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Something about Grace Is Gone caught my eye a few months before its release. I guess it was before it became apparent that most of these Iraq movies were going to be critical and box office bombs. I’m also something of a sucker for a well-made tearjerker, plus John Cusack is all-around pretty terrific. Alas, Grace went nowhere during the Oscar season despite buzz for Cusack. It made it to a grand total of 7 theaters in December for just two weekends before disappearing (it then reappeared for two weekends in late January). But even after it bombed it continued to haunt me. Our local arthouse had its poster up well into the spring. It became a recurring theme at Golden Grouches screenings to laugh at how often we’d see the trailer long after it exited theaters.
Finally, finally I was able to see it once it came out on DVD and get that monkey off my back. It’s not superb, but it is better than many of the other War on Terror films that came out in late 2007 like In the Valley of Elah and Rendition. It keeps the story narrowly focused on Cusack’s Stanley Phillips, a man who loses his soldier wife in Iraq. There are no flashbacks, mysteries, or battle sequences- just a solid dose of understated anguish. Faced with telling his two daughters of their mother’s death, he cracks and instead takes them on an impromptu road trip to a Disney World-style resort in Florida.
Yes the tears flowed a little throughout, but there’s a line between earned emotion and manipulation and Grace Is Gone likes to meander back and forth across the line. Read the rest of this entry »
Things We Lost in the Fire is the sort of deliberately-paced, melodramatic family tear-jerker that seems to usually drive the Academy wild. With a bit more cohesion and, more importantly, a lot more box office dollars this film may have gone somewhere.
Which isn’t to say I particularly liked it. I found it decent at best and strangely distant for a film that relies so much on heavy emotion. And I think a lot of that is because almost all of the characters felt wrong.
The film follows Halle Berry’s Audrey, a widow after her husband is murdered, and her two children. It turns out that Brian, the dead husband played in flashbacks by David Duchovny, was pretty much a saint that everybody loved. His childhood friend is Jerry, a down-on-his-luck drug addict played by Benicio Del Toro. Brian has always supported Jerry despite Audrey’s wishes. After Brian’s death she decides to take Jerry in, I guess as sort of a nod to her husband’s kindness.
Jerry ends up becoming like the surrogate Brian to everyone in Brian’s life and the film becomes sort of unintentionally creepy. There’s will they or won’t they tension with Audrey, Brian’s neighborhood pal insists Jerry go running with him like Brian used to, and Jerry gets involved in the children’s lives. Throughout it all I found myself connecting only with unstable, distant, addicted Jerry. With every conflict we’re supposed to be following Jerry’s internal struggle but really all I saw in him was what I was thinking, which was, “This is really weird, right??” Read the rest of this entry »
In the Valley of Elah was a pleasant surprise in that it didn’t completely suck. We all saw the combination of an Iraq War film and Paul Haggis and thought it would be terrible. Instead it was merely bad with a couple of surprisingly good elements.
The film follows Tommy Lee Jones’s Hank Deerfield as he searches for his son, who has gone missing shortly after returning from Iraq. The local police are happy to pass the case to the military police, who are in turn happy to bury it. There is, naturally, an underdog (and female!) local cop who wants to help Hank despite pressures from her department, played by Charlize Theron. The search for Hank’s son is the stuff of Law and Order: dramatic, compelling, and twisty but contrived and unoriginal. You want to find out what happens but you’d rather skip to the end than sit through the journey. The suspects include the son’s fellow soldiers from his tour in Iraq and it’s from this angle we get a lot of Iraq war preaching.
This is the type of war drama/murder mystery where Hank finds his son’s cell phone and a mysterious tech guru only sends him one video recovered from it per day. Each video, conveniently, reveals slightly more than the last. It’s also the type of mystery where the camera lingers obviously over a case-breaking clue that isn’t discovered until a climactic ending and where innocent people act as if they have something to hide when they don’t for no apparent reason. Hank may be deep into the mystery of his lost son but that doesn’t prevent him from telling his wife not to open a package sent from Iraq, in order to “protect” her.
Jones got nominated for Best Actor for this role. It’s a quintessential Jones role: reserved, sharp cop. In that sense I don’t think it was a stretch for him and I liked him better in a similar role in No Country for Old Men. Of course, he gets these parts because he’s damn good at them and he’s good here. I like characters that don’t show a lot of obvious emotion but still manage to articulate so much with small looks and expressions. (For another great 2007 example, check out Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others.) In a film that doesn’t understand the meaning of understatement, Jones imparts a lot of emotion very subtly. There are probably performances I would have chosen over Jones, like Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, but it was no means a bad choice.
In the Valley of Elah isn’t exactly subtle. Soldiers talk of their experiences in a stilted, affected manner like they’re oh-so-troubled actors. We’re treated to some strangely situated and heavy-handed screeds about the evils of war. I guess this is sort of expected from a Haggis screenplay and there is no clever or original insight into the wartime experience.
But just when it looks like the film will play out in an obvious manner there comes some surprisingly well-crafted touches. Read the rest of this entry »
The Grouches have plowed their way through all of the films nominated for the big eight awards. Now we make the case for which film or performance we WANT to win. Doesn’t mean we think it will win or even have a shot at winning. But if we had a vote on the nominees, here’s who we would pick, and why:
BEST ACTOR NOMINEES: George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood), Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd), Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises), Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley Of Elah)
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There Will Be Blood tells the story of…well…what, exactly? It isn’t really the story of an oil well/reserve, or the town in which it resides. Though both certainly figure prominently. The easy argument is that it is the story of Daniel Plainview and his relationship to the wells and town. Maybe, but the tacked-on feeling of the ending aside, I’m not quite sure that relationship is ever adequately described. TWBB is a sprawling effort of a movie, and if not for the magnetic performances of Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis, its meaning would have been much more pronounced.
I loved the style of Sweeney Todd but little else. It looks stunning, as Tim Burton flicks are wont to do. The sets are gorgeous in their dingy and gloomy splendor. The colors are vibrant, mostly dark but sprayed with red. Some of the scenes are so stylishly gruesome that they made me groan. The score is great. The Oscar nominations for Art Direction and Costumes are well-deserved.
And merely looking at all of this was enough for a while, but not entirely. The major problem is that Sweeney Todd is a musical but the songs just aren’t good. They have no melody, nothing to hum as you leave the theater. The music should be a style to tell the story but it’s just inaccessible.
I also didn’t really care about the story. It mostly just made me hungry for a meat pie. And to top it off, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter aren’t very good singers. This would be fine if they merely had to compete with Alan Rickman, but all the children in the film can actually sing! It doesn’t serve the movie well that the supporting cast members blow the stars out of the water when given their chance to sing. Depp’s Best Actor is a pretty weak nomination. Except for the singing voice I liked him fine, but I wasn’t blown away.
So I’m glad I saw it because I’m a big fan of Burton’s style but I doubt I’ll go back for a second helping.
According to this film, the people of northern Wisconsin are either the most tolerant and kind-hearted people on Earth or are really, really bored.
Lars is the type of film that had to tread a thin line to be successful. It’s a film about a man who orders a sex doll to be his girlfriend; for most of Hollywood the urge for crassness would be too hard to ignore. But it also needed to stay away from being too heavy, too schmaltzy, too gimmicky. I think it succeeded fairly well.
Ryan Gosling did not get an Oscar nomination for his work here, but he did get a Golden Globe nod. He was a contender though, and he truly makes this film. His performance is restrained, true, and compelling. The character of Lars has to spot on for this film to work well and Gosling nails it. It’s too bad Oscar eluded him this year but he must have been one of the last one or two contenders cut. I loved him here.
When we first meet Lars he’s utterly socially incompetent, unable to make normal conversation with his co-workers, fellow churchgoers, or even his brother and sister-in-law. So Lars does what any normal social deviant would do and orders a sex doll off the internet, names it Bianca, and treats it like his girlfriend. The neat thing is that the film doesn’t treat this as a move of desperation for a pitiful figure but it instead comes off as a proactive and even promising step for the sheltered man, like he’s making a gutsy move to improve his life. Lars may be a messed up guy but the film never mocks him or wallows in his problems. Read the rest of this entry »
I like characters. I like characters more when they actually do something. I like nuance. I like nuance more when it isn’t just for the sake of nuance. I actually think John just about nailed it with his original thoughts - a review I believe he’d now like to recant. Adam must have gotten to him or something.
I’m just struggling to understand why a drama with little to no discernible drama, thrills, or suspense has garnered so much acclaim. Sure, it is an exaggeration to say the plot was entirely linear, there were maybe three kinks in there. Of course, if one of those Kinks isn’t Ray Davies, what’s the point? Ah, British Invasion humor! Read the rest of this entry »
So it took me a long while to figure out first, if I liked the movie, second, how much I liked it, and third, why I liked it. End conclusion: I liked it a lot, but I’m still not even sure why, so please excuse the stream of consciousness nature of this post.
As you can tell from some of my other reviews, I kind of like comparing movies to other movies. Except There Will Be Blood is the most original movie I’ve seen in a long while, and the closest comparison I can make is Citizen Kane, which is unfair to both Paul Thomas Anderson and Orson Welles.
Subtitled: John has figured out how to capture frames on his DVD player.
Here’s the problem with Breach: Ryan Phillippe isn’t convincing as a person so how could he fool Robert Hanssen, a man who can sniff out a lie a mile away? I don’t think Phillippe’s a very good actor and he wasn’t very good here. So when his character manipulates Hanssen I’m thinking, “I’m not even falling for this, how are you??”
With some early buzz Chris Cooper got for his work as Hanssen I went back and rewatched Breach. I found him to be really terrific in this, especially as I was able to really take in his performance instead of worrying about the plot since I’d seen it already. Hanssen is a very guarded man and Cooper manages to convey a lot of emotion with a quick frown or furrow of the eyebrow. The guy is also a total creep and a jerk and Cooper gives us the right level of creepiness and jerkiness. I’d be surprised if there isn’t a Best Actor nominee I find inferior to Cooper.
Despite this being my second viewing, it held my attention surprisingly well. I also enjoy a movie set in my hometown so seeing all the DC scenes was fun. The Memorial Bridge: as seen in Breach! And Laura Linney can do no wrong.
So back to Phillippe. A warning: I’m about to point something out that may ruin every other Ryan Phillippe movie for you for the rest of your life (if he doesn’t do so already). Read ahead at your own peril.
Sweeney Todd is, at its core, ridiculous. At least in the sense that if the turns of the plot were translated into a non-musical, it would probably make for a half-decent Fear.net movie. You know, one of those they can pump out on a weekly basis. But, the thing is, musicals are inherently ridiculous. Unless you normally detail and solve your problems in song and dance. In which case, I commend you. But ultimately, I think Sweeney Todd works, and works well. Read the rest of this entry »
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is bleak as hell. The plot is depressing and the characters unlikable. While I neither demand positive plots or likable characters, in this case I was left wondering, what’s the point?
I really enjoyed Philip Seymour Hoffman as the conniving, colder older brother Andy. I’m halfway through PSH’s terrific work this year and both of his performances I’ve seen (this and The Savages) are Oscar-worthy. Andy is ruthless but also desperate and delusional and Hoffman nails it. The other performances are good here too: Marisa Tomei, Ethan Hawke, and especially Albert Finney. Looking at it from an Oscar perspective, all of them appear to be long shots but I would welcome a nomination for any of them. While I merely liked the film, it was interesting and unique enough that I hope it gets at least one nomination somewhere.
I had a hard time explaining what I thought of Eastern Promises. Then I went back to watch the review from Ebert and Roeper and they summed it up perfectly as a “weirdly formulaic genre piece.” There’s a lot of great stuff here, including the performances by Viggo Mortensen and Armin Mueller-Stahl and some stylish scenes of graphic violence, all trapped in a very straight-forward Russian mob genre flick.
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This was a great movie. I had no idea what to expect going in, but I came out thoroughly enjoying this film. Brian actually had the same sentiment as I did leaving the theater, namely, for what it set out to accomplish it was nearly flawless in its execution. In fact, Brian does a very good job in his review of the piece, so I’ll just jot down a couple of things I also noted during the movie. (Note to self: In future, pick people you disagree with more when writing a blog. Agreeing with people is much less satisfying than criticizing them.)
Much as it pains me to admit it, I agree with Jared on this one. I was a big fan of the last Cronenberg/Mortensen outing A History of Violence, but this one was lacking. As Jared stated, I don’t think it was a question of bad acting or directing, the screenplay was too weak to allow anyone to shine. There were a couple of good scenes that were like bright lights in an otherwise dismal night, but these were too few to be able to make me highly recommend the movie.
To be blunt, I really liked this movie. For what it aimed to accomplish, The Savages was close to flawless in its execution. Everything from the writing, the acting, the tone, the camera work, hit the right note, which is somewhat ironic as the music choices were at times bizarre, and thus the only minor criticism I’d make. As two siblings forced to deal with their father’s rapid downward spiral towards death, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are so genuine in their conflicted emotions and seem so true to real life.
After throwing John a bone with Talk to Me, I can now criticize his opinions to my heart’s content (that’s how it works, right?). I really liked this movie. In fact, if you have been reading religiously to all the posts (so, really I’m talking to the three other guys who right for this), you’ll notice that it was in my original top 5 movies of the year. I thought it was a great character study with some very memorable performances. And, this is where John and my opinions diverge.
Read the rest of this entry »
Talk To Me is a decent movie and interesting to watch, but not necessarily anything special. I honestly don’t think it should be in the running for any award. That is not to say it is a bad movie, or that the acting in it isn’t good. Both Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor do terrific jobs – as usual. I think that both of them are two of the most consistent actors in Hollywood. Their performances are constantly top-notch. I was also a fan of Taraji Henson’s performance.
For a brief synopsis of the movie, you can check out John’s post. I also agree with the points John makes in regards to this movie (and only this movie, unless otherwise noted). In fact, I would recommend you just read John’s post and forget about this one.
I liked this movie a little more than John did, but I agree that ambivalence is a pretty fair expected reaction to the movie. Most of the literary references went way over my head. And I thought the last third of the movie fizzled out something fierce. But I have a little thing for Lauren Ambrose, so that helped.
Frank Langella was fine and all, but nothing earth-shattering, I’d say. I don’t know if John would agree, but I could see an argument that save for one 45 second scene in the bathroom, he wouldn’t really be getting any buzz at all.
I guess there’s a reason there aren’t many movies about literary criticism. It’s a very niche audience. And not terribly exciting.
Anyway, I didn’t hate it but I didn’t like it. I wasn’t particularly bored but I didn’t care at all. Frank Langella is getting the buzz for his role. I’m just indifferent. Whatevs.
Yeah, the title of this post is a When In Rome reference. You wanna make something of it?
I forgot this movie pretty much as soon as I finished watching it. I’m writing this recap a few weeks after watching the movie, and I think I can vividly remember maybe five scenes. One, of course, is the bathroom fight scene. Which is notable not just for the extent of the nudity, but for the dichotomy of badassitude and sensitivity it bring to the table. I would not be surprised in the least if they filmed the scene first and then hired a scriptwriter to make up a story around it. Or at least sold the backers based on the scene. It will, without a doubt, be one of my favorite movie scenes of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
I thought Talk to Me was okay, marked by some good acting work, a couple powerful scenes, and a neat look back into my city’s past.
Don Cheadle got some early awards buzz for his portrayal of Petey Greene, a DC talk show host in the 60s and 70s. Petey is a fast-talking, take-no-crap, calls-’em-like-he-sees-’em, ex-con who talks his way into a radio DJ gig then onto TV and a stand-up career. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Dewey Hughes, the station manager who first gives Petey his break and then acts as his manager. Taraji Henson is Petey’s loud and long suffering girlfriend.
The story follows Petey as a hesitant and petulant rising star while Dewey tries to guide him and keep him in line. It’s a story that’s been told in some form a thousand times before made somewhat unique by Petey’s big personality. There are some interesting components here, particularly looking at race relations. Despite playing soul and Motown and aiming towards a black audience, the station is owned and run by whites. Martin Sheen is the station owner and represents the powerful white man even though he’s probably the most progressive white boss in movie history. There’s also tension between Petey and Huey as Petey thinks Huey acts white. All in all fairly interesting but also fairly forgettable. Read the rest of this entry »
I can understand why someone wouldn’t like Into the Wild but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes it’s long and yes it’s slow-paced and yes it’s at times full of itself. But I was pulled into it and didn’t feel its long runtime until the very end.
The film walks a thin line between glamorizing McCandless and disapproving of his attitude and journey. He’s romanticized prominently but the negative aspects are more subtle until the end. Occasionally you think throughout the film, “man this guy’s kind of a dick” but by the end there’s no doubt. “Yes,” you say, “he’s definitely a dick.” I still felt for the guy at the end, but he is exposed as a naive, stubborn kid whose flaws did him in. The glamor is completely gone at the end as he realizes he’s eschewed a major part of the human experience - social interaction - in his deluded search for truth.
I’ll probably be repeating some of the themes we discussed at Dremo’s, so bear with me, but my main problem with Into the Wild was that Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless was so obnoxious and irredeemable that I was rooting for his inevitable death throughout. Maybe its because I have an anti-hippie streak in me, but I had no empathy for his character’s “F— the World” mentality.
I wrote a much longer post, in which I detailed what I liked and didn’t like about the movie. After I was finished, I realized that all I was doing was re-hashing what my “esteemed” colleagues have already stated. So, instead of critiquing the movie, I’ve decided to scrap my earlier draft (just assume it was ridiculously well written and insightful) and critique my blog-mates’ posts (which I’m sure they’ll all love and end up falling all over themselves inviting me to do other blogs with them).
Had I been completely ignorant of Oscar hype going into this movie, I’m not sure i would have pegged anything about it as Oscar material. Nothing about the movie struck me as particularly ambitious. The subplots (e.g. all the family issues) onto which I would have imagined Oscar latching weren’t particularly developed or stark. As much as I loved The Girl Next Door, Emile Hirsch didn’t seem all that special in the movie. The directing and cinematography seemed subpar to me, especially considering the material. And while I liked the supporting crew, I personally didn’t see anything memorable. That’s not to say I didn’t like the movie. I just found it, like American Gangster or Eastern Promises (generally speaking, at least), a movie enjoyable enough, but I’ll likely mostly forget it in a few months, and not really miss much.
The Eddie Vedder songs were pleasant enough, though I couldn’t remember them by the end of the night. And I don’t think the Abita Purple Haze had anything to do with that. In a vacuum, I’m not opposed to one getting a nomination, I can’t say for sure yet whether I think it would be in my top five.
Brian summed up my thoughts on American Gangster perfectly when he wrote that it “lacked sizzle.” I don’t think I can find a specific fault in the film. All the components were at least good if not great, but the sum of the parts did not add up to something that leapt off the screen and grabbed me.
Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas was certainly more compelling than Russell Crowe’s Det. Richie Roberts. His brilliant and ruthless consolidation of power and smart business moves to both rise to the top and remain hidden from the authorities make for an exciting story. Lucas has the makings of a classic evil genius character: very intelligent, always one step ahead, and brutal, like an entrepreneurial and less cannibalistic Hannibal Lector. He doesn’t quite make it to that level, but it is fun to watch along the way.
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Michael Clayton is another in a long line of films this year that I liked but didn’t love. It’s billed as a legal/ mystery thriller but in reality it’s more of a character drama. If anything the film is too character-driven because the plot is distressingly straight forward. But as a film that depends heavily on its characters it’s getting buzz for acting nominations for Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney and all three would be fine choices. Read the rest of this entry »
From conversations with some of you, it appears we’re pretty much on the same page. I found American Gangster entertaining and well-made, but overall unsatisfying. Perhaps it was because of the businessman-like demeanor of Denzel’s Frank Lucas, or because of the lack of interaction between him and Russell Crowe’s Richie Roberts, but the film lacked the sizzle and electrifying suspense of last year’s violent gang film, The Departed.
Which isn’t to say that Gangster was looking to emulate the 2007 Best Picture winner, you can leave that to last month’s flop We Own the Night. Clearly, Ridley Scott looked to Scorcese’s earlier masterpiece Goodfellas and its own logical predecessor The Godfather for inspiration. And while the comparison is probably unfair, Gangster fails to emerge from the shadow of either of them.
(My comments will continue, after the jump. As with all posts on this blog, spoiler alerts within.)
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