MOVIE REVIEW
The Scouting Book for Boys (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
David (Thomas Turgoose) and Emily (Holliday Grainger) are the only staff kids in a vacation trailer park in Norfolk, the unfashionable part of England that’s the butt of every joke. David’s dad (Tony Maudsley) runs the pub, while Emily’s mother Carol (Susan Lynch) runs the convenience store. David and Emily are teenagers at that awkward stage between childishness and maturity. Emily in particular flips between flaunting her sexuality and throwing epic temper tantrums. Especially now the summer is ending, they spend all of their time together, swimming in the public pools, playing in the arcade, dreaming of adulthood. Then Emily learns Carol wants her to go live with her dad and disappears.
Continue reading “My Summer of Loss” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Morphia (2008)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
"Morphia" is the most nihilistic moviegoing experience possible, which is meant as a supreme compliment. It's based on the autobiographical stories of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose most famous work, "The Master and Margarita," is about the devil coming to 1920s Moscow. In this film though the young Dr. Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin) is in a remote rural hospital in 1917, and the devil is morphine.
Continue reading “Just What the Doctor Disordered” »
MOVIE REVIEW
His & Hers (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
The movie's gimmick is very simple. Women are filmed in their homes, talking about the men in their lives. But a little more thought has gone into "His & Hers;" the movie begins with a diapered infant being laid down on a layette, and ends with the shot of an elderly woman sitting alone in a home. In between the women featured go up incrementally in age from the first child interviewed — aged about seven — to elderly women who still live on their own.
Continue reading “Irish Springs of Life” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Séraphine (2008)
Music Box Films
The act of painting is a visual one and therefore inherently cinematic. Artists are usually interesting individuals with complicated personal lives and dramatic outlooks — or so the stereotypes say. So movies about painters are visually and dramatically interesting. Except, of course, when they are not.
Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was a bonne à toute faire (a woman worker who could do anything in the home; literally, a jill-of-all-trades) in Senlis, a small town outside Paris, in the 1910s when she started working for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German escaping the city life of Paris. They interacted as a bourgeois bohemian normally interacts with his cleaner, until he realized that she painted. As it happened, he was one of Europe's premier art critics, and so Séraphine's career was born.
Continue reading “Juggling Scrub Brush and Paint Brush” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Brothers (2009)
Lorey Sebastian/Lionsgate
This is a war film only in that war is an easy background for bad things to happen. What Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) experiences could have taken place anywhere, to any terribly unlucky person. It's just that when your helicopter crashes in Afghanistan you are unluckier than most.
Continue reading “Action Is No Reward” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Nowhere Boy (2009)
Icon Film Distribution
Biopics of musical figures are becoming commonplace. What was fresh with "Ray" and "Walk the Line" is now not so much. And when the subject of your film is famously bigger than Jesus, it’s difficult to bring a unique selling point to your movie. John Lennon inspires deathless admiration for his music, his sardonic wit and his guitar playing. But this movie is not really about him. It’s about the women who brought him up.
Continue reading “Just Like Starting Over” »
MOVIE REVIEW
We Live in Public (2009)
Donna Ferrato/Interloper Films
Well-known investment advice says never to put your money with the early adopters. The first company to break into a new sector will make mistakes that the second or third company to do will avoid, so that's where your money should go. In the same way, the initial idea for new format or style of doing something usually doesn't go mainstream without being watered down or changed in some way (think reality TV shows or anything shown on a fashion catwalk). But without the early adopters, where would we be?
Continue reading “Lives Wired” »
MOVIE REVIEW
A Prophet (2009)
Roger Arpajou/Sony Pictures Classics
This movie could have been called "An Education." Nineteen-year-old Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives in an adult prison in France for a five-year stretch with only a hidden 50-franc note that’s immediately confiscated. He has no friends or family on the outside to send him money, and knows no one inside either. Immediately this isolation brings him to the attention of César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) — the godfather among the prisoners — who requires a favor. And if Malik doesn’t oblige, he will be killed.
"A Prophet" follows Malik and the ramifications of this favor throughout his prison career, as he works toward leaving his incarceration a very different man from the frightened teenager who came in. The prison is very obviously not realistic — just as dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs, they can also sniff out mobile phones, for one example — but the liberties taken are understandable dramatic license. Because what director Jacques Audiard has done is throw down the gauntlet for a revolution.
Continue reading “Arrested Devolvement” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Dear Lemon Lima, (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
Every hit film spawns a few imitators. For your setting, pick a location not frequently shown in movies. Make your lead character peripherally involved in high-school politics. Give them some friends who want nothing more to help further them in their goal. There’s some amusing attempts at physical activity, and broad comedy at the expense of the actors of color. Work in an emotional dance scene. Oh, and don’t forget the repeated drawings on lined paper, frequent use of sign language and even references to tater tots.
In other words, first-time writer-director Suzi Yoonessi’s “Dear Lemon Lima,” is “Napoleon Dynamite” for girls. Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong) lives in Alaska with her single mother (Eleanor Hutchins). Her absent father is Yup’ik, which qualifies her for a scholarship to the private school attended by her on/off boyfriend Philip (Shayne Topp, alternating his Tom Cruise and Owen Wilson impressions) where she meets a group of equally misfit kids. One of them, Hercule (Zane Huett of “Desperate Housewives”), is her next door neighbor whom she has somehow never met. When she learns the other cliques call the kids like her “FUBARs,” Vanessa is outraged; when she learns what that means, she is incandescent. The only way to show them is to put together a team to triumph in the annual winter sports competition.
Continue reading “Out of This Ghost World” »
MOVIE REVIEW
45365 (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
There is something special about small-town America. If you’ve lived in a place your whole life, you can really get under the skin. You know where to go, what to do, and whom to do it with. You know who the characters are and what their stories are; and you can usually figure out what’s the most succinct way of demonstrating the character of the place to a visitor.
Something along the lines must have been in the minds of the Ross brothers — Bill IV and Turner — when they began filming “45365,” the zip code of Sidney, Ohio and the hometown they decided to film for about six months in 2007. They went on ride-alongs with the local cops, followed a local judicial candidate on his campaign trail and sat in with the D.J.s at the radio stations while they took requests. They filmed kids playing baseball; girls arguing with their boyfriends on the phone; men taking their sons to the barbershop; and the ex-wives of a man shaking their heads together over his current situation.
Continue reading “Deep in the Heart of It All” »