W.E. (Friday, February 3, 2012) (7)

I worked in international auction houses for 12 years of my life, including at Sotheby's, where in 1998 they held the sale of the property from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Though I was not there at that exact time, I worked with dozens of people who spoke about how amazing the lines were to get into the exhibition and how ridiculous the crowds were to see all their tchockes. I also saw other big and silly exhibitions of crap from famous people and how people went nuts for them. I can promise you that Madonna has no such insight into such things and thinks such auction are romantic and wonderful. They're not. They're sad and boring.

But the framing device for her film W.E. is the 1998 auction, where Mohamed Al-Fayed sold all sorts of stuff owned by Edward and Wallis, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Into this auction exhibition dives Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a bored Upper East Side housewife who was named after the Duchess and now lives with her ex-pat English shrink husband on Park Avenue. She feels some connection to her namesake, although we don't totally know what it is, aside from "something womanly" and ersatz feminist.

We are thrown back and forth between Wally's World and the lives and romance between Wallis (Andrea Riseborough) and Edward (James D'Arcy... that's Mr. D'Arcy to you, ladies). We see how she had a rough first marriage to an American soldier who beat her, how she was married to another American businessman who moved them to London and how they met as she was climbing up the social ladder of London (and being a rather loose woman along the way). Madonna presents Wallis as a self-confident and smart woman, but also strangely as a foxy one totally aware of what she was doing the whole time.

The royal story is a bit dull, if fairy-tale-romantic, so we spend lots of time in the '90s with Wally, whose husband is a dick and who can't figure out how to pass her time. She ends up going to the Windsor auction exhibition a few dozen times and spending hours there. I can speak from personal experience that this is all but impossible as auction exhibitions are some of the most boring places on Earth.

While spending her time there, she meets Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a security guard who is also supposedly a Russian immigrant, though he looks more like Guatemalan... because the actor is... Guatemalan (and because Madonna has a thing for Latin dudes). Somehow the Upper East Side princess falls for this blue-collar dude from Bushwick... because that could happen (that has never happened in the quarter-millennium of auction house history, despite years of security-guard efforts).

This all sounds like a terrible narrative with two unconnected stories? Well, that's about right. This is a totally stupid plot with two ridiculously unrelated threads that shouldn't and don't really meet at any point. I guess there's an idea that Wally is sad that her marriage is not all she hoped it would be and she takes solace in the idea that her namesake was also in such a marriage until she got a divorce and married up... but that's such a banal and superficial link.

Madonna's directing style is so turgid and blunt it ceases to be art and moves into baseball-bat-over-the-head-territory. Do I care that Wally had some sort of fake career at Sotheby's before she got married to her foreign beau? Does that make her more likable? No. It makes her exactly the kind of woman who would get herself into the dumb marriage that she's in and exactly the remote personality that makes for great and terrible melodrama, but totally urelateable.

This could have been a nice historical romance, but the contemporary story feels more like a gilded lily than any sort of necessary frame. I think Madonna has it in her to be a good filmmaker, but she needs to learn when enough is enough and not the entire history of everything in the world (including a bunch of lame excuses for why Wallis and Edward weren't really Nazi lovers). I think a good editor would have done this script and this film a good service. But I guess that would have been less romantic, or something.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Iron Lady (Saturday, December 31, 2011) (130)

The first thing I noticed about Phyllidia Lloyd's The Iron Lady was that the makeup in it is amazing. The film opens roughly in the present day as Margaret Thatcher (Dame Meryl Hepburn Dench Streep), now in her late 80s, is walking around her London flat talking to her dead husband who seems to stick around in her mind as if he was really there. At first glance it really doesn't look like Meryl at all. As much as you look for a terrible wig seam on her forehead or terrible plastic droopy jowl, you can't find any evidence that it's makeup. It's really remarkable (particularly in light of the makeup debacle that just occurred onscreen with J. Edgar).

I was totally expecting that I would hate this movie before I went in to see it. I expected that it was going to show Thatcher as a heroic feminist who fought men and did what was right for her country, while underplaying her major and lasting sins. I have to admit, it was not that bad... though it was really not that brilliant either. Much of the praise of the film will go to Meryl, of course, and more than anything, this feels like a movie created for her, while trying to not offend anyone one any political side (it's really not offensive... which is a bit offensive in its own right).

The film has a typical biopic structure, told mostly through flashbacks. We see present-day Maggie looking back at her life: the daughter of a middle-class grocer with conservative political leanings himself, she went to Oxford and then became a young star in the Tory party. We see her quick rise through the party until she became P.M. in 1990. From there the three major events of her tenure are mentioned and shown, but not dwelled upon. We see the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, though we never really get much info on that story; we see the Falklands War for awhile, but never really see how she used it to wag the dog and get out of the heat she was taking for the terrible economy (that third thing)... which we don't really see or hear any mention of. Ultimately we see how either because she was losing some level of mental clarity or because she was losing track of sound economic principles, she was shown the door by her party and resigned.

Meryl is much better as the doddering old Maggie than the middle-aged spitfire (young Maggie is played well enough by Alexandra Roach). I think a lot of that comes the fact that the old Maggie is a bit of a subtler performance with small reactions and lots of associations by the audience, while the younger Maggie is filled with all sorts of speechifying and grandstanding, which I've always found to be Meryl's weakness (though I know most people love that stuff from her). I guess I also have to admit that I'm so repulsed by the positions the middle-aged Maggie took that my reaction to that segment of the film was probably not unclouded.

There's a good deal of really cliched and lazy filmmaking here as well. At one moment when we see Maggie walking into Parliament for the first time, we look down a long hallway with windows at the end. Through a lighting trick, the windows are all white and the foreground is dark. As she steps into the frame she's out of focus and is merely a dark spot in a white background. Then the focus racks and she comes into focus as she approaches. This terrible shot is used in terrible TV shows nightly, to say nothing of silly movies. I hate this shot. Later, we see old Maggie in her flat watching the TV as a commentator explains that "she's a polarizing figure because..." and goes on to list her basic resume of achievements and perceived failures. Show, don't tell, Phyllidia. Show, don't tell.

I'm not really sure what Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also co-wrote Steve McQueen's disappointing Shame) are trying to do here. There is no particular emotion that comes out of the film. It's not an intricate take-down of a villain, like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall and it's not a heroic social-political piece like Ford's The Young Mister Lincoln or Eastwood's Invictus. At times the tone felt rather over-the-top and goofy like a film by Bunuel or John Waters (I'm sure John Waters would giggle throughout this film if he were to see it... it's pure camp), though I can't be sure that that was intentional or if the tone was just too earnest at those moments. At one point we hear the song "I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher" by the Brighton punk band The Notsensibles... but out of context there's an idea that it's actually a pro-Maggie song... which it's not... it's a joke... at least I've always thought it was...

I guess I really should hate this movie because it doesn't tear down someone I hate (I would be throwing this computer across the room if such a polite film about Reagan was released... and I'm sure it's coming). I guess I just was expecting so much more of a story of sacrifice and achievement than this, that what we get was really only lightly painful. She really comes of as a typical silly old lady more than any sort of political hero, and although I wish she had been decimated by this film, I guess that's better than being lionized.

Stars: 2 of 4

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Sunday, December 25, 2011) (128)

So this is this movie based on Jon Foer's much-heralded book. It takes place in the days after September 11, 2001, when young boy Oskar Schell (Oskar with a K because his parents both read Gunter Grass in college) (Thomas Horn) is having difficulty dealing with the fact that his dad, Thomas (Thomas Hanks), was caught on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center and died a lot. Oskar has Aspbergers and is a fucking annoying and weird kid. For some weird reason he seems to be in no sort of therapy, either for his disorder or for the fact that he's a kid whose dad just died in a horrible tragedy. But that's cool... and totally the way Upper West Side Jews relate to the world. Totally.

So he starts snooping through his dad stuff and finds a key in an envelope that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides that this is some sort of posthumous game his dad has arranged for him, so he goes off on a long journey to find this Black person and figure out what the key means by visiting all the people with the name "Black" in New York City. Along the way he meets his long-lost grandfather who no longer speaks ... but we don't know why and never find out... and he meets a black couple in Fort Greene who are getting a divorce, but give a shit about Oskar for no particular reason.

There are so many layers of shit to dig through in this story, let alone the presentation on screen, that it's hard to know where to begin. Why does Oskar have to be on the Asperberger's spectrum? Why does Tom Hanks have a terrible New Yawk accent in some scenes and not in others? (Answer: looping.) Why does the grandfather not speak and why should I care about that? Why would a mother let her sorta special-needsy son walk around without her (even if she scouts the locations first)? (And how on earth does she have time to scout the locations for him?)

To say that Thomas Horn is annoying is like saying that Hitler wasn't fond of Jews. There really aren't words for whatever Horn is in this film. "Repulsive" comes to mind. It's impossible to align with the kid because his way of talking and looking at the world is so precious and otherhumanly that I could only be totally turned off by him. He's a totally concocted persona whose artifice is on display to all. And he carries around a fucking tambourine that somehow soothes his soul (like how watching Judge Wapner soothed Raymond Babbitt) so every time we see him walking around New York (which is about 80% of the film) he's ringing a goddamn tambo. Ugh!

I've said here before that movies about September, 11 are cheap because it's just simply too soon to have any perspective on. I had my own experience that day and I don't care about a fucking annoying kid's experience. What's more insipid here is that the fact that Thomas Schell died that day has nothing to do with the story. It's sentimental shorthand of the most vile variety. All that matters is that he dies - he could have simply chocked on a bagel and lox any other day in history. That would have been random and unfair. This is just manipulative garbage that tries to help understand what Oskar is feeling, but really just sets us spinning in a cycle of "I remember where I was on that day when..." - which really isn't story telling at all.

This is a movie about fathers and sons. Big fucking deal. Yet somehow it became a story about pain in the wake of September 11. It's all nonsense.

Stars: 1 of 4

War Horse (Tuesday, December 13, 2011) (115)

I should say right up front that War Horse is probably not a movie for me. I really hate animal movies because I think they're generally overly sentimental and rather thin when it comes to content ("Look - you can see the horsey is scared. I'm scared for him.!"). I also find episodic stories like this one frustrating because the moment you get to know any characters, the story switches to a new set of characters and a new situation. War Horse is a terrible, dumb, empty movie that has a greater level of Spielbergian emotional manipulation that I have seen in a long time, possibly ever. If at any moment you are emotionally ambivalent or unsure of what is going on, the director will come down on you with a sledgehammer to make sure you understand exactly what he's trying to do.

Based on a book by Michael Morpurgo, the story is about a thoroughbred horse named Joey (oh, how sweet - his name is Joey!) who is raised by a young man in England before World War I. There's a whole lot of stuff that happens with nobody believing the horse is worth anything and him almost getting shot. Actually, every person who "owns" him at any point almost gets him shot. This is the horsey torture porn thread of the story. The horse is sold to an officer in the British military who takes him to the Front at the beginning of the Great War, at a time when the Brits thought the war was going to be old-fashionedy with horses and swords and all. Of course the war was not like that, and horses were only used up and then discarded as the war went along. Joey is first stolen by some German deserter boys, then taken to a small strawberry farm and looked after by a French girl, then is stolen back by the German army to pull stuff with. At some point there's "miraculous stuff" that happens.

As much as the film is called "War Horse," there are really only three sequences directly involving the war and fighting, and one of those is very brief. It's more "Around a War Horse." This is basically Forrest Gump with a horse. The moment you get to know and like any particular character or story, it switches to be about something else, with new characters and a new set of rules. Every character falls deeply in love with Joey, though I don't know why. I guess I'm a heartless person, but just showing me a horse with big eyes doesn't make me fall in love with him. I guess I need more content or reasons to fall for him. Well, really, I don't fall in love with movie animals, because I can't interact with them and make any sort of personal connection. I don't go in for anthropomorphizing of animals, and I think that's my problem here. There is no reason why Joey doesn't get killed several times - which I guess is not totally true... the reason he doesn't get killed is because he's the star of the movie and is written that way. He doesn't seem to have any particular traits that help him. Sure he's a fast runner, but so are so many other horses.

This is a very cruel and violent movie, which on its surface would seem like a "family film." Putting aside all the guns that are aimed at Joey for non battle-related reasons, Spielberg has a fascination with disgusting, uncomfortable situations, like the penultimate sequence when Joey runs into no-man's-land and gets rolled up in barbed wire. All I could think about was the endless and cruel beatings in Gibson's loathsome The Passion of the Christ. Is Steven suggesting Joey is Christlike? ("Take these oats, brothers. They are my body.") I don't really see the point in all this. Yes - it's war and war is hell, but it seems like most of the war stuff is much more bland than Spielberg has shown in past films (Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List), except when it deals directly with Joey, when he gets particularly frank and mean. This is not a movie for kids. (I'd like to thank my mother, here, for showing us The Great Santini when I was about 5. Because it's a movie about dogs. Right - a dog who is shot. Thanks, Mom!)

Spielberg is anything other than subtle in this film. There are loud bangs, open wounds, cuts to what look like tears in the horse's eyes (they're not tears, by the way. I'm not sure horses can cry), and lots of sentimental garbage with drawings and journals of Joey. We are reminded over and over again that the war changed from being about "gentlemen with horses" to being a technological nightmare with trenches, tanks and machine guns (I wish we could come up with a phrase for this war about how it was so big and how it might be the last war because it was so violent and terrible). The final sequence is so over-the-top with digitally enhanced "magic hour" lighting that it's almost painful to watch both from a technical point of view (magic hour is already gorgeous, Steve, you actually don't need to touch it with a computer) and a thematic view (OK, we get it. It's a happy, beautiful, wonderful, sentimental ending).

There is a single wonderful shot in the film, as the British soldiers mount their horses before the first battle of the war. It is reminiscent of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (a film I love) and Malick's The Thin Red Line. I wish that one shot could be excised from the final film here and put on display on a 5-second loop. This would leave War Horse with nothing but garbage... all the easier to send to the soap factory.

Stars: 1 of 4

My Week with Marilyn (Friday, November 25, 2011) (106)

My Week with Marilyn is about the 1956 shoot of the film The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). While in London during the shoot she meets the story's narrator Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) who is an assistant director trying to break into the film industry. The two work on the film for several weeks and develop a friendship as she proves to be a fish out of water in London with actors who are not movie stars. She brings with her an acting coach, her husband Arthur Miller and her manager who try to help her at every moment not freak out.

At some point the stress gets to be too much and she panics. The only person who can help her is Colin, who proceeds to have a week-long romantic interlude with her, despite her husband and management team's wishes.

This is a movie about falling in love with actors and actresses and falling in love with movies. This is a nice little idea - that we fall for celebrities who don't really know us and can't ever love us back and that the relationships they have with us is as fabricated as the characters they play onscreen.

Clearly the biggest performance here is Williams as Marilyn - and she does a very good impersonation of her. The problem that I had is that the character is so annoying that it's hard to like her at all. She's such a moron at all times and totally unable to even pretend to act. It's clear that Marilyn was a movie star because she knew how to play to the camera, but it's infuriating to watch her here barely able to chew gum and walk at the same time. It's impossible to align with her, and I think that hurts the dynamic of the film. If we can't fall in love with this Marilyn the way Colin does, there is no magic. Branagh actually does a great job as the pompous and irritated Olivier, though he's not getting much attention for his performance.

This is an OK movie, but is not brilliant. I love movies about movies (though this one is in London, not Hollywood) and this is a decent one, but not as wonderful as some from the past.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

A Dangerous Method (Thursday, November 24, 2011) (105)

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method tells the story of Carl Jung's early relationship with Sigmund Freud, from around 1904 until 1914. These are the early days of psychoanalysis when many of the Freudian methods that we take for granted were being established. Jung (Michael Fassbender) is a psychologist working in a hospital in Zurich. He has read all of Freud's writings and has started employing his "talking cure". Once they meet, Freud (Viggo Mortensen) expresses to Jung that he could be the "gentile savior" of psychoanalysis, putting a protestant face on the method that is largely practiced by Jews.

One of Jung's patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), has massive troubles with her sexuality and sanity. Over time Jung heals her through talking therapy and she begins to fall in love with him, or at least she becomes erotically interested in him. They have an affair, which is totally unsanctioned by the medical world and by his strict protestant background. The two doctors come into conflict over Jung's handing of the affair and what it means for his place in Freud's world.

I think this is a very well-made film (Cronenberg really doesn't make bad movies), but it's a bit cold in its tone and uninteresting beyond the depiction of obscure history. The parts of the story that deal with the two doctors' diverging beliefs is hard to establish as Jung had not yet written much of what he would become known for by this point in history. In other words, Jung is just a doctor trying to practice Freudian psychology, he could be anyone really. The film seems to be presented as an "either/or" between the two philosophies, but only Freud's ideas are presented.

The thematic structure seems to fall apart further when you engage in the father-son story. Clearly there are the suggestions of a Freudian Oedipal relationship going on (that Jung wants to bring down his father... though not to sleep with the mother, per se, rather to take control of the movement and establish himself as king). This is only briefly interesting, though, as any analysis of the film from this point of view underlines the relevance and durability of Freud's ideas. The conflict in the film is resolved entirely by analyzing it. A snake that eats its own tail.

Fassbender gives another great performance here, as a stiff and tortured Swiss man, dealing with more emotional issues that he seems ill-suited to deal with. Knightley's performance is good, but a bit showy. I guess it's easy to say playing a crazy person is easy, but it's really hard to do it convincingly. I think her performance is more affectation than virtuosity.

I actually like this film, but there's something in it that's missing for me. It seems like it's trying to be more than merely a historical drama, but I don't know what that "more" is. I want it to like it more, but in the end, it leaves me a bit cold. I wonder what Freud would say about that...

Stars: 3 of 4

Margin Call (Saturday, November 19, 2011) (102)

I'm not sure you heard, but a few years ago, there were a bunch of banks that sorta fell apart because they were over-leveraged and had too much risk for their asset base. Well, the good news is that if you somehow missed that story, Margin Call is a movie about one such bank and all the good people who work there who didn't mean to cause any harm to people and were really doing their best to stop the damage before it got out of hand.

This is an ensemble piece about the risk management department of a bank, where one of their analysts discovers that the firm is massively over-leveraged and that by the next morning could collapse the whole international banking sector. From late one afternoon until the early morning the next day, the banker people work to stem the tide of destruction that is coming.

As with most ensemble pieces, this is much more about the fact that a certain actor is in the film at all than that he or she actually does a good job acting. Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker and Mary McDonell are just a few of the (small) stars who deliver totally pedestrian performances here. One actor who does a really great job is Zachary Quinto, who plays the young buck analyst who puts all the numbers together. He's cocky about what he knows, but humbled by the size of his revelation. He has one great scene where he's speaking to the chairman of the bank about his C.V. and his background.

I really hate ensemble movies and I also hate movies about recent events. I think we're way too close to the economic troubles of 2008-9 to have anything worthwhile to say about it. I also think such a story functions as shorthand for real storytelling, allowing very average stuff to be presented, rather than something more critical or thematically significant. Still, this movie is really not bad. It's a good movie with a clever, if precious, script and not too much room for grandstanding acting.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

J. Edgar (Friday, November 11, 2011) (98)

It's really not clear to me why Clint Eastwood made the movie J. Edgar. The film seems to be totally uninterested in getting into the mind of the FBI boss and seems to be particularly prudish with some of the sweatier details of Hoover's life, like how he had a "male life-partner" for thirty-some years.

The biopic shows Hoover (Leo Dicaprio) as an old man dictating his memoirs to a series of typists. He looks back at his rise through the Justice Department to become the head of the FBI. It goes into great detail about some of the bigger events in his career, such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder, his obsession with Communism and his secret files of political and social leaders of the age. It is very clear from the film that Hoover and his deputy, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), are lovers of some sort, though there are several scenes of aborted non-sex, leaving us wondering what their relationship really was. This is, of course, absurd that two gay men would live together (in separate residences in Washington) for so long and never have sex. Though I have to wonder what the point is in making a movie about a mysterious man that doesn't try to figure him out more. All in all it feels very disinterested in Hoover as a persona.

Clearly part of the problem has to do with the cumbersome script, by Dustin Lance Black, though Clint's direction is equally inelegant. On top of this, the makeup looks silly on Dicaprio and Hammer when they get older, and it's problematic that they speak like the young people they are now when they get older (yes, voices age like skin ages). This feels like a movie that has no point and no insights into its subject. It's pretty dull and not very well made.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Anonymous (Tuesday, November 1, 2011) (94)

This is a rather fun movie about the back-story behind the true identity of William Shakespeare, who was not the humble man from Stratford-upon-Avon, as we have all learned over the years, but a nobleman with dreams of political influences and an undying love for poetry and playwriting. All this from Roland Emmerich, the man who put a necklace made of ears around Dolph Lundgren's neck in Universal Soldier. The film is told elegantly, as a play within a play (get it?) and shows many classic moments from Shakespeare's works play out in the real life of the suggested author, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The film makes a compelling case for de Vere being the true author, but there are clearly lots of ways the viewer's feelings are swayed by information given or withheld. The William Shakespeare in the film is a medium-talent actor, illiterate and completely incapable of creating anything of substance. It all fits together a bit too neatly and raises as many questions as it answers. The story is a bit muddied by parallel narratives on the political level and the artistic/authorship level, creating dozens of characters with the same facial hair and similar noble names. It all gets a bit confusing, though, is generally enjoyable. There are lovely cameos by great Shakespearean stage actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance and a very clever framing sequence. I find myself asking why it really matters who the real Shakespeare was - it's rather missing the point. Besides, if what the film is arguing is true, I really don't care because mythologizing artists, to say nothing of writers using pen names, goes back as long as there have been artists and this is nothing special.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Fighter (Saturday, December 18, 2010) (157)

It seems like these days every year has to have a boxing movie - or at least a movie about poor white people in Massachusetts. This year that film is The Fighter. It is basically just a boxing movie with almost nothing more interesting about it than that.

The story is about Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a white boxer in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has had a good, but less than totally impressive career. He's training for an upcoming fight that his mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who is also his manager, has set up for him. He has two trainers, a local cop and his brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who is a local hero because he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once in a great fight. Now Dicky is a crack addict who never shows up on time to train his brother because he's either smoking crack or stoned from smoking recently.

At the opening of the film there is a crew from HBO Sports shooting a documentary on Dicky, about how he went from such a promising boxer to a crackhead wasteoid in just a few years. Dicky thinks the whole time that they are doing a profile piece on him as a champion, but they are really just focusing on his addiction.

Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender at the local watering hole, and they fall in love. She's very concerned that he's flushing his talent away working with the losers in his family. One night, Dicky gets in a fight and a chase with the cops and Micky comes out to help him. He gets his hand broken and has to rebuild his career, including taking better control of his training and management. This upsets the balance of his family, who all defend or ignore Dicky's addiction and puts Charlene at odds with his mother and sisters (he has, like, eight sisters... which is actually sorta funny... in a good way).

More than anything else, this film has gotten a tremendous amount of press for the acting - mostly the performances by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. I was honestly not totally impressed with either of them. They're both very showy roles that allow the actors to dive into a big pool and get wet. I think the best performance in the film is Amy Adams as Charlene. She's a very smart woman who knows what she wants and can generally get it. She has an wonderfulness about her (Adams is cute, after all), but a very endearing frankness as well (she has a tramp stamp tattoo, which suggests a less-than-angelic side). She's a sweetheart who will tell you to go fuck yourself is she needs to. She totally lights up the screen whenever she's on. It's a much more subtle performance than the others, and I think much better.

(I should say here that Bale's performance is very good, but it feels more like a very good impersonation of a guy who is rolling on crack. I never saw the depth in his characters as I did in Adams'. In the opening moment of the film, however, when he's being interviewed by HBO, he is really amazingly believable as a guy on drugs.)

The biggest problem with the film is the script, which is really badly organized, relies mostly on terrible boxing movie cliches (He's a boxer and he gets his hand broken! Oh no!), has lots of terrible dialogue (there's a scene with Dicky telling Micky, "I coulda been a contender!") and is mostly really boring sequences much too heavy on dialogue that doesn't move the story along. There is not that much boxing in this film (basically three bouts).

Director David O. Russell actually does a beautiful job technically with the boxing scenes (and with lots of the technical things here). Most of the boxing matches are seen through a TV signal - as if we were watching the fights on our couch in our living rooms. This is a very clever, original twist to the boxing movie. There is a lot that is made about Micky getting a fight on HBO (especially after the doc on Dicky hurts him so badly), that when we see him in his big match, we watch it as if it was on TV. Very clever.

One other really nice moment by Russell is in the bar when Micky first meets Charlene. There is a wonderful amount of background noise that surrounds them (it's almost reminiscent of Altman's sound use in McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and as they begin talking and she warms up to him (because he's goddamn charming), the noise recedes and you just hear the two of them talking. It's an elegant and nice effect.

As nice a job as Russell does with most of the film, this never really feels like a David O. Russell movie. I think of him as a master of black comedies. Even his most serious stuff (Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings) are very, very funny and are told with a wink throughout. This is much too serious and feels sorta like a director-for-hire piece rather than a Russell piece. He doesn't really do historical stories (Three Kings is a fictional fantasy piece set in a historical time and place).

Mostly this is just a particularly uninspired piece. It's not bad at all, it's just not much of anything. I feel here like I feel with a lot of movies, that I would rather just watch a documentary on Micky Ward rather than have to watch this. The film is as much about his brother (it is really about Dicky totally) and his crazy mother and family as it is about him. It doesn't really know what it wants to be, a boxing drama, a tale of drug use, a story of an effed up family. It's sorta none of those in the end.

Stars: 2 of 4

Fair Game (Friday, December 3, 2010) (151)

Imagine, if you will, that you were raped in the most brutal and violent way possible. Now imagine you were forced to watch a feature film of your own rape. Finally imagine that as a cherry on top of this horrible sundae, you were forced to watch another person being horribly raped, although you really didn't totally care about them. This whole viewing experience might be rather nauseating and terrible for you. This is the best analogy of my experience watching Doug Liman's Fair Game.

OK, I know the rape metaphor sounds extreme, but what else would you call Bush's horrible, horrible war in Iraq based on political motive and not any sort of military goal. Fair Game is essentially as much a film about how the Bush administration moved to a war footing from their first day in office and then sold the war with bullshit as it is about a career-C.I.A. operative being exposed by a Bob Novak column (leading to the deaths of several people at a minimum) for political retribution. This film was downright hard to sit through for me, partly because it's just not very interesting or gripping and partly because the story underlying the narrative is so incredibly foul (and, of course, true).

Based on the books by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson, the film tells the story of what happened to lead to their entire lives being turned upside down as political pawns. We see Valerie organizing what seem to be high-level research and negotiations on counter-proliferation matters in the late 1990s, going undercover with assumed identities, all while working for the C.I.A. We see Joe, a former diplomat in the State Department, being sent to Niger to investigate the claims of a deal with Iraq for yellow cake uranium. We see how the war begins in Iraq, and that Joe decides to write an op-ed in the New York Times about how the claim of the uranium deal was based on bad intel. Then we see how the Bush White House leaks Valerie's name as pay-back.

There's something about films dealing with recent, painful events (mostly told from a liberal or ultra-liberal points of view) that I think are inherently frustrating and uninspired. Like a work about September 11, 2001, a film about the trail of lies that led to our involvement in the Iraq War stands as a rather hollow monolith devoid of much interest or emotional hooks. Clearly I have very strong emotions about what happened. (I fucking hate Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and all those motherfuckers with every bone in my body. I knew they were lying the whole time they were talking and I find their lack of concern for what they've fucked up beyond infuriating.)

How is Doug Liman (who really is a very mediocre filmmaker) going to tell me a story that adds something new to my experience? My emotions on the subject are so powerful that the film simply becomes a catalyst for my own rage; Liman can get away with emotional shorthand to trigger me having an extreme emotional reaction. This is very different, of course, from a filmmaker who has to tell an entire story from scratch and make me feel emotions simply from what he puts onscreen. Once he sets off my emotions, based on nothing he is doing cinematically, they cloud my ability to watch the story with any sort of unbiased view. The experience for me becomes about my rage and not about what I'm seeing, which really becomes secondary.

But there are a lot of other problems with the film. For one, the style is totally banal and so recycled it's just plain boring. Liman uses lots of hand-held cameras to make it seem like a documentary, make it seem intimate. But then nearly every transition occurs with the most hackneyed helicopter shots over D.C., showing monuments and the Capitol Building then such shots are totally unnecessary. (He also bizarrely suggests the Wilsons take cabs all the time - including Valerie taking a cab when she finally goes to talk to Congress. This makes no sense. Why would people who are somewhat afraid for their safety take cabs. Nobody in D.C. takes cabs.)

Beyond these issues, however, there is a lot of problems with the characters that are presented. Joe Wilson, who gives his resume to us at least twice, is a life-long diplomat and foreign service worker, yet somehow he's totally unaware of how the C.I.A. gathers intel and how governmental bureaucracy is sometimes frustrating. (Are you telling me, a former deputy to several embassies in West Africa and the former ambassador to Gabon never worked with the C.I.A? Hard to believe.) We only ever get the most superficial portrait of Joe and Valerie and never really connect to them at all. Mostly we see that they are both heroically fighting to knock down lies that they are asked to support. This isn't a connection to then, however, this is an observation.

I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but Joe Wilson comes off here as a reckless narcissist. We constantly see Valerie telling him to shut up and not stir the pot about what he knows about Saddam (having met him over the years) and yellow cake, but he constantly doesn't listen to her. I feel like Liman is showing this almost as a joke (she tells him to not go on television the next day and then there's a cut to him doing exactly that), but it's not really funny. In the strangest turn of events, we see that a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists, who Valerie had worked with in the lead-up to the invasion and who she was trying to get out of the country, are murdered as a result of the whole Bob Novak column. Novak is absolutely not in this film to such a great degree that it's really presented that the blood of the scientists falls on Joe's hands. Is that what Liman meant to do?

Also strangely absent from this whole story are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; all we see are Scooter Libby and Karl Rove discussing what to do about the Wilsons. Is Liman suggesting that somehow this was organized by Bush's and Cheney's head men, but not by them specifically? Is he absolving the two of them of responsibility? It's very hard to tell.

I should mention something about the acting, which is getting lots of attention, but which I found totally unimpressive. Penn is unemotional, mechanical and rather overdone; Naomi Watts (as Valerie) is fine, but she's so monotone and her style is so vanilla it's hard for me ever to like her very much. The best acting job is Sam Shepard (playing Valerie's dad... he always plays dads these days), who gives a beautiful one-scene performance.

The most exciting moment for me in this film was when I realized a scene where Joe and Valerie are talking in a park was actually shot in my neighborhood park a block from my home in Brooklyn. The rest was either incredibly dull and badly formed or so dramatically uncomfortable as it showed infuriating material that I already know well. This is not much of a movie, it's just a regurgitation of a somewhat interesting, somewhat uninteresting story.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Social Network (Friday, October 1, 2010) (126)

I think Mark Zuckerberg is a fascinating person. From everything I have read and seen about him he is a computer genius who was able to synthesize technical code-writing with the youth zeitgeist at the exact moment it would work best. Later he was able to make some very significant business moves (some of them unethical) that led him to more than $1billion in worth and his company to significant cultural relevance. All the time he was doing this, it seems he was never able to make human connections, letting his feelings of low self-esteem and his deep sense of pride in his own knowledge-base get in the way of his connections to friends and business associates. I might call him a bit of a sociopath (or at least someone with a disorder somewhat like Asperger's) - someone who does not have violence in him, but rather the complete lack of tools to deal with the world emotionally.

Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's film The Social Network attempts to look at Zuckerberg and understand what drove him in the early years of Facebook and what made him who is his (and his company what it is as a result). Sadly we really don't get much depth at all beyond the superficial character assessment I wrote above. The characters in the story, Zuckerberg most prominently, don't grow over the course of the film. Some of them make smart moves, some make dumb moves, but almost all of them are kids behaving the way people in their early-20s behave - no matter how good their ideas are or how much money they have.

The punchy script by Sorkin is much more an example of his showy, high-polished dialogue style, than of anything any 19-year-old would ever say. The film has no particular visual or emotional style from Fincher (who previously made one of the most beautiful emotional stories of recent memory in Zodiac). Much has been written about how this is an "important" movie or a "defining" movie of our times. I didn't see that at all. I thought it was a very well-crafted story that is based on a true Shakespearean and Classical narrative. At no point did I see depth or significance on the screen.

The story is told through the framing device of two depositions for two lawsuits involving Zuckerberg and the ownership of Facebook. The film opens with Zuckerberg(Jesse Eisenberg), a brash Harvard computer science undergrad, on a date with his girlfriend who goes to Boston University. He is talking on and on about the importance of getting into one of the elite old-fashioned social clubs on campus. The girl doesn't understand why he's so fixated on it (and frankly, aside from the sad psychology of a high school dweeb looking to finally fit in, we don't understand it either). He makes a thoughtless comment about how she's not as smart as he is and she breaks up with him and verbally slaughters him, calling him an asshole (which he seems to be).

In response, he goes back to his dorm room to blog about what a bitch she is and then as he gets more and more drunk, writes a website to rank girls on campus in terms of hotness. (I guess we are supposed to think that Zuckerberg's brain is so juvenile that he responds to one woman by attacking all women. It might be realistic, but it's pretty facile, no?)

In the drama that follows, he ultimately is contacted by the Winklevoss twins (along with a cohort devoid of any personality) who try to get Zuckerberg to write a website they've been thinking about for a long time: a social network like Friendster or MySpace but with the exclusivity of only listing Harvard students, thus making others on the outside want to get in. Zuckerberg catches on to the idea immediately.

He goes to his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who comes from some tremendous amount of Brazilian money and agrees with him to create a website they would call "The Facebook" (ultimately the article would be dropped) that does what Zuckerberg has been asked to do - but never telling Saverin about the prior agreement.

After a few months, thefacebook.com launches, kicking on a long story of Winklevoss emotional, social and legal battles. Zuckerberg and Saverin, meanwhile are constantly butting heads in their endeavor as Zuckerberg has one vision for the company (to make it very big, to keep it ad-free and exciting for as long as possible) and Saverin has a different idea (to monetize the site as soon as possible and see the ad-dollars roll in).

Zuckerberg ultimately consults with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) a party-loving wildman who had previously created the online music site Napster. Parker has lots of money contacts and a lot of experience with online companies. He drives a wedge between the Facebook partners that ultimately results in a lawsuit.

Throughout this story, Zuckerberg is constantly faced with questions of who his real friends are, how he can make new friends, and what he has to do to keep his old friends. There is a constant reminder the the main character is obsessed with fitting in and that he's responsible for this site that brings people together - but that he's unable to do connect to people in his own life. To me, this is lightly interesting, but mostly really trite. It's like a movie about a blind man who can see the future. It's a particular Classical concept, but not anything particularly deep or interesting.

The writing throughout is very Sorkiny, to coin a term. Aaron Sorkin loves very fast, punchy dialogue where characters speak in full, perfect sentences, never pause to think of their next line and never are at a loss for the most perfect, cutting and funny metaphor or figure of speech. I find it exhausting and totally unrealistic. You might as well have 20-year-old drunk American undergrads speaking Finnish or Tagalog - it's equally true-to-life.

Meanwhile, the portrayal of Zuckerberg is very fair and rather complimentary, I think. He does not come off nearly as dark as I might have thought. He is at his core a nice guy who just has no social graces. He says exactly what is on his mind and he lives with he constant knowledge that he's the smartest guy in the room.

He also is clearly very lonely and not incredibly comfortable with women (strangely for all the wild sex in the film, we never see him even kiss a girl). He is always looking to fit in, but is never really able to do the follow-up work that friendship requires. The very reason he was able to write the program code for the Facebook site is because he was able to lock himself in a room for weeks on end with only limited social interaction. (This reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell thesis... oy vey.)

This is all very nice, but it is not really deep. Eisenberg does a good job with this role, but I don't think there's all that much there in terms of emotion. Zuckerberg is a dork who wants to fit in. I don't know - that doesn't seem like the hardest character to play.

I was also a bit annoyed that aside from the fast-talking girlfriend in the first scene and the lawyer in Zuckerberg's deposition (played by Rashida Jones) there are absolutely no women of substance in this film. Beyond that, all Harvard and Stanford women shown here are hot sluts looking to bang computer science students - who are all hot guys in their own right. It's a big ridiculous, dontcha think? (We couldn't have gotten one pimple-faced four-eyed dork on screen, even for a moment?)

Aside from the sometimes clever, mostly disorienting switch between the two depositions and the flashbacks, there is really no style in this film - something I think Fincher has done beautifully in past movies. Everything is so very straightforward that it feels like it could have been directed by just about any Hollywood hack (which is basically the same thing I felt about Benjamin Button). This is upsetting to me. If there was any director who I would think could direct a film about a young man's psychology and darkness (because I think screwing friends and unethical business dealings is dark), it would have been Fincher. But we get almost nothing aside from the super banal facts about his character that we already know from news reports.

Again, I don't see this as an important movie. Is it important because it's a film about a man with no social connections making a website about social connections and that is somehow emblematic of our society? My answer to that is: Meh. Who cares? I could get that insight by watching a two-minute segment on the Today Show on a Tuesday morning. People are weird and have all sorts of weird views of social interaction. So what?

This is a very old, traditional story of friendship and betrayal. Unless you're going to give me something deeper than superficial psychology, I'm not really interested. This is a well crafted film, to be sure - I would certainly aspire to speak to my drunk friends as well as Sorkin's characters speak to theirs - but it is not interesting at all.

Stars: 2 of 4

Made in Dagenham (Monday, September 27, 2010) (124)

Made in Dagenham has been described as the British version of Norma Rae, and that's basically exactly what it is. The film follows the story of Rita O'Grady, who in 1968 led a strike by the women in the Ford factory in Dagenham, England to get equal pay for their work. The plant was one of the biggest in the world and the center of Ford's European production center.

The 140-or-so women who worked there were considered unskilled laborers for their work sewing vinyl seats for the interiors of all the Ford cars produced in the factory. With such a classification, they were paid less than people with semi-skilled or skilled titles. The problem, however, was that even if the women got the semi-skilled designation, they would still be paid less than men at the same level.


O'Grady (played by the bright and sunshiny Sally Hawkins), with the help of her union organizer, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), got the women to strike for several months, ultimately resulting in a shut-down of all car production at that factory, as they couldn't complete cars with no interior seating. O'Grady had to deal with the constant onslaught by male factory workers who didn't see the labor issue similarly as well as a growing friction with family and friends. Her loving husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) struggles with wanting to support his wife and her causes and feeling emasculated that she is the boss of the house (and keeping the factory idle as well).


This is a very nice story filled with all sorts of wonderful tearful moments where women assert themselves and demand equal pay, but it is banal and somewhat lifeless. O'Grady is a very important woman in world labor history, to be sure, but there's not much here other than some rather dull history.


To make matters worse, the script, by Bill Ivory, is much too long and complicated and the directing, by Nigel Cole, is rather styleless and badly done. The film should have been been no more than 90 minutes, rather than the 113 that it clocks in at. There is a lot of time wasted on side stories, like the lady who led the women's section of the union before O'Grady and how her husband is an dusty old war vet, or the hot-stuff young woman who is a symbol of '60s sexual liberation while trying to fit into the old factory mindset.


Cole really does a terrible job of letting us know exactly what will happen to characters three scenes ahead of time. When one character gives a passionate speech about how proud he is of the women strikers, it is clear in context that he is going to die in the next few minutes. The most upsetting is that once the women's demands are basically met and the Minister of Labor (who is a lady) agrees to a pay hike for them, we get a horrible back and forth between O'Grady and the Minister about the clothes they're wearing - because they might be important union and labor people, but at the end of the day, women just love talking about clothes. Ugh.


These things are not all that terrible, though. The film is OK and not brilliant - but not terrible. It's not as good as Norma Rae, because there's just too much going on, but it's nice and inoffensive.

Stars: 2 of 4

Howl (Sunday, September 26, 2010) (122)

Howl is a multi-form film about Allen Ginsberg around the time he wrote his masterpiece poem and about the obscenity suit that was brought against the publisher for it. Apparently, we are told, the dialogue all comes from interviews with Ginsberg and the courtroom transcription from the trial.

There are four threads that mix and cut through this piece. In one we see Ginsberg (played by James Franco) in his apartment in 1957, about two years after the piece was published talking to an interviewer (in color). Another one is the courtroom (in black and white) with David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Jon Hamm as the defense attorney and Bob Balaban as the judge. There are several "literary experts" brought to testify about the value of the poem and whether or not it is obscene. In another thread, we see (again in black and white) Ginsberg (again Franco) reading the poem to a crowded nightclub with his crushes Jack Kerouac and Neal Casssady and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky looking on. The final section is an animated expression of the poem playing out with Franco's voice (as Ginsberg's voice) reading the poem on top.

The impressive thing about the film is that it presents the entire poem in a way that becomes rather easy to understand through all the different ideas that swirl around it. Just as you hear one section in the animated part, you see a discussion of that part by the courtroom "experts" and then see Ginsberg explaining it himself to the interviewer. Sometimes his stand-up reading of it gives more tone to that section, so we once again understand it better.

On top of this, we see a good amount about who Ginsberg was at the time. He was a very sad gay man who was constantly in and out of mental hospitals. We get the sense that he was sent to these places not necessarily because he needed it, but because he was weird and gay and many doctors didn't know how to deal with him (he might have had some anxiety disorders, though he was never particularly crazy). We see how his love for a few men (straight men) like Kerouac and Cassady was a painful burr in his side through much of his 20s. He was able to hook up with them once in a while, but never felt that he got the same love he gave them.

This is a very interesting movie and a very clever, creative presentation. I have always appreciated the poem, but always found it a bit cumbersome and dense. The formal elements of the film help to break down the wall I've always had with the piece and make me appreciate it more. In the end, though, it is very small and just about a single poem. That's a bit unfair of me to say, I know, but it doesn't have a tremendous amount of depth beyond some interesting insights in to Ginsberg's life.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Runaways (Saturday, March 21, 2010) (21)

This is a totally lifeless movie about the history of a band you've never heard of, the Runaways, in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. The only reason why they are at all special is because they were the first band Joan Jett was in. They were the first major-ish "all-girl" rock band and apparently sold sex, sexual independence, bi-sexuality and a very average rock sound.

The only reason I can figure out that the film is getting polite reviews is that the American men who are generally reviewing it are so misogynistic and homophobic that a slight taste of lesbianism is enough to get them erect and their brains clouded with hormones so they miss the rest of this mess. The lesbianism isn't very special, erotic or believable and the film never rises above a tired yarn about a garage band hitting it big-ish and then coming back to earth. The production values are embarrassingly low, which distracts from the story and makes it incredibly hard for the slightest suspension of disbelief.

The movie opens with 15-year-old Joan, played by the dead-behind-the-eyes Kristen Stewart, buying dirty leather clothes, being kissed by a ratty scene girl and sniffing glue - because she's disaffected, you see. (Of course this only leads one to think about the great Ramones song "Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue" - a musical height that we never see throughout the rest of the film.)

Then we see teenage Cherie Currie, played by the cute-kid-star-cum-grown-up-beauty Dakota Fanning, who is obsessed with Ziggy Stardust, lipsynching her way through a Bowie song in a high school talent show. She's from a broken home and likes to go to clubs with her sister. You get it?

One night out in LA, Joan, who plays guitar, meets music producer and promoter Kim Fowley, played by the tremendously talented Michael Shannon (who is badly used here). They set out to form an all-girl rock band. They meet Cherie at a night club and audition her. She sounds terrible, but they decide that she has the right look for the band. Once they start practicing and playing together they sound terrible to me, but apparently they are good. Their sound is not really that hard or punk - it's sorta hard-ish pop and somehow sexually liberated on the surface.

The band begins to tour in crapholes and begins to use drugs and alcohol. They become very sexual, fucking their manager, roadies and all sorts of people they meet on the road. They also screw each other in very, very PG ways. We never clearly see that they really love each other (though we're told they do). Joan seems mostly bored and interested in sex because she's not really interested in anything else. Cherrie seems stoned mostly and not really in control of much.

They go on tour to Japan, which is a surprise because it's not clear they've really hit it big. (Director Flora Sigismondi does a terrible job with this sequence that is clearly shot in downtown LA with a bunch of *Asian* extras playing excited Japanese teens - this is a joke). They fight a lot because Cherrie is too hot for them (I mean, objectively, Dakota is hot!) and then when they're cutting what seems to be their first album (at least the first one we see them working on) they break up.

The film has absolutely no emotional flow and terrible pacing. We see a bad band playing music, then they get messed up on the road, then they mess with one another, then they break up. At no point do we like them or care if they turn out well. It feels like it's one slow, bad scene after another. There are no climaxes and no high moments. Even when the band has a good show in Japan, they still sound like they can't play a good note.

Bizarrely there is almost no music used in the film - either music from the Runaways or from bands they might have been listening to. OK - there's one Iggy Pop song and one Bowie song, but that's about it. This is laughable in a movie about a great moment in music (when punk was in its formative years and glam was hitting its peak). It almost felt like they couldn't get the rights to more music there was so little in the film.

The acting throughout is overdone and generally bad and I think it's about time that we all admit that despite Kristin Stewart being a central part of one of the biggest film franchises of all time (Twilight) she really is untalented and terrible. It's actually hard to know if she's trying to act like a lifeless rat or if that's just how she is. Dakota Fanning is not as bad as Stewart, but she's not very good either. Michael Shannon is generally very good, but he's way overdone here. Like a beautiful steak, he's good without all sorts of toppings and marinades and stuff. Just cook him on two sides and serve.

Generally I found the lesbian make-out scenes tepid, safe and less than erotic. It seems like they're just screwing around for lack of anyone else to screw around with. Of course maybe there is a connection between these two, but, again, Stewart is so bad that you couldn't tell it. I never get the sense that Cherrie is all that into the sex and we see Joan having sex with men too... All in all, it seems like a cheap trick to get two young starlets (Stewart and Fanning) to kiss so people will talk about it and rush out to see it. I hate being manipulated like this.

I don't care that the movie apparently looks like old Super-8 footage or old Kadachrome pictures and early music videos. It's super boring, badly made and badly acted. The script is terrible and the direction seems unaware of what we're seeing and feeling.

Stars: .5 of 4

Creation (Sunday, January 31, 2010) (8)

This film tells the story of Charles Darwin's scientific research and journey of faith in advance of publishing his masterwork, On the Origin of Species. As he set out on his scientific studies, he was simply a curious researcher with a strong faith and loving wife. His daughter died tragically in the middle of his studies and he could not square the horrible malady she suffered with his understanding of God or the fact that what he saw on the ground led him to believe that plants and animals developed without divine assistance.

This created a tremendous amount of tension between him and his wife (a woman of unyielding faith), especially as his scientific colleagues were pressuring him to publish his findings after years of struggling with the ramifications.

The film, directed by Jon Amiel (with script from John Collee), is told in a terrible, choppy way, where Darwin's memories of his daughter, his fantasies of her still being alive and his present struggle are all inter cut to make figuring out the narrative mind boggling. It is not clear to me why the script couldn't have been more straightforward. There really isn't anything positive added to the film by this jumpy chronology and it's mostly just frustrating.

Paul Bettany, as Darwin, and Jennifer Connelly, as Mrs. Darwin, are both good in their roles, though it seems almost like they less important than the complicated script. Overall this is a disappointment of a movie. It's interesting from a historical point of view but it's a mess as a viewing experience.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Last Station (2009) (Saturday, January 16, 2010) (216)

This movie has a somewhat strange setup for a little romantic dramedy. It takes place in the last days of Leo Tolstoy's life, when he was living in his country estate after publishing his masterpieces. He has become a cultural and folk hero in the early part of the 20th Century and his manager is trying to influence him to donate the copyrights of his works to the Russian people, rather than keeping them in his family's name.

The movement that has taken off as a result of his writing is in full swing and there is a hippie community on his estate that believes in shared property and no sex. Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, is a lively old man with a long beard. He doesn't totally believe in the message of his followers (he loves sex and, despite dressing like a farmer, likes the riches that come with his life), but lets them fawn over him without correction.

His manager, played by Paul Giamatti, hires a young academic, played by James McAvoy, to be the old man's secretary, hoping he can steer the writer to his will. Tolstoy's wife, played by Helen Mirren, hates Giamatti and doesn't care at all about her husband's proto-socialist movement. She loves her wealth and wants to keep it and grow it.

The Tolstoyan ban on sexuality becomes hard for McAvoy to deal with when he meets a woman, played by the lovely Kerry Condon, who is in the movement on the estate. They fall in love and McAvoy has to figure out if he's going to listen to the passionate, romantic Baroness Tolstoy or the more severe, rational doctrine of the Tolstoy fundamentalists. As this is happening, Tolstoy himself has to figure out if he's going to listen to his brooding manager and give his books to the people or if he's going to listen to his wife and keep them in the family.

The film is a bit too convoluted, I think, for a rather silly and light story. There are too many layers of detail, when all that is needed is a light story about a man torn between his social beliefs (in abstinence) and his passionate heart. Generally the dialogue is snappy and funny, though it does get a bit more serious at times, especially as Tolstoy gets closer and closer to death. I can't figure out if maybe the problem is that it is trying to be a comedy at some level and that it should not be. Perhaps a straight light drama would have worked better. At any rate, it needs about 20 minutes cut out of it.

The acting here is getting a good amount of praise nowadays - and generally there are good performances here. Helen Mirren is very good as the grand old lady who sees her way of life under attack (of course it will come under further attack in a few years with the Bolshevik revolution). She is sensible and passionate and rather at her wits end with her husbands followers. Plummer is also good as a somewhat devilish old man who loves life and thinks all the attention on his is rather fun. He does deal with the copyright question, but this is not an issue that really presses on his mind too hard at first. Giamatti is basically the same character he played in the Howard Stern Private Parts movie - Pigvomit. He is a stuffed suit with no soul and no sense of humor. This role is a bit thin, and Giamatti's performance is OK - but seems a bit recycled. McAvoy is very good throughout the film and plays his character well dealing with the political mess he gets himself into.

I think this is a movie that probably comes off well as a script. It looks interesting, with a dynamic central character (Tolstoy), at least two main points of tension, including a love story. When put on screen, though, it is a bit dead. There is great scenery and nice costumes and everybody has a nice English accent (English accents being a stand-in for people speaking Russian, of course), but there is not much depth to the story. All the issues that the characters deal with feel very superficial and not all that emotional.

Stars: 2 of 4

Me and Orson Welles (Saturday, November 28, 2009) (177)

Me and Orson Welles? Orson Welles and I? Orson Welles and me. Whatever.

It's hard to figure out if this movie was written first and then they cast actor Christian McKay as Welles, or if they looked at McKay and constructed a Welles movie with him in mind. Either way, his resemblance to the young Welles is uncanny and stunning (his resemblance to John Lithgow is also pretty close - so I guess he would have the lead in that biopic as well!). Other than the casting choices, there is not much going on in the movie.

The story is about a high school kid in suburban New York who cuts school and gets a role in the famous Welles-Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar. That production remains today a grand historical achievement setting the Shakespearean history in fascist Italy. Along the way, the boy, played by teeny heart-throb Zac Efron falls in love with Claire Danes, an assistant in the theater company and gets bent out of shape when Welles seduces her. Danes is still gorgeous and shows herself here to be very good - it's a shame she doesn't work more.

One of the most fun elements of the movie is seeing some of the famous actors of the Mercury Theater. Oh - look there - it's Joseph Cotten; Oh - there's George Coulouris; Hey - there's John Houseman. Overall, the actors cast here look a tremendous amount like the real people they're playing. But that's about all we get from the film. The main point of intrigue, which only comes in around the middle of the third act, isn't all that interesting. It's great to see how the theatrical production came to fruition - but most of what we see is Welles behaving badly and still being a genius (of course he could behave badly because he was a genius - because he had a world class ego and because he knew he was talented enough to get the job done in the end). That's not all that interesting.

One very curious thing is that one of the big points of tension in the story is Welles' belittling treatment of Efron's character. Strangely, nobody ever makes a comment that in 1937 Welles himself was only 22 - only four or five years older than Efron's character. This is very strange, of course, because the whole point of the movie is that Welles is a genius. In this film there is no comment on Welles' age - and he comes off as a man in his mid- to late-30s. There could easily have been a line, like: 'Wow-Welles is so talented and so young!' (This is where everybody over 27 should feel shame that they didn't make one of the greatest films of all-time by that age!)

I generally think director Richard Linklater is an interesting director (though I certainly don't love all his movies). This film, however, feels especially anonymous and almost Disney-Channel-esque (and not just because of Efron). It feels very amateurish and superficial. Like a glossy history of a bygone era, with almost no grit and no psychology to speak of.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Coco Before Chanel (Sunday, November 1, 2009) (157)

At some point in the near future we will reach a time when absolutely everyone who lived before 1950 will have a biopic made of their lives. This day will mark a small celebration when filmmakers will feel free to make movies not tied to dull life stories of semi-famous people. We will all dance in the streets as we realize that we don't have to worry about the casting of the William Techumsah Sherman movie (Willem Dafoe) or the life story of Babe Didrickson (Elizabeth Moss) or Jacques Cousteau (Scott Glenn), as all of those films will have been made. (For the record, I have not heard of any biopics of these people, but I would hope that if they ever come, they will cast these people in these roles.) In the meantime, we are left with yet another dull movie based on a dull life- Coco Before Chanel.

I guess Coco Chanel's life sounds good on paper. She was raised in an orphanage and got into 'cabaret' singing in Paris in the nineteen-aughts. ('Cabaret singing' in this film looks a hell of a lot like hooking - but I guess it was different and classier somehow.) She got set up with a rich dude who lived in the country. She was too low-class for him to introduce her to his friends, but she still lived with him and had lots of sex with him. Then she met an English friend of his who she fell in love with. Sadly he wouldn't marry her either because she was a filthy whore-like woman. Still, he got her set up in Paris as a hat designer in the later nineteen-teens - and somehow in Paris, hat designers also made lots of fancy clothes - so she became a fashion icon.

That summary is actually very fair to the movie - where almost 100 minutes are spent with her at her lover's chateau basically doing nothing. It's not even that we see her doing fashiony things like designing ball gowns or something. She spends most of her time on her back in bed with one of two men or bitching about how she wants some independence (as she eats bonbons off a silver tray in the living room of a castle). There is one scene where she makes her friend a rather frumpy dress for a costume party. There is another scene when she finds herself on vacation without an evening gown, so she goes to a dressmaker and asks for a black velour dress with no corset. Big freaking whoop.

Audrey Tautou as Coco is almost asleep, she's so boring. She's cute-ish, but not at all sexy and it's very hard to understand why men would be attracted to her. Her personality is direct and stern and almost never bright or positive. She generally seems like a serious downer who is unaware of her place in the world. (I'm not advocating for the subjugation of women, but it seems silly to me that she should be upset about her low standing in the world in a time when all women were treated as chattel.)

Mostly, the problem here is with a bad script. I think the concept of a biopic of Coco Chanel preceded the research that found that she was a rather unremarkable person before starting her fashion house. In addition, it is not explained why this has to necessarily be a story of her pre-fashion days - and not just a biography of her entire life. It would seem that if one were making a movie of her life, all the content in this film would be one scene when she was 'getting started' (the same way there was one scene in this film about her childhood in the orphanage).

I would have loved to know what she did that was so amazing for fashion (uncorsetted dresses; lower necklines; knit suits in two pieces), how she was inspired and what happened to her in the last 60 years of her life. I don't know these things about her and I would like to. I think that would all be more interesting than this forced, sad romantic tragedy.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Amelia (Saturday, October 24, 2009) (151)

It seems to me like a biopic about Amelia Earhart would be a totally thrilling and interesting movie about a proto-feminist and her high-flying (literally!) life and career and a wonderfully tragic ending. I'm somewhat surprised that there is not a new film version of her life every few years, the way there are so many Queen Elizabeth movies. But then when I saw this totally anemic film effort, I realized that lives that are inherently cinematic should not always be made into movies - and that sometimes it is possible to screw up a grilled cheese sandwich.

The structure of the film is completely trite: We see Amelia setting off on her final trip, and then cut back to her childhood in Kansas learning to fly with her father; then we see her later in the round-the-world trip flying over Africa, and we cut back to her first flight across the Atlantic. This back-and-forth format is so tired that it's surprising director Mira Nair is even breathing. You could design a computer program, I'm sure, to come up with a more creative plot.

Amelia Earhart (played by Hillary Swank) meets George Putnam (Richard Gere), a New York publisher and advertising and PR man who is looking for a woman who can sit in the back of a plane while two men fly it to London (or Ireland, as it turns out to be). Earhart is strong-willed, but concedes control for hope of marketing riches that would follow the flight. And the riches do follow. When she is done, she gets swept up on a lecture tour with product endorsements and instant fame.

She falls in love with Putnam and also meets and falls for Gene Vidal (Ewan McGreggor), Gore Vidal's father. As she struggles with her love life, she embarks on other flying expeditions (from Hawaii to California; across the Atlantic solo; and somewhere in South America). At some point she attempts the Mt. Everest of flying - a trip around the world. As history shows, her plane goes down somewhere in the South Pacific.

There are so many problems with this film it's hard to know where to begin. My biggest complaint is how lifeless and superficial the movie is. We basically don't know anything about the characters (including Earhart) or their motives and backgrounds. Putnam and Earhart fall in love sorta because they sit next to each other in meetings and Model-T Fords - but we never see why they fall in love. Clearly Ewan McGreggor is hot, but it is never clear why Vidal and Earhart are attracted to one another. (Also - putting a child Gore Vidal in the film is totally unnecessary and dumb. His character adds nothing to the film - and honestly, I think most viewers don't know enough about him today to care who he was then.)

We are never shown that Earhart is a great pilot - and one of our first introductions to her is as a passenger in her trans-Atlantic flight shows her as a restless but compliant second to the male fliers. This doesn't help her case as a master aviatrix. (OK - I do want to say that I love the word 'aviatrix' - and not because it sounds like dominatrix - but because there aren't enough English words that end in 'trix'.) We see that she was selected because she was pretty and could fly - but we are supposed to think that she was the best pilot in the world (or something like that), but we never see this.

Not only is the structure of the script terrible, but the dialogue is laughable too. It seems like most of the talk in the film is simply explaining what was going on or what going to happen next in very clear terms. It felt like the dialogue was written by children - or maybe for a children's book. At one point, Earhard says that she likes flying because it lets her move in three dimensions ... Well, yes, Amelia, you can also walk or run or sit in bed in three dimensions if you want too! This terrible talking was compounded by Swank's totally terrible affected accent. I can only guess that Earhart had some midwestern folksy accent - though it really just comes out as a caricature of a 1930s woman.

(In addition, the production values are terrible and I was constantly bothered by the badly looped-in dialogue that didn't sync with the footage on screen, especially in the most important moment of the film as Earhart is leaving for her final journey -which is shown twice!)

One of my biggest pet peeves in film is anachronisms that would be easy to fix - like bad props and costumes. This film features two Longines watches that are shamefully modern and totally unnecessary. These are clearly put in by the studio's marketing department - but there's no reason why Nair should have allowed modern watches (that do sorta look old) rather than vintage Longines watches - especially when the Longines brand was basically made on the back of 1930s-era aviation. I mean, Nair should be in control of everything on screen - props and costumes and all. If you can see a quartz watch on a wrist in 1937, why not a black box in the cockpit of Earhart's plane. That would have made the search for the wreckage much easier!

In the end, Earhart does not come off as a feminist who is in control of her sexuality or her career during an era when women were not equal to men. She comes off as a woman who knows how she is a second-class citizen and uses her sexuality to control men and steer her career. I think it is, in fact, anti-feminist to suggest that a woman's only tool is her sexuality. This plays directly into the themes of the chauvinist world we live in and is not progressive at all.

Stars: .5 of 4