February 2012 movie reviews

A SEPARATION.  Nader and Simin are a loving couple who plan to leave Iran to make a better life for their daughter.  But his father has Alzheimer’s, and Nader refuses to leave before the visas expire because he needs to take care of his father.  Samin tries to force the issue by asking for a divorce (they still love each other, so she hopes the separation will convince him to see it her way).  She goes to live with her parents, so he has to hire someone to take care of his dad while he is at work.  The woman he hires has problems of her own: an out-of-work husband with anger issues.  The couple’s separation creates a cascading series of events that no one could have foreseen.  This is a really good movie in showing two decent people, neither wrong or right, but with differences of opinion that will drive them apart.  An unbelievably sad movie.  I believe this won the Oscar for best foreign movie.

WOMAN IN BLACK.  Daniel Radcliffe is Mr. Kipps, a Victorian-era lawyer who can’t get over losing his wife in childbirth.  His employer gives him one last chance to improve at his job, sending him off to the countryside to review the estate of an old woman who died.  But when Kipps gets there, the townspeople are unwelcoming.  He can barely get someone to give him a ride to the estate, which turns out to be a dark forbidding place.  And while he works, things really start going bump in the night.  Apparitions, empty chairs rocking, toys playing music, etc.  Seems the estate was the scene of a tragedy and is haunted.  I am not a great fan of ghost stories, but if you are, this is, I think, an adequate example of the genre.  Nice atmospherics, a few little shocks, and an effective ending.  Also starring Ciaran Hinds.

CHRONICLE.  Teenage Andrew feels invisible, so he decides to start videotaping his life.  Home life is bad, with an abusive father and dying mother.  At school, the videotaping gets him bullied, even more than before.  His cousin Matt is good to him, though, and along with Matt’s friend Steve, invites him to come with them to film a mysterious hole in the ground they have discovered.  And they go down into the hole, and when they come up, they have the power of telekinesis.  Generally speaking, teenage boys with superpowers is not going to be a good thing.  At first it is all fun and games, but then it gets serious.  Andrew has some rage issues that will manifest themselves.  Not great, but kind of a fun 90 minutes.

THIN ICE.  Mickey (Greg Kinnear) is a Wisconsin insurance salesman, a very shady one who is skating on the edge of bankruptcy.  When he discovers a somewhat flaky client (Alan Arkin) has a valuable violin, he starts plotting how he can make money off of it.  But before he knows it, he is in way deeper than insurance fraud.  Up until nearly the end, the movie is like a poor man’s version of FARGO.  Then the last few minutes completely turn the story on its head.  I didn’t think the end really worked well as it was mostly recounted in a voice over and seemed to come out of nowhere.  The script just needed a little more work to make me buy into it.   Also starring Billy Crudup, Bob Balaban, and Lea Thompson.  [I just found this on Ebert’s website: Footnote: This review was written before I received a letter from Jill Sprecher, which may explain my problems with the film: “The producers and distributor of our film completely re-edited it without me. Nearly 20 minutes were cut; the structure rearranged; out-takes used; voiceover and characters dropped; key plot points omitted; a new score added. Although our names contractually remain on the film, my sister and I do not consider ‘Thin Ice’ to be our work.” ]

December 2011 movie reviews

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.  Mikael (Daniel Craig) is a disgraced journalist who takes the job of investigating the disappearance 40 years ago of a teenage girl, a member of a powerful industrial family.  The patriarch of the family (Christopher Plummer) hires Mikael to finally unravel the mystery, and makes it pretty clear that he thinks someone in his crazy family murdered her.  So Mikael moves to the island where they all live and starts investigating.   Meanwhile, Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) is a computer hacker and investigator, and also a very tough woman with a past.  She has to report to a social worker, who revels in his power over her.   And she barely contains her rage (at first).  Early in the movie, their stories are only slightly connected, but Mikael will hire her to help him, and they eventually work together on solving the girl’s disappearance.  I hadn’t seen the Swedish movie or read the best-seller, so I really enjoyed following the mystery to its conclusion.  Really a well-done movie (and I gather different enough from the Swedish one to still be worth seeing if you saw the earlier one.)  It most definitely didn’t seem like a two and a half hour movie.  One of my favorites of the year.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY.  George Smiley (Gary Oldman) works in British intelligence fighting the Cold War.  His boss “Control” (John Hurt) is convinced there is a double agent working with/against them.  The powers that be think he is paranoid, so Control and Smiley are forced into retirement.    Then a politician contacts Smiley to investigate the possibility that there is  indeed a Soviet mole in the upper echelons of the service.  Smiley slowly and methodically starts working to discover whether there is in fact a mole, and if so, who it might be.  (Candidates include Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds.)  I found the first half of the movie a little slow going, but the pace picked up, and the complexities of the spy’s life, where so much is not what it seems, and paranoia is everywhere, is fascinating.  Spying is mostly plodding work, no car chases or explosions here.  In the end I found this a very satisfying movie.  (I never read the book or saw the earlier mini-series, so that was probably good.)

THE ARTIST.  George Valentin is a major silent screen star, doing what appears to be a combo of swashbuckling and romantic roles.  He loves his life, and the adulation.  But when talkies arrive, he doesn’t adapt and finds himself on his way down.  Meanwhile, a young woman he supported on her way up becomes a big star.  Whether she can help him recover from his downward spiral is the gist of the movie.  This movie is making a big splash because it itself is mostly silent, and in black and white.  I personally didn’t find that annoying at all.  It’s not necessary to hear people talk to know what’s going on.  At about 90 minutes, I found it charming and entertaining. 

THE MUPPETS.  Gary (Jason Segal) is a big fan of the 1980’s Muppet Shows.  Coincidentally, his brother Walter is a Muppet, and despite their physical differences, they are very close.  When Gary decides to take his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) to LA to celebrate an aniversary, Walter tags along and insists they tour the old Muppet studios.  The studios are rundown and abandoned, and Walter overhears an oil tycooon’s plans to tear down the studios to drill for oil.  So Walter and Gary go on a quest to find Kermit, and then they all try to reunite all the Muppets (Miss Piggy, Animal, etc.) and put on a show to raise money and save the studio.  Sunny songs, some witty dialog, celebrity cameos, this is a cute movie, especially if you can channel your inner child and just go along with it.  Or if you were a Muppet fan back in the day.

BEING ELMO: A PUPPETEER’S JOURNEY.    This short documentary covers the career of the puppeteer behind the Elmo Muppet.  Shy Kevin Clash has always been obsessed with puppets, so much so that he cut up the lining of his father’s raincoat to make one when he was young.  The movie covers his career path from putting on shows for the neighbor kids to a local TV kids’ show to Captain Kangaroo to Sesame Street.  I also learned a little more about the talent it takes to be a really good puppeteer.  This is really a sweet movie about someone whose dreams have come true.    When I wasn’t smiling, I had tears in my eyes.  It’s just so life- and decency-affirming.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL.  Ethan (Tom Cruise) and his team (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner) are blamed when a proponent of nuclear war blows up the Kremlin.  The Russions are blaming the Americans and now the world is on the verge of armaggedon.  The MI team have been disavowed and must work on their own to stop the maniac.  I am fine with popcorn movies (see: Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and I liked this for about the first half (especially the action on the tallest building in the world), but then it started feeling bloated to me.  A too long car chase, a scene in a parking garage…  Despite some fine action scenes, I lost interest.  The crowd I was with seemed to like it, though (applause).

YOUNG ADULT.  Mavis (Charlize Theron) is a former prom queen (and mean girl) who has had some success in writing a series of novels for teenage girls.  But now she is down on her luck and drinking too much.  When she gets a announcement that her former boyfriend has had a baby, she decides to go back to her small hometown and win him back.  The fact that he is happily married doesn’t even give her pause.  Before she connects with the boyfriend, she meets a former classmate (Patton Oswalt), who had a locker next to hers.  He remembers her, but she doesn’t remember him.  Until she remembers he was the infamous victim of a hate crime that has left him disabled and bitter.  Knowing he doesn’t have a chance in hell of impressing her, he doesn’t have any trouble telling her how delusional she is.  I think he knows her better than she knows herself, but nothing he says stops Mavis.  Because this movie is by the director and writer of Juno, I think there is a tendancy for people to think this is a funny movie.  Yes, there are a few funny lines, but personally I don’t think nasty alcoholics are all that amusing.  Although well-made and especially well-acted, I wouldn’t call it entertaining.  Movies about really dislikeable people who do really appalling things just aren’t my thing.

November 2011 movie reviews (part 1)

TOWER HEIST.  Ben Stiller is the general manager of a posh Manhattan co-op, and he has no life other than providing top-notch service to the wealthy residents.  Alan Alda lives in the penthouse.  He is a financial guru who one day is arrested by the FBI (Tea Leoni) for stealing everyone’s money (a la Bernie Madoff).  This includes stealing the hotel staff’s pensions, who gave him their money to manage.  So Ben, along with some of his co-workers/friends (Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick) decide to steal their money back from him.  Since they aren’t criminals, they recruit Ben’s childhood friend (Eddie Murphy) to help them.  Occasionally amusing, with some edge-of-the seat moments, this is a mildly entertaining heist movie (made better by Murphy), but nothing special.  Worth seeing on TV.

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE.  Margaret (Emily Watson) is a social worker in 1986 England.  She is doing group therapy with some adoptees when a woman asks her assistance in finding her roots.  The woman tells Margaret that she was shipped to a home in Australia when she was a child.  Margaret doesn’t believe this, as it would be quite illegal, but then she hears of another case of the same thing.  She starts investigating and finds that the English and Australian governments conspired to send thousands of foster and orphan children to Australia (up until 1970).  And some of these children still had living parents.  She starts a non-profit trying to reunite families.  The movie doesn’t really tell a surprising story (unfortunately) of the abuse that some of the children suffered.  But it is quite good in showing the stress of the work on Margaret, and the differing affects the emigration had on the children (especially Hugh Weaving and David Wenham).  Very good because instead of focusing on the event, it shows the effect on individuals.  Based on Margaret’s book in the subject.

BLACKTHORN.  This movie presupposes that Butch Cassidy (Sam Shepard) was not killed in Bolivia in 1908, but instead bought a horse ranch on the Bolivian frontier.  The movie opens in 1928 as the old Butch (using the name Blackthorn) decides that it is time to go back to the States and see his family.  So he goes to town to sell his belongings for the money he needs, but on his way back to the ranch he is shot at and loses his horse and everything with it.  The shooter is Eduardo, a young Spanish mining engineer, who claims that a posse is out to get him because he stole money from a mining company.  Eventually the two men team up to retrieve the stolen money and evade the posse.  Mortality is weighing on Butch’s mind, and at times he flashes back to his early days with Sundance and Etta.  This movie is just a little slow-paced for me, but other than that, I quite liked it.  We don’t see Westerns much anymore.

ANONYMOUS.  This movie takes the position that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, the Earl of Oxford did.  He apparently is a favorite candidate among the Shakespeare-didn’t-write-his-plays crowd.  I don’t really care one way or the other who wrote the plays, but I would want a movie like this to clearly explain its position.  But I found the court politics surrounding this theory confusing, and was expected to believe plot twists that I just couldn’t buy.  The movie is kind of fun in depicting the Elizabethan era, but it’s too long, and like I said, just didn’t make enough sense.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE.   Martha escapes from the at-first-glance bucolic commune she is living on and has her estranged sister Lucy come pick her up.  Lucy feels guilty for not having been there for Martha when their mother died, so she wants to make it up to Martha.  But Martha is very odd.  It turns out what she was escaping from was a seriously creepy cult led by John Hawkes, and she is dealing with PTSD from having lived there for two years.  The movie flashes back and forth from Martha’s experiences in the cult to her trying to cope with the real world at her sister’s house (although she never tells her sister the truth about what she has been through).  Martha is just falling apart.  Well-acted, and believable, I guess, but this isn’t my kind of movie.  I just don’t enjoy movies where the main character is suffering some kind of psychological breakdown (like Black Swan last year) and you are just waiting for something horrible to happen.

A VERY HAROLD AND KUMAR CHRISTMAS (3D).  The 76% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes who gave this a positive rating must have been high when they saw it.  I wish I had been, it might have helped.  I laughed a lot at their first movie, even though it was stupid,  but this one is horrible; I laughed maybe twice.  The plot doesn’t matter, so I won’t relay it here.   The 3D was good though, and they played it for the gimmick it is.

October movie reviews

50/50.  Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kyle (Seth Rogen) are best friends.  At 28, Joseph gets diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his back, and his chances for surviving aren’t that great.  So the movie takes us on his journey of dealing with this life-threatening illness.  There for him are Kyle and his girlfriend Bryce Dallas Howard (though she isn’t really the supportive type).  Joseph also goes to a young therapist (Anna Kendrick), who is just starting out and doesn’t have the professional facade down pat quite yet.  Angelica Huston has a great small role as Adam’s mother, and Philip Baker Hall is a member the chemo club.  Adam goes through the usual stages; anger, grief, accepatance, etc., while the people around him do what they can (or can’t) to support him.   Fairly amusing, I didn’t dislike the movie; it’s actually quite entertaining.  But for some reason I kept thinking that if the two leads had been women instead, this would have been a good fit for the Lifetime network.

IDES OF MARCH.  Stephen (Ryan Gosling) is the ambitious and idealistic press secretary for progressive presidential candidate Governor Morris (George Clooney), who is fighting to win the Ohio primary.  Winning the primary will ensure he wins the nomination.  Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti (who works for the opponent) are more cynical campaign managers and Marisa Tomei is a reporter.  This is probably a fairly decent representation of the workings of a campaign, but midway through the story an event involving an intern (Evan Rachel Wood) takes place that threatens to upend the Governor’s candidacy.  I just didn’t believe the intern’s character, so it was hard to buy into everything that follows.  It exists solely to move the plot along and show how cynical the political process and players are.  Although the movie is well done and acted, I really don’t care for politics, so I just didn’t enjoy the movie (as it just confirms my cynicism about national politics).

PUSS IN BOOTS.  I am a fan of Puss as he is in the Shrek movies.  Here, the character carries a movie on his own, with a story line that includes a golden goose, Jack and Jill, and Humpty Dumpty.  The movie will probably entertain children, and won’t make parents want to slit their wrists, but for a 90 minute movie, it seemed kind of long to me.  It didn’t have enough humor to entertain this adult.

MARGIN CALL.  This movie involves a crisis for a large financial institution (like Goldman Sachs).  During layoffs, a young analyst (Zachary Quint) is given a file to work on by fired risk manager Stanley Tucci.  Working late at night, he discovers that the assumptions that company has been making about their financial products is wildly overblown, and once the outside world realizes they aren’t worth anything (which they will soon), the company will go under.  He calls his boss (Paul Bettany) who calls his boss (Kevin Spacey) and so on, until the highest levels of the company are all in the office (Simon Baker, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons).  They need to decide what to do before the markets open in the morning.  Very much a look at what brought on the 2008 crisis, and even though one can guess where things will go, it still kept my interest throughout the movie, mostly because the characters are well drawn.  And it is frightening to see how most of the people in the company didn’t even understand the details of the work they were doing; it was just an obsession with making money with no concern for the larger picture.

TAKE SHELTER.  Michael Shannon is a ordinary working class guy with a wife and daughter he loves.  But one day, he starts having apocylptic visions and nightmares.  Horrible storms, swarming birds… He tries to deal with visions, checking books on mental illness out of the library, because he does know that what he is seeing isn’t real.  But he starts feeling himself spiraling out of control, so he reaches out to family and therapists.  At the same time, he starts preparing for something horrible to happen, which makes friends and family question just what the hell he is doing.  He is making them nervous.  The viewer knows something bad will happen, but isn’t sure quite what.  The movie felt long to me, although there is some suspense.  But this just isn’t my kind of movie.

WE WERE HERE.  Docomentary on the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.  The movie consists of interviews with five people who lived in SF during the 80’s and 90’s, and they talk about what it was like.  Good movie, be prepared to get misty-eyed.  It’s so sad.