Prince of Broadway is a pretty typical story that I've seen at least a few times before. In this case Lucky is an illegal immigrant from Ghana living in New York City and hustling fake sneakers and handbags in the Garment District. One day a woman shows up while he's working on the street and gives him a young boy (maybe 2 years old) and says he's the kid's father.
Lucky doesn't believe it and can't figure out what to do with the kid. On top of all the problems of taking care of the baby, he is worried about how this will get in the way of him selling his merch. He bitches about his situation to anyone who will listen to him - basically bitching for most of the film about how much his life sucks. Lucky tries to get his girlfriend ho help him, but she leaves him when he can't get his act in gear fast enough. He is forced to grow up quickly and learn to be a father overnight.
In the mid 1980s, this same basic story was called 3 Men and a Cradle or 3 Men and a Baby. (OK, those were about three men, not just one, but in the big view they are the same story.) In the 1990s it was called Big Daddy; now it's called Prince of Broadway. I guess the original twist this time is that it's about a poor illegal immigrant guy rather than the other films about more established white guys. But Lucky's illegal-ness is not really what this movie is about. Yes he says he can't go to the police with the kid because they'll arrest him for his status, but the movie is really about how the kid helps Lucky grow up - the same way Adam Sandler, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson and Tom Selleck (and those three French guys) were forced to grow up in their movies because of their kids.
What makes this movie especially frustrating is how much time Lucky spends complaining about the baby and how little time he spends actually engaging with him. He pushes the kid around in a stroller for a few months before giving it a name (when he gets the kid from the mother he doesn't know his name). One day well into their time together he starts calling the child Prince and decides he likes him. We don't really see the growth from disliking him to loving him - it's much more binary than that.
Director and co-writer Sean Baker uses a rather effective hand-held camera for most of the shooting here, putting us directly inside the back rooms where Lucky sells his fake goods. This is a nice touch, but doesn't fix the larger problems with the script that are still here. Ultimately this is a pretty trite story that spends too much time covering recycled material rather than examining the world of New York's illegal immigrants, which would have made for a much more interesting story.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
31 Ağustos 2010 Salı
30 Ağustos 2010 Pazartesi
29 Ağustos 2010 Pazar
Change of Plans (Sunday, August 29, 2010) (110)
Change of Plans is a very tidy, writerly dramady about a big group of friends who gather for a dinner party. In the group there are at least two couples whose relationships are on the ropes and another few people who have major secrets they are hiding from the others. We see each story play out over the course of the night before jumping to the same night exactly a year forward.
One year later most of the stories have either come to a head or have been washed away by other events. One woman was hit by a car and is not in a ridiculously complicated wheelchair, one couple is in the process of getting a divorce, at least two of the people who are not married are having an affair together.
This is a cute, but ultimately over-written film that ties up much too neatly. The ensemble cast is good throughout, though none of the characters are particularly complicated. The best of the actors is Christopher Thompson (who also co-wrote the film with his brother Daniele, who is the director) who plays the most outside-the-circle character in the story. He and his wife are clearly on the rocks on the first night and having a rough divorce a year later. He's very good navigating the rough waters of this weird clique and maintaining his very posh, snobby demeanor.
There are some very nice directoral moments from Daniele Thompson, though most of the movie is rather beige and style-less. There is really nothing bad about this film, but there's also nothing very great about it either. It's nice enough, but utterly trite.
Stars: 2 of 4
28 Ağustos 2010 Cumartesi
Mesrine: The Killer Instinct (Saturday, August 28, 2010) (109)
The Killer Instinct is the first of a two-part biopic on French super criminal Jacques Mesrine who tore across France and Quebec from the late 1950s through the 1970s robbing banks, kidnapping billionaires and killing scores of people.
The story opens as Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) is in Algeria in the late 1950s torturing a few insurgents along with his fellow French soldiers. When he gets back from the war, his loving father has arranged a nice, respectable job for him in a factory. He wants none of this and falls back in with his childhood best buddy, Paul, who introduces him to crime-boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu).
Mesrine stars running small jobs for Guido (robbing houses, beating up rogue pimps) and builds his reputation and his lust for blood and violence. At some point he goes to Spain with Paul and knocks up a woman there who he marries and has three kids with. Ultimately he has to leave France on the lam and ends up in Montreal with his new girlfriend Jeanne. There they keep robbing, kidnapping and killing, ultimately getting caught and locked up in maximum security prison. Mesrine breaks out, of course, and then returns to the prison to take out his frustrations on the warden.
More than a proper narrative, the story is simply a string of action pieces, one leading to the next, leading to the next. There is very little motivation for these sequences. Mostly he commits a crime, gets away from it, and just when you think he'd be wise to stop, he commits another crime - as if addicted to the thrill. Characters come and go with little explanation (only minutes after his wife leaves him to return to Spain, we meet Jeanne who picks up with him on a robbery with no explanation), and locations change dramatically from one moment to the next.
Vincent Cassel is good in the role, however the writing of the character is so limited there's not very much for him to work with. We never really understand what drives Mesrine or what he gets out of the violence. We see that he gets bored with a simple domestic lifestyle, but we never totally understand why he does what he does. Depardieu is also a good enough actor to make Guido work enough, but in the end he is just another banal "type" - the crime boss - and not really three-dimensional.
Director Jean-Francois Richet has some very elegant moving camera moments and adds some rather nice touches to the work. At moments in the early going of the film, it feels like we're watching Goodfellas. We see the back-room deals that run the crime world and see the access that criminals have in Paris (especially with pimps and whores). What follows is mostly fun, but it's all over the place and hard to follow. I would hope the second film will have a bit more structure and a bit more insight. At least it will have a lot more Ludivine Sagnier. Thank god for that!
Stars: 2 of 4
27 Ağustos 2010 Cuma
GET LOW: The Film Babble Blog Review
GET LOW (Dir. Aaron Schneider, 2009)
Set in depression era Tennessee, this is a whimsical tale of a mysterious old hermit who has an unusual plan for his funeral – he wants it to be a party while he’s still alive.
A grizzled Robert Duvall is the hermit, the kind who’d put up a self made wooden sign stating: “No Damn Trespassing – Beware Of Mule” on the road leading to his rustic house.
From his night sweats we see that Duvall is sick and dying. Knowing he has little time left he goes into the small town he lives on the outskirts of to make arrangements. “About time for me to get low” he tells the local pastor (Gerald McRaney).
A young funeral home employee (Lucas Black) overhears this and tells his boss – a mustached worried wart of a man played beautifully by Bill Murray – that their ailing business may have a possible client.
This is a perfect timing for Murray as he was just talking about how down the death business has been lately. Murray: “What are the odds of a funeral home going broke? We have a business that everybody on earth needs. If you can’t make that work it’s got to be you. Right? And yet, I don’t know. What do you do when people don’t die?”
Everybody in town appears to have heard rumors and gossip of all sorts about Duvall’s past. He wants it known that everybody who has such stories should come tell them at his “funeral party.” Duvall in turn will tell his story.
Sissy Spacek is an old flame who appears to be charmed by the old codger, but like everybody else she is tight lipped about what went down back in the day.
As the film began with a flashback to a burning house with a silhouette of somebody on fire jumping out of an upstairs window we have some hints about what will be revealed.
GET LOW has a lot of folksy charm, but it feels like it needed to be a lot more fleshed out. It sails sweetly on the strength of its performances largely Duvall and Murray, but it doesn’t take the risks necessary to give it the emotional power it sorely lacks.
As an African American preacher that Duvall wishes would attend his “going away” affair, Bill Cobbs unfortunately reminds us that this is a whitewashed version of the ‘30s in the South – one with no detectable racism.
The depression era really has no baring on the plot - it could've taken place anywhere at any time, but as it is loosely based on a true story that happened in 1938 Tennessee, that's how we have it.
Also the idea that the town folk would open up at the funeral party and the stories would fly never comes to pass. The climatic event contains a wonderfully delivered confessional speech by Duvall, but after that the ending peters out.
Still, Duvall is always an appealing actor and he never plays a false note as this cantankerous character, and Murray’s masterful portrayal of a broken-down-yet-still-chugging-along-salesman oaf makes every scene he’s in as absorbing as they are amusing.
Spacek and Black are fine in their roles, but both are broad strokes as supporting players which would've benefited from just one more rewrite by the screenwriters (Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell).
It’s a light drama sprinkled with light comedy that gets a little too carried away with its own whimsy. That’s okay though, I have a feeling that many audiences will get carried away with it.
More later...
25 Ağustos 2010 Çarşamba
MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON: The Film Babble Blog Review
MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON (Dir. Stéphane Brizé, 2009)
It’s a simple story – married man meets woman and they flirt in a restrained manner. Will they consummate their slowly budding relationship? How much will it mean to us if they do or don’t?
Unfortunately these bare bones of a premise are all there is to sift through in this extremely spare French film adaptation off a 1996 Éric Holder novel.
The man is a stoical mason played by Vincent Lindon who we often see on his job smashing walls with a mallet.
The woman is the title character played by Sandrine Kiberlain – a new schoolteacher in town (an unnamed village in France) who asks Lindon to come to her home to fix a drafty window.
After finishing the job, Lindon sees that Kiberlain has fallen asleep in her bedroom and he pokes around her apartment taking interest in the fact that she plays the violin.
When she awakes he asks her to perform the instrument for him. After some hesitation she complies, but with her back turned to him.
He is transfixed by her, but nothing romantic happens between them – yet.
Lindon’s wife (Aure Atika) gradually feels that her husband is drifting away which is confirmed at a Birthday party the family has for Lindon’s father (Jean-Marc Thibault).
Kiberlain plays the violin for Thibault and Atika witnesses her husband’s suppressed passion.
There is quiet beauty in several sequences in “Mademoiselle Chambon” but it isn’t enough to make for a vital movie going experience.
The camera lingers on too many sad shots which make the film feel padded. The characters are supposedly suffering inside, but we only get broad surfaces that never bring us inside this material.
Lindon and Kiberlain were once married in real life and there is a palpable chemistry between them especially in a tense scene in which they sit and listen to a CD of chamber music together, their hands finding each others naturally.
This scene is indeed effective and if the rest of the movie had its hold we might have something special here. As it stands however, MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON is too slight, too twee, to be a memorable experience.
MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON is now playing at the Colony Theater in Raleigh. Check the theater's website for showtimes.
More later...
24 Ağustos 2010 Salı
Cairo Time (Tuesday, August 24, 2010) (108)
There is not a heck of a lot of story in Ruba Nadda's Cairo Time. Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), a middle-aged American woman visiting the Egyptian capital to see her husband who is a U.N. aid worker in Gaza, meets Tareq (Alexander Siddig), a youngish good-looking guy who had worked with her husband but is now "retired." As her husband is being held up by his the work and she is left to explore the city by herself, she and Tareq consider a romantic fling, but never really fully commit to it.
I guess there's something romantic about the "almost-romance" here, but I found it pretty dull and unmotivated. Juliette seems to be pretty happy in her life. She complains a bit about how her grown kids now have their own lives, and she's certainly not thrilled to be abandoned by her husband, but all in all, she seems pretty happy. There is no real reason that wee see that she would fall for Tareq, aside from the demands of the banal script and the romance of beautiful post-card vistas she sees around her.
Throughout the film the dialogue is laughable and Tareq suffers most from this. At one point Juliette is speaking about how she's never been to the Middle-East and he quickly interrupts her saying, "I don't understand why they call it the 'Middle East.'" Uh - I don't know how to explain it to you, dude, but if you're speaking a language developed in the West, there's the Far East and the Middle East. That's about it.
Moments later she says something about how her daughter is in college studying creative writing, to which Tareq jumps in inquisitively saying, "Well, how will she make money doing this?" This is not a rhetorical thing, the way two Americans might joke about how there's no money to be made in artistic endeavors - this is a serious questions. To begin to explain "creative writing" here is ridiculous, let alone suggest that Egypt is home to a long history of great "creative writers".
On top of both of these things is the concept that Tareq is supposed to have worked in the U.N. for a decade or more and the idea that he is so un-cosmopolitan is ridiculous. He's never visited New York or Geneva? It's not like he's some scarf-wearing Bedouin who's never seen Western stuff. This is just sloppy and silly.
One of the most significant problems with the flow of the story is that Juliette and Tareq really only begin their almost-romance at the start of the third act. Before that they're hardly onscreen at the same time. Most of the first two acts have Juliette walking the streets and back-alleys of Cairo in silence (well, actually there's a beautiful piano score and a very nice use of traditional Egyptian music, including the magnificent Umm Kulthum). Basically nothing happens in this film before stuff starts happening.
This film is basically the recent Irish film Once, but with no music and no story. It's about how easy it is for two people to almost fall in love. That is suggests that this is some mid-life, mid-marriage crisis for Juliette is rather beside the point. Nadda would have been much smarter to re-write the script a bit and focus more attention on the couple's relationship instead of making such a tribute to the gorgeous sights of Cairo.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
I guess there's something romantic about the "almost-romance" here, but I found it pretty dull and unmotivated. Juliette seems to be pretty happy in her life. She complains a bit about how her grown kids now have their own lives, and she's certainly not thrilled to be abandoned by her husband, but all in all, she seems pretty happy. There is no real reason that wee see that she would fall for Tareq, aside from the demands of the banal script and the romance of beautiful post-card vistas she sees around her.
Throughout the film the dialogue is laughable and Tareq suffers most from this. At one point Juliette is speaking about how she's never been to the Middle-East and he quickly interrupts her saying, "I don't understand why they call it the 'Middle East.'" Uh - I don't know how to explain it to you, dude, but if you're speaking a language developed in the West, there's the Far East and the Middle East. That's about it.
Moments later she says something about how her daughter is in college studying creative writing, to which Tareq jumps in inquisitively saying, "Well, how will she make money doing this?" This is not a rhetorical thing, the way two Americans might joke about how there's no money to be made in artistic endeavors - this is a serious questions. To begin to explain "creative writing" here is ridiculous, let alone suggest that Egypt is home to a long history of great "creative writers".
On top of both of these things is the concept that Tareq is supposed to have worked in the U.N. for a decade or more and the idea that he is so un-cosmopolitan is ridiculous. He's never visited New York or Geneva? It's not like he's some scarf-wearing Bedouin who's never seen Western stuff. This is just sloppy and silly.
One of the most significant problems with the flow of the story is that Juliette and Tareq really only begin their almost-romance at the start of the third act. Before that they're hardly onscreen at the same time. Most of the first two acts have Juliette walking the streets and back-alleys of Cairo in silence (well, actually there's a beautiful piano score and a very nice use of traditional Egyptian music, including the magnificent Umm Kulthum). Basically nothing happens in this film before stuff starts happening.
This film is basically the recent Irish film Once, but with no music and no story. It's about how easy it is for two people to almost fall in love. That is suggests that this is some mid-life, mid-marriage crisis for Juliette is rather beside the point. Nadda would have been much smarter to re-write the script a bit and focus more attention on the couple's relationship instead of making such a tribute to the gorgeous sights of Cairo.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
23 Ağustos 2010 Pazartesi
Sylvester Stallone & His All Star Band!
THE EXPENDABLES (Dir. Sylvester Stallone, 2010)
This is the definition of a critic proof movie – as its rating on the Rotten Tomatometer rapidly falls (in a week it fell from 58% to 39%) its box office rises - its been #1 since it opened with a gross nearing $70 million so far.
Apparently America wants a big badass blockbuster with a crew of well known action stars. Call it “Monsters of Mediocrity” if you will, but triple threat (actor/writer/director) Sylvester Stallone has assembled a solid B-Team of action movie mavericks including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Dolph Lundgren.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that from the trailer that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are on the mission too, but they only appear in one scene that tries, but fails to make much of a punch.
That could be said of the whole movie with its generic let’s-throw-over-a-corrupt-Latin American-dictator premise, but there is some fun to be had with this ‘80s throwback even if it oddly has too much downtime.
Mickey Rourke has a longer appearance than Willis and Schwarzenegger, but it’s still another glorified cameo as he never leaves his tattoo parlor. Rourke has one of the only serious dramatic moments telling a story about a woman that he failed to save from suicide that brings tears to his eyes. In a movie like this I really didn’t expect to see Rourke cry.
It’s mainly Stallone and Stratham’s show as they spend the largest amount of screen time getting each others backs in fights and shoot outs. The ending is a giant shit-storm of machine gun fire and explosions on top of explosions as expected. It’s played out in a lot of darkness and hyper cutting that makes it hard to follow, but if you like a lot of fiery explosions it should make your day.
Oh, there’s also Giselle Itié as the underwritten damsel in distress (What - An underwritten woman role in a Stallone action flick?) fighting for her poverty stricken people, her angry General father played by David Zayas (Angel Batista on Dexter), and Eric Roberts as an evil ex-CIA man agent backing the dictatorship.
THE EXPENDABLES is undercooked and overblown at the same time, but its core audience doesn’t appear to care. I shouldn’t either because this kind of mindlessness really shouldn’t be minded.
More later...
This is the definition of a critic proof movie – as its rating on the Rotten Tomatometer rapidly falls (in a week it fell from 58% to 39%) its box office rises - its been #1 since it opened with a gross nearing $70 million so far.
Apparently America wants a big badass blockbuster with a crew of well known action stars. Call it “Monsters of Mediocrity” if you will, but triple threat (actor/writer/director) Sylvester Stallone has assembled a solid B-Team of action movie mavericks including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Dolph Lundgren.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that from the trailer that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are on the mission too, but they only appear in one scene that tries, but fails to make much of a punch.
That could be said of the whole movie with its generic let’s-throw-over-a-corrupt-Latin American-dictator premise, but there is some fun to be had with this ‘80s throwback even if it oddly has too much downtime.
Mickey Rourke has a longer appearance than Willis and Schwarzenegger, but it’s still another glorified cameo as he never leaves his tattoo parlor. Rourke has one of the only serious dramatic moments telling a story about a woman that he failed to save from suicide that brings tears to his eyes. In a movie like this I really didn’t expect to see Rourke cry.
It’s mainly Stallone and Stratham’s show as they spend the largest amount of screen time getting each others backs in fights and shoot outs. The ending is a giant shit-storm of machine gun fire and explosions on top of explosions as expected. It’s played out in a lot of darkness and hyper cutting that makes it hard to follow, but if you like a lot of fiery explosions it should make your day.
Oh, there’s also Giselle Itié as the underwritten damsel in distress (What - An underwritten woman role in a Stallone action flick?) fighting for her poverty stricken people, her angry General father played by David Zayas (Angel Batista on Dexter), and Eric Roberts as an evil ex-CIA man agent backing the dictatorship.
THE EXPENDABLES is undercooked and overblown at the same time, but its core audience doesn’t appear to care. I shouldn’t either because this kind of mindlessness really shouldn’t be minded.
More later...
JOHN Q - DENZEL WASHINGTON İZLE
Filmin Konusu İşçi olarak bir fabrikada çalışmakta olan John Q (Denzel Washington) bir gün ansızın oğlu Mike in maç sırasında rahatsızlandığını öğrenir. Hastahaneye gittiğinde ise aldığı haberle yıkılır . Oğlunun kalbi normalden üç kat daha büyüktür ve bunun tedavisi için ameliyat olması gerekmektedir. Fakat maddi durumlar buna elvermez. Maddi sıkıntı eşiğinde oğlunu hayata döndürebilmek için John Q evinde ne var ne yoksa hepsini satar yine de çözüm olmaz. Ve sonunda çaresiz bir şekilde kalp cerrahı Raymond Turner(James Woods) un da aralarında bulunduğu hastane personellerini rehin alır.
22 Ağustos 2010 Pazar
The Tillman Story (Sunday, August 22, 2010) (107)
I have to admit that even as a pretty avid football watcher (college and pro) I had never heard of Pat Tillman until he was killed in action in Afghanistan in April 2004. (In my defense, I don't really care about Arizona State football and the Arizona Cardinals were going into their 70th or so year of cellar dwelling around the time he started playing for them.) For me the original story I heard about him made total sense: As a meat-headed jock he decided to enlist in the Army the day after September 11, 2001; he was tragically killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan. He immediately became a national hero, in part because he played our national sport and in part because he gave up lots of money to serve in the Army.
Of course, almost none of that story is actually true. What came out over the next months and years was that Tillman was a wild individualist who did join after September 11, though his motives for doing so were always a bit murky. He was a very smart guy and by the time he was killed, he was basically totally against the war in Iraq and much of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. He hated George W. Bush and was a proud atheist. He was killed by friendly - not enemy - fire, although the Pentagon hid this fact for at least a month after his death.
The Tillman Story is a very interesting and heartbreaking documentary about how Pat Tillman's death was used by the Bush Administration and the Pentagon as a political cudgel, burying the truth and never owning up to the disgusting lengths they went to create a fantasy universe of heroes and American Exceptionalism. Director Amir Bar-Lev does a very nice job of weaving in the facts of the story with the emotional experience of his family and friends and the greater political meaning of these strands.
The film walks us through the main points of the narrative, from his background as a foul-mouthed wildboy jock (he and his brothers never met a use for the word "fuck" they didn't love), to his college career (with a 3.8 GPA... not bad!), to his days busting his ass to make an NFL team despite his rather average height, to his enlistment and service in two tours of duty. We see how his family was informed about his death and how immediately facts of the case were being kept from them.
For his family, there was the Pat they knew and the Pat they saw on the TV news. Senator John McCain made a sickening speech at his memorial service about how he was being "reunited with his God" or some such nonsense - of course Pat didn't have a God... but that was not something a politician or a 24-hour news outlet could admit to. The heroic prop he was turned into was disheartening to his family, and his mother, Dannie, began doing the job no journalist was willing to do: looking into the friendly-fire killing and finding out why it was covered up and never owned up to.
We should not forget that by April 2004, the war in Iraq was not going brilliantly. The administration had been embarrassed by the fraudulent Jessica Lynch rescue story and the damning torture photos from Abu Ghraib had just been released. The tragic death of a professional athlete (even an obscure one) became a life raft for military support. It could re-position the war as a battle of good against evil and lift it up out of the mud it was in.
The film is as much as condemnation of the press (especially cable news) as it is a condemnation of Rumsfeld and Bush (who are shown to be the dark, evil men that they are). We see how brazen the news companies were to tell a binary story of an uncomplicated man who died in action. Once it came out that he was killed by a fellow American soldier, it became a double tragedy, and he became a symbol for the confusion of battle.
Bar-Lev shows how television news programs used the term "fog of war" dozens of times to hold nobody accountable for the tragedy (lest the troops who actually fired on their fellow soldier be disciplined). And with nobody accountable, Bush and his cronies got away with turning Pat Tillman into something he never was. Even after all the facts of the cover-up were on the table, we see Wolf Blitzer still talking about how some general at the Pentagon "bungled" the story. There was no mistake made by the Pentagon. That general was following orders to lie and cover-up the friendly fire - orders he got from higher up the chain of command. Of course we never get that view of the story.
This is a very well crafted, well structured film. It presents the story in a way that shows the Pentagon, the news media, Bush and his posse as well as main street America all complicit in the cover-up of a truly terrible story. It is not preachy, but it is very powerful.
Stars: 3 of 4
Of course, almost none of that story is actually true. What came out over the next months and years was that Tillman was a wild individualist who did join after September 11, though his motives for doing so were always a bit murky. He was a very smart guy and by the time he was killed, he was basically totally against the war in Iraq and much of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. He hated George W. Bush and was a proud atheist. He was killed by friendly - not enemy - fire, although the Pentagon hid this fact for at least a month after his death.
The Tillman Story is a very interesting and heartbreaking documentary about how Pat Tillman's death was used by the Bush Administration and the Pentagon as a political cudgel, burying the truth and never owning up to the disgusting lengths they went to create a fantasy universe of heroes and American Exceptionalism. Director Amir Bar-Lev does a very nice job of weaving in the facts of the story with the emotional experience of his family and friends and the greater political meaning of these strands.
The film walks us through the main points of the narrative, from his background as a foul-mouthed wildboy jock (he and his brothers never met a use for the word "fuck" they didn't love), to his college career (with a 3.8 GPA... not bad!), to his days busting his ass to make an NFL team despite his rather average height, to his enlistment and service in two tours of duty. We see how his family was informed about his death and how immediately facts of the case were being kept from them.
For his family, there was the Pat they knew and the Pat they saw on the TV news. Senator John McCain made a sickening speech at his memorial service about how he was being "reunited with his God" or some such nonsense - of course Pat didn't have a God... but that was not something a politician or a 24-hour news outlet could admit to. The heroic prop he was turned into was disheartening to his family, and his mother, Dannie, began doing the job no journalist was willing to do: looking into the friendly-fire killing and finding out why it was covered up and never owned up to.
We should not forget that by April 2004, the war in Iraq was not going brilliantly. The administration had been embarrassed by the fraudulent Jessica Lynch rescue story and the damning torture photos from Abu Ghraib had just been released. The tragic death of a professional athlete (even an obscure one) became a life raft for military support. It could re-position the war as a battle of good against evil and lift it up out of the mud it was in.
The film is as much as condemnation of the press (especially cable news) as it is a condemnation of Rumsfeld and Bush (who are shown to be the dark, evil men that they are). We see how brazen the news companies were to tell a binary story of an uncomplicated man who died in action. Once it came out that he was killed by a fellow American soldier, it became a double tragedy, and he became a symbol for the confusion of battle.
Bar-Lev shows how television news programs used the term "fog of war" dozens of times to hold nobody accountable for the tragedy (lest the troops who actually fired on their fellow soldier be disciplined). And with nobody accountable, Bush and his cronies got away with turning Pat Tillman into something he never was. Even after all the facts of the cover-up were on the table, we see Wolf Blitzer still talking about how some general at the Pentagon "bungled" the story. There was no mistake made by the Pentagon. That general was following orders to lie and cover-up the friendly fire - orders he got from higher up the chain of command. Of course we never get that view of the story.
This is a very well crafted, well structured film. It presents the story in a way that shows the Pentagon, the news media, Bush and his posse as well as main street America all complicit in the cover-up of a truly terrible story. It is not preachy, but it is very powerful.
Stars: 3 of 4
Cehennem Meleklerini İzle
Oyuncular: Jason Statham , Bruce Willis , Jet Li , Sylvester Stallone , Arnold Schwarzenegger
21 Ağustos 2010 Cumartesi
Soul Kitchen (Saturday, August 21, 2010) (106)
I strongly believe that Fatih Akin is one of the greatest active filmmakers working today. Both Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are brilliant and they suggest to me that the young German writer/director will have a long and interesting career ahead of him.
His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.
Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)
I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.
I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).
There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.
I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."
Stars: 2 of 4
His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.
Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)
I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.
I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).
There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.
I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."
Stars: 2 of 4
19 Ağustos 2010 Perşembe
WILD GRASS: The Film Babble Blog Review
WILD GRASS (Dir. Alain Resnais, 2009)
A frizzy red haired woman (Sabine Azéma), who we mainly see from behind, has her purse snatched just after leaving a shop at the beginning of this French (comic?) drama.
The narrator (Édouard Baer) explains that although it is an natural impulse she doesn’t call out after the thief.
Later an eccentric middle aged man (André Dussollier) finds one of the contents of the purse - a wallet – in the parking lot of a mall. After seeing Azéma’s picture the man starts to become infatuated with her.
After some deliberation Dussollier turns in the wallet to the police - Mathieu Amalric (“Quantum Of Solace”) is the attending officer – but that doesn’t stop him from phoning and writing letters to Azéma, much to her displeasure.
Anne Consigny, as Dussollier’s wife, appears to know what’s going on, yet is fascinated. When her husband finally stops the correspondence, Azéma misses the attention almost immediately. She speaks with Consigny on the phone and finds out that Dussollier is at the cinema so she goes there to wait for him to exit the theater.
After this I would be hard pressed to describe the remainder of the plot. The first two thirds are absorbing as they explore the character’s boundaries albeit in an abstract manner, but the final act is a mess of artsy imagery and an aviation diversion that finds Azéma and Dussollier in a small plane flying as far away from audience comprehension as they can get.
Every so often there are shots of weeds growing in the cracks of the street or a sidewalk and I suspect that we’re supposed to connect this to the title. It’s some symbolic comment on the characters finding love where it wasn’t originally supposed to exist, but I’m just guessing here.
WILD GRASS (French title: “Les Herbes Folles”) is a baffling bizarre mind numbing movie that loses its hold and fizzles out in a stupefying display of pretension.
More later...
A frizzy red haired woman (Sabine Azéma), who we mainly see from behind, has her purse snatched just after leaving a shop at the beginning of this French (comic?) drama.
The narrator (Édouard Baer) explains that although it is an natural impulse she doesn’t call out after the thief.
Later an eccentric middle aged man (André Dussollier) finds one of the contents of the purse - a wallet – in the parking lot of a mall. After seeing Azéma’s picture the man starts to become infatuated with her.
After some deliberation Dussollier turns in the wallet to the police - Mathieu Amalric (“Quantum Of Solace”) is the attending officer – but that doesn’t stop him from phoning and writing letters to Azéma, much to her displeasure.
Anne Consigny, as Dussollier’s wife, appears to know what’s going on, yet is fascinated. When her husband finally stops the correspondence, Azéma misses the attention almost immediately. She speaks with Consigny on the phone and finds out that Dussollier is at the cinema so she goes there to wait for him to exit the theater.
After this I would be hard pressed to describe the remainder of the plot. The first two thirds are absorbing as they explore the character’s boundaries albeit in an abstract manner, but the final act is a mess of artsy imagery and an aviation diversion that finds Azéma and Dussollier in a small plane flying as far away from audience comprehension as they can get.
Every so often there are shots of weeds growing in the cracks of the street or a sidewalk and I suspect that we’re supposed to connect this to the title. It’s some symbolic comment on the characters finding love where it wasn’t originally supposed to exist, but I’m just guessing here.
WILD GRASS (French title: “Les Herbes Folles”) is a baffling bizarre mind numbing movie that loses its hold and fizzles out in a stupefying display of pretension.
More later...
Salt - Angelina Jolie Filmleri İzle
Tür:Aksiyon, Biyografi, Casusluk, Dram, Gerilim, Gizem,
Alternatif 2
Movshare tek bölüm izlemek için tıklayın
17 Ağustos 2010 Salı
Blu Ray Review: A PROPHET
This Oscar nominated French drama played briefly in my area (Raleigh, N.C.) to small yet very appreciative audiences last spring. It’s now out on DVD and Blu ray so, with hope, it will gain much more appreciation.
A PROPHET (Un prophète) (Dir. Jacques Audiard, 2009)
In this film’s swift opening scenes we are immediately drawn into the dark world of 18-year-old Arab Malik (Tahar Rahim) when he is thrown into prison with a 6 year sentence.Rahim, after spending the better part of his life in juvenile detention, is told that he’s going to be in with “the big boys now” and finds himself stuck between a rock (the Corsican mafia who rule the joint) and a hard place (the Muslim contingent who want nothing to do with him).
After completing a gruesome task for an elder lifer – the Godfatherly Niels Arestrup - Rahim's power rises in prison to the point in which he can take day passes to oversee the business on the outside.
The film’s storytelling strengths lie in how it posits pivotal characters. With bold white lettering we are introduced to Hichem Yacoubi as an Arab murdered by Rahim early in the film, yet he visits his cell as a haunting reminder throughout the film; Adel Bencherif as a Muslim recovering from testicular cancer who believes highly in rehabilitation, and Mamadou Minte as dangerous drug dealer Latif the Egyptian among deadly others.
Often brutal in a way that may cause some viewers may have to avert their eyes, A PROPHET earns its 2 hours and 35 minute running time with a gripping pace – it’s truly one of the most compelling films of the year.
It’s challenging with its non compromising stance on the futile forum of prison reform and in your face violence, but one can sympathize and cringe with Rahim as he brushes off the insults of “dirty Arab” and tries to assert himself on this treacherous yet unavoidable path.
Not sure if this one would make that noticeable a difference on Blu ray from DVD as it’s a pretty gritty looking movie to begin with, but both versions have deleted scenes and an insightful commentary by from director Audiard, Rahim and co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain.
In French, Arabic, Corsican with English subtitles. Also available in the Raleigh area at multiple Redbox locations.
More later...
16 Ağustos 2010 Pazartesi
Centurion (Monday, August 16, 2010) (105)
For my entire life I have always wanted to be able to use the word "pictish" in a sentence. Thank goodness for the movie Centurion that I am finally able to do that!
This film is in the second century A.D. as the Romans are beginning to lose their control of Britain. They are fighting the Pict people, native to the middle-to-upper part of that island, and are losing badly. The 9th Legion is the last effort by Rome to push north, but they are severely routed by the Picts who are more familiar with the environment.
Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is one of the last officers left from the regiment (the singular eponymous centurion) and he has to hightail it out of the Pictish land and back to the newly constructed Hadrian's Wall. On the way he is joined by a handful of Roman soldiers as well as an outcast Pict lady (who is totally hot!).
The film is sorta high-level popcorn fun. There is nothing particularly brilliant about it, but also nothing really terrible either. It's incredibly violent and bloody (writer/director Neil Marshall comes from the world of slasher thrillers) and it's not uncommon here to see heads chopped off or smashed in, or eyeballs gouged out with sticks.
I have become a big fan of Michael Fassbender, from his work last year in Hungar (one of the best films of 2009) as well as his very troubling, interesting role in this year's Fish Tank. He is quietly confident and immediately likable. I think his character is written a bit light (with a focus more on his brawn than on his brains), but this is clearly Marshall's fault and not his own.
This is a fun, gory twist on a more typical "sandals and swords" flick. It is a modestly sized film (even the battle scenes seem to have fewer extras than many movies from this genre), which I appreciate. Again, there is nothing amazing here - and it's certainly not something that one needs to rush out to see - but what it does, it does well enough.
Pictish. (I just wanted to be able to write that again.)
Stars: 2.5 of 4
This film is in the second century A.D. as the Romans are beginning to lose their control of Britain. They are fighting the Pict people, native to the middle-to-upper part of that island, and are losing badly. The 9th Legion is the last effort by Rome to push north, but they are severely routed by the Picts who are more familiar with the environment.
Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is one of the last officers left from the regiment (the singular eponymous centurion) and he has to hightail it out of the Pictish land and back to the newly constructed Hadrian's Wall. On the way he is joined by a handful of Roman soldiers as well as an outcast Pict lady (who is totally hot!).
The film is sorta high-level popcorn fun. There is nothing particularly brilliant about it, but also nothing really terrible either. It's incredibly violent and bloody (writer/director Neil Marshall comes from the world of slasher thrillers) and it's not uncommon here to see heads chopped off or smashed in, or eyeballs gouged out with sticks.
I have become a big fan of Michael Fassbender, from his work last year in Hungar (one of the best films of 2009) as well as his very troubling, interesting role in this year's Fish Tank. He is quietly confident and immediately likable. I think his character is written a bit light (with a focus more on his brawn than on his brains), but this is clearly Marshall's fault and not his own.
This is a fun, gory twist on a more typical "sandals and swords" flick. It is a modestly sized film (even the battle scenes seem to have fewer extras than many movies from this genre), which I appreciate. Again, there is nothing amazing here - and it's certainly not something that one needs to rush out to see - but what it does, it does well enough.
Pictish. (I just wanted to be able to write that again.)
Stars: 2.5 of 4
15 Ağustos 2010 Pazar
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD: The Film Babble Blog Review
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (Dir. Edgar Wright, 2010)
This long awaited adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series opens with a pixelated Universal Studios logo with a symphonic variation on the company's famous theme music. The funny implication is clear - this is a video game cartoon of a movie.
Each character's stats are given in pop-up black boxes, there are subspace doors to alternate dream levels, and when our hero defeats a baddie they explode into a cloud of coins that clank into piles of pocket change on the ground. Our hero, of course, is Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) - an unemployed 23 year old slacker who plays bass in a punk rock band called Sex Bob-Omb.
Cera lives in a shabby apartment in Toronto with his "cool gay roommate" (Kieren Culkin), and he starts off his movie boasting about having a new 17 year old high school girlfriend (Ellen Wong). This budding romance is stunted by the arrival of the girl of Cera's dreams - literally a girl that's been in his dreams - Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers.
The spunky Winstead re-colors her hair every week and works as a delivery person for Amazon so Cera orders something just to be able to ask her out. This is on the side of the woefully oblivious Wong who becomes very upset upon learning of her boyfriend's cheating. This is, the least of Cera's problems as he learns that he has to fight the "League of Evil Exes" for his new girlfriend's hand. That is 7 of Winstead's exes are coming to take him down mostly by way of a big battle of the bands competition. The Evil Exes are (in order of appearance) Satya Bhabha, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Mae Whitman, twins Shota Saito and Keita Saito, with Jason Schwartzman bringing the smarm for the cluttered climax.
Each of the exes has some sort of power which are all fairly well explained (I think), but Cera has mighty powers when he needs them that are not explained. I know, I know - it's just a big surreal world they're having fun with - why ask why? In between the mix of Manga and Martial arts mayhem, director Wright impressively makes the most of the crowded cast that also includes Anna Kendrick as Cera's cynical sister, a very Molly Ringwald circa 1985 looking Alison Pill as Sex Bob-Omb's drummer, and Aubrey Plaza (Parks And Recreation) as a bad tempered co-worker of Kendrick who's foul-mouth makes her a running gag of a character.
But then in this film everybody is a running gag of a character.
The super charged movie has an enjoyable soundtrack provided by Beck who wrote Sex Bob-Omb's material, Nigel Godrich, and Broken Music Scene. It all enhances the playing a video game while blaring punk feeling - or at least the watching somebody playing a game while blaring punk feeling.
Though he is still basically the same old Cera, it must be said that he can be detected trying to play some different notes than he has before with this character. Some of his line readings show a lot more effort than in his last few movies (YOUTH IN REVOLT, YEAR ONE, and PAPER HEART for instance) and he has some tangible chemistry with Winstead.
There's a lot going on (split screen effects, Batman style exclamations like "POW!", frenetic cross cutting, etc.) in every frame of SCOTT PILGRIM and it moves fast through it, but it gets way overloaded in its second half. Not being a gamer or graphic novel enthusiast I'm sure that a lot of stuff flew by me that would give nerdgasms to the audience this is aimed at.
Still I laughed a lot and it doesn't seem out of place with the other wonderful work of Edgar Wright (Spaced, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ) even if it's not quite up to par with those Simon Pegg vehicles.
As I was writing this I saw that surprisingly SCOTT PILGRIM opened at #5 at the box office, beat out by THE EXPENDABLES, EAT PRAY LOVE, THE OTHER GUYS, and INCEPTION.
I guess the geeks aren't going to inherit the earth after all.
More later...
This long awaited adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series opens with a pixelated Universal Studios logo with a symphonic variation on the company's famous theme music. The funny implication is clear - this is a video game cartoon of a movie.Each character's stats are given in pop-up black boxes, there are subspace doors to alternate dream levels, and when our hero defeats a baddie they explode into a cloud of coins that clank into piles of pocket change on the ground. Our hero, of course, is Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) - an unemployed 23 year old slacker who plays bass in a punk rock band called Sex Bob-Omb.
Cera lives in a shabby apartment in Toronto with his "cool gay roommate" (Kieren Culkin), and he starts off his movie boasting about having a new 17 year old high school girlfriend (Ellen Wong). This budding romance is stunted by the arrival of the girl of Cera's dreams - literally a girl that's been in his dreams - Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers.
The spunky Winstead re-colors her hair every week and works as a delivery person for Amazon so Cera orders something just to be able to ask her out. This is on the side of the woefully oblivious Wong who becomes very upset upon learning of her boyfriend's cheating. This is, the least of Cera's problems as he learns that he has to fight the "League of Evil Exes" for his new girlfriend's hand. That is 7 of Winstead's exes are coming to take him down mostly by way of a big battle of the bands competition. The Evil Exes are (in order of appearance) Satya Bhabha, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Mae Whitman, twins Shota Saito and Keita Saito, with Jason Schwartzman bringing the smarm for the cluttered climax.
Each of the exes has some sort of power which are all fairly well explained (I think), but Cera has mighty powers when he needs them that are not explained. I know, I know - it's just a big surreal world they're having fun with - why ask why? In between the mix of Manga and Martial arts mayhem, director Wright impressively makes the most of the crowded cast that also includes Anna Kendrick as Cera's cynical sister, a very Molly Ringwald circa 1985 looking Alison Pill as Sex Bob-Omb's drummer, and Aubrey Plaza (Parks And Recreation) as a bad tempered co-worker of Kendrick who's foul-mouth makes her a running gag of a character.
But then in this film everybody is a running gag of a character.
The super charged movie has an enjoyable soundtrack provided by Beck who wrote Sex Bob-Omb's material, Nigel Godrich, and Broken Music Scene. It all enhances the playing a video game while blaring punk feeling - or at least the watching somebody playing a game while blaring punk feeling.
Though he is still basically the same old Cera, it must be said that he can be detected trying to play some different notes than he has before with this character. Some of his line readings show a lot more effort than in his last few movies (YOUTH IN REVOLT, YEAR ONE, and PAPER HEART for instance) and he has some tangible chemistry with Winstead.There's a lot going on (split screen effects, Batman style exclamations like "POW!", frenetic cross cutting, etc.) in every frame of SCOTT PILGRIM and it moves fast through it, but it gets way overloaded in its second half. Not being a gamer or graphic novel enthusiast I'm sure that a lot of stuff flew by me that would give nerdgasms to the audience this is aimed at.
Still I laughed a lot and it doesn't seem out of place with the other wonderful work of Edgar Wright (Spaced, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ) even if it's not quite up to par with those Simon Pegg vehicles.
As I was writing this I saw that surprisingly SCOTT PILGRIM opened at #5 at the box office, beat out by THE EXPENDABLES, EAT PRAY LOVE, THE OTHER GUYS, and INCEPTION.
I guess the geeks aren't going to inherit the earth after all.
More later...
Making Plans for Lena (Sunday, August 15, 2010) (104)
The French title for this film, Non Ma Fille, Tu N'ira Pas Danser, means "No, my daughter, you will not go dancing." This wonderful phrase refers to a sequence in the film when the main character Lena is talking to her son about a story he's reading. In it, a young Breton woman who loves to dance has a competition where she will marry the man who can dance with her all night. Every man she picks to dance with her dies because she's is so talented. After burning through several men, she finally begins to dance with my mysterious guy, who turns out to be the devil. He ends up killing her because he is so much more talented at dancing than she is.
Much of this poetry is lost in the English title for the film, Making Plans for Lena (a reference to the XTC New Wave song from the early '80s Making Plans for Nigel), but the gist is still there. Lena is a middle-aged woman who has two kids and leaves her husband after she discovers him cheating on her. She quits her job and her life begins to fall apart from the pressure of the children and her family who try to tell her what to do at all times. Her family is very close and to them, she is a grown child who needs pushing and prodding at all times. They try to get her a new job, they try to set her up with new boyfriends, they try to get her to reunite with her husband, they try to give her advice about how to raise her kids.
Clearly the subtext here is that she is dancing around in circles to such a degree that she is risking her life (and the lives of her dependent kids). Lena is a flake, to be sure, but she's also a good person who is really trying to do the right thing all the time. She's not abusive to her kids, but she does put them in bad situations. Her family is probably too overbearing for her, and possibly if she was to get more space she would figure things out herself - it's just the pressure of her life that throws her off tilt.
Throughout the film, the acting is wonderful, but particularly Chiara Mastroianni (daughter or Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) as Lena. She does a beautiful job with the rather difficult role. She has clearly been a more put-together person in the past, but is fraying at the edges right now. She's capricious and youthful, but also serious when it comes to mothering.
Director and co-writer Christophe Honore does a nice job of creating a very naturalistic world, even inside the few fantasy or story sequences. The colors are rich and vibrant and the apartments and houses have a nice internal geography and are filled with real crap that you'd find anywhere.
One thing I did not like was that the story frequently jumped around from one place to another without much explanation, leaving us a bit confused for the first moments of the next scene. This seemingly arbitrary continuity got rather frustrating as the story moved along and I had some trouble following it at times.
I really wanted more from this film. I really liked what I got in general, but it felt rather whimsical and not all that well formed. Not a heck of a lot happens in it. Basically we spend a few months with a woman while her life is falling apart. I'm not sure it really ends anywhere in particular - it just ends. I really love the symbolism and presentation of the fable of the woman dancing to death, but that doesn't really tie in to Lena's story on a deeper level. It's just a beautiful moment in a bigger, rambling tale.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Much of this poetry is lost in the English title for the film, Making Plans for Lena (a reference to the XTC New Wave song from the early '80s Making Plans for Nigel), but the gist is still there. Lena is a middle-aged woman who has two kids and leaves her husband after she discovers him cheating on her. She quits her job and her life begins to fall apart from the pressure of the children and her family who try to tell her what to do at all times. Her family is very close and to them, she is a grown child who needs pushing and prodding at all times. They try to get her a new job, they try to set her up with new boyfriends, they try to get her to reunite with her husband, they try to give her advice about how to raise her kids.
Clearly the subtext here is that she is dancing around in circles to such a degree that she is risking her life (and the lives of her dependent kids). Lena is a flake, to be sure, but she's also a good person who is really trying to do the right thing all the time. She's not abusive to her kids, but she does put them in bad situations. Her family is probably too overbearing for her, and possibly if she was to get more space she would figure things out herself - it's just the pressure of her life that throws her off tilt.
Throughout the film, the acting is wonderful, but particularly Chiara Mastroianni (daughter or Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) as Lena. She does a beautiful job with the rather difficult role. She has clearly been a more put-together person in the past, but is fraying at the edges right now. She's capricious and youthful, but also serious when it comes to mothering.
Director and co-writer Christophe Honore does a nice job of creating a very naturalistic world, even inside the few fantasy or story sequences. The colors are rich and vibrant and the apartments and houses have a nice internal geography and are filled with real crap that you'd find anywhere.
One thing I did not like was that the story frequently jumped around from one place to another without much explanation, leaving us a bit confused for the first moments of the next scene. This seemingly arbitrary continuity got rather frustrating as the story moved along and I had some trouble following it at times.
I really wanted more from this film. I really liked what I got in general, but it felt rather whimsical and not all that well formed. Not a heck of a lot happens in it. Basically we spend a few months with a woman while her life is falling apart. I'm not sure it really ends anywhere in particular - it just ends. I really love the symbolism and presentation of the fable of the woman dancing to death, but that doesn't really tie in to Lena's story on a deeper level. It's just a beautiful moment in a bigger, rambling tale.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
14 Ağustos 2010 Cumartesi
Animal Kingdom (Saturday, August 14) (103)
Animal Kingdom tells the story of Josh who moves in with his grandmother and four uncles after his mother ODs on heroin. His extended family, who he does not know very well, are all drug pushers and gangsters. His grandmother, Janine, is a weird lady who seems to not be upset if her kids die from their life of violence and substances. Her oldest son, Pope, is wanted by the cops for any number of things and comes and goes when he things the coast is clear from them. Three other sons work as deputies to Janine and Pope in their world of crime.
Josh is taught how to survive and work inside this family. He has a girlfriend who seems oblivious to what is going on - and he likes it that way. He pretends that he has a normal life as a way to guard against the chaos he actually lives in. When a murder by his uncles goes wrong, he is interrogated by and becomes friends with detective Leckie, Guy Pierce, who wants to break his family's crime ring for good.
The film has a good-looking style and visual look, with lots of interesting, quiet set-ups, but the script by writer-director David Michod is mostly trite and uninspiring. The movie plays much to slow and way too long. By the end it seems like there are about four false endings, one more dull than the next.
Perhaps the worst part of the film is that it's hard to identify with any of the characters. Clearly we are supposed to align with Josh, but he's so quiet and internal with his thoughts and actions that it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. His uncles and grandmother are all bat-shit nuts so it becomes hard to understand why he sticks with them at all. By the end it seems like we're watching this family through a dirty window, rather than being inside the family, which I think would have been a much more effective view.
There isn't really that much crime in this crime movie. By the time we're up and running in the family house, most of the uncles are already done with their violent lives and looking to get out of the game. We see about three illegal acts, but we don't see all that much that would lead them to become such a serious target of the police. That we don't see how totally bad these guys are from the outset really hurts our conclusions about them.
This is just a very slow, boring and banal crime movie. There is nothing very special about it. The acting is good enough, but most of the characters are under-developed and weird (especially Pope and Janine) and that gets in the way of any real positive or negative feelings about them. At then end of the film I was mostly happy that it was over at all rather than happy or upset with the way the story ended (which felt rather random and unnecessary, by the way).
Stars: 1 of 4
Lebanon (Saturday, August 14, 2010) (102)
The first shot of the film Lebanon is the prettiest and most colorful and open. We see a horizon in the distance behind a beautiful field of sunflowers in the foreground with a clear blue sky above. From this moment on, everything else onscreen is dark, tight and dirty. This film is a super-intense, super-intimate look at the early days of the 1982 Labanon War from inside an Israeli tank. Other than this early shot, everything is seen from inside the tank and the only views we see outside are through the scope and cross-hairs of the tank's gun.
This is very different from other films in the spate of Lebanon War movies that have come recently (Waltz with Bashir and Beaufort, to name two). Those movies are more about an intellectual level to the fight - what the men felt at the time and how they see their actions 25 years later. This movie is really about the exact moment these things are happening. The men in the tank are not able to sit and dream about marrying their sweetheart - they're getting shot at and they're worried about not crapping in their pants or getting killed.
There are four solders inside the tank with us: Assi, the commander; Herzl, the rocket loader; Schmulik, the gunner; and Yigal, the driver. Each one is new to war (this is the first day of the conflict) and deals with his fears in different ways. Yigal constantly asks for his mother and asks that the commanders let her know he's safe. Schmulik is easily unnerved and misses several shots because he has trouble pulling the trigger (which leads to the deaths of several friends). Assi is new at leading and doesn't yet know how hard to push these weak men serving under him.
More than anything this film is about the textures, sounds and smells of war. From very early on, we hear the hatch on top of the tank clanking as it opens loudly. We see the water dripping from above into the hold. We see a box that the men piss in so as not to get out and risk getting shot - this of course, however, makes the place smell like piss.
Every surface is covered in grime, oil, blood and soot. Each rocket they launch is a huge explosion inside the pod. When the machine begins to smoke and break down, there's a visceral sense of a human death. This tank is an old man and is falling apart. It groans and aches from its years in service (maybe it was used in the 1967 Six-Day War).
Writer-Director Samuel Maoz doesn't really comment on value or ethics of the war at all - this is much more intimate than that. He merely presents us with a bunch of soldiers in a particular position and shows us how stressful and difficult that spot is. This is much more a comment on the act of war itself, rather than whether or not this is a good or bad fight.
What we see through the rocket scope is very interesting. It is a very small view and it puts us directly in a seat inside the tank. Our view is very limited so we quickly realize that there could be people (enemies) directly outside of our field of vision and we wouldn't know it. We soon learn the blind faith these guys have in trusting the radio orders they're getting and the allies on the ground (the Lebanese Christians). Without these connections, they would be totally lost in a tin can in the middle of a hellscape.
I should say that at times, I did find the frame of the scope and the cross-hairs rather heavy-handed - that everything becomes a possible target and that we become so incredibly vulnerable. I think the use of it is important for the emotional experience of the film as well and is more good than bad - but it was a bit manipulative. Perhaps Maoz overused this view a bit and could have shown it less.
One amazing thing about the film is the use of the quiet spaces between the fire-fights. We get two or three minutes of loud shooting, smoke and explosions and then we get 10-15 minutes of nothing. In these spaces the soldiers reflect on what they're doing and become paranoid at what's coming next or what they've just done. There is a ton of unnerving hurry-up-and-wait in this film and it's these "wait" moments that are sometimes the most dramatic. It's in these spaces your left with your thoughts and worries, not to mention the drips of the decrepit tank and the growing stench of shit, sweat, dead bodies and grease.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
This is very different from other films in the spate of Lebanon War movies that have come recently (Waltz with Bashir and Beaufort, to name two). Those movies are more about an intellectual level to the fight - what the men felt at the time and how they see their actions 25 years later. This movie is really about the exact moment these things are happening. The men in the tank are not able to sit and dream about marrying their sweetheart - they're getting shot at and they're worried about not crapping in their pants or getting killed.
There are four solders inside the tank with us: Assi, the commander; Herzl, the rocket loader; Schmulik, the gunner; and Yigal, the driver. Each one is new to war (this is the first day of the conflict) and deals with his fears in different ways. Yigal constantly asks for his mother and asks that the commanders let her know he's safe. Schmulik is easily unnerved and misses several shots because he has trouble pulling the trigger (which leads to the deaths of several friends). Assi is new at leading and doesn't yet know how hard to push these weak men serving under him.
More than anything this film is about the textures, sounds and smells of war. From very early on, we hear the hatch on top of the tank clanking as it opens loudly. We see the water dripping from above into the hold. We see a box that the men piss in so as not to get out and risk getting shot - this of course, however, makes the place smell like piss.
Every surface is covered in grime, oil, blood and soot. Each rocket they launch is a huge explosion inside the pod. When the machine begins to smoke and break down, there's a visceral sense of a human death. This tank is an old man and is falling apart. It groans and aches from its years in service (maybe it was used in the 1967 Six-Day War).
Writer-Director Samuel Maoz doesn't really comment on value or ethics of the war at all - this is much more intimate than that. He merely presents us with a bunch of soldiers in a particular position and shows us how stressful and difficult that spot is. This is much more a comment on the act of war itself, rather than whether or not this is a good or bad fight.
What we see through the rocket scope is very interesting. It is a very small view and it puts us directly in a seat inside the tank. Our view is very limited so we quickly realize that there could be people (enemies) directly outside of our field of vision and we wouldn't know it. We soon learn the blind faith these guys have in trusting the radio orders they're getting and the allies on the ground (the Lebanese Christians). Without these connections, they would be totally lost in a tin can in the middle of a hellscape.
I should say that at times, I did find the frame of the scope and the cross-hairs rather heavy-handed - that everything becomes a possible target and that we become so incredibly vulnerable. I think the use of it is important for the emotional experience of the film as well and is more good than bad - but it was a bit manipulative. Perhaps Maoz overused this view a bit and could have shown it less.
One amazing thing about the film is the use of the quiet spaces between the fire-fights. We get two or three minutes of loud shooting, smoke and explosions and then we get 10-15 minutes of nothing. In these spaces the soldiers reflect on what they're doing and become paranoid at what's coming next or what they've just done. There is a ton of unnerving hurry-up-and-wait in this film and it's these "wait" moments that are sometimes the most dramatic. It's in these spaces your left with your thoughts and worries, not to mention the drips of the decrepit tank and the growing stench of shit, sweat, dead bodies and grease.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
Einstein E=mc2 Fizik Belgeseli
Dünyanın en büyük dehası ışık hızını ve daha birçok keşfi bulunan einstein belgeseli
Belgesel izle - Şişir Beni Hamburger
Şişir Beni – Super Size Me
Amerikadaki obezite konusunu işleyen bir belgesel
fast food belgeseli
Amerikadaki obezite konusunu işleyen bir belgesel
fast food belgeseli
13 Ağustos 2010 Cuma
Eat Pray Love (Friday, August 13, 2010) (101)
Eat Pray Love is based on a book by Elizabeth Gilbert that was gigantically popular a few years ago with women (in particular). The story falls somewhere between "nth-wave" feminism and treacly white urban cosmopolitanism. I fucking hated this stupid film - and hate everything it represents and says about dumb American culture. It is the story about how in an effort to come to terms with female self-dom, women are somehow only able to take cues from men, that women's self-worth is entirely dependent on men and that white people in general use the developing world as their toilet in an effort to sell goddamn herbal soaps and moisturizers.
Liz (Julia Roberts) is a travel writer (that's a real serious fucking job!) who is married to a nice loser of a man, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She grows tired of him, possibly because he's a loser with no direction and possibly because she's a fickle bitch, and gets a divorce. She then moves in with another loser - an actor and yoga, new-age freak, David (James Franco). She complains to her black best friend Delia (Viola Davis) (Ooooh! Look! How cool that she has a black best friend) about her dumb life and decides to travel for a year to find herself because she has never spent time examining who she is inside - rather, she has spent her life bouncing from one guy to another.
She goes to Rome for a few months where she eats and learns to give up counting calories (which we never see her doing before); then she goes to India to meditate with a guru and comes to terms with the pain she feels from losing her two men (which is weird because she was the one who left them - so now she regrets it?); and then to Bali, where she talks to a healer-guru guy who helps her recharge and learn to love again - I guess this time not as a fucking self-centered witch.
In each place she meets white people who are rich enough to not work and fuck around all day. In Rome she falls in with a group of people who love to eat and travel and talk about the rest of the world. In India, despite the fact that the guru is apparently a woman who we never see, she mostly talks to an American guy, Richard (Richard Jenkins) who has some pain in his life that he's working through. (In all fairness, Richard has the most interesting view of things where he says that she fills her head with bullshit and if she were to clear her head, she would experience stuff much better.) In Bali she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who is also recovering from a hard divorce, but is a Brazilian fuck-machine and fucks her brains into submission (and love).
All of the white people seem to be totally unaware of the ethnic specialness of their surroundings or the deep socioeconomic differences between their own lives and those of the native peoples they live among. Yes - in Bali, Liz does try to raise money for a woman who has lost all her money in a divorce, but this is presented so lightly that it seems that she doesn't understand that there are probably twelve women down the road who are in similar situations or the amazingness of the ability of woman to get divorces in Indonesia - which most woman cannot get throughout most of the developing world. This moment is pure tokenism and rather upsetting for what it exposes about her aloofness.
The direction of the film by Ryan Murphy (and the adapted script by Murphy and Jennifer Salt) is almost entirely terrible. We barely see Liz in her day-to-day New York life to get a good picture of her. When she suggests that she married a guy when she was "young" and is now "older," it is confusing because the flash-backs to her wedding have her and her husband as the same age they are now - suggesting she got married in her 30s or 40s rather than her teens or 20s. We never really she where she starts to know well enough how much she has grown at the end.
Murphy uses a ton of moving camera shots to make scenes fancier-looking. Some of these shots are clever and actually nice and poignant, but mostly they are overdone and unnecessary. By the end, I was nearly screaming for him to stop moving the camera and give us a simple, straightforward shot with a level horizon. Just because it looks fancy doesn't make it interesting; if what you give us is dog shit in the first place, when you twist it around you just get pretty dog shit.
Ever since Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has re-made herself into a bitter woman with an acid tongue ("They're called tits, Ed!"). This role is no different. She's very hard to like because she seems like such an antagonistic person, that it ultimately gets in the way of the story. In the end I just don't like Liz - because she's just another version of the same Julia Roberts character I've seen before and disliked before. I understand that as an actress she has some power over people - but I will never figure out why that power exists or where it comes from. To me Julia Roberts is just Julia Roberts. She's bigger than any character she's ever played and doesn't relate to me as a sympathetic person.
(One more totally unfair thing that I'll say is that this film has a shit-ton of marketing tie-ins from jewelry to food to soaps and skin-care products. Meanwhile the film is not really about this stuff. It's not about consumerism at all - though buying shit is really in the background of everything that happens in the story, even if it's never really examined. Is the idea here that if I liked the movie I can go to the Fresh beauty supply store and buy Eat Pray Love soap and become like Liz? I recognize that the marketing effort has nothing to do with what I see onscreen, but this tone-deafness in licensing is exactly and amusingly the same as the tone-deafness that you find in the film.)
What am I supposed to take from this movie? That we should all get in touch with our inner selves because white men who have tons of money and can afford to not work tell us we should? That if you're lucky enough to lead a life of pure pleasure you will be happy? That brown people are more in touch with the earth and can teach us things about it - but that their poverty makes us sad so we should ignore that?
What I particularly hate about this film is that on the surface it's about how a woman gets in touch with herself by stopping to smell the roses, but it never examines how she has roses at all to smell. I never get the sense that she comes to terms with her inner (or outer) bitch, so I don't know why I should care about her self-proclaimed growth.
Stars: .5 of 4
Liz (Julia Roberts) is a travel writer (that's a real serious fucking job!) who is married to a nice loser of a man, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She grows tired of him, possibly because he's a loser with no direction and possibly because she's a fickle bitch, and gets a divorce. She then moves in with another loser - an actor and yoga, new-age freak, David (James Franco). She complains to her black best friend Delia (Viola Davis) (Ooooh! Look! How cool that she has a black best friend) about her dumb life and decides to travel for a year to find herself because she has never spent time examining who she is inside - rather, she has spent her life bouncing from one guy to another.
She goes to Rome for a few months where she eats and learns to give up counting calories (which we never see her doing before); then she goes to India to meditate with a guru and comes to terms with the pain she feels from losing her two men (which is weird because she was the one who left them - so now she regrets it?); and then to Bali, where she talks to a healer-guru guy who helps her recharge and learn to love again - I guess this time not as a fucking self-centered witch.
In each place she meets white people who are rich enough to not work and fuck around all day. In Rome she falls in with a group of people who love to eat and travel and talk about the rest of the world. In India, despite the fact that the guru is apparently a woman who we never see, she mostly talks to an American guy, Richard (Richard Jenkins) who has some pain in his life that he's working through. (In all fairness, Richard has the most interesting view of things where he says that she fills her head with bullshit and if she were to clear her head, she would experience stuff much better.) In Bali she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who is also recovering from a hard divorce, but is a Brazilian fuck-machine and fucks her brains into submission (and love).
All of the white people seem to be totally unaware of the ethnic specialness of their surroundings or the deep socioeconomic differences between their own lives and those of the native peoples they live among. Yes - in Bali, Liz does try to raise money for a woman who has lost all her money in a divorce, but this is presented so lightly that it seems that she doesn't understand that there are probably twelve women down the road who are in similar situations or the amazingness of the ability of woman to get divorces in Indonesia - which most woman cannot get throughout most of the developing world. This moment is pure tokenism and rather upsetting for what it exposes about her aloofness.
The direction of the film by Ryan Murphy (and the adapted script by Murphy and Jennifer Salt) is almost entirely terrible. We barely see Liz in her day-to-day New York life to get a good picture of her. When she suggests that she married a guy when she was "young" and is now "older," it is confusing because the flash-backs to her wedding have her and her husband as the same age they are now - suggesting she got married in her 30s or 40s rather than her teens or 20s. We never really she where she starts to know well enough how much she has grown at the end.
Murphy uses a ton of moving camera shots to make scenes fancier-looking. Some of these shots are clever and actually nice and poignant, but mostly they are overdone and unnecessary. By the end, I was nearly screaming for him to stop moving the camera and give us a simple, straightforward shot with a level horizon. Just because it looks fancy doesn't make it interesting; if what you give us is dog shit in the first place, when you twist it around you just get pretty dog shit.
Ever since Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has re-made herself into a bitter woman with an acid tongue ("They're called tits, Ed!"). This role is no different. She's very hard to like because she seems like such an antagonistic person, that it ultimately gets in the way of the story. In the end I just don't like Liz - because she's just another version of the same Julia Roberts character I've seen before and disliked before. I understand that as an actress she has some power over people - but I will never figure out why that power exists or where it comes from. To me Julia Roberts is just Julia Roberts. She's bigger than any character she's ever played and doesn't relate to me as a sympathetic person.
(One more totally unfair thing that I'll say is that this film has a shit-ton of marketing tie-ins from jewelry to food to soaps and skin-care products. Meanwhile the film is not really about this stuff. It's not about consumerism at all - though buying shit is really in the background of everything that happens in the story, even if it's never really examined. Is the idea here that if I liked the movie I can go to the Fresh beauty supply store and buy Eat Pray Love soap and become like Liz? I recognize that the marketing effort has nothing to do with what I see onscreen, but this tone-deafness in licensing is exactly and amusingly the same as the tone-deafness that you find in the film.)
What am I supposed to take from this movie? That we should all get in touch with our inner selves because white men who have tons of money and can afford to not work tell us we should? That if you're lucky enough to lead a life of pure pleasure you will be happy? That brown people are more in touch with the earth and can teach us things about it - but that their poverty makes us sad so we should ignore that?
What I particularly hate about this film is that on the surface it's about how a woman gets in touch with herself by stopping to smell the roses, but it never examines how she has roses at all to smell. I never get the sense that she comes to terms with her inner (or outer) bitch, so I don't know why I should care about her self-proclaimed growth.
Stars: .5 of 4
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Friday, August 13, 2010) (100)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a wildly fun take on dating in the video-game age. Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, smartly adapted by Michael Bacall and video game/comic book lover Edgar Wright (whose Spaced series is totally brilliant and serves as a wonderful corollary to this film) and directed by Wright, this film is totally fresh and funny, taking itself seriously enough to connect with the characters, but being silly enough to know what its doing at all times.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a dorky bassist in a dorky emo punk rock band. He is in a year-long recovery from a long-term girlfriend who broke his heart when she dumped him. He starts seeing a girl much younger than him who becomes more of a buddy than a sexual partner (because she's too young for him). All of his band mates and friends mock him for his lame non-sexual relationship.
One day he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who he falls in love with immediately. They go on a few dates and he soon learns that she has seven exes who she broke up with over the years. These exes have formed a league of villains whose mission it is to destroy Scott and re-take Ramona's heart.
On his team, Scott has his gay best friend, Wallace (Kieran Culkin), his sister, Stacey (Anna Kendrick) and a passel of hangers-on. As he fights successive exes, he is wrapped up in his own nerdy self-doubt and never totally confident in his actions. He's the anti-super hero and totally relatable every-man.
Typical of Wright's earlier work, this film uses 1980s and 1990s video game references throughout to enhance the dramatic moments. When he defeats each ex, their bodies turn into coins that he can collect to move up to a "new level". Small, clever details decorate each scene, so when he goes to take a leak in the bathroom, we see his "pee level" go from 10 to 0, or when he gets a jolt of self-confidence, he wins an "extra life".
Wright also uses a wonderful score by Nigel Godrich, a frequent collaborator of Radiohead and Beck, that uses 64-bit sound effects and musical cues to underline critical moments in the story. Perhaps it's a bit obvious to use Nintendo sound cards to make some of the music, but it still works well in this context.
Michael Cera is a bit annoying as an actor (and has super-annoying hair here) mostly because he plays the same dweeby role over and over again. He's always the less-than-confident-but-secretly-brilliant teen or twenty-something - and he remains that in this movie. But I think he's very sympathetic here and helps convey the emotional story very well. At one point he worries that because Ramona changes the color of her hair without much thought that she might be flaky and could dump him with as much thought as well. This is funny because we have all been in this position of self-doubt and vulnerability - and that is exactly who he is in every movie.
This is a very light and easy movie and a ton of fun. Wright has a fantastic ability to mix a geeky tech theme into a very realistic emotional world, making a story that is both reminiscent of childhood feelings of deficiency with a more heady barrage of cultural references. Even as a person who really never had a deep connection with video games or comic books, this film totally works for me. Dating is like a bad video game where you constantly just miss the ledge and always fall into the lava pool - but then you get a new life and begin again from the last saved level.
Stars: 3 of 4
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a dorky bassist in a dorky emo punk rock band. He is in a year-long recovery from a long-term girlfriend who broke his heart when she dumped him. He starts seeing a girl much younger than him who becomes more of a buddy than a sexual partner (because she's too young for him). All of his band mates and friends mock him for his lame non-sexual relationship.
One day he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who he falls in love with immediately. They go on a few dates and he soon learns that she has seven exes who she broke up with over the years. These exes have formed a league of villains whose mission it is to destroy Scott and re-take Ramona's heart.
On his team, Scott has his gay best friend, Wallace (Kieran Culkin), his sister, Stacey (Anna Kendrick) and a passel of hangers-on. As he fights successive exes, he is wrapped up in his own nerdy self-doubt and never totally confident in his actions. He's the anti-super hero and totally relatable every-man.
Typical of Wright's earlier work, this film uses 1980s and 1990s video game references throughout to enhance the dramatic moments. When he defeats each ex, their bodies turn into coins that he can collect to move up to a "new level". Small, clever details decorate each scene, so when he goes to take a leak in the bathroom, we see his "pee level" go from 10 to 0, or when he gets a jolt of self-confidence, he wins an "extra life".
Wright also uses a wonderful score by Nigel Godrich, a frequent collaborator of Radiohead and Beck, that uses 64-bit sound effects and musical cues to underline critical moments in the story. Perhaps it's a bit obvious to use Nintendo sound cards to make some of the music, but it still works well in this context.
Michael Cera is a bit annoying as an actor (and has super-annoying hair here) mostly because he plays the same dweeby role over and over again. He's always the less-than-confident-but-secretly-brilliant teen or twenty-something - and he remains that in this movie. But I think he's very sympathetic here and helps convey the emotional story very well. At one point he worries that because Ramona changes the color of her hair without much thought that she might be flaky and could dump him with as much thought as well. This is funny because we have all been in this position of self-doubt and vulnerability - and that is exactly who he is in every movie.
This is a very light and easy movie and a ton of fun. Wright has a fantastic ability to mix a geeky tech theme into a very realistic emotional world, making a story that is both reminiscent of childhood feelings of deficiency with a more heady barrage of cultural references. Even as a person who really never had a deep connection with video games or comic books, this film totally works for me. Dating is like a bad video game where you constantly just miss the ledge and always fall into the lava pool - but then you get a new life and begin again from the last saved level.
Stars: 3 of 4
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