movie with both playfulness and a point, The Dark Knight seems to know only ponderousness. The sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins brings director Christopher Nolan and Caped Crusader Christian Bale back to Gotham (a sleek-looking Chicago) for an increased dose of mayhem and malevolence, this time led by the Joker (the late Heath Ledger, as much of an evil marvel as you’ve heard). Nolan said he wanted to create a crime epic, and The Dark Knight has psychology and political-science lessons to spare: on vigilantism and copycats, on the search for the person to “save” us - if this is even attainable. It’s almost Shakespearian in its approach to tragedy, yet it’s so black it’s draining, with none of the poetry of the Bard to ease the message. In fact, what I remember most fondly about the film is Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score, its incessant foreboding and distant sirens literally making me bolt up in nervous anticipation.

Yes, Ledger deserves an Oscar nomination - but you know? So does Downey Jr. He IS Iron Man, and I can’t wait to see what he and Favreau come up with next. As for Batman, wake me up when he’s obtained some antidepressants.

Bad Blogger, Bad Blogger!

2008-08-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

I have been a horribly remorse blogger this summer. I took up running in the middle of May, and being the Type A personality I am, I’ve become kind of obsessive about it. I also hadn’t been to a lot of movies until early August, so very little inspired me to write. Now, though, I’m presenting myself with a challenge: Review every 2008 release I’ve seen in a theater or on DVD since the Tribeca Film Festival ended May 4 … in a maximum of five sentences per film. Gulp.

1) Then She Found Me (May 9)

Helen Hunt hasn’t stitched her writing and directorial debut, Then She Found Me, as neatly as one might hope, but the thought and care that went into the filmmaking bind the flick through any messiness. Hunt’s April Epner yearns to be a mother - a situation complicated by the end of her marriage to fellow teacher Ben (Matthew Broderick), a burgeoning relationship with a high-strung Colin Firth and the sudden reappearance of her birth mother, a drama-queen talk-show host (a relatively restrained Better Midler). Hunt doesn’t manage the emotions or storylines that steadily, but what she struggles with structurally she makes up for in details: a financially appropriate wardrobe for each character, for example, or visible strain as April’s emotional cauldron boils. Hunt also depicts something rarely seen in contemporary cinema: an openly observant Jewish woman, and April’s emphasis on her faith is deeply moving. Seek out Then She Found Me because, ultimately, it has something to say: about identity, religion, the many forms of motherhood, and what it means to be a woman.

Jim and Jon, Linked For Life

2008-05-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

A break from movies, but it's for a good reason. (I do promise to write my Iron Man review soon.)

On Monday, my father turned 60 years old. On Monday, 23-year-old Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester threw a no-hitter. Both of them are cancer survivors, and every day they personify "survivor" in ways beyond any flowery cliche.

As many of you know, I found the 2007 title season more meaningful than the 2004 version, in part because my father's ups and downs mirrored the team's and Lester's.

http://womanonfilm.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-red-sox-cant-trade-jon-lester.html

Since that mid-December posting, my father's health has continued to improve. It's been 13 months since his diagnosis - hey, there's that number again! - and he really does seem to be "back," and maybe even better than before. He's working full time. He's been on vacation to Portland, OR, with Alan. He and my mother plan to drive to visit all their New York-based children next month. (I suppose the last part really ought to be the indication he's doing well - he won't leave the driving to Peter Pan, Greyhound, Amtrak, or anyone else.) Sure, he can't eat everything just yet, and his taste buds are still fried. Then again, one doesn't really need to eat beef and barbecue.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox didn't trade Lester, or Jacoby Ellsbury or Clay Buchholz, for that matter. (Thanks, Theo!) Our young lefty's season has been erratic so far - too many walks, too many pitches per start - but he did appear to be maturing more with each start. The team also seemed to play with greater streakiness than before. It's been a fun but frustrating year.

Then we hit Monday. Actually, first we hit Sunday.

My cousin Cathy invited us with her to use her brother's season tickets. Our seats were amazing, 13 rows back in a field-box seat at the edge of the outfield grass. This time, we could get there early. My father could eat a sandwich and roam the park for hard lemonade for my mother. She could sing along with "Sweet Caroline." We could stay for the whole game. And this time, the team cooperated and won. What a great turnaround from our September experience, which itself was more than we thought it would be.

That would be the greatest Red Sox birthday present for my father - right?

As I was returning home Monday night, I saw on my phone that Lester had held the Kansas City Royals hitless for seven innings. I wanted to call my parents, but I knew the superstition. (Don't talk about a no-hitter while it's in progress.) When ESPN began broadcasting the ninth inning, I began praying aloud. It was my father's birthday - would fate be kind enough to grant this gift?

YEEEEAAAHHHH! I waited 30 seconds after the game ended - where was my parents' call? Answer: They were watching House and had no idea what was happening. People!

Lester has said he doesn't want to be recognized for his medical charts anymore, that he'd rather be seen for what he does on the mound. I believe my father feels similarly (minus the baseball reference). Of course we can respect that, but at the same time, there's nothing wrong with embracing feel-great stories in cynical times.

P.S. Dad, your buddy pitched a no-no 21 months after his doctors delivered devastating health news. Twenty-one months since your cancer diagnosis would be January 2009. Hey: Walt Disney World has a series of races then. Maybe you should sign up for the 5K. There's still room. ... :)

Great Actors Don't Equal Great Product

2008-05-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

I actually saw Smart People in April, but I was buried in those many, many Tribeca reviews. I so wanted to like this movie. I adore SJP and have for more than 20 years, and I really like Dennis Quaid. Yet the flick fell short for me; it was in love with its perceived braininess.

A lack of acuity dulls Smart People. A shame: With a gifted cast of Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page and especially Thomas Haden Church, this comedy/drama should have been more than it settles for. Alas, writer Mark Poirier skimps on character development, particularly in the relationship between gruff professor Lawrence (Quaid) and his doctor/former student, Janet (Parker). Director Noam Murro also struggles, overreaching with Sideways and Wonder Boys similarities. The banter between strikingly similar adopted brothers Lawrence and Chuck (Church) suggests the wry wit Smart People could reach, yet the film climbs to those summits all too infrequently.

Tribeca Dispatch: Sunday, May 4

2008-05-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

Originally, I’d planned on taking in another two volunteer screenings, to give myself 15 flicks in all. Then my friend’s father died in Boston, so I traveled north for a funeral. Therefore, this entry serves as the festival wrap-up.

On an organizational level, this year’s model was more successful than the 2007 version: fewer movies (120 vs. 160), cheaper tickets (as little as $8, as opposed to as much as $25), more centralized setting (mostly the Village East and the AMC Village VII, which are around the corner from each other, rather than trips to the Upper West Side). I know it’s silly the TRIBECA Film Festival barely took place in Tribeca, but the only large theater in the area, the Regal at Battery Park, wouldn’t give up its screens for 12 days.

The quality of the films seemed better this year. While I myself had only three movies to which I would give high marks – Kassim the Dream (which grew on me over the week), Pray the Devil Back to Hell and most notably Fighter – I at least marginally liked almost everything I saw. Last year, I think I disliked all the features and many of the documentaries. When I asked Tribeca employees and critics what they enjoyed, a consensus emerged, one reflected in the awards. Once again, documentaries ruled; I think Tribeca gets caught up in star power when it comes to features.

As I hinted in a couple of previous posts, volunteer organization could be better. Schedule us in blocks, have us work outside the box office on the day tickets go on sale (I stood in line for four hours because my fellow customers were clueless when they would get inside), make sure we have something to do, don’t overbook us. I’d consider working for the festival in 2009, but honestly, I don’t want to give up my volunteer perks of vouchers and surprise screenings!
Why was I more cranky and drained this year? I’m not 100% sure. I’ve seen more than a dozen films each of the prior two years, so it’s not that. It might be that keeping up the blog was hard work! It also might be that the weather was lousy and that I couldn’t have the entire week off from work.

Still, I love Tribeca. It really is one of the highlights of my year.

Yes, but Can They Make Money?

2008-05-05T07:16:00.000-07:00

As Michelle and Liz inquired, what are the box-office prospects for some of these movies?

Alas, Tribeca doesn’t have that great a track record. Transamerica, from 2005, remains the most successful money-maker to date, with $9.5 million in ticket sales and two Oscar nominations. In the past two years, a documentary has made the Best Documentary roster at the Oscars, with Taxi to the Dark Side winning for 2007.

Of my baker’s dozen, Savage Grace and Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot have release dates of May 30 and June 27, respectively, but subject matter and odd opening time likely will hurt both. Why not save Gunnin’ for Labor Day, during the Elite 24 tournament, or either the start or finish of college-basketball season? Baghdad High and The Zen of Bobby V will play on cable television later this year – HBO for Baghdad, ESPN for Bobby V – which is where both belong, as does Milosevic on Trial. (That’s played on TV overseas.)

If the Weinstein Co. picks up Trucker, expect a loud Oscar push for Michelle Monaghan. She’s very good, but not quite that great, and Harvey no longer has the Midas touch. I’d love to see Fighter receive a U.S. release and be marketed to a teen audience, but sadly, I’m not sure people can accept reading subtitles if it isn't Chinese kung-fu. (Fighter is Danish/Turkish kung-fu, though. ...) Could Theater of War ever attract anyone outside New York? Its subject matter seems limited, and it feels like a two-week run at Film Forum. I’m not sure how This Is Not a Robbery would work in a theater - TV would be better, but where? The same goes for Eden.

The Africa trio – Kassim the Dream, Pray the Devil Back to Hell and I Am Because We Are – has the biggest hurdles. No matter how much critical acclaim they receive, how much star power is behind them, how much they’re in the news, Africa documentaries simply don’t do well at the box office. Kassim has a better chance because it has the viewer friendly sports angle, but even that probably won’t be enough. Documentaries, while chic, don’t attract audiences these days, likely because the outside world is weighty enough. They’re worth a release, but an eager viewer and his or her friends need to spread the word the first week, before the movies disappear to DVD.

Tribeca Dispatch: Saturday, May 3 (Pray)

2008-05-05T06:41:00.000-07:00

Now for my ninth documentary ...

Second movie seen: Pray the Devil Back to Hell
What it is (description from TFF Web site): After more than a decade of civil wars leading to more than 250,000 deaths and one million refugees, a group of courageous women rose up to force peace on their shattered Liberia and propel to victory the first female head of state on the African continent.
Viewing partners: Michelle and Liz

Pray Review: The vibrant Pray the Devil Back to Hell deservedly earned Best Documentary honors at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, showcasing a riveting storyline and compelling women telling their own story, with no narrator. It also successfully balances text and narrative, using factoids that act as transitions.

In 2002, as civil war raged in Liberia, social worker Leymah formed the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative, which even Muslim women joined – the first time the two faiths came together. Journalists, police officers, secretaries and market workers engaged in seemingly simple tactics in pressing their agenda: prayer, fish market sit-ins, even initiating a sex strike. After more than a year, they made it to the peace talks in Ghana and, when all hope seemed lost, pushed the movement forward with dramatic action.

“Inspiring” and “hero” are such overused words in the English language, but they really apply when discussing the ladies of Liberia. The model of mission statements and peaceful protests legitimately could inspire women everywhere, be they in Iraq or Darfur, to urge their men to stop the violence. (Indeed, producer Abby Disney said she and director Gini Reticker have shown the film in Peru and plan to screen it in Ramallah.)

At only 72 minutes, Pray the Devil actually could stand to be longer, as the film glosses over the women’s role in Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s election as Africa’s first female head of state. Besides, it would be a pleasure to spend more time with Leymah, Janet, Asatu and their compatriots.

Tribeca Dispatch: Friday, May 2 (Fighter)

2008-05-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Second movie seen: Fighter
What it is (description from TFF Web site): This high-energy martial arts drama chronicles a driven high school student caught between the expectations of her traditional Turkish family and her kung fu dreams. With slickly choreographed fight scenes, Fighter is an empowering story that culminates with an emotional punch.
Viewing partners: none

Fighter Review: Bend It Like Beckham and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can add another member to the cinematic girl-power family: Fighter, an exhilarating Danish/Turkish production about a wannabe teen kung-fu fighter.

For Aicha (Semra Turan) to achieve her dream, she has several obstacles to tackle: gender bias, failing grades, familial disapproval, and suspicions about her relationship with cute training partner Emil (Cyron Melville). Much of this sounds like the Beckham blueprint, but in Fighter, the struggles run deeper. As a member of Copenhagen’s close-knit Muslim Turkish community, Aicha will suffer grave consequences for her defiance. When her family learns her secret, we watch a food fight unlike any other, with awesome wire work – as well as punches and cruel slams of Aicha’s character.

Writer/director Natasha Arthy doesn’t make Aicha’s life a total downer: A training run with Emil over rooftops would boost even the laziest theatergoer’s endorphins, and Turan glows during the fight sequences.

The end of Fighter may not be the traditional crowd-pleaser in the American sense, but it honors Aicha and her heritage, and it still makes a person cheer. After 11 movies at the Tribeca Film Festival, I finally felt alive after this feature.

Tribeca Dispatch: Saturday, May 3 (I Am)

2008-05-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

It was my third consecutive double-feature dip and my second double-documentary day. This time, I had company in my madness: my friend and former boss Michelle and my sister-in-law, Elizabeth. Michelle saw three movies Saturday, something I couldn’t bring myself to do on any day of the festival. Meanwhile, I don’t think Liz ever has seen two movies back to back.

First movie seen: I Am Because We Are
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Executive producer Madonna exposes the tragic stories of the millions of Malawi children orphaned by AIDS, offering both a call to action and a revelatory personal journey. Featuring interviews with Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu, the film is a testament to survival, change, and hope.
Viewing partners: Liz and Michelle
General festival notes: 1) While waiting for Michelle – at the wrong theater, as it turns out – Liz and I saw Michael Moore (again, in my case). 2) My beloved Tribeca really ought to think about scheduling its volunteers better, as many were fried and snippy at the Village East. I did my four days of volunteering in the middle of the festival, and I thought it was just right: I could refresh the staff without burning out myself. 3) People with rush tickets for I Am Because We Are began coming into the theater much too late. The film has a lot of subtitles, which we could not read because folks were streaming in as much as 20 minutes after the movie started. 4) Michelle and Liz debated the documentary over our halftime dining. Their discussion prompted the direction of my first review, and it’s given me something else to ponder – box-office viability – for a later post.

I Am Review: As a call to awareness, I Am Because We Are offers devastating scenes of poverty, suffering and orphaned children. (Malawi’s population of 12 million includes 1 million orphans.) It also features a much-needed reminder that AIDS remains a problem: The image of a 75-pound mother so gaunt a wheelchair overwhelms her will linger in my memory for a long time.

While I admire the sentiment behind the Madonna-narrated documentary, I am not here to evaluate its social merits. I am here to examine its cinematic ones, and those credentials are somewhat shakier.

The biggest problem, ironically, is with the narrator herself. Madonna’s writing borders on clichéd – “I didn’t (choose Malawi). It chose me” - and in her attempt t0 sound dispassionate, she can come across as clipped. Watching Madonna play with the children more effectively conveys her emotions than much of what she says, although I like when she makes the connection between the death of her mother and her identification with the orphans. While Madonna (thankfully) doesn’t turn I Am into the story of her son’s adoption, it’s surprising she and director Nathan Rissman don’t delve into the issues with international adoption from Malawi.

The other hang-up comes with the overreliance of talking heads. The roster, while impressive – Jeffrey Sachs, Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton – overwhelms after a time. I would have preferred to hear more from the people of Malawi. It’s their spirit and hope we’re supposed to admire, so let’s give them more air time.

Tribeca Dispatch: at last, Tuesday, April 29

2008-05-04T16:48:00.001-07:00

I wish I knew why Tuesdays are never a good day in my Tribeca volunteer world. For the third year in a row, I was not in my usual location for my rotation, and that once again meant I felt unnecessary. Because my supervisor wasn’t around much, by the time I was able to leave, I lacked the turnaround time to go home for a break before returning to the city for my evening screening. At least I found a nice coffee/tea spot with Internet access on 6th Avenue near 11th Street.

Without realizing it, I chose the perfect viewing partners for Kassim the Dream. Ben is interested in Africa and knew who Kassim Ouma was; he’d even watched some of his boxing matches. Patricia wasn’t familiar with the subject matter but has worked with abuse victims for years. They balanced each other out and enhanced my viewing experience.

I also learned that New York City is a small place. It turns out my best friend was at this screening, too, although I wasn’t certain of it until three days later.

Oh, and here's how our subject is doing today, per New York magazine:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/04/boxer_and_former_child_soldier.html

Movie seen: Kassim the Dream
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Kassim "The Dream" Ouma went from Ugandan child soldier to world champion boxer. In this gripping tale of survival and determination, Kassim proves that even against all odds, a man can achieve his dreams and turn tragedy into inspiration.
Viewing partners: Ben and Patricia (and Tim was there, too, although I wasn't 100% sure at the time)
General festival notes: I manned a random desk at the New School for the first two hours and worked in the overly crowded Target Tribeca Filmmaker Lounge for the other two.
Otherwise … You know how if you can’t find something nice to say, you should keep your mouth shut? That might be best here.

Review: Kassim Ouma, the subject of Kief Davidson’s documentary Kassim the Dream, reminds me of … pitching great Pedro Martinez.

Certainly not at first: Kassim, a world-class boxer, was kidnapped from his Ugandan boarding school at age 6, forced to become a child soldier. He deserted the army at 17 and came to America on a boxing visa. Martinez grew up in the Dominican Republic. However, the two share a similar look, a jovial nature that can turn surly and a goofy tendency to call people “Daddy.” In Kassim’s case, it’s his baby son, named for his late father, whom the army killed when Kassim fled Uganda.

Despite his gregariousness, Kassim cannot hide the effects of abuse: pot smoking, sudden changes in attitude, memories of murder, a tendency to blame himself for his family’s misfortune.

Kassim the Dream highlights Kassim’s boxing career, notably his fight with WBO Middleweight champion Jermain Taylor, as well as his desire to return home after a decade away. The latter requires visits to Congress and a pardon from the Ugandan government, now run by Kassim’s former army general.

Davidson’s lensing is simply fantastic. The boxing footage, some of which comes from television, even captures the sweat spray coming off the fighters. The Africa scenes resonate most, though, the crisp blues and ruddy reds provoking envy in even the most talented videographers. Kassim’s journey includes visits to his father’s grave and to his grandmother and other child soldiers, but the most affecting moment comes during a so-called therapeutic re-enactment – staged in the boxer’s honor! – of a murderous attack on a village. Kassim is shaken, and so are we.

Davidson’s protagonist has more complexities than most fiction films could conjure, which may be why Hollywood wants to remake this documentary. Dreadful idea: Kassim is his own man.

Tribeca Dispatch: Friday, May 2 (Theater of War)

2008-05-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

After four hours at Dow Jones, I spent - yes! - more time in movie theaters. I paid for none of it, though. Earlier in the day, I’d told several people that while most of the films I’d seen this year were pretty good, none left me energized and enthralled. I found that magic moment at last, in a flick I didn’t even know about at the beginning of the festival.

First movie seen: Theater of War
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Art and politics converge in this provocative look at the life and ideas of Bertolt Brecht, interwoven with The Public Theater's staging of his Mother Courage. Meryl Streep, Tony Kushner, Kevin Kline, and George C. Wolfe take audiences on a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process.
Viewing partners: none
General festival notes: 1) This year, volunteers have the chance to attend more free screenings than ever before; in fact, Friday and Saturday were all-day film fests at the Village East. (I’m skipping Saturday, as I’m already seeing two movies.) We don’t find out what the movie is until we arrive at the theater. Much to my delight, the two selections I caught were ones I hadn’t been able to get into during the previous 10 days. 2) Working Press and Industry screenings has the added perk of giving me access to press notes. During the week, this helped me discover movies I’d ignored in the online guide. That’s how I found Fighter.

Theater Review: Acting class with Meryl Streep! Oh, and the politics of theater, war and Bertolt Brecht. Thus summarizes John Walter’s documentary Theater of War, which really explores the 2006 Central Park production of Mother Courage and Her Children.

The Iraq War inspired playwright Tony Kushner to adapt Brecht’s 1939 work for Streep. The actress said she’d been reluctant to show her “process” because that’s “clunky,” but thank goodness she did: Otherwise, the film feels like a dense collegiate English lecture with strident anti-war sentiment. Theater comes to life with Streep, naturally, but also in examining Brecht. The movie intersperses scenes from a Berlin production starring his wife, and daughter Barbara traces Brecht’s time in exile and testimony before the House un-American Activities Committee.

Ultimately, it’s Streep, “the voice of dead people … interpreter of lost songs,” who engages us in Theater. The Oscar for Best Performance in a Documentary goes to …

Festival Winners

2008-05-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

For the first time, I've seen one. Heck, I've seen two! I agree that the Eileen Walsh was Best Actress for Eden and that Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which I saw Saturday, May 3, was the Best Documentary.

http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/tff/news-views/Tribeca_Film_Festival_Announces_Winners.html

Tribeca Dispatch: Thursday, May 1

2008-05-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

I swear, April 29 is coming!

I had to return to the real world today, i.e., my regular job, and I had two documentaries to see after work. I was back to feeling the wall. The Q&A at the first documentary left me outraged, but not for the reasons you might think.

First movie seen: Baghdad High
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Four classmates (Kurd, Christian, Shiite, and Sunni/Shiite) in Baghdad are given cameras to document their last year in high school, resulting in a rare firsthand view of what it’s like growing up where sectarian violence rages right outside the classroom window.
Viewing partners: none
General festival notes: For the third year in a row, I spotted Michael Moore at a general public screening of a documentary. (He always sits in the back.) It’s nice to see he goes to movies with the normal folk.

Baghdad Review: I’m not really sure how to review Baghdad High.

The documentary tells the tale of four Iraqi high-school seniors: a Kurd, a Christian, a Shiite and a Sunni/Shiite. Ali, Anmar, Hayder and Mohammad filmed their lives for a year, starting in August 2006. As such, the quality of the filmmaking isn’t particularly polished, and the movie is overly reliant on explanatory text to fill storyline gaps, but the heart behind it is undeniable. The pervasive American music culture proves especially charming: One student studies the Koran … while listening to Tupac. Other than wondering why the students weren’t listed as co-directors, I was OK with what I saw on screen.

Afterward, I found out how much was missing. Directors Laura Winter and Ivan O’Mahoney weren’t in Iraq at all during the filming; Winter doesn’t even speak Arabic. We never learn that it was the principal who chose the students, basing his selections on safety issues as much as anything else. He didn’t want anyone talking to war lords, nor could the students be seen with Western journalists; otherwise, their lives would be in jeopardy. Winter said she sometimes sent emails asking the boys to explore certain issues, such as a day in the life of their principal or why Mohammad’s relatives moved in with him. What we didn’t hear much of: the boys’ feelings about the coalition presence. We heard from one of the parents, but that doesn’t have the same impact. In the post-script of Baghdad High, we discover that Ali and his family fled Iraq. We don’t find out that they’re in America. Seeing boxes being packed, hearing Ali’s thoughts about the U.S. - missed emotional moments.

Critic Lisa gives Baghdad High a C, knocking it down a full letter by what was left out.

Second movie seen: The Zen of Bobby V
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Former New York Mets manager Bobby Valentine took his baseball expertise to Japan in 2004. This film follows a season in the life of an American who has become an admired icon-and a primary reason that baseball remains Japan's most popular sport.
Viewing partners: none

Bobby Review: Hundreds cheer his arrival in an airport. Middle-aged women scramble to photograph him with their cellphones. Parents have their children touch this man of greatness. His beer and burgers sell like crazy.

Brad Pitt? Michael Jordan?

Nope. It’s Bobby Valentine, former manager of the Texas Rangers and New York Mets, and now the manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines.

Andrew Jenks, Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew and Andrew Muscato spent the 2007 season in Japan, following Valentine and exploring the phenomenon of baseball there in the ESPN documentary The Zen of Bobby V.

One person at the Q&A said the movie felt like a “Bobby love fest.” That’s an accurate assessment: In addition to the aforementioned giddiness, we watch Valentine embrace Japan. He learns Japanese, relishes trying raw fish, explores many gardens and rushes to a drum show. However, the directors stop short of really showing Valentine during the bad times. We hear from several people how losing gets him down, but we don’t see it, and the Marines’ summer struggles are reduced to a fast-moving montage. As with Baghdad High, the filmmakers rely too much on text. We read that one player gets hits often and that people suspect this happens because he’s black, yet we don’t hear from him.

We do glean random, funny thoughts from other players, though. Jose Ortiz’s account of the nature of Japanese dining is especially amusing and also illustrates the country’s orderly structure. The directing trio capture the Marines’ spirit with images from their promotions - ballroom with Bobby is one - and snippets from their crazy fan base. Those people, with their umbrellas and nonstop chanting, reduce Red Sox Nation to a quiet village hamlet.

The Zen of Bobby V is fun and pleasant enough, best suited for its eventual TV home.

We Interrupt the Dispatches ...

2008-05-03T07:18:00.000-07:00

And on the 10th day, she found something to love.

It took me until Friday night, but I finally saw a kick-butt film. Mom, it has subtitles, so that might rule it out for you, but it was amazing. Fighter tells the story of a Turkish 16- or 17-year-old girl in Denmark who wants to be a kung-fu fighter. Naturally, her Muslim family doesn't approve. It was a last-minute decision to attend, and boy, was it the right one.

More to come later. I'm staying home this morning to catch up on sleep and this blog.

Tribeca Dispatch: Wednesday, April 30

2008-05-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know this is out of order. I finished the Milosevic on Trial review Thursday morning, whereas I'm still working on the (longer) Kassim the Dream one.

The festival is winding down for the Industry department, part of the reason I tied up my volunteer duties. Now it's time to redeem vouchers for some screenings, as if I weren't attending enough already! I used only one Wednesday, for by far my heaviest film to date. ("Heavy" equaled "intelligent" here, not "tawdry" like Savage Grace.) Milosevic on Trial was the least-populated show I've attended thus far - about 30 people on a Wednesday afternoon, the first nice day we'd had since Saturday. However, the Q&A was fantastic: A 70-minute documentary was followed by a 30-minute discussion with the director. His next project, due later this year: Saddam on Trial.

Movie seen: Milosevic on Trial
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Defending himself against widely credited charges of genocide before an international court in The Hague, Serbia's former ruler proved frustratingly difficult to convict, as this riveting look at Milosevic and the chief prosecuting attorney attests.
Viewing partners: none
General festival notes: It was my last volunteer day, as I must return to the real world and my job. Sob! I returned to my Village East haunts, at this point recognizing some of the same press people and Tribeca staff. I was pleased that my supervisor trusted me enough to be on my own a couple of times, and I felt confident handling everything that came up. One of these days, maybe I should work for a festival rather than just volunteer at it.

Review: More suitable for a 90-minute CNN special than a theatrical viewing, the documentary Milosovic on Trial combs through 2,000 hours of courtroom footage from Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic's four-year trial at the Hague.

Michael Christoffersen and his crew were able to obtain amazing access: to Geoffrey Nice, the prosecution's lead barrister; to Milosevic's personal lawyer - "Slobo" chose to represent himself during the trial, which he deemed "illegal" - and, briefly, even to Milosevic's widow, just before she went into exile. Alas, the prosecution shut Christoffersen out of many of its strategy sessions, leaving an impression of a disjointed legal team in court.

The other problem: While the information is fascinating, its presentation is cold and clinical, not to mention somewhat dense. Milosevic on Trial represents a rare instance where commercial interruptions would help a production - and in fact, the documentary has been on TV globally.

Tribeca Dispatch: Monday, April 28

2008-04-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

The answer to my Sunday quandary (talk vs. movie): the flick. It actually was an easy decision: 1) I love college basketball; 2) I love hip-hip; 3) Time Out New York described Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot as “the hip-hop Hoop Dreams.” Hoop Dreams frequently appears on my favorites list; 4) It was a red-carpet premiere; 5) Brooklyn Jen, who also loves college basketball and hip-hop, was able to go; 6) The prior two years, a competition-themed documentary (The Heart of the Game and Chops) was my favorite thing at the festival.

My decision was the correct one. I’ll get to the review below, but for now let me just say that being surrounded by happy high-school students and a happy Brooklyn Jen definitely boosted my liking of the film. So did the reason for Jen’s excitement: the presence of four of the eight players in the documentary, including the likely #1 pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, Kansas State's Michael Beasley. I guess he scored that #1 spot?

Movie seen: Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Rucker Park. The mecca for all street basketball players. In Beastie Boy Yauch's super-energized documentary, eight of the country's top 24 high school players participate in the first "Elite 24" tournament on the same court that helped turn Dr. J, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wilt Chamberlain into legends.
Viewing partners: the aforementioned Brooklyn Jen
General festival notes: Most people become star-struck when they meet actors. I become giddy when I meet critics. While one I encountered proved to be a jerk, I’d rather focus on Scott Weinberg from Cinematical.com. I discovered his site when I was searching for Tribeca coverage Sunday, and I was pleased with the number of reviews and panel write-ups. I complemented him when we met Monday, and he seemed flattered. Therefore, I bookmarked his site, and I encourage everyone to check it out: http://www.cinematical.com. In other news, for the first time in three years, I had a cold, rainy volunteer day. Waah! I worked Press & Industry screenings at the Village East and was super-busy the entire time.

Review: As March Madness memories fade, Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot revives the excitement of amateur basketball. The passion of director and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch cannot be denied, making it easier to accept the documentary’s organizational issues.

Yauch focuses on the first Elite 24 tournament, which took place in September 2006 at Harlem’s famed Rucker Park. (Rucker even receives top billing in the “cast.”) He examines eight of the 24 players, including three likely picks in next month’s NBA Draft: Michael Beasley, Kevin Love and Donte Green.

While Yauch spreads his attention among the players fairly evenly, this also brings Gunnin’ to a long timeout: After a jumbled intro about Rucker and the tournament, we spend the next 35 minutes on very similar star profiles: intro, video of skills, family presence, why Rucker matters to them. Prankster Beasley and the laid-back Kyle Stringer manage to stand out. (The latter on giving up his starting-quarterback gig: “There’s something I’ll miss about football. [Beat] I don’t know what it is.”)

A cool fish-eye lens angle moves the action from Brooklyn to Manhattan, improving Gunnin’s rhythm. As one might expect from a rap legend, the marriage of music to sport stands out, a greatest-hits package of New York City hip-hop from the past 10 years. Indeed, Yauch may be too successful: The Notorious B.IG.’s “Hypnotize” was so electric I barely focused on the third quarter! The game contains slick passing and thrilling scoring drives captured in slo-mo, highlighted with colorful on-court commentary. (Per Rucker tradition, the greatest players earn nicknames; “Shampoo” is the best.) Unfortunately, Yauch breaks up the game for lessons on sneaker endorsements and player rankings - useful information, but he needed to weave it in better.

Gunnin’ isn’t a slam dunk, but it nevertheless swishes into my sports-loving heart.

Tribeca Dispatch: Sunday, April 27 (Robbery)

2008-04-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Here's the rest of the Sunday report.

General festival notes: 1) Much to my surprise, the Q&A for This Is Not a Robbery was by far the most intelligent and lengthy, despite taking place at 11:15 a.m. on a dreary Sunday morning. 2) Being an American Express cardholder seems to have more perks each year. (Amex was the first sponsor of the festival.) I stopped by the Insider Center in Union Square for access to computers, Daily Variety, free food and drinks, and the chance to sign up for talks, post-movie receptions, and short-film screenings. A discussion about clothing design from Annie Hall to Sex and the City caught my attention, and I made a reservation for Monday night. An hour later, tickets for a highly acclaimed sports documentary became available, and I suddenly had a conflict. What did I do? You’ll have to wait until later Tuesday to find out.

First movie seen: This Is Not a Robbery
What it is (description from TFF Web site): One morning, J.L. "Red" Rountree woke, ate breakfast, went for a drive, and robbed a bank. He was 87. This is the unusual story of how this devoted family man and law abiding senior citizen became one of the country's most notorious serial bank robbers
Viewing partners: none

Review: After living a quiet life for eight and half decades, Texas businessman J.L. “Red” Roundtree suddenly began robbing banks. This sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit, but in fact This Is Not a Robbery is a documentary. Roundtree had died by the time directors Lucas Jansen and Adam Kurland started filming, so they used audiotapes of a GQ interview, friend recollections, family photographs and inventive animation - the directors found re-creations too cheesy - to show how their subject went from family man to criminal. Think untapped rage: A bankruptcy filing in the 1950s led to years of resentment. Roundtree also said he wanted to replicate the high he found from his brief, mid-1990s drug dalliance with his gold-digging prostitute second wife. (It only seems like the Anna Nicole Smith story.) Oh, and he found robbery “fun.” The tale is funny in a “can you believe this” kind of way, the animated sequences in particular adding to the jocularity. Yet something is lacking - some sense of concern for a lonely old man’s degeneration.

Breaking up Tribeca's gloominess

2008-04-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Let's just say this wasn't the cinematic comedic conclusion I expected.

At the end of my weekend comedy experiment, the funniest movie I saw was, er, um, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, the stoner comedy. No, I was not stoned, drunk or even loopy from movie-watching yet. It did prove my theory, though: Comedies come across much funnier when viewed in a large group.

That’s a bit of a lie. I should say “comedies come across much funnier when viewed in a large group at Manhattan’s Union Square theater” because my screening the night before of Baby Mama in Bayonne, N.J., didn’t provoke the laughter I thought it would. In fact, I laughed more when I was by myself the day before while watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

That proved surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my documented dislike of things Judd Apatow. (I read in last week’s Entertainment Weekly that the man has been involved in 13 projects over the past three years. Judd, take a vacation. Please.) Many reviews suggest Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t as strong as Knocked Up and Superbad. Still, I liked the awkwardly endearing Peter (Jason Segel, who also wrote the screenplay) and his Dracula musical, the Owen Wilson-esque Paul Rudd, and especially a rare fleshed-out Apatow female lead (Mila Kunis). The titular character remains an underdrawn cipher, but I guess I can’t have everything. Most of all, I guffawed shamelessly, even though I was one of only seven people in the theater.

While my Sarah Marshall experience blew half my theory out of the water, I figured Baby Mama would redeem the other portion. After all, I think Tina Fey is great, and I like Amy Poehler well enough. Yet I came away disappointed with the pleasant but predictable story of uptight yuppie Kate (Fey) and her “white-trash” surrogate, Angie (Poehler). Picture a 100-minute sketch between Liz Lemon and Amber, the girl with one leg (except here she has two). What’s more, people in my audience didn’t really laugh - they giggled politely in spots, their amusement escalating only with the DMX-spouting doorman (Romany Malco).

How, then, did I end up at Harold and Kumar the next afternoon? Well, I was on a date, and the documentary we’d planned to see was canceled, and Union Square was the nearest theater, and H&K was at the most convenient time, and … oh, who am I kidding? Sandra knows the truth: The trailer made me laugh like a loon. We’re led to believe in a North Korea/al-Qaeda terror cell! The official Duyba impersonator appears! Neil Patrick Harris plays himself and imagines unicorns! I seriously doubt this flick would work for me on DVD, but in a theater with 200 other hysterical 20- and 30-somethings, it’s pretty close to comedic bliss.

Segel and Harris co-star in the CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother. Maybe that should be the next comedy breeding ground. When can we look forward to Let’s Go to the Mall: The Robin Sparkles Story?

Tribeca Dispatch: Sunday, April 27 (Eden)

2008-04-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

No work made for a two-movie day. This is my third consecutive double feature, and the exhaustion and mental wall I’m experiencing already remind me why I don’t want to make film my career. (Note to self: See only one movie a day for the next three days.)

The review for This Is Not a Robbery, actually the first movie I saw Sunday, will come later Monday. Right now, I need sleep.

Second movie seen: Eden
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Taking a frank look at the slow disintegration of a marriage during the week before a couple's 10th anniversary, Eden catapults an intimate story from O'Brien's award-winning play onto the big screen while only enhancing its emotional impact.
Viewing partners: Josee and Mark

Review: Featuring a mesmerizing performance from Eileen Walsh, Eden depicts an Irish couple at the edge of their 10-year union. They don’t communicate, they barely interact, Billy (Aidan Kelly) is drawn to a younger woman - can this marriage be saved?

Bleak stuff, to be sure, but Eugene O’Brien’s script, based on his play, is also highly realistic. Like many men, Billy has feelings he cannot express. He’d rather spend time with his buddies and booze, living a stunted fantasy. Wife Breda is more emotionally aware but no better at speaking of heartbreak. She sobs to her best friend, her voice catching on her pain: “I tried to … I couldn’t make him … he was soft … he didn’t …”

Eden’s production team cited In the Bedroom, the 2001 Sissy Spacek/Tom Wilkinson drama, as inspiration for the tone. Musical choices underscore the characters’ thoughts, notably during a slowed-down “House of the Rising Sun” by Sinead O’Connor. Director Declan Recks and cinematographer Owen McPolin enforce the emotions through their shooting methods: Breda’s scenes were done with a still camera, the more unsettled Billy’s with a hand-held one.

While Kelly adroitly gives voice to an internalized man, Eden ultimately is Walsh’s movie. In one lovely sequence, a sassy haircut and violet dress give Breda the confidence to confront the head of her weight-loss program; her satisfied retort and sharp swivel inspire a “you go, girl.” Minutes later, Breda watches her husband arrive in a nightclub for their anniversary date. She sees his eyes travel to Imelda (Sarah Green) rather than her. Walsh slumps, her eyes falling in familiar disappointment. The princess spell is broken.

Irish hearts and eyes won’t be smiling after Eden - they’ll be too drained - but viewers of all nationalities will applaud the craftsmanship of this personal film.

Tribeca Dispatch: Saturday, April 26

2008-04-27T19:50:00.001-07:00

I am an early riser, so a 9:30 p.m. screening of a heavy drama normally isn’t on my to-do list. However, I love Julianne Moore, and I figured the Downtown resident would be at the New York premiere of her new movie, Savage Grace. I never saw her. WAAHH!! I did meet the director of hot documentary Baghdad High, though, and she was so cool that I used my first voucher for a screening of her movie Thursday. Encounters such as that one are why I love volunteering in the Industry department.

Movie seen: Savage Grace
What it is (description from TFF Web site): A daring dramatization of the disintegrating psyche of '60s socialite Barbara Baekeland, Savage Grace brilliantly showcases Julianne Moore at her most haunting. Insulated by wealth and abandoned by her husband, Baekeland falls into tragic dysfunction with her adoring son.
Viewing partners: Tim
General festival notes: This was my first day of volunteering. I was supposed to work the concierge desk, but that division had nothing for me to do, so I took myself to press and industry screenings at the Village East Cinemas. I had a lot of industry folks to check in for four hours, but mostly I briskly walked between the east and west sections of 12th and 13th streets to obtain press notes. Yes, I was a big-time gopher. I also learned that Amanda from Cycle Seven of America’s Next Top Model is an actress - she and her agent were milling about the lobby - and that Rider Strong (of Boy Meets World fame) made a short film. I found him a bit off-putting.

Review: Savage Grace is based on a book about the Baekeland family, who epitomized “dysfunctional” before that was a buzzword. Tom Kalin’s bumpy direction and Howard Rodman’s choppy script make it feel as if the cinematic adaptation begins in Chapter 3.

Over a 26-year period, we follow Bakelite plastics heir Brooks (Stephen Dillane); socialite wife Barbara (Julianne Moore); and their son, Tony, through five countries and enough elements for a week of Jerry Springer: Dad steals Son’s girlfriend, Son kills Mom … shortly after he and Mom get it on. (That scene is as uncomfortable to watch as one might expect.)

Kalin and Rodman said they found the story “juicy.” I’d call their presentation “stylized.” Even Moore, master of 1950s housewives thanks to Far from Heaven and The Hours, can’t overcome Savage Grace’s overly arch dialogue and lurching rhythms. Meanwhile, a parade of young flesh, particularly from Eddie Redmayne ( the adult Tony) and Hugh Dancy (gay walker Simon), seems to have come out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog - as do the actors’ performances.

It’s also distracting that Moore never ages from 1946 to 1972. Did Barbara’s limitless tobacco supply come in a wrinkle-free formula?

Tribeca Dispatch: Friday, April 25

2008-04-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

True, Trucker was not on my original list of flicks I was seeing, but that’s because I was unable to procure tickets. Therefore, I decided to try the rush-tickets line, arriving about 45 minutes before the show. Lo and behold, someone in the regular line had an extra ticket, so he gave it to me … for free! The rush-ticket system DOES work - as long as you show up early.

Movie seen: Trucker
What it is (description from TFF Web site): Michelle Monaghan is riveting as a tough-talking, devil-may-care truck driver who is faced with raising her estranged 11-year-old son after his father (Benjamin Bratt) is hospitalized. This eloquent and uplifting story also features Joey Lauren Adams and Nathan Fillion (Waitress).
Viewing partners: none
General festival notes: The side exit of the AMC 19th Street theater dumped us right into the press line for Bart Got a Room. I saw William H. Macy being interviewed, which was a cool celebrity sighting for a couple of reasons: 1) Earlier that morning, my co-worker Nicole told me Macy was one of her favorite actors. 2) More than once, my agent friend Jason said Macy and his wife, Felicity Huffman, were the nicest actors with whom he’d ever worked.

Review: Trucker recalls the 2006 Ashley Judd indie Come Early Morning: coarse, hard-drinking woman doing a man’s job well when a more feminine aspect interrupts. Evoking a gritty Diane Lane, Michelle Monaghan convincingly portrays Diane Ford, a truck driver so disconnected she can’t even bring herself to call her estranged 11-year-old son (Jimmy Bennett) by his name.

Writer/director James Mottern hits the perfect tone with Trucker’s fadeout and takes Diane’s relationship with love-struck friend Runner (charming Nathan Fillion) to a surprising climax. Mottern also successfully captures the tired Riverside, Calif., setting and its encircling crossroads of interstates, although the abundant natural sunlight can lead to distracting haziness.

Alas, Mottern doesn’t have a sure-enough grasp of character development. Is it the job that leaves Diane this empty, or something else - say, depression? (Diane tells Jimmy that when she’d hold him as an infant, she felt as if she was only half there. She left when he was 1.) While Jimmy has justifiable anger about the abandonment, glimpses of the loving relationship with his dying father (Benjamin Bratt) make it difficult to accept the invectives the boy hurls at Diane.

Overall, Trucker is a shaky but promising debut, boosted by Monaghan’s performance.

How to See a Movie, Lisa Style

2008-04-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of writing this entry for a while. A screening of Semi-Pro in March - seriously - and my lack of reaction to it, despite my love of Will Ferrell, gave me some ideas for a test.

With all due respect to my friends and family, my ideal movie-viewing partner often is … myself.

I like a lot of indies, documentaries, and/or mediocre-looking movies with one redeeming element. I told several people recently that Hope Davis is one of my two favorite actresses. I received a lot of blank stares. This makes me sad. (I see a Hope Davis essay in my future.) The point, though, is that I can’t tell someone, “Hey, I want to check out the new Hope Davis feature,” as most people have no idea who she is. By going to a theater alone, I also don’t feel as great a need to justify why I would spend $10 to see a poorly reviewed George Clooney flick. (Leatherheads, BTW, was much better than I expected, particularly when it stuck to the newspaper angle. Oh, and I didn’t pay for it; I had a free movie pass courtesy of my AMC Moviewatcher membership.)

I like the darkness enveloping me, and I feel more smothered in solitude. In addition, I enjoy drinking my fountain soda and eating my contraband snack with nothing around me except my stuff. And, well, to be honest …

The best part about going to the cinema alone is that I don’t have to have someone yammering in my ear or asking questions in the middle of the flick. I’ve never admitted this to my offending friends and family members, and now I’m confessing it in a blog entry: You know who you are, you know I love you, but I really cannot stand it when you smack my arm midway through a crucial scene to ask me where it’s being shot or how you know that actor. Write the question down and ask me when we’re outside! Look, I paid good money to sit in this theater! Furthermore, these days, at least half the time I’m taking notes.

That being said, I have two exceptions to the “me, myself, and I” rule: summer blockbusters and comedies. I’m not much of a big-budget bonanza person, so if I have to see one, I’d rather have someone take me. At that point, I also realize the plot usually doesn’t require much focus, so I won’t be as irked if you comment on Will Smith’s ears. As for comedies, I believe I’ve read studies about this, and it’s true: They’re funnier in a group. A related case in point: The Mena Suvari-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live in 2001 was iffy at best, but seeing the dress rehearsal made everything hysterical, and it wasn’t just the Janet Reno cameo. A lot of the so-called recent classic comedies - Old School, Mean Girls, Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin - failed to amuse me at all. I’ve seen Clerks three or four times, and the only time I liked it was at a seven-person party at my house.

With several comedies coming out in the next few weeks, I have decided to test a theory. I will go to two well-received movies, one on my own on a weekday after work and the other on opening night with a friend. I believe I’ll enjoy my second movie experience more because of the audience angle.

Using Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, I have chosen to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall alone on a Thursday afternoon at the mall and Baby Mama with my 16-year-old sister on Friday night - opening weekend, no less - in Bayonne, N.J. Let’s see how the experiment works, shall we? In the meantime, what’s your ideal viewing scenario?

Tribeca Time!

2008-04-24T15:12:00.001-07:00

I swear I didn't drop off the planet. Read on.

My favorite time of year in New York City began Wednesday night with the start of the Tribeca Film Festival. Once again, I'm volunteering. For the second year in a row, I'm with the Industry department, which means my work is behind the scenes. Twice, I'll be working screenings for press and industry folk. Those are usually at 8:30 or 9 a.m. The other two shifts, I'll be at the new concierge desk, setting up meetings between filmmakers and studio executives - and perhaps telling them how to get between points A and B and where they should go for a meal or drink. It's a great use of my tour-guide skills.

Much as I love volunteering, to me the festival is about seeing movies. So far, I have tickets to seven: Savage Grace, This Is Not a Robbery, Eden, Kassim The Dream, The Zen of Bobby V, I Am Because We Are, and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. The majority are documentaries, as I think Tribeca is much stronger in this category than it is in features. I'll be filing brief (no more than 150 words) reviews throughout the festival with my film feelings.

To read more, go here:
http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/filmguide/

A Film for All Time

2008-04-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, I saw this back in February, when the Museum of the Moving Image presented its Ford on Fox series. Yes, I meant to do a review then. Yes, I should write reviews within 48 hours of seeing something. This took much too long to put together, and it's only 250 words. However, I think it's a fantastic film, a deserved classic. See it.

One of the most determined performances in film history - Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, the moral center of The Grapes of Wrath - did not win the 1940 Best Actor Oscar. Nor did Wrath receive Best Picture. (The Actor winner was no slouch: Fonda’s roommate, Jimmy Stewart, for The Philadelphia Story. I’d dispute the merits of Rebecca over Wrath.)

Wrath, which adapts John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, has much to recommend, from its portrayal of Dust Bowl life to its social statements. Today, two elements particularly stand out: John Ford’s Oscar-winning direction and, of course, Fonda’s acting.

Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland give Wrath a documentary feel, using grainy landscape and untrained actors. Each transient camp looks more depressing than the last, each day without food leaves the actors more gaunt. Ford employs shadows to heighten mood; horizons appear especially foreboding. Steinbeck said Ford’s techniques made poverty even harsher on screen than in the book.

Fonda, through Tom, shows how the common man can respond to social injustice. At first, Tom must suppress his feelings, so when the death of preacher friend Casy leads to greater outspokenness, we really sense the drive for a better life. Ford’s final image of Tom depicts the now-fugitive as a tiny figure against sweeping terrain. He’s climbing. We never lose him.

Wrath’s stark depictions of labor and the Depression make it a classic. Much of the praise deservedly goes to Ford, but it’s Fonda’s commitment and passion that imprint Tom Joad on many movie memories.

Experiencing Eve with Celeste Holm

2008-04-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

It's been almost 24 hours since the experience below, and I still can't believe this happened.

After standing in line for Tribeca Film Festival tickets for four hours Saturday, I wasn't sure I wanted anything to do with cinema for the rest of the day. It was in the mid-70s and sunny, a Yankees/Red Sox game was on, I was wearing a cute new jacket - why would I want to spend my evening in a theater watching a movie I already own? Well ...

Hundreds of people, including the Village Voice’s Michael Musto, lined up Saturday night on a side street in the gritty Journal Square section of Jersey City, N.J. , to watch a movie. It wasn’t just any movie, though: It was All about Eve, one of the greatest films ever (and my No. 7 all-time favorite). As if that weren’t enough, the print was from the Fox archive and screened at one of the remaining movie palaces in the country, the 3,000-seat Loews Jersey, which opened in 1929. What’s more, we had preshow entertainment, live pipe-organ music. AND Celeste Holm, the only living Eve cast member (she turns 91 at the end of April), presented the flick to us and did a Q&A afterward.

The cost for all this grandeur? $6. Seriously. Popcorn and soda were $1 each.

Had I died and gone to cinema heaven?

In introducing Eve, film professor and author Foster Hirsch stressed that it was a “talking” picture. Indeed, Joseph Mankiewicz’s Academy Award-winning screenplay - one of six Oscars Eve won, including Best Picture - includes some of the most memorable lines around. Everyone knows “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” a statement Bette Davis delivers with such bite before a life-altering party. That party featured a sparkling Marilyn Monroe as a starlet, and her performance garnered her a seven-year contract at 20th Century Fox. However, Hirsch told us that none of the original Eve reviews even mentioned the woman Holm described as a “fuzzy young duckling.”

In addition to the “seatbelts” comment, Eve’s screenplay contains notable quotables aplenty. Some are poignant: “Funny business, a woman's career. The things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman,” Davis’ stage diva Margo Channing muses as she reflects upon her storied career and stormy relationship with director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill, later Davis’ husband). More often, the words are tart, as one might expect from an ode to theatrical life. “What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end,” Birdie (Thelma Ritter) sneers upon hearing Eve’s (Anne Baxter) sob story of Wisconsin and a deceased war-hero husband. She’s the only one not initially taken in by Eve Harrington, the seemingly naïve newcomer to New York who manipulates her way into the lives of Margo, Bill, scriptwriter Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife, Karen (Holm).

Many of the best quips come from … well, why don’t we let him introduce himself? “My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theatre.” Addison finds Eve intriguing, but he doesn’t drink her Kool-Aid. “You're an improbable person, Eve, but so am I. We have that in common,” Addison archly observes in a riveting confrontation. “Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition - and talent. We deserve each other.” Addison’s portrayer, George Sanders, won the Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Hirsch asked Holm whether she recognized the brilliance of Eve’s screenplay, she replied, “Well, yes. I can read.” For all the homages and remakes, the wordplay of All about Eve still stings almost 60 years later. Brilliance.

All Hail the King

2008-04-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

A.O. Scott is by far my favorite New York Times reviewer. In this Sunday's Arts section, he's written an appreciation of one of the all-time critical greats, Roger Ebert. It's a must-read.

Smart man, that Mr. Scott.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/movies/13scot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin