January 24th New Releases
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in New Releases
A couple of real surprises this week…. The Whistleblower landed without any hype; in fact I hadn’t even heard of it, but thought the premise seemed promising. It’s based on a true story of a Nebraska beat cop, played by Rachel Wiesz, who joins a private security company contracted to run crime investigations for the U.N. in post-war Bosnia. She uncovers information that her own co-workers are involved in a sex trafficking ring, and risks her own life to expose it. The movie’s heart and soul is the performance by Wiesz, and although the story can be grim at times, it’s a fantastic film.
Hugh Jackman in “Real Steel” is another one that caught me by surprise. I’m not the biggest fan of movies about “mecha” characters, in this case boxing robots, but with Steven Spielberg producing, I figured I had to give it a chance. Glad I did, because it really is a great movie. It has characters that you’ll care about, and kind of heartwarming story about an estranged father and son, and the “boxing” elements take a lot of cues from inspirational stories like Rocky. I mean, let’s be real, it’s not a film for fans of the festival circuit – it’s still about boxing robots – but I suspect that most mainstream viewers are going to watch this and find themselves really enjoying this.
50/50 was marketed at a “laugh-out-loud” comedy, but while there are some great comedic moments featuring Seth Rogan’s trademark potty-monologues, the movie’s core is a story about cancer. Not exactly a topic that evokes hilarity. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who plays Adam) is a great actor who likes to fly under the radar with roles that flirt with the indie scene, and brings that vibe to a more mainstream feature here. He and Rogan have wonderful chemistry together as a pair of shlubs who are dealing, each in their awkward way, with a disease that threatens to kill one of them. Bryce Dallas Howard, as Adam’s cold, emotionally aloof artist-girlfriend, brings the same kind of nasty charm that she brought to The Help. Great cast, great story, great movie.
“Another Earth” – Sci Fi Meets Philosophy
26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Full Movie Reviews, New Releases
Sci-fi movies and books have generally always fallen into one of two categories – the kind where hostile creatures invade and mayhem ensues, and the kind which used alternate universes to explore deeper questions about the nature of humanity. Another Earth falls into the latter. It contains very little in the way of special effects, but poses some pretty deep questions about the threads which hold our life together, for better or worse.
Relative newcomer Brit Marling (who also co-wrote the script) plays Rhoda Williams, a brilliant young student on the verge of entering MIT, whose life comes apart after a night of drunken celebrating, when she gets into a car accident kills the wife and child of a music professor named John Burroughs (played by William Mapother). All of this occurs on the night that astronomers discover a planet which is absolutely identical to Earth, right down to the people living on it. In the moments leading up to her accident, Rhoda is listening to this news on her car radio and looking into the sky. Later, scientists speculate that the moment these two “Earths” discover each other, is also the moment in which their identical histories diverge (a key element to the end of the film).
Flash forward a few years, following a prison sentence, and Rhoda is working as a janitor. She’s plagued with guilt over killing Burroughs’ family, and wants desperately to tell him how sorry she is. Burroughs, meanwhile, is living in squalor, unable to function as a human being any more, let alone continue his career as a professor. Rhoda pretends to be from a company offering free house cleaning, and slowly involves herself in his life to try and save him from the despair that is drowning him.
During the years that Rhoda was in prison, wealthy individuals from the private sector develop a plan to visit the “other” Earth, and offer to give a seat to anyone who writes an essay telling why they would be a good candidate. As you can probably guess, Rhoda enters this competition. And while this sort of story could fall over itself trying to ape just about every cliche the genre has created, it doesn’t. Instead it brings us into the story on a human level, asking audiences to imagine your own life in which everything possible has gone wrong. How would you react if you met yourself in another, parallel universe? What would you say? Would it make anything better? And in the greatest of sci-fi traditions, Another Earth makes no attempt to answer its own questions.
As the film began to wind down, I sat trying to speculate as to how they were going to pull off an ending to a story like this, without making it seem obvious and laughable. All I will say is this, the writers deserve huge kudos for executing one of the most clever conclusions I could imagine. It hearkens back to some of the brilliant Twilight Zone episodes of the golden age, and deftly uses an element of suggestion to leave the audience both satisfied, yet full of questions.
Warrior – Full Review
25 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Full Movie Reviews, New Releases
The premise of “Warrior”, which is the story of two brothers competing in the same UFC-style Mixed Martial Arts tournament, will probably scare off more discerning film fans who dismiss it as another throwaway kickboxing movie. This is unfortunate, because at the heart of this film is one of the most powerful dramatic stories to hit screens in a while. Joel Edgerton, who won raves for his role in the excellent Australian film “Animal Kingdom“, plays Brendan Conlon, a popular high school teacher forced to enter a brutal fighting tournament after hospital bills from his daughter’s illness devastate the family’s finances. His brother Tommy (Tom Hardy), recently returned from a tour in Iraq, enters the same tournament, while being trained by their father Paddy, played by Nick Nolte in one of his best roles in decades.
The emotional key to the story is the complex relationship between the brothers, whose family was shattered by the abusive behavior of their alcoholic father. Long estranged from Paddy, Brendan refuses to have anything to do with him despite the fact that he has obviously cleaned up his act and is nearly 1000 days sober. Tommy, despite enlisting his father’s help in training for the MMA tournament, refuses to make any kind of emotional connection with him or attempt to resolve their past conflicts. Nolte does a marvelous job in a role that tasks him with conveying a man who has lived a hard life and made tragic mistakes as a human being. In a scene where he breaks down after being verbally destroyed by Tommy, Nolte delivers what may be his finest 90 seconds on screen. It’s truly heartbreaking.
The back story surrounding Edgerton’s role as Brendan is a bit more formulaic, with some standard underdog tropes at work. It fits nicely into the “struggling father trying to pay for his little girl’s doctor bills” tradition that Hollywood loves. In fact, it’s Edgerton himself who rescues the story with a fine performance, making some of the cliches more believable.
I also had a hard time buying the coincidence that, in a tournament featuring the top 16 fighters in the WORLD, that two brothers would both make the cut. But, I guess if you just go with it, the unlikely scenario doesn’t really take anything away from the core story.
Although the film is punctuated by some lengthy fight scenes, I hope this doesn’t deter film fans from giving it a chance. Like many of the greatest “sports” movies of all time, the sport itself is not the most important element of the film – the characters are. Films like “Rocky” and “The Natural”, as well as the recent television series “Friday Night Lights”, appeal to a large audience because they tell a story that audiences can connect with. “Warrior” succeeds for the same reasons, and should garner a decent following based on word-of-mouth buzz. It’s a great film.
Midnight In Paris – Full Review
25 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Full Movie Reviews, New Releases
Some of my favorite movie include The Terminator, Alien, and The Matrix. Logic suggests that I shouldn’t even watch, let alone enjoy, a Woody Allen movie. Yet I’ll confess, Midnight In Paris hooked me (and if I’m being honest, I’ll admit it isn’t the first Allen movie I’ve enjoyed – there, I said it).
It’s the kind of movie that works simply because it’s operating on a number of different layers. On the surface, it’s a simple romantic comedy featuring the usual neurotic male lead that Woody Allen loves (and which he himself played in so many films). But underneath is a film that celebrates art & literature, while parodying the self inflated sense of intellectualism that seems to blossom among dilettantes and academics who revere the great works.
Owen Wilson plays Gil, an American screenwriter who travels to Paris with his fiance and her family, and finds himself swept up in the romantic notion that the French capitol holds the key to his desire for success as a serious novel writer. Allen uses a series of scenes where Gil finds himself transported back to parties during the 1920′s, during what he thinks of as the golden age of art and literature. He meets a number of famous faces from this era, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and Gertrude Stein. Gil’s conversations with Ernest Hemingway (played brilliantly by Corey Stoll, a relatively unknown bit actor) make some hilarious references to the larger-than-life persona surrounding the author. This role should open a lot of doors for Stoll.
Whether you love or hate Allen’s movies, one thing that’s undeniable is that he represents a dying generation of filmmakers who are still able to present a signature style. In an age where VOD and illegal downloading has reduced movies to disposable commodities made by interchangeable directors, you can still spot a Woody Allen movie miles away. Like Steven Spielberg and David Fincher, Allen is one of a handful of working directors who still manages to inject his films with a unique voice and vision that fans come to expect, and adore. Young hotshots who think that movies are all about jump-cuts and seamless CGI could take a few lessons from Allen. Midnight In Paris is one of his best in years.
