MOVIE REVIEW
Ong Bak 2/Ong-Bak: The Beginning (2008)
Magnet Releasing
In “Ong Bak 2,” Thai martial artist Tony Jaa flips above, kicks, punches and places choke holds on his many opponents, all when he’s not leaping across and taming a herd of elephants. Mr. Jaa, the star and co-director (with Panna Rittikrai), sends the camera on frenzied fits of pans, zooms and swoops, with shock cuts taken from all sorts of angles. Frequently, the film stock is sped up or slowed down, while the actors enthusiastically enter the heightened world of extreme battles and betrayals.
Continue reading “The Thai That Spellbinds” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Spike Jonze has spent years putting together this ambitious adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” one of the iconic staples of 20th-century children’s literature. In so doing, he and co-writer Dave Eggers have had to find a way to transform a 337-word story into a full-length feature, padding out the themes of loneliness and mischievousness that characterized Mr. Sendak’s exploration of the child psyche.
Continue reading “Bless the Beasts and Children” »
MOVIE REVIEW
St. Trinian's (2007)
NeoClassics Films
This sixth “St. Trinian’s" film, which opened in Britain in 2007 before finally earning its American release this week, attempts to reboot the franchise based on the work of Ronald Searle. Beginning with 1954’s “The Belles of St. Trinian’s” and culminating, or so it seemed, with “The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s” (1980), it’s a beloved comedy series in Britain, if only a semi-known one stateside.
Continue reading “High School Debacle” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Trucker (2009)
Kevin Estrada/Trucker Productions
Set against the vast expanse of the American West, James Mottern’s “Trucker” tells the story of a lone wolf who’s an archetype in every way but these: She’s a woman and a mother. As played by Michelle Monaghan, Diane is as hard-nosed and rugged as the California dessert she inhabits, prone to spending weeks on the road driving her truck, aggressive random sexual encounters and some serious drinking.
The picture, which resists the pull of easy catharsis and obvious emotion, depicts the ways her personality modifies when circumstances find her caring for the adolescent son Peter (Jimmy Bennett) she abandoned more than a decade ago. The story of the reformation of a mother-son bond has been told many times before, while the relationship traverses the predictable range from mutual disgust and unease to powerful love.
Continue reading “Keep on Trucking With Son in Tow” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Damned United (2009)
Laurie Sparham/Sony Pictures Classics
Sport at the highest levels can very often be boiled down to little more than a clash of egos. For proof, look no further than the me first attitudes of such N.F.L. players as Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco, who take to the sidelines, the media and their Twitter accounts to let their favorable self-impressions be known. This fundamental principle applies to the political world as well, the behind-the-scenes complications of which have helped the screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan make his name with his work on “The Deal,” “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon.”
Continue reading “An Ego Flies Out of Bounds” »
MOVIE REVIEW
A Serious Man (2009)
Wilson Webb/Focus Features
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives the quintessential postwar American dream. He has a nice suburban Minneapolis home, a picturesque family of four and a car all his own. He gets up each morning and goes to work at a university, where he’s being considered for tenure. He’s a pillar of the local Jewish community and fashions himself a success, wholly contended with the direction of his life.
But the year is 1967, it’s the Summer of Love, and the tumult that will upend the social mores of the first two decades of the baby boom has begun brewing. Although “A Serious Man,” the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, only obliquely references the changes manifesting well beyond Larry’s front porch, they’re felt throughout a narrative that finds the bedrocks of the character’s well-heeled life methodically upended. Commencing with quotes from the Jewish scholar Rashi and Jefferson Airplane, the movie brilliantly considers one of the ultimate questions: Is there some order, some higher plan, that shapes our existence, or are we going at it alone?
Continue reading “The Mensch Who Wasn’t There” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Disgrace (2008)
Paladin
While most works of literature and cinema centered on South Africa have focused on the experience of Apartheid, Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” — a Booker Prize winning novel published in 1999 — broke from that trend. An urgent piece of contemporary fiction that serves as a warning against false complacency in the post-Apartheid era, it reveals a country still torn at its roots despite the progress that had occurred earlier in the decade.
Continue reading “Cry Thraldom” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Surrogates (2009)
Touchstone Pictures
There’s an interesting movie buried inside “Surrogates,” but it rarely emerges. From director Jonathan Mostow and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, the film squanders a premise rife with potential on rote police theatrics. A lackadaisical adaptation of the eponymous graphic novel series penned by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, the picture trades in hoary Bruce Willis procedural clichés and underdeveloped conceits.
Continue reading “Virtually Living Vicariously” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Informant! (2009)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Lest one be fooled by the presence of full-fledged movie star, Matt Damon. This should be clear: Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” continues the auteur’s ongoing penchant for experimentation with film form and genre. When considered in a career that includes “sex, lies, and videotape,” “Bubble,” “Full Frontal,” the “Solaris” remake, “Che” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” it’s further proof of Mr. Soderbergh’s admirable conviction to make exactly the movie he wants every single time out.
Continue reading “The Inside Joke” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Crude (2009)
David Gilbert/First Run Features
Environmentally-themed documentaries have been all the rage since Davis Guggenheim offered the
previously unfathomable revelation that Al Gore giving a PowerPoint lecture could
be made dramatic. In fact, multifaceted movies about our brewing natural
crises — once the forte of activists and special-interest filmmakers — have
become such a norm, that there’s a definite threat of oversaturation. This year
alone has produced “Earth Days,” “No Impact Man” and “At the Edge of the World,”
among others.
Yet
director Joe Berlinger keeps “Crude” — his crack at eco-themed issue oriented
filmmaking — from seeming passé. That’s because he’s chosen a voluble,
compelling subject: the ongoing law suit filed by Ecuadorean natives against
oil giant Texaco (now Chevron), alleging years of unmitigated pollution of their
waters and lands. Embedded in the story — which alternates between scenes of
lawyerly machinations, the compiling of sad stories of the victims and a
look at the media’s representations of the case — are enough intriguing
characters and moments of high human drama for it to function more like a piece
of effective fiction than a work of overwrought agitprop.
Continue reading “Chevron Drinks the Amazon’s Milkshake; Chevron Drinks It Up” »