Verve Pictures
The year 2011 was probably not one that will be best remembered for its cinema. As the world swirled with upheaval, the movies we saw didn't quite manage to capture the frenetic pace of change around us. Since movies usually take about three years to make, this is not completely surprising; but it does seem a shame that so few of our artists are ahead of the times. This is also the year in which Steven Spielberg — executive producer of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" — proclaimed his disappointment that so few truly great movies were being made these days. Darkness was one theme very visible in the year's films, usually darkness without real reason other than the director wanted to see what he could get away with. So among other things we had — spoiler alert — a father selling his child for cash ("Real Steel"), a man sleeping with his girlfriend's mother in a fit of pique ("Beautiful Lies") and — possibly worst of all — Buzz Aldrin lending credibility to Michael Bay's hard-on for space-program conspiracies (the aforementioned "Transformers"). This is very depressing. No wonder we’re not as interested any more. To top it off, when all the comedies that actually like their characters have moved to television, is it any wonder that people stay in?
Continue reading “Art of Darkness” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Coriolanus (2011)
Larry D. Horricks/The Weinstein Company
You can tell a lot about an actor by the vanity projects he or she undertakes, by which we mean the films an actor self-finances once he or she has made it big in Hollywood. Some actors choose to take small parts in defiant anti-blockbusters, such as when Ewan McGregor followed “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” with “Young Adam,” about a raping, stealing, murdering canal-boat worker in 1950s Glasgow. Other times an actor will take his money to direct something, such as when Samantha Morton used the clout of her Oscar nominations to direct “The Unloved,” about a girl abandoned to the British foster-care system.
So whatever Ralph Fiennes decided to use his Voldemort paychecks for would be interesting. He’s brought one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays to the screen, set it in a modern, unnamed Eastern bloc country (filmed in Serbia with a mainly Serbian crew) and showed someone shot in the head within the first five minutes. “Coriolanus” does not feel like the work of a first-time director. Mr. Fiennes pulls it off triumphantly. He’s made a historical curiosity relevant now, when our cities are in uproar and the citizens have taken to the streets.
Continue reading “A Very Top Dog to the Commonalty” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chicken With Plums (2011)
Le Pacte
Marjane Satrapi has carved herself a very particular niche, firstly as a cartoonist with an extremely distinctive black-and-white drawing style shown off her in her graphic novels, which are based on her life growing up in Iran. Now living in France, Ms. Satrapi has further branched out into making films based on her graphic novels; the first was 2007’s “Persepolis,” an animated, autobiographical film drawn in her style co-written and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. And now they have reteamed for the live-action — though stylized — “Chicken With Plums.”
Continue reading “Fiddle While Home Burns” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rampart (2011)
55th BFI London Film Festival
“Rampart” is a symphony of bad decisions and their consequences. For example, early in the film Los Angeles cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) chats up a woman (Audra McDonald) in a bar, who persists in wanting to converse despite Dave’s dramatic insults. Evidently, she has a serious cop fetish. When she cheerfully presses for his nickname around the station, he shrugs: “It’s Date Rape.” She flinches; and he explains that many years ago he was involved in a shooting in which a serial rapist was killed. Dear reader, she sleeps with him anyway.
Continue reading “Weasel Weapon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist (2011)
The Weinstein Company
“The Artist” is a movie made out of love. There is no other way to describe it. It is a love letter to cinema, to style and to the art of making movies; and anyone who loves movies needs to see it — now.
It is about the relationship between George Valentin (Jean Dujardin of the “OSS 117” movies) and young Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who was the maid in “A Knight’s Tale”). George is the biggest movie star in 1927 Hollywood; and he meets Peppy when she accidentally drops her handbag at a red-carpet event. Photographs of them together make the front page, to the annoyance of studio head Zimmer (John Goodman, who you can tell enjoyed himself). But the fuss gets Peppy — and her legs — work as an extra; and her career takes off from there. But as sound comes into movies, George doesn’t realize his star status might change along with the movies.
Continue reading “Silence Is Golden” »
MOVIE REVIEW
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Nicole Rivelli/Oscilloscope Laboratories
For many mothers, their primal, taboo fear is that the children they give birth to will be something unrecognizable, something they cannot control, maybe even something evil. “Rosemary’s Baby,” which was based on a hugely successful novel, took this fear to the extreme. But now there is the only slightly less extreme “We Need to Talk About Kevin” — also based on a novel — and coming to our screens with the same level of horrified anticipation.
Continue reading “Sowing the Bad Seed” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Like Crazy (2011)
Fred Hayes/Paramount Vantage
“Like Crazy” is the story of an attachment, but without the glue. It is meant to be a romance between British journalist Anna (Felicity Jones) and American furniture maker Jacob (Anton Yelchin), who meet cute as students in Los Angeles and rapidly fall in love. Drake Doremus’s direction styles the film in a series of brief vignettes, skipping forward like a highlight reel, with the unfortunate result that we never get under Anna’s or Jacob’s skin. After a problem with American border control, they text; they call; sometimes they even meet in her cramped London apartment. But beyond the scenes of their initial attraction, their relationship is oddly hollow.
Continue reading “Distance Lends Disenchantment” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Las acacias (2012)
Verve Pictures
“Las acacias” is about a long-haul truck driver, Rubén (Germán de Silva), and the once-in-a-lifetime chance which arrives in his cab in the shape of Jacinta (Hebe Duarte) and her little daughter Anahí (Nayra Calle Mamani). He was hired for a three-day trip driving her past the Paraguayan border down to Buenos Aires; but the baby was not originally part of the deal. Director Pablo Giorgelli filmed in what looks like a real truck — the movie is named after the load of lumber Rubén is carrying — in patently real locations in Argentina and uses this unlikely setup as an opportunity to explore the size of the human heart.
Continue reading “A Kindred Spirit Gets a Lift” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Dark Horse (2011)
Jojo Whilden/37th Deauville
American Film Festival
If Gregg Araki ever decides to remake “Synecdoche, New York,” Todd Solondz might sue the pants off him — because with “Dark Horse,” Mr. Solondz has already done it.
It’s the story of Abe (Jordan Gelber), an overgrown man-child who still lives with his parents, Jackie (Christopher Walken with a bad toupee) and Phyllis (Mia Farrow with some oversize red glasses). He works — after a fashion — for his father’s company; although only the competence of downtrodden colleague Marie (Donna Murphy in an impossible role) keeps him from even greater professional trouble. His main love has been shopping at a big-box toy store whose logo is conspicuously blurred. But that’s before Abe meets Miranda (Selma Blair), a sulky, oddly passive woman who also still lives at home and has a secret.
Continue reading “Welcome to the Doghouse” »
MOVIE REVIEW
You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo (2010)
Films Transit
Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian, was barely alive when American troops captured him in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan that killed an American soldier. Mr. Khadr then spent several months in Bagram before being transferred in February 2003 to Guantánamo Bay, where he was interrogated by Canadian military and intelligence agents for four days in the presence of a C.I.A. officer. The tapes of these interrogations were recently declassified by the Supreme Court of Canada; and directors Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez have built a riveting film around them.
Continue reading “Consequences of Truth” »