MOVIE REVIEW
The Road (2009)
Macall Polay/2929/Dimension Films
John Hillcoat’s book-to-film adaptation “The Road” does everything it can to repel. The cinematography — while quite remarkable — is layered in grime, depicting a landscape decimated after unexplained destruction. The very few actors seen in the film (prominently Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) look distressed throughout, smeared in dirt and unrelenting desperation. A somber, bleak story of a father’s undying love for his son in the face of hopelessness, “The Road” even comes equipped with images of a pistol pressed against a little boy’s forehead and a father washing a man’s brains out of his son’s hair.
Continue reading “Once Upon a Time of the Wolf” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Box (2009)
Dale Robinette/Warner Bros. Pictures
The most cynical fans of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” consider 1963 to be the year that the immortal television series jumped the shark, albeit momentarily. In its fourth season, the beloved anthology program expanded its episodes from 30 minutes to a full hour with decidedly mixed results. For every superlative entry, such as the Martin Balsam-starring “The New Exhibit,” that justified the stretched-out running time, that uneven season also gave viewers interminable bores the likes of “I Dream of Genie.” What fans — along with Mr. Serling alike — learned in ’63 was that, on the whole, the tried-and-true “Twilight Zone” structure (three to-the-point acts leading to a head-smacking ending) worked best at a half-hour clip.
Richard Kelly — the 34-year-old, .500-batting filmmaker responsible for 2001’s wondrous “Donnie Darko” and its inferior follow-up, 2007’s all-kinds-of-wrong “Southland Tales” — should have sat with “I Dream of Genie” before taking on “The Box.” Based on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story “Button, Button,” “The Box” operates with a pure “Twilight Zone” level, that of a morality tale disguised masked in creepy mood. Mr. Matheson wrote 16 of Serling’s “Twilight Zone” scripts, and saw “Button, Button” adapted into a sloppy episode of the show’s early 1980s revival. At least Mr. Kelly’s film is better than that. Still, at 110 scatterbrained minutes, Mr. Kelly’s film pushes Mr. Matheson’s perfectly fine short work to the point of narrative obesity. Two problematic 1963 “Twilight Zone” episodes for the price of one.
Continue reading “Fright on the Button” »
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
Collapse (2009)
Vitagraph Films
In “Collapse,” documentary filmmaker Chris Smith subjects his audience to 82 uninterrupted minutes of the dire end-of-the-world scenario foreseen by former L.A.P.D. officer and freelance journalist Michael Ruppert. The protagonist — in his sure-footed intensity, unwavering commitment to his ideas and knack for what he proclaims to be, “conspiracy fact” — seems at first glance to be one of those nutty prophets of doom one periodically encounters around major American cities and in the murky depths of the Internet. The movie sounds insufferable, but it’s not.
Continue reading “Profit of Doom” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
With "The Disappearance of Alice Creed," screenwriter and first-time director J Blakeson has avoided the numerous pitfalls that befall many fledgling filmmakers by thinking small. Shot in four weeks with a cast of just three actors, Mr. Blakeson has evidently concentrated on getting the crucial aspects of successful filmmaking just right; a strong cast, slick direction and an engrossing plot that’s brimming with greed and deceit.
Continue reading “Wit to Be Tied” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Pirate Radio (2009)
Alex Bailey/Focus Features
A box office bomb in Britain, “The Boat That Rocked” has been re-titled, re-edited and handed off to Focus Features for its American release. The move is unlikely to help matters. Now known as “Pirate Radio,” Richard Curtis’s tribute to the illegal radio stations that broadcast rock music to Britain in the 1960s functions as no more than a halfhearted collection of scenarios and characters that’d be more at home in a sitcom.
Continue reading “Humor Misses the Boat” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009)
ImageMovers Digital
If there’s one definitive conclusion to be drawn from “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” it’s this: Motion-capture animation, as practiced by Robert Zemeckis, doesn’t work. This is the third film in the director’s continuing experiment with the technology and — five years after “The Polar Express” — he and his team still haven’t figured out how to preserve the human qualities of the actors beneath the deadened mannequin demeanor forced upon them by the technology.
Continue reading “The Last of All, Hopefully” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
Lena Herzog/66th Venice Film Festival
“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” — which director Werner Herzog only made when screenwriter William Finkelstein gave him “a solemn oath” that it wasn’t a remake of Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” — is as much about a particular idea of post-Katrina New Orleans as it is the bad lieutenant of its title. It’s a depiction of a fevered, lawless world of decay, in which morality and the proper modes of human conduct have fallen by the wayside. The forces of good have left for drier ground, and all that’s left are the looters, exploiters and the drugged.
Continue reading “Drawn and French Quartered” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fourth Kind (2009)
Simon Vesrano/Universal Pictures
The pretension that suffocates "The Fourth Kind" belittles common sense. Writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi wants his film — equal parts dramatization of a Nome, Alaska-based psychologist's close encounters of the fourth kind (alien abduction), which were supposedly recorded in 2000 and said "archival footage" from the hypnosis sessions — to leave the audience in uncomfortable deliberation: Was what we just saw real? Could that have actually happened? The way Mr. Osunsanmi conducts "The Fourth Kind," though, those questions are repeatedly silenced by his increasingly hokey structure. A stacked deck of sci-fi promise is squandered.
Continue reading “X-Filing Away” »
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” »