Tag: film review

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Homefront wounds exposed.

How am I to feel about Paul Haggis? The creative force behind two of the last three Best Picture Oscar winners (writer of Million Dollar Baby and writer/director of Crash), Haggis is hotter than anybody not named Apatow in Hollywood. But Million Dollar Baby left me feeling sucker-punched with melodrama in the last act, and Crash left me feeling bullied into a corner and browbeaten with lofty message.

But Haggis is also the guy who helped breathe life into James Bond in Casino Royale and acquitted himself admirably as co-author of Clint Eastwood’s WWII diptych (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima).

And now he’s made In the Valley of Elah. Inspired by actual events, the plot is about a soldier, just back from Iraq, who has gone missing, and the concerned father, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), who investigates his disappearance. The movie kicks up all kinds of dust about combat stress, the horrors of war, the loss of patriotism, and parents coming to grips with the wages of their convictions. This was, I told myself going in, the exact kind of movie Haggis would ruin for me. I’m pleased to report I was wrong.

The bulk of the film is dressed up like a mystery. Hank is a classic red-stater, of the strong and silent mold: former military investigator, pickup-truck driver, prays before meals, drinks Beam. When Hank gets the call from the Army that his son has gone AWOL, he doesn’t believe it: The son he raised would never have been derelict in his duties. Hank’s wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) is a bundle of nerves over it. In the course of Hank’s search, he enlists the aid of Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a townie cop near the army base.

Jones is perfectly cast. The script fails him in tracing Hank’s growing disillusionment with his country and its institutions, but Jones sells each moment he’s given. Also, apparently, when Theron tries to look plain and not ethereally beautiful, it means she’s serious about a role. It’s the equivalent of Robin Williams’ beard. In Elah, her acting’s mostly fine, but some of the dialogue is too tin for her ear.

In the Valley of Elah is solemnly anti-war (little “w”). Its depictions of soldiers broken by the experience are universal. But Haggis sets the film very specifically — November 1, 2004 — making it a historical drama. American flags fly in front of every house and on cars. Bush’s voice echoes on the radio, and the Iraq War fills TV screens. One character says, “They shouldn’t send heroes to a place like Iraq.” In this sense, the film is anti-War (big “W”). Haggis doesn’t successfully spell out what makes Iraq different from any other war, especially with Vietnam looming a generation ago. But I believe that he believes it. And, in 2004, the cuts were fresh enough to wound faith.

In the Valley of Elah

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

After Violence

A subterranean favorite best known for “body horror” flicks (They Came From Within), coal-black comedies (The Brood), squishy remakes (The Fly), and outré exercises (Crash — the car-wreck sex-cult movie, not the platitude-packed Oscar winner), the superb Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg went mainstream a couple of years ago with A History of Violence. A director-for-hire studio product, the film boasted Cronenberg’s biggest budget ever and marked his first film set in the United States since 1983’s The Dead Zone. But as mainstream entertainment, A History of Violence was a bit of a Trojan horse. It honored Hollywood convention but only in the service of interrogating it.

On the surface, Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is an aesthetic sequel to A History of Violence. Both films open with bloody, unsettling pre-credit sequences. Both cast Viggo Mortensen as an outwardly calm man capable of great violence and pair him with a striking blonde (Maria Bello in Violence, Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises). And both films chart the disruptive intersection of a seedy criminal underworld and middle-class domestic normalcy.

But where Violence only seemed old-fashioned, Eastern Promises really is. Emotionally and morally, A History of Violence left the viewer in an uncertain, unsettling place. Eastern Promises‘ denouement is more abrupt and less tidy, but it sets the moral world in order in the manner Hollywood films are expected to.

But if Eastern Promises is a less ambitious film than is the norm for Cronenberg, it’s still a fine one. A filmmaker of great technical skill and visual economy, Cronenberg hooks the viewer from the beginning with a crisp opening sequence that sets the entire plot in motion with two deaths and a birth. You can further sense his sure hand with the way key bits of back story are parceled out.

Eastern Promises was written by Steven Knight and covers the same London-immigrant-underworld milieu as his Dirty Pretty Things. Here, Watts plays Anna, a midwife of mixed British and Russian ancestry who pockets the diary of a hemorrhaging, unidentified 14-year-old who dies while giving birth. Attempting to translate the diary in order to find the newborn’s family, Anna is pulled into the world of the London-based Russian mob, led by menacing restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his weak, erratic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill’s mysterious driver/bodyguard Nikolai (Mortensen) takes a protective interest in Anna.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is a classic screen creation. A brooding, mysterious, and dangerous figure, Nikolai’s body is covered in prison tattoos that are markers of experience within the Russian mob. These tattoos take on a key narrative role when they’re used by a couple of revenge-seeking Chechens to (mis)identify Nikolai in a bathhouse. The ensuing savage, two-on-one knife attack is the film’s centerpiece, with Mortensen’s full nudity ratcheting up the vulnerability and queasiness of the scene.

Though Mortensen’s Nikolai is iconic, Watts also functions as part of the visual design, seen often riding a motorcycle through the London streets in a constellation of black — jacket, boots, helmet, sunglasses — broken up by blond hair and tight blue jeans.

If this visually striking, expertly directed film falls short of Cronenberg’s usual standards, it’s because of a script that’s too conventional, something underscored by a key revelation about Nikolai’s motivation that suggests a lesser, more procedurally oriented crime film than what Eastern Promises strives to be.

Eastern Promises

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Vitus

Vitus may be the best of the occasionally explored film genre about child prodigies, of which Little Man Tate, Searching for Bobby Fischer, (half of) Shine, and (one-tenth of) Magnolia are notables. In Vitus, the titular youngster is shown at ages 6 (Fabrizio Borsani) and 12 (Teo Gheorghiu, himself gifted) as his genius piano ability is discovered and cultivated by his parents, Helen (Julika Jenkins) and Leo (Urs Jucker). Vitus’ grandfather (Bruno Ganz), a charmer, figures prominently in the talented youth’s life as well.

Vitus is a curious and clever boy and is very easy to root for. When he rebels, it’s not the snotty flare-ups of a kid trying to deal with his exceptionality relative to his peers. Rather, it’s against his parents, who push him in directions he’s reluctant to go. Vitus just wants to be normal; his parents, of course, want what’s best for him, which in their opinion is for him to not be normal.

The film scores big points by doing right by Helen and Leo. Like many parents, they load expectations onto their kids by assuming them to be special at something. When their child turns out to actually be gifted, Helen and Leo aren’t surprised. They make mistakes in raising Vitus, but they’re no villains. Vitus also understands the audience’s own strong desire and need, as they become foster parents of a sort, to see the child prodigy be a success and gain renown.

With its keen ear and eye for the psychology of parenting — and without scrimping on entertainment value and charm — Vitus is a joy to watch.

Opens Friday, September 14th, at Ridgeway Four.

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Film Features Film/TV

A Global-Warming Lesson Plan

Because The 11th Hour — Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Peterson’s fast-paced, oddly breezy new global-warming documentary — seldom offers any much-needed time to catch one’s breath and think about the numerous worthy issues it brings up, I’ve put together some discussion questions for use during and after the screening. Make no mistake. The 11th Hour is a noble film with a noble purpose. In trying to cover every aspect of the global-warming crisis, it works so hard that it practically sweats sincerity and good intentions. But its educational strategies could use a little guidance.

Short-Answer Questions:

1. If one of the principal problems our society has with global warming is its vast and complex sources and origins, why try for a sweeping overview of the topic rather than a focused, well-documented exploration of one or two key facets of the problem?

2. Why is it so hard for scientists to ponder (much less mention) the concept of God even though most of their pleas for climate control and citizen action are based on their carefully unspoken belief in the preservation and maintenance of a mysterious, nondenominational “spiritual force” that we need to preserve?

3. Why do the eyes of so many climatologists, researchers, and philosophers in The 11th Hour shine with something not unlike glee when they prophesy the imminent destruction of humanity?

4. In a film whose second half overflows with promising solutions to many of the climate and energy difficulties posed in the first half, why don’t the filmmakers spend more time examining the eco-friendly designs that apparently exist already?

5. If consumerism and advertising culture are two of the main obstacles preventing humans from living a less materialistic, more eco-friendly existence, why do so many of the montages from The 11th Hour feel like infomercials or music videos?

6. Why are polar bears and penguins such indie-film fetish objects?

Long Essay:

Discuss the significance of David Suzuki’s observation — “extinction is a natural part of life” — as it relates to the future of documentary films that, while intermittently thoughtful and powerful, lack the patience and intelligence to develop their central arguments.

The 11th Hour

Opening Friday, September 14th

Studio on the Square

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Shooting Blanks

The day before I saw Shoot ‘Em Up, I attended an advance screening of Eastern Promises, the latest film (set to open in Memphis September 21st) from brilliant Canadian director David Cronenberg. Both films feature scenes in which a male protagonist (Clive Owen in Shoot ‘Em Up, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises) is attacked in a bathroom by a knife-wielding baddie.

If you want a demonstration of the gulf that separates concept from execution, especially in regard to action cinema, then see these two movies and juxtapose these similar scenes. The bathroom (bath house, actually) battle in Eastern Promises is bracing and uncomfortable. With minimal camera movement or editing, you feel the physicality of the action and the force of Mortensen’s performance. In Shoot ‘Em Up, the action is so dark, blurry, shaky, and chopped up, you may find yourself squinting and bobbing your head to try and get a better look. There are novel ideas in the scene — Owen uses the heat from the automated hand dryer to force his attacker to drop his weapon — but they get lost in the noise and clutter. And so it is with much of Shoot ‘Em Up‘s breathless, overheated 86 minutes.

Shoot ‘Em Up — which pits Owen as everyman action hero against Paul Giamatti’s scenery-chomping criminal commando — goes gonzo less than five minutes in, as a pregnant woman flees a gun-brandishing predator by ducking into an empty warehouse. Innocent bystander Owen comes to the woman’s rescue and ends up delivering her baby while fighting off a dozen or so attackers in a lavish gun battle as remixed Nirvana pounds away on the soundtrack.

The scenario is like something from a John Woo film (think Hard Boiled or The Killer), but where Woo instilled his ridiculously grandiose action set pieces with near-guileless conviction, writer/director Michael Davis makes self-consciousness his very mission. As a result, Shoot ‘Em Up aims to come across as something like a compendium of Woo highlights as filtered through the artificial, ironic video game/graphic novel/cartoon sensibilities of movies such as The Matrix, Sin City, and Raising Arizona.

Davis is more a scenarist than screenwriter, as Shoot ‘Em Up is packed with cool action-scene ideas. There’s a baby on a merry-go-round targeted by a villainous shooter, the child’s good-guy protector shooting at the handle to spin the contraption around and foul up the assassin’s shot. There’s a Rube Goldberg series of booby-trapped gun devices Owen’s hero uses to slay a score of foils in a firearms factory.

One scene has Owen and Italian screen goddess Monica Bellucci having sex while bad guys burst in, forcing Owen to grab a gun and finish off his attacker while he’s finishing off Bellucci. In concept, that’s gold. In execution, it somehow manages to underwhelm.

Though some ideas are rewarded with commensurate follow-though — a head-on car collision Owen uses to catapult himself into better shooting position, a skydiving shoot-out that ends with a static wide shot of downed villains littering a field like mosquitoes on a windshield — most aren’t. Too often in Shoot ‘Em Up, editing and effects reign over real human movement or inspired camera movement or placement. Blurry, hectic visuals attempt to scam the viewer into the illusion of great action scenes that aren’t quite there. The result is too often as tedious as watching a video game rather than playing one.

Shoot ‘Em Up

Now playing

Multiple locations